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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
You know, if you go to the jungles of Colombia where they're making cocaine in
jungle labs, most of the people working in those jungle labs
are working there at the point of a gun. Correct. They
don't have autonomy, and many of the people
selling sex don't have the autonomy to make a.
To make. To make a choice to go and do something different. They're stuck in
there until they're either too old to work or they clamber out the
window and run away. When you sit and talk with someone who works
at that end of criminality, for them, this
is simply business. And they want business to go as
smoothly and calmly as is possible. And it's a real
rarity if you are sitting in conversation
with someone who is utterly unpredictable,
and those are uncomfortable circumstances,
and I used the best word I could think of at the time to describe
those. So you need to go and be prepared.
But ultimately, these people are
in it for business. This is just about money.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast, where we
talk to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller. I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century, and I'm also the chairman of the
IFG, a network of international investigative and
asset recovery lawyers. I'm delighted to be joined
by a good friend of mine, Neil Giles. Neil and I
have worked together at the Traffic Analysis Hub, where
he is president and CEO, but Neil is
one of the few people I have met that has been in the investigation space
longer than me. Neil has been in that space
for over half a century. I know it doesn't look that way, Neil,
but you were or you have been, and I'm
delighted to have you on the show today.
Welcome. Thank you, Gary. It's a pleasure to join you. Before
I ask you a few questions about the
young Neil who joined the Metropolitan Police
at the tender age of 17, you tell me.
I'm going to ask you kind of one of those questions that I always
wonder about. When people have been involved as you were in the.
In SOCA, in Metropolitan Police,
etc, was there a time
that you recall that you ever felt in personal danger
as a result of the investigations you did? Yes,
on more than one occasion. And can you pick one and
give us a flavor of what that both looked like and what it
felt like for you? I spent a number of years
as an organized crime undercover
infiltrator. So
in the mid-1980s, I
would be introduced
through an informant to groups of people who were keen to sell
large quantities of narcotics. And on one
particular occasion, and this matter's been through the
courts very openly, so there's nothing secret here.
But on one particular occasion, I was foolish
enough to make the
meeting for the exchange of money
and drugs, as the bad guys
thought, who were two Colombian gentlemen
in the car park of the Serpentine restaurant in
Hyde Park... What a
great location, Neil. Here's me thinking some dingy garage
in Wapping, but not my friend Neil. He goes for the real
up class establishments. It
was designed principally for
mutual security. It's really hard to hide a lot of
cops in the car park of the
Serpentine restaurant in Hyde Park.
I've got this vision, Neil. I've got this vision of undercover police
either dressed up as trees or alternatively
operating as waiters in the restaurant. Now, there are
smarter ways to do it than that, but we're not far wrong.
It was carefully planned. There was
concern that the bad guys might be armed. So
we had authorized firearms officers available.
And the idea was that
at the appropriate time, once we were convinced that
we'd actually seen the narcotics and we
had the evidence that we needed, that we give the signal
for those officers that were secreted to,
to come and arrest the bad guys. And just in order
to create a short term
gap in their understanding as to what had gone on so that,
you know, the people that had assisted us along the way
could be as safe as possible. I was supposed to
skip the scene. And I
was relatively young and fit in those days, so at the
appropriate moment, I gave the signal and my
colleagues exited their hiding places as planned.
And I trotted off bit quicker than
trotted, only to discover after about
100 meters that actually pretty much all the cops were chasing me.
And some of them were armed. Oh,
my God. And of course, nothing untoward occurred. The
bad guys were appropriately apprehended by, by those
that managed to retain their sense of equilibrium
and the matter proceeded through the justice process as
per normal. But I have to say, being chased by policemen with
guns was scary. And so I must
admit I didn't expect the story to develop in that way. But it's
a great, and it's a great example how but
for the best laid plans, right, you can do everything
and then something just gets thrown
into the middle of, into the mix. So what was it
in your case that made these cops, had they not been
briefed as to the guy in the red trousers was not to be shot at
or arrested? Now, that was my first mistake, Gary. I was.
Weren't wearing red trousers.
