Drugs, sex and anarchy

There is nothing hidden about the illegal drugs and under-age vice openly on offer in the heart of Theatreland in London's West End. "You want girls? Boys? Ladies? Men? Cocaine? Tell me, whad-you-want, whad-ever you want, I geddit for you."

The drug dealer brazenly delivered his pitch to passers-by from his perch on the corner of Peter Street and Berwick Street, apparently without fear of arrest by the pair of uniformed policemen standing just out of earshot 20 yards away. Even the slightest hint of eye contact and the dealer was onto you, falling into stride alongside. "We have everything," he said. "Hash, weed, cocaine, £20 for a rock. Got a pipe of crack, too, same price. Heroin, same price. Girls? I got Italian, Spanish, Russian, £30 for sex. You want?"

It was just 10.35pm - the hour when theatre-goers head home and hard-core clubbers begin to arrive - but for this drug dealer and the hundreds of others who make the streets of the West End their office, business hours had only just begun.

At first, a veneer of respectability prevails, but as the night draws on, especially after 1am, "the atmosphere on the street becomes intimidating" and "near-anarchy reigns".

So says none other than the leader of Westminster City Council, Conservative councillor Simon Milton, who, in a frank indictment of part of his own borough, described the West End as a lawless, out-of-control, ungoverned nether-world teeming with low-life.

"Until 3am and 4am, the West End is saturated with drug dealers, illegal minicab drivers, illegal hot-dog sellers, petty criminals and noisy, latenight revellers who leave the streets running with urine and faeces and strewn with rubbish," he said. Earlier, he had delivered an only slightly more restrained speech on the same subject to the Greater London Authority's investigative committee.

Westminster has the highest crime rate in London, higher even than Lambeth, and more than half of it occurs in the West End. Lately, the nature of the crime has become more serious, progressing from theft and muggings to shootings. Mr Milton blamed the increase in anti-social behaviour partly on the burgeoning "late-night business", which attracts criminal elements. "The West End has always been the entertainment hub of London, but in the past five to 10 years, the number of places with licences to open late, until 1am or 3am, has soared, so the capacity of these places has risen from 33,000 people to 125,000 people," he explained.

"Another problem is that, instead of having more police on the beat, we actually have fewer."

Westminster's force has been cut from 2,000 police officers in 1996 to 1,500 in 2001, and a further 100 are due to go, said Milton. But more alarming is that only 15 police officers are assigned to the beat from 11pm, even though half a million people converge on the West End every weekend, many tanked up on drugs or alcohol, or both. The night that the Evening Standard went onto the streets of the West End coincided with an experimental three-week police swoop called Operation Upright. So, instead of the usual 15 policemen, the force was present in numbers, with vans parked on dealing corners and dozens of highly visible police patrols. We were interested to see whether the increased police presence - one of several measures Milton is calling for (another being tighter control over late-night licences) - made a difference.

The policeman standing in front of the minicab office just off Cambridge Circus in Soho began the night sounding optimistic. "We've got officers and cars placed all over this area," he said. "We're even sending in a traffic unit to deal with the unlicensed minicabs. They run a mile when they see a police car."

He was standing 50 yards from two police vans and eight other officers. Surely the illegal minicab drivers - of which there are said to be 5,000 operating in the West End - would be crazy to tout for business here?

But, as the officer wandered over to the police vans and began chatting to a colleague, a man with a heavy African accent strolled up. "Want a minicab?" he asked. When his offer was refused, he tried a different tack. "What about some weed? I can get you some really good skunk, lovely smoke. No?"

The police officer was still chatting to his colleague through the open window of the van, oblivious to the dealer/driver attempting a hard sell just a few yards away.

By 10.15pm, as theatre audiences headed for Shaftesbury Avenue, the cab touts were out in force. "Minicab, mate?" asked an Asian-looking man with a bushy beard and a mouth full of rotten teeth. His "cab" - a 15-year-old Peugeot 205 - was almost as decayed as his teeth and smelled of something halfway between fish and burning rubber. There was no way that this car had passed its MoT.

It shuddered into life after three attempts and he drove off cheerfully after lighting a foulsmelling cigarette. The car travelled 100 yards and then stalled in the middle of the junction with Oxford Street. After getting the car moving again, he drove off, apologising for the delay.

To make up for it he shot straight through two red lights. Despite his dreadful driving and clapped-out car, the driver - an Ethiopian by the name of Mohammed, who had come to England to train as a website designer - was charming. "I have a licence," he said. "I am licensed minicab driver."

He seemed a little wary about a request to see proof, but eventually offered his standard driving licence. "You see," he said triumphantly, "licensed."

By 12.15pm, things were hotting up in Soho. An inebriated Irishman carrying a two-litre cocktail tankard started throwing punches, and the brawl spilled out into Wardour Street. Four policemen arrived and sat on him, each taking hold of a limb, while a fifth man held down his head which was covered in vomit. "Gerroff!" he yelled, struggling and yelling for 15 minutes at the top of his lungs until an ambulance arrived.

