Looking back at Britain’s first drugs baron Gurdev Singh Sangha and his illicit Birmingham business

The cancer that would cake our streets with stale blood at first bore the sweet smell of cannabis reefers.

Then it turned to the heroin colour of brown sugar. Then china white as powdered party drug cocaine found an elaborate route from Colombia. More recently it hardened and crystalised as crack heralded a sickening criminal epidemic.

Despair stained the latter years of my career as young life after young life was lost to the drugs turf wars raging in Birmingham and the Black Country. The fleeting highs conjured by a pharmaceutical battery of narcotics were, inevitably, paid for in a currency of despair, degradation and death.

But in the beginning there was the weed. It was cannabis joints that put a pronounced stutter step in the swing of the Sixties. Back then, beautiful party people wanted more than rum and coke and St Moritz cigarettes. Being juiced on alcohol was no longer enough. They craved joints.

By the mid 1960s, the guilty pleasure had become a large-scale problem. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE) officers realised cannabis had become a very big business.

An illicit industry had emerged, an industry that, even back then, came with a multi-million pound profit margin. The scene was set for the biggest cannabis bust that had, up to then, been seen on these shores. It was a bust that had its roots in Birmingham.

It is a raid outlined in Peter Walsh’s fascinating book Drug War:The Secret History, which chronicles the fight against the tide of illicit substances. HMCE undercover officers were, back then, innocents in the drugs war. Until detecting the strong scent of cannabis, the black market trade in watches was the most profitable for pirates,

But the clock was ticking for the arrival of a greater enemy, a commodity that brought with it organised crime and violence. Cannabis began to arrive by the boat-load. And the fledgling mob business had an unlikely pioneer, a suave, charming and highly educated Indian immigrant known to investigators as The Doctor.

Gurdev Singh Sangha is considered Britain’s first drugs baron. He was born in 1930 in the Punjab village of Bhabiana and later claimed to be from a well-to-do family, telling new found friends his grandfather served in the Indian Army when the country was under British rule.

He gained an arts degree before arriving in England in 1954 hungry for success and spent five years as a rubber dipper in a Slough factory to pay for technical college night classes.

Armed with three A Levels, Sangha gained a place at London University and graduated in engineering in 1962. By 1967, Sangha was studying for a doctorate in space research. “He was,” said one former HMCE officer, “thoroughly Westernised.”

But the fiercely ambitious scientist was already eyeing darker ways of becoming a millionaire. He crammed a house in Slough with immigrants from his Punjab village, formed them into work gangs and drove them to local factories.

Sangha soon realised cannabis would provide much, much more cash. His grubby trade, with its business end in Birmingham, was born. He began bringing in colossal amounts of the drug.

Sangha’s front was the Thames and Ganges Traders company, which, ostensibly, imported food, spices and medicines for growing Asian communities in Birmingham, London, Manchester and Bradford.

Those innocent consignments, which arrived via Tilbury and Liverpool docks and Heathrow, were also crammed with bricks of cannabis resin. A friend who worked for Air India also organised a network of couriers.

The end of Sangha’s empire came by chance. On April 1, 1967, a customs officer at Heathrow’s import shed emptied a crate of kinnows, an orange like citrus fruit, and cannabis spilt on the floor.

A four-man HMCE lay in wait for the “fruit” to be collected. Two Asian men - one from Birmingham - duly arrived and fled in panic when they spotted the officers. They were captured and later convicted of importing 90 pounds of cannabis resin - at the time, the largest quantity ever discovered in air freight.

One received two years, the other 15 months. January, 1968, brought a major breakthrough. Bombay cinema owner and film distributor Abbas Haji had been arrested for a minor offence in Birmingham. That was of little interest to HMCE officers.

His enquiries, made to a shipping agent, about cases of pickles being carried to the UK from Pakistan on merchant vessel Padma aroused suspicion, however.

A search of those cases revealed 250lbs of cannabis. The consignment was followed to a semi-detached in Walthamstow, London. Haji and two other men were arrested and, importantly, a discarded cigarette packet, with Gurdev Singh Sangha’s address scrawled on it, recovered.

A search of Sangha’s home uncovered a note detailing 80 cases due to arrive at Liverpool on the ship Surma The cases, containing a rose petal jam, concealed another 164lbs of hash. Other big seizures followed.

Sangha, aged 37, stood trial with three others at the Old Bailey in August, 1968, charged with the Tilbury seizure and first Liverpool cargo. His counsel painted a flattering picture of the defendant as a space scientist of “the highest degree of intelligence in his field”.

He was, nonetheless, jailed for five years.Haji, a man with no previous convictions and who possessed degrees in chemistry and biology, was also jailed for five years.

Both men appealed their sentences and received short shrift from Lord Justice Widgery. He told them: “No one, I think, doubts that those who import it (drugs) and make a living out of its distribution on a whole-sale scale should be discouraged, to say the least of it, by substantial penalties.”