And of course, and I alluded to, alluded to it in,
in, in kind of my setup for. Right, for the story,
in that it was a very dark environment, very,
very poorly street lit. I'd made it for after dark. There
were a lot of park cars. There was kind of more movement in the
car park than, than was helpful. You know, you'd
like it to be a bit quieter, but it wasn't that quiet. And you've got
to bear in mind, of course, that the general public
need to be as far removed from
situations that might go pear shaped as is possible.
And I'm going back 40 years
here. So it
was a different world, but
two kilos of cocaine and appropriate arrests
were made and convictions
subsequently emerged. Wow.
And your undercover career, when I
asked you had you ever felt in danger, I mean, I might be
wrong, but every single time that you went into a
scenario as Bill Smith, whatever your,
your legend was, you were in danger, Neil, you were in real
danger of being somebody having grasped you or
having suspected you and being taken away and disposed of in a body bag,
weren't you? That's a bit dramatic to.
I'd like to think we planned better than that. Okay.
We didn't, we didn't routinely go out on a whim. We,
we would make sure that we had contingency plans in
place for things that went wrong. You know, I can think of other
instances where
situations got really complicated,
but I always had the confidence that
there was a backstop in place if it really went badly. Pear
shaped. Yes.
Been scared many times. Bad guys get scared when
they're, when they're in the middle of a trade.
You know, they're working on really high adrenaline. Right.
The best of them retain a really calm and businesslike
air. And that was always my approach
if I'm talking to someone who.
In fact, it was the lesson for all of my investigative
career. When you sit and talk with someone who works
at that end of criminality, for them this
is simply business. And they want business to go as
smoothly and calmly as is possible.
And it's a real rarity if you are sitting
in conversation with someone who is utterly
unpredictable. And those are
uncomfortable circumstances. And I've used the
best word I could think of at the time to describe those. No, I get
it. But. But yes. So you need to go
and be prepared. But ultimately
these people are in it for business. This is just about
money. And can I ask you. Sorry to interrupt you. When you
were, for how long were you undercover? If you're allowed to
say, if not I'll move on. It was a dip in and out
life. So I. In the early days it was
very unregulated. Subsequently
it became much more scientific.
And indeed later in my career, after I got promoted a
couple of times, I became the national trainer
for undercover people for undercover
officers and led the group at Scotland
Yard that led and delivered that work.
And bringing my own experience to that environment
I think was helpful because it
helped me to cover
off some of the areas that I traditionally been uncomfortable with
to make sure that we recruited into the
work and trained people who could cope with the work. Because
living a different identity for a length of time can
be distorting for an
individual. So to be able to return to
normality in some way, shape or form quite quickly after
your deployment, really quite important. The longer
you're out in a fake identity, living a
different, a different personality, a different,
a different entity, the more complicated things get. So long term
infiltrations are problematic. And what, what impact
you're here. You look reasonably normal. I've known you for a few
years. What kind of impact would, was
would had it. What impact did it have on you
to mentally and psychologically once
you'd been in and come out of a situation?
Do you now look back and feel, gosh, that had a really
powerful impact on me and the way I saw the world or just
I wanted to lock myself away? Or were you one of those
individuals that are pretty stoic and you just worked through it all
and it was another day in the office for you? Probably
all of the above to be fair. Right. I didn't
with the adrenaline at the end of an
operation, it wasn't the sort of thing I could go off and
celebrate a success in relation to. I
just needed to go away and
de-stress. I suppose. So after I
completed the administrative
material that needed doing, my, my answer
was to just go, go home if I could. So I would,
I would disappear and go home. It did have an adverse impact on my
relationship without shadow of a doubt. And I did divorce
during that period. And
can I lay the blame at the door of my
work as an undercover officer? Probably in part.
But yeah. All of
these experiences help shape your
understanding of the world that you're there
to police investigate.
And I was fortunate to be able to carry that
experience into relatively senior roles in law enforcement
because the more you understand about how criminal business
works, the greater the opportunity
you've got to
be more effective as a law enforcement
entity. Yeah. So please stop me if
I'M being a bit too probing, but
for example, was your ex wife, was she in the
force with you or did you marry a civilian, as they say?
I did. I married a civilian quite young,
married at 20, 21. And do you
think that again, all I can do? Well, I do
have a few friends like you who have been through
and come out the other end and gone into private. The
private sector. But you get the feeling
generally, and of course from tv, et cetera, that
it's not like the course the private sector where you're paid overtime or you
work harder and you get more shares. And I know you work hard, you get
promotion, but it just seems to me that there is some.
