Losing a close friend in a coke tragedy drove telly chef Gordon to investigate the Class A drug
TELLY’S most hot-tempered chef Gordon Ramsay gives the impression of never being fazed by anything.
But still seared in his brain is the painful memory of being summoned to identify the body of a close friend who died due to contaminated cocaine coursing through his veins.
He says: “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I physically broke down. I couldn’t go behind that glass screen and identify a guy that I loved dearly. It took years to get over that.”
Last year Brits consumed 30 tons of the drug — up 40 per cent in 20 years — and more than in any other country in Europe.
But it was the death of fellow chef David Dempsey in 2003 that has prompted Gordon to turn up the heat on the crime gangs who are swamping the UK with the Class A drug.
In a hard-hitting two-part documentary starting on ITV tonight Gordon says: “I’ve wanted to understand the world of cocaine ever since I lost one of my chefs at my flagship restaurant in Chelsea.
“Why is this drug becoming such an epidemic, not just globally but specifically in the culinary world? I saw cocaine quite a lot in my career.
“I have been served it, I have been given it, I have had my hand shaken and left with little wraps of foil.
“I have even been asked to dust cocaine on top of souffles, to put it on as icing sugar.
“Coke is everywhere. It is spiralling out of control. Year on year, death after death, there’s devastation.
Yet no one wants to talk about it but they all want to f***ing snort it.
“Cocaine, once an exclusive drug of millionaires and celebrities, is now Britain’s favourite Class A drug, commonplace in every town and city across the UK.”
Gordon is still haunted by David’s death, 14 years after the head chef fell 40ft from a balcony after taking a contaminated batch of coke.
He says: “He had two kids, Megan and Jack. I never thought in my wildest dreams that David, my head chef, was on cocaine.”
They had had dinner together on the night David died, and Gordon recalls: “He seemed agitated, constantly restless, disappearing to the toilet every 20 minutes.
“I went back home and he went back to Chelsea. He went to a dealer’s house who gave him some s**t cocaine and it f***ed him over.
“David died after falling from a block of flats. At the inquest it was described as an ‘excited act of delirium fuelled by cocaine’.
“I kicked myself for not doing more and recognising it earlier.”
Father-of-four Gordon also watched his own brother, Ronnie, become enslaved by Class A drugs.
He says: “I have been very anti-drugs from very early on in my life, having to watch my brother f*** his life up, going from coke to heroin.
“I went to a dealer’s house once and I had to take my little brother into this s**thole of a flat for a fix to get him to my father’s funeral.
“That was f***ing grim. That was a big shock for me, to see how far he had gone.
“I worked my a*se off to get out of the s**t mess I grew up with.”
In 2007 Ronnie was jailed for ten months after being caught with heroin on the Indonesian island of Bali. Afterwards he returned to the UK and was last known to be living in Plymouth, Devon.
Drugs have long cast a shadow over Gordon’s life. He guessed that diners in his restaurants who take side plates to the loos were using them to snort coke — but he had no idea some of his staff were also taking the drug during their shifts. Using wipes that turn blue when cocaine is detected, he swabbed five staff loos and 12 used by diners at five of his London restaurants — and was horrified to discover cocaine in all of them. In one there was so much cocaine that the wipe turned the colour of a J Cloth.
Gordon says: “That was the shocking one. It looked like it had been doused in cocaine. It was a wake-up call. Right now I’m obviously concerned about my 750 staff in London. That’s my responsibility.”
So Gordon began investigating the cocaine trade in Britain, where 80 per cent of the drug comes from just one country — Colombia.
He says: “Behind cocaine’s glamour images lies criminality, cruelty and death. Violence, gang crime, shootings and stabbings are linked to cocaine.
“More than 140,000 drug-related offences were committed last year, costing Britain over £10billion. People are making a lot of money out of generating a lot of misery.
“Cocaine-related deaths are reaching epidemic proportions.”
As part of his investigation, Gordon visited the London forensics lab where 70 per cent of cocaine seized in the UK is analysed.
During his visit 30 kilos of the drug were brought in, wrapped in rubber-coated blocks the size of paperback books, with a street value of £3million. Scientist Peter Caine showed Gordon two bottles of golden rum — one genuine, the other containing a quarter of a kilo of cocaine hydrochloride. A 25ml shot probably contains about eight grams of cocaine.
Peter says: “If you were to drink one mouthful you would die. Cocaine is very soluble — you can actually dissolve two grams in one millilitre of water.
“To get it back into powder form, just put it on a baking sheet and gently warm it until the liquid evaporates.”
Gordon was horrified at the plight of “swallower couriers” who bring drugs into the UK from Panama, Nicaragua and Honduras.
He was shown a graphic X-ray of a courier with 120 pellets of cocaine, weighing a total of two kilos, inside them. Tom Saggars, head of drugs intelligence at the National Crime Agency, tells Gordon: “That is going to pass through the intestine and is going to come out the way all food comes out. Then someone is going to sift through and pick the layers off that and then, in your restaurant, someone is going to snort it as a glamorous drug.
“There is nothing glamorous about that picture.”
In the second episode Gordon meets Rachel, a mother-of-two whose life was almost ruined by cocaine. She used to have a house, mortgage and a well-paid job in finance but for 12 years she spent £800 a week on cocaine and now claims the only thing she owns is a television.
Rachel says: “It was like ordering a takeaway. I never had a time in 12 years when I couldn’t get it. It was always available.”
Gordon travels to South America to see for himself the illegal “cooking” process by which the drug is made.
He meets hired assassins and a big-time drug-smuggler, witnesses the immediate aftermath of a suspected coke-related murder and joins a Colombian anti-narcotics unit on a helicopter raid. Back home he is determined to rid his restaurants of cocaine — for good.
Any staff member with a problem will be offered professional, confidential counselling and in the most extreme cases, rehab.
Managers will also be trained to identify signs of cocaine use. Finally, the practice of customers taking side plates into the toilets will not be tolerated.
Today Gordon employs his late pal David’s son Jack, who is training to be a chef, like his dad.
He says: “I’m determined that neither Jack nor any of my staff fall victim to drugs as my friend David did.”
— Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine is on ITV tonight at 9pm. Part two is next Thursday.
