Mugged Off in Organised Crime

How a snake is charmed

You've probably seen a snake charmer in a film. A man sits cross-legged, plays a pipe, and a cobra rises out of a basket and sways in time, as if it's under a spell.

Here's the thing most people don't know. The snake isn't enjoying the music. Snakes can barely hear it. The snake is watching the pipe, which it sees as a threat, and moving to follow it. The charmer knows exactly how the snake will react, so he controls it without the snake ever realising it's being controlled.

That's how recruitment works. The person doing it knows how you'll react before you do. He knows what you need, what you're missing, what you're angry about and what you're scared of. And he plays to it, move by move, until you're swaying to his tune and thinking it was your idea.

It isn't magic, and it isn't luck. It's a pattern. The same pattern turns up again and again, in different cities, with different drugs, with different people doing it. Once you know the pattern, it gets much harder to charm you.

I'm going to show you the shape of it. Not so you can do it. So you can see it coming.

It's possible

I'm going to be honest in this chapter, because you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort.

Getting out can be hard. There can be debts, threats and fear. There can be people who don't want you to go, and people who'll make you feel like you've got nowhere else to be. I'm not going to pretend any of that away.

But people get out. They do it every day, from every kind of situation, including situations that looked impossible from the inside. And almost none of them do it on their own.

The first step out is almost always the same. Tell one person.

You don't have to tell them everything at once. You can start with "I'm in something and I don't know how to get out."