There is a huge tension between being a police
officer, particularly in an area of narcotics,
undercover, serious, organized crime. There is
a tension that makes it almost impossible to keep
a stable relationship. At the same time, I do think.
It's difficult and I do think that the
service needs to do as much as it can to
regularize those situations.
And they have taken steps to do that. It's a much more.
When I did was something that I had to
obtain release from my normal duties to go away and do.
I would always have support from other senior
people within the service to do that, to negotiate with my
seniors. But it was always a challenge.
And your work didn't go away, your
teamwork didn't go away. So
yeah, it wasn't as well
organized then as it is now.
And I'd like to say I should take some credit for the better organization
that emerged after I took my experience
into leadership in the area for a while. So with the
benefit now, and I know you've been out of the public sector for a while,
if you were. If I was a youngish recruit
thinking of going into undercover work
as a way of either advancing my career or because I felt
passionate about somebody needing to take that extra risk,
would you say, you know what, why don't you hang off
getting married or anything until after you've gone through this
thing? Or would your advice be you can make it work?
The structure and the relationships are such that
you. It can be a
normalish relationship. I would say it's something
you need to have a conversation with your
partner. Yeah.
And equally, the entry
program now is much more
scientific, lot more psychology involved
in it, where the
organization tries to select people who can cope
with the stresses and strains,
using the learning from old soldiers like
me to kind of build the profiles that
are strong enough to manage it psychologically.
Now, I'm sure I'm going to come back to another
risky situation where you were at risk
from people other than your own colleagues or
comrades. But let's go back to you at
age 17. What on earth
possessed you to join the Met? Did you see something on tv?
Did you see Sweeney Todd or something and think I want to be
like him or what? No, none of the above.
I was very keen to join the navy and I had parents
who were very keen that I didn't join the navy.
And I'm London boy, born and
bred in north London, went to school in
Edmonton. Hoping not to put your
readers viewers off, but I'm a lover of Tottenham
Hotspur football club and I used to walk there on a
Saturday with my school friends and pay 2 shillings to get in
those days. Yes, those were the days. And watch Jimmy
Greaves and people that play football. So
my father said, son, you need to think about the police
because they have a very good pension.
I didn't think about the police because I had a good pension, but I was
a relatively well
behaved young man and if my parents
wanted me to do something, I generally tried it.
So I applied as a 16 year old actually to join the cadets and
they turned me down because I was too short
and reapplied a year later where despite the fact
I was still a teeny bit too short, they were kind enough to
admit me. So you just fluffed your hair up a bit, did you, in
order to get that extra inch or what? No, no, no, no.
Wasn't that the medical was one of those very
old fashioned ones. I won't go into any more details of that, Gary. No,
no, please don't. So without wishing to cause you any
mental stress, why at 16,
I'm sure like most people you had the alternative. You had the
possibility of going on to do A levels or university.
What was it? Were you like me, just not a great student
or what? What was it that made you decide not to go that route?
As the child of a working class family with five siblings,
the university was not an option. Okay.
People from my background didn't go to university very much. Got it.
I was okay as a scholar, but not stunning
and so middle of the middle of the road.
So, what O-levels did you do, Neil? Do you remember?
Yeah, English
I had to do. It was one of the first years they did CSEs
and I had to do CSE. Mathematics, okay, but
English, geography, history, I got O-levels in those
subjects. Biology, chemistry. Not great
grades, but yeah, okay.
And at school were there. I mean, I remember I was a
few years after you,
I think not that many, but the school's
careers officer was really just somebody that said, what do you think you'd
like to be an astronaut or a doctor or a
banker and then pat you on the shoulders and say, well, that's
a long way away. Why don't you do some A-levels or do this or do
that? But were most of your
contemporaries also leaving school at that age
from where you were coming from? Neil? Yeah, 80% of
the kids left at age 16.