For residents of Soho, such as Alex, 39, who shares the same street as the author Ken Follett and has lived in Soho for seven years, the worst part is the unrelenting noise.

"You notice it especially after 1am when people come onto the street after having been enclosed in loud clubs. Their ears are desensitised and so when they reach the street, they shout," said Alex. "Many residents end up having to sleep in their bathroom at the back of their house in order to get any rest.

"At the moment it's completely lawless in the West End. There is drug dealing all over. We hear the whole lurid transaction from our apartments, then we have to pick the needles out of our window boxes in the morning. Also, the pimps beat up their prostitutes - many of whom are under-age Slovakian girls - and we can hear the screaming late at night. It is just appalling. Believe me, it is very disturbing."

One of the scourges of the West End is what police and locals refer to as "clipping". Women offer sex for money upfront, and then disappear after the cash is handed over. It's a lucrative trade. Alex was able to point out the "big bloke" who organises the clipping ring and who every night occupies the same streetside table outside Bar Bruno (although the premises has nothing to do with him) on Wardour Street, from which spot he directs his illegal clipping and drug-dealing operations.

"People get very angry when they get diddled," said Alex. "Sometimes they kick the doors where the woman was standing, and ring the doorbell and scream, this at 2am, not realising that normal residents live there who have nothing to do with these prostitutes."

Other prostitutes operate in more conventional style in seedy, narrow walk-ups all around the West End. Many of them are clearly, if unsubtly, signposted - "Fantasy girl this way" or "sex here" - but there are other unmarked buildings where every room is a brothel and where drug dealers were ferrying interested clients up the stairs, offering "Mexicans on floor one", "Caribbeans on floor two", "Slovakians on floor three" and so on, and receiving a five per cent cut on the £30 for their trouble.

But in the wild West End there is always another cause for concern. At 1.30am, the police were still about, but seemed to turn a blind eye to establishments flouting their licences. According to the "music and dance licences", an establishment can only serve alcohol after 11pm if doing so is secondary to food, dancing or entertainment. Yet a humid, first-floor walk-up at the back of Tottenham Court Road, a roaring drinking pub packed to the rafters, blithely sold alcohol to all comers, without any food or entertainment on site.

A small sign above the bar said "members only". But it was a thin conceit - no one was asked for proof of membership and perfect strangers were served whatever they wanted. At 1.15am, two policemen approached the front door, the wall of sound from the illegal drinking den surged onto the street, but the police walked on by.

"Those places are not our priority," a police officer later explained. "In order to prove they are breaking the law, we'd have to establish that they are serving drinks without food, and that is too draining on our manpower. Crime has reached such a bad level that we are concentrating on the drug dealers, bag snatchers, pickpockets, dippers (who dip their hands in pockets or bags to steal money or purses) and clip joints. Unlicensed minicab drivers and unlicensed pub owners are a nuisance, but the most they will get is a fine. So it's not worth our trouble."

What can be done to stop all this? Councillor Milton said the police agree with him that there should be a halt to new late-night licences in the West End. "The West End has become saturated," he said, "and we urgently need to identify alternative areas for future growth, such as the City, Clerkenwell, Holborn and the South Bank, in order to disperse this energy and create a safety valve."

He added that there was crossparty agreement on this, and he also encouraged a tripling of the police presence, although he acknowledged that smarter policing, rather than higher numbers, is needed.

Back in Soho, on the south side of Leicester Square, the police presence appeared to have been only marginally effective: the drug dealers had moved their business a block along and were still trading openly.

Outside Leicester Square Tube station, already shuttered for the night, a man with his pants halfway down his thighs relieved himself against a theatre door. The area stank of urine. By now, all the streets were piled high with rubbish bags. Homeless people mingled with the crowds, begging, and slagging off anyone who wouldn't oblige. "F*****, you're heartless you are, f***** tight," complained one.

A drunk staggered by, leaning backwards as if to try to maintain his centre of gravity. A couple tried to kiss outside Burger King, but he kept falling over and she kept missing. Suddenly two policemen-started sprinting towards Covent Garden. "Someone reported gunshots," a third policeman explained later. "We thought someone might have been shot, but it seemed to have been a false alarm."

Further up, on Charing Cross Road, the illegal minicab drivers leaned against their cars parked on double yellow lines down the entire length of the street. They looked as if they didn't have a care in the world. One driver, Jamal from the Caribbean, admitted without hesitation that he was unlicensed and carried no insurance for his passengers.

"But the passengers, they behave worse than me," he said, trying to edge his car through a crowd of people. "At least I know how to keep my food down. These people, they vomit in my car, they pee. Some women even offer me blow jobs to take them home for free," he said.

As he drove, he passed someone squatting in the doorway outside Borders bookshop, using it as a lavatory. "See what I mean. There are some people around here who are real low-life," he said.