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When Nick was in his twenties, he struggled to make ends meet. After a spell in the army, he started a construction business, but in the years after the 2008 financial crisis work was hard to come by. Adding to the pressure was the fact that his ex-girlfriend was expecting their baby. Keen to support them financially, Nick accepted a job from an old friend in the building trade. All he had to do was go to France, pick up a stranger and hide them in the back of his car while boarding a ferry back to England. Once on board, Nick would choose a lorry parked on deck and hand his passenger a knife so they could cut a hole in the lorry’s tarpaulin and climb inside. For this, he would be paid £3,500.
Nick — not his real name — is now in his forties with two criminal convictions. He is also the main protagonist of Shadow World: The Smuggler, a new BBC series written and hosted by the investigative journalist Annabel Deas. At once an illuminating character study and an extended confession in audio, The Smuggler finds Nick sharing his decade-long activities moving illegal migrants across the English Channel, first on car ferries and later via private boat. Nick’s years in the army meant he knew about reconnaissance and how to blend in or extricate himself from dangerous situations. What becomes clear over these 10 episodes is that Nick is also a charmer and an adrenaline junkie. “When you get away with something . . . there’s no other feeling like it,” he says.
British listeners will be aware of the highly politicised debate over the small boats making the perilous journey across the English Channel from France, sometimes with tragic consequences. According to Deas, Nick was among the first to use this method, which was later adopted by international traffickers. Rather than using boats, they opted for dangerously overcrowded dinghies. Deas fleshes out Nick’s story with the testimony of experts on people smuggling, modern slavery and migrant routes. She also speaks to a police detective who spent months tracking and building a case against Nick, which ultimately led to his second conviction and an eight-year jail sentence.
The Smuggler is, in many ways, a companion piece to last year’s To Catch a Scorpion, the BBC podcast about illegal boat crossings that, as well as chasing down international traffickers, told the stories of individual asylum-seekers risking everything for the dream of a better life. As with To Catch a Scorpion, The Smuggler is a slickly made production that deploys sharp sound design to place the listener on a noisy car ferry, or on a boat in a busy shipping lane. Through its meticulous and wide-ranging reporting, it also tells a disturbing tale of a ruthless trade that is still thriving, despite the promises of successive governments to shut it down.
bbc.co.uk/programmes
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