Some went into jobs in
banking and working in local branches
or local governments, the civil service,
etc. Very few stayed on to do
full A levels. And indeed subsequently
I bumped into two or three lads
that joined the police service in later life
in the Met. So two or three of my contemporaries
ended up in the force as well. I see. And what do you do at
that age? Does your dad take you by the hand and you walk into the,
the local constabulary in, in
Edmonton or do you go on? No, of course I go online. There was no
such thing as online. So what do you do right away to the police force
and say, I'd like to join or what? Oh, yes, there was a
written application process then. Then a
full morning of written exams.
Okay. Police station in those days. In where?
Neasden. Paddington. Oh, Paddington Recruitment center
was. And after each written exam, someone
would collect them and take them away and mark them and then X
number would be weeded out and said goodbye to. So you.
There was a winnowing and those that remained
then had some lunch and went for medicals and then an interview process.
And it was, was it all done in one day? In other words, by the
end of the day you knew you were going to be joining or not joining?
Precisely. Wow. Okay. So you come home from
that first day and you,
you tell mum and dad, I'm in.
And your first assignment was what? So you,
you transfer in those days to. It's. It's like going to a college
or a university. So we, I, I shipped off to
Hendon in early September of 19,
1971. Oh. To the police training college, which no
longer exists, am I right? No, no, no, I think the college is still
there, but the cadet school that was attached there
too, is no longer. Yeah.
So off to the police college, where there were about
300 police cadets at
various stages and I spent a very happy
year at Hendon and then went off
as an 18 year old to what they called
third phase. So you'd spend
time as a police cadet accompanying a police officer around the streets of
London somewhere. I spent my time at
Marylebone Lane police station just north of Oxford street in
central London. It sounds like
quite a nice posting to me, if I'm thinking of Marylebone Lane now,
Neil, it's quite posh. Yes. In those
days it was a very old Victorian police station with a
canteen in the basement where you could share your breakfast with rodents if you
were lucky. Well, at least
they didn't talk a lot. Right, Yeah, I. Absolutely. And
it was an education for me
to see life in a police station, particularly the throughput of
the custody, what is now called custody suite, but was a charge room in
those days. Right. And having done your year,
did you at any stage stop and think, my
God, I had no idea that policing was actually like
this? I can't say that I did. I mean
I. Every day, every day was a learning day
and, and I enjoyed it enormously.
So I kind of fell on my feet, if I'm truthful. And did you
have a mentor in the person you were shadowing?
Either him, her or. When did you find, or indeed
did you find somebody that became your mentor through either your
career or part of your career? At various stages.
Yes. Different people at various times.
So, you know, on. When I was working on
the Mets narcotics squad in the early
1980s, along came
a guy called John Grief who was
the chief Inspector. I was a scabby DS on the.
On, on a team. But, but John
Grieve was a remarkable visionary as a
senior manager within the police service and one that you want
the like of which you don't find very often. Right. And
I learned a lot from the way he thought about
organized crime and particularly narcotics trafficking.
Okay, let me, let me just, let me just ask you this,
knowing of course that things have moved on, but an
inspector's exam would be focused on. Would
it be multiple choice? Would it be a face to face
interview? Would it be. What would you do in this situation, Neil, if
somebody pulled a gun on you, what was it like? In those days
it was law and practice, it was all written, an entire
written exam. So you
had a weight of study material
and classes for months
beforehand and everything rested upon
the score that you achieved on exam
day. So several hundred
of you would turn up at the training school on a Saturday
and sit the exam. It would take all morning and
a range of questioning styles, including
long, quite long written answers, kind of
theory, theory questions. Right.
And, and then thereafter you simply went into
a queue to be promoted when a vacancy arose.
Interesting. And when was it that
you found yourself either leaning towards
or being drawn towards narcotics as
an area of. I don't know whether you would call it specialty, but
I think you spent quite a bit of time dealing with
narcotics. Yeah, it was. It was my kind
of. It was the thing I was best at, I think, to
begin with. I mean, my,
my first arrest. My first arrest as a police
constable for drugs. Literally
a stop in the street, found someone with some amphetamine
sulfate in personal use. But in those days,
it was in the 70s that was arrestable. So I
took the gentleman to the police station and put him
through the process. And a detective came
downstairs and said to me, that's a really, really good job, well done, young man,
but don't do it again. It was to discourage officers from arresting
people for drugs so that there wasn't drugs problem. The division
1970s thinking. But
blessing that individual became my first informant
and he told me the source of that
amphetamine sulfate. So I
contacted the Mets drug squad and they
routinely arrived about four or five days later, having
conducted some observations and with a search warrant.
I've got lost here. Your first arrest. You bring him back to the
station and he then becomes, he becomes your informant and
gets released back on the street. Well, he's bailed. Pending.
He's bailed. Okay. Yeah. Pending appearance of court.
And did you have to do. Was it you who had the conversation about.
Look, Jimmy boy, you can. We can, you know, classic.
We can go lightly on you, gov, if you are prepared to play
ball with us. Or is it like. Like you're just bailed and you follow him
and it's one of those things. There's a slightly more formal process
than that. If someone. If someone gives information
that the fact that they did can be brought to the attention of the court
that adjudicates their case in due time.
I see. In a process.
And so, yeah, we. We followed that line and.
And that, bless him, that young man
later died of a heroin overdose, unfortunately, because he was a heroin
addict already. But
yeah, he was. He, he was able to, to let us
know about the address that he'd been buying amphetamine
sulfate from as a substitute for heroin.
And that proved to be good information.
And when it was searched, a reasonable quantity of
amphetamine sulfate and three people were arrested by
the Met Central Drug Squad. That was the first time I'd ever
seen the big boys at work, I suppose.
And that was my encouragement
to think I'd really like to work there one day. And so what
I'm interested In as well is
the psychology of how people behave
when they've committed a criminal offense and how, you know,
you watch a lot of movies with customs officers saying,
we watch for people walking very fast, we watch for people who
are looking at us, who obviously are looking nervous,
etc. Did you ever develop a particular
technique for when you are around,
walking around or on duty in particular, of knowing
some telltale signs when you thought something was going on as opposed to someone running
out the shop with someone screaming after him? Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think I
did. I think I almost arrived as a 17 year old
with. I mean, I grew up in Edmonton. It was a relatively
tough area to, to grow up in. So you
kind of, you kind of develop a bit of a radar in any
event, for what's, what's not a good thing to be
close to. And then if you take
that into a policing environment, yes, you have your
wits about you and you'll look as you're walking on the street
and, and I spent time walking as a uniform officer.
You get to interact with people in a way that helps you form
a view and yes, so eye contact's really
important and just where
people are and why they're there at
that particular hour, all of it comes
together in a way that is helpful. He
was just walking back, having bought this. And there was a big
part of it, you know, you just,
several things, several red flags all fall over in
line. So you stop and have a word and
then one thing develops to another.
And in terms of looking at
narcotics and the
spread of them and the way in which law enforcement
investigates, is there a huge difference
between what you dealt with and saw and
what you would face if you were a narcotics
officer in 2025? I mean, of course, I
appreciate you've got ways of laundering the money, you've
got crypto, you've got. But would I be writing and saying, look, the
fundamentals are the same. You've got to get the product, you've got to buy the
product, someone's got to make it, you've got to import it,
you've then got to distribute it. Is there anything that you can
think of nowadays that has changed fundamentally?
More hiding places for drugs being imported.
Right off the bat, the size of the market has changed
significantly. It is bigger by a factor
of probably 100, maybe more.
It's an enormous market now
and the supply chain changes.
Amphetamines, synthetic drugs, were
routinely manufactured in the UK
before in people's garages or old Warehouses or
whatever. There would be an amphetamine factory
and maybe a pilling machine to turn the powder
into tablets if you were making ecstasy or whatever.
Although ecstasy came along later.
Cocaine was a rarity in the
70s. Heroin much more
available, cannabis much more, much more available. All
of that imported, obviously. I think the
heroin we had in the early 70s tended
to come from Southeast Europe,
Turkey, Iran, that kind of environment.
And then later in the 1970s,
Pakistan, Afghanistan came much more into focus as a source
for heroin. Cannabis came from a range of sources.
There was red lead from Lebanon, there was
Moroccan hash, there was
Nepalese cannabis that came in
really thick resinous rolls.
And then you would have.
The vegetable variety, vegetative variety of
cannabis that came from the Caribbean or from other parts
of Africa. Quite odd supply
chains. Most of it now is grown in the uk.
Really? What, in these, in these farms that you see on tv?
Hydroponics. Yeah. Some
is still imported, but the vast quantities
are manufactured here now. And
investigative techniques, you were teaching,
if I'm right, you were teaching covert. You were teaching the younger
officers who were preparing to go into, or
training to go into covert investigations. Do
you think that's changed much over the years in terms of how
you would, how you would teach if you were transported to
Hendon today? I think the basics of the training
program are probably still relatively similar
to the way we were running it in the late 80s, early
90s. That was when the first training
programs emerged. Beyond
that,
Everything revolves around tradecraft. And tradecraft these
days is much more, more about digital, digital
connectivity and,
you know, you need to understand the market that you're
engaging with, so you need to understand
prices and quality and routes and
methodologies and everything moves with the times.
They're constantly updating their, the way that they do
business in just the same way that
the tobacco companies are constantly diversifying the
products that they're offering and the pricing and the
delivery programs and the way they move them, way
they invest their assets.
The financial world is constantly on point trying to
spot criminal assets entering the system.
Yet billions of pounds do still get
into financial systems without being spotted.
Sorry to interrupt you, but when you were involved,
I imagine that there were quite a few
scenarios where you were working together with international
police forces, Interpol or other countries
police forces. And how did,
how did that work? Did you feel that there was
an ability or there was a
positive element about cooperation? And
do you think that that's still the case these days? There was a
very positive and
receptive market for cross
border Investigations where the intelligence was strong
and Interpol sometimes had a part to
play. Bilateral arrangements
were also very, very good,
particularly with the United States. They always had a very
strong contingent at their embassy in London who were
always open to
seeing if an investigation had validity in their environment
as well as ours. And I did
one cross border investigation with the
DEA in the states in the mid-1980s that
finished with me having to go to Miami to give evidence in federal court.
And that was a very large heroin seizure in,
in, in the US. Just pausing on, on that point, Neil.
When you did that, were you concerned at that
stage or did you give your evidence behind a, a,
a screen? Were you at all nervous
that somebody might take retribution
as a result of your putting their buddies away? I suppose
there was always in my head,
remote possibility that that would come to pass.
But I gave evidence pretty much for the entirety of my
undercover career in my true identity. And it was only,
it was only in, in later times that there was the
potential. But yeah, for the, for the vast. And when I gave evidence in the
US I gave evidence in my true identity. Right. And were you
ever personally, did you ever receive
threats unfortunately, posted through your letterbox
or in some other way that people would try and,
and seek retribution or revenge for, for
bringing them in? I've had someone
call me on the work phone, the
undercover, the undercover firm end, and
be very explicit about what they're going to do to me.
Okay. That's pretty much the same. I've found
in, in a way that I've found I actually found on that
occasion more unsettling than, than
I should have given it credence for, because I was
absolutely confident that they didn't know where I lived.
But they alluded to the fact that they did know where I lived
and they would come and get me and my family.
That particular incident was one that
took me a while to clamber over. And I'm sure
that you have to refer that up the
tree in terms of if you've got a call like that and somebody does
a risk assessment as to whether or not you need protection. Yeah,
I'm not so sure the risk assessment process was quite as well
developed back in those days as it is now, Gary. But yes,
essentially someone had a
discussion with me and drew the same conclusion that I did, that I
wasn't really at risk and if anything else happened, to give them a ring.
To give them a ring. Right. And they'll send a panda car around every four
hours or something. Not many people will know what a panda car is,
Gary? No, you're right. You're right. I'm showing my,
my age as well. So coming back to.
Because everyone finds undercover work, I mean, super
interesting, I don't think I could ever do it. I'm just
far more of a volatile personality. But I've known you for
a few years and I spoke to, in fact, another.
Another friend of mine from the, used to be at the Met
has also been kind enough to join me in a podcast, and he's
got a very similar temperament. And you alluded to it before, if
you are Mr. Even Keel, if not very much,
it's quite difficult, I would think it's quite difficult to
upset or rile you, Neil. Would I be right? Yeah,
pretty much. I do get angry, but I don't show
it very easily. So what happens? What does it do?
Does it emanate or does it express itself in terms of, I
don't know, cramps internally when you're really cross,
what physical change comes over you or nobody would
ever know that it's happening. My children would say,
you always know when Dad's angry because he grits his teeth in a way that
you have to look to see, but if you can see those teeth being gritted,
you know that it's going bad.
Okay, that's fair enough. Because you had. You did tell me you've got.
You've got two or three kids from your first marriage. I can't
remember. Two from my first marriage, two from my second. And in
your second marriage, you also were working at some stage
within the police as well, or you had both of
them. So your kids in the first marriage, what
did they think of having a dad as a policeman? Was it. I mean, you
didn't use words like super cool, but were they, like, really
interested? And they came home every day from school saying, dad, who did you
nick today? They would have done if I'd
have ever been there. When they got home from school,
I probably worked 12, 14 hours
most days. I see. And that sort of links
back to the conversation we had before about the toll
that this kind of job, or any deed, any
workaholic style of human being takes
on family. You're just not there. And of course,
I was in a similar position. Came back from Hong Kong, I was
35, and I was building
up my career, and I was out at school seven in the morning and back
at nine at night and didn't see the kids for three years
after they were born. And I am pretty sure even today
they feel as If I let
them down at certain stages. So
I can relate to that position. Neil,
did you actually at the time understand that that
was the decision and the sort of quid pro
quo was that you were gonna be an absent father?
I know you were. But the long term impact of that, did you
ever think about that or not? I'm not sure. At the time
I thought I was being a particularly absent father,
my
breadwinner. All that kind of sort of traditional
thinking was, was in,
in my, in my DNA, I think. Yeah.
And yeah, I,
I was on a mission, I suppose to a, to a degree,
you know, I wasn't completely absent as, as, as a father.
And, and, and if you ask my two
older lads, they, they would both say
that they don't actually remember much of my absence.
So they're, they're, they're quite gracious about,
about their upbringing and we're still good friends.
Well, that's, you've told me that before and I think that's a tribute to you,
my friend, that you've got that relationship.
And in terms of being a disciplinarian,
I don't know, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you were
the more mild mannered
parental force in the family and it was your wife. I
know she was there, had to be there most of the time. But was she
the good, the bad guy and you the good guy or have I got it
wrong? I think those roles were
interchangeable.
So yeah, it wasn't. Not as clear cut as
that. Okay. And
there was a time as your career
as you got more senior and you, I guess
you did less undercover work and more training as you said, of
undercover police officers.
Yeah. Did you miss the buzz? Did you really want to continue
doing that UC work or not really? It became,
it became as plain as a pikestop that I was more
useful in a,
in an oversight role than I was
by continuing to kind of
deploy in a, in an undercover, in
an undercover role had more to offer.
Shaping investigations with
colleagues who were, who were
in those roles, some of them of long standing,
some of the newer entrants to the business. But
it was quite clear that it
was the right time to shift gear into a
much more, I'm not going to say
management role because that would be underselling,
was almost a consultancy role that
you would bring this growing portfolio of
both personal experience, but expertise that
you gained by having a view of all of the activity
that was going on in that environment
and being able to learn from others experience and build that into
both training and practice. Right. And I know
because we're getting towards the witching hour
which has just flown by. And I'm going to truncate
lots of bits of experience, but you leave the police and
then you go into the private sector. What was your first job
after leaving the police, Neil? I left the police for a
brief period and worked in the traditional
private security world doing risk assessments for businesses
and some consultancy work. And then I went back to the national
agency when it was formed in 2006,
spent another six years working for them as a deputy director
and then left. And
at that stage my second
wife was very unwell,
had cancer the second time around and I
needed to be more available. So I worked in a family business,
which was an English wine business
and in commodities trading,
natural rubber. Working with family,
it was something that I could do as a part time thing. And
I began working with Stop the Traffic as a volunteer.
I could do a lot of that from home or with occasional
deployments. I'd work with them as a volunteer while
I was still in service and had introduced them
to the Serious Organized Crime Agency
because they knew more about human trafficking than we did as an
agency in sort of 2007-8. Human
trafficking wasn't the priority crime
type in those days that it is now.
And so Stop the Traffic's relationship with the national agency is
partly responsible for accelerating that conversation.
Right. And
2010, while I was still serving, I took some time out and went
with them to Southwest Asia, to India. And
we spent some time with a, with a partner, men who'd been in,
in this city in India for decades, some of them trying to teach them skills
that would sustain them and feed them and their children. They
having been kicked out of the brothels to not make enough money anymore.
And I listened to their stories being played back through an interpreter
and was instantly interested in where are these stories?
If we can gather these in quantity, we can begin to understand
how we need to work to prevent
people being trafficked in the first place. Because they were able to tell
us where they had been when they were first recruited, how
that happened, the journeys they'd taken into trafficking. Because
the whole thing of people trafficking, is it
just that the label
became more familiar or
became a thing? Because historically people have always
used mules to move drugs, they've always
intimidated, they've always
sadly kidnapped and,
and forced people to do things that they
didn't want to do. So what changed, do you think,
before we leave our conversation, what changed in the
awareness of humanity that suddenly everything
that's been going on for years suddenly got this label and it became an
important thing to get involved in? I think
we had, prior to that, kind of
ignored it. And you know, if someone was
a drug mule, they'd get arrested for possession of drugs
and they would essentially take the fall
for the drug trafficker. You know, if you go
to the jungles of Colombia where they're making cocaine in jungle labs,
most of the people working in those jungle labs are working there. At the point
of a gut correct, they don't have
autonomy. And many of
the people selling sex don't have the autonomy
to make a choice to go and do something different. They're stuck in there until
they're either too old to work or they clamber out the window and run away.
So it was that earlier recognition in
me that, that this was something that we in
law enforcement had missed.
And it really wasn't very different from plantations
in southern USA in the early 1800s.
We just needed to process the information in a way that was helpful.
So followed the Modern Slavery act And from
that 2010 meeting I was on a mission to
try to find ways to gather
industrial quantities of lived experience so that
everybody who needed to have access to an understanding about how it works and
where it works could access that
from the people who'd experienced it. So
just very briefly, I know some of this, but not
enough to be able to talk to it the way you will. As we are
parting company, just tell us now where the
hub stands in terms of the richness of data,
what kind of data and who is able to access it.
That is the role that it is playing, the really critical role that
it's playing in helping to stop
people trafficking. The Traffic analysis hub is
a repository of, of vast quantities of
lived experience narratives drawn from all
sources. So open sources from individual experience,
they're debriefs with the people who are restoring them.
Classified and ingested into a system that
presents it in a map based format. So you can log
into the system. If you're a not for profit, if you're law enforcement, if
you're a business with a supply chain, if you've got
a legitimate reason for having access to it, if you're
not a commercial entity, you can have access to it at no cost.
If you're a commercial entity, we like to try and
get you to pay. And it's a very intuitive
platform, map based. So if you want to know what's happening
in the county of Sussex in England over the last Six
months. You can apply a series of filters,
including dates, and zoom in to
Sussex and there will be a number of icons that you can click on and
it will give you a story. Okay. If you want to download
that data, you could do that. Okay. And with the
advent of AI, is
that data going to become so much more
useful in the investigation and detection of
crime? I mean, or. And I'm assuming every
bit of software has got some AI factor in there, but is
there a way in which people are, and you are looking now at, you know
what, if we take this data and we apply some AI
formulae to it, this is going to be just
even better gold dust than we had before.
As AI progresses,
it's not totally reliable, of course, AI, as we, as
we know, but as AI progresses, we are
constantly updating the way that the
AI generates location data
from the, from the material we've got. So it's much more
accurate now the way it winnows out
and decides on just how reliable
the data that we're collecting is. So there's a reliability
score, et cetera. It's becoming
a swift way of understanding how trends
in trafficking are changing month on month, year on
year. You can display routes into
trafficking from Brazil into Ireland if you want
to. And it will show you
that whilst two years ago, that was quite a rarity,
now in 2025, it's very much not a rarity.
So this helps you to. Helps the user to
understand what to look for and where to look for it.
Well, Neil, I'm aware that I have kept you
not against your will, I hope. I've kept you in your
chair without a good cup of tea for just over an hour.
And I wanted to say what a pleasure it was
spending a concentrated period of time. I hope
I didn't get too intrusive and too personal, but
I've now come away richer, I promise you, as a
person, as a result of having shared some time with you. So thank you very
much. And who knows, I may well be knocking on
your virtual door for part two of
part two, part three, etc of Neil Giles,
investigator extraordinaire. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Gary. You have a lovely evening. Take care now.
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