Turn Year-End Cash Management Into A Year-Round Process: Fill & Download for Free

Went from $4,000 to $1,000,000+ by 28 and from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000+ by 40 due to:Luck. Got through 55 interviews over 7 rounds to land a job in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Someone like me from a state school (William & Mary), had no business getting this job, but I got on a 6am bus to go to a career fair one Saturday and one thing led to another. Base salary was $40,000, so that kinda sucked, but my experience taught me how to invest, network, sell, and build relationships.Luck. Invested in VCSY in 2000, a Chinese internet stock that climbed 50X in six months. Turned $3,000 into $170,000 and sold at $155,000 when it started collapsing. The stock went to nothing a year later. At the time, I only had about $4,000 to my name, so this investment was a significant leap of faith.Luck. A headhunter called my VP to see if she wanted to work for a competitor covering West Coast clients. She said no and handed me the phone because I covered West Coast clients out of NYC! One thing led to another, and I got a new job after 2 years with GS as an Associate with a raise. Over the next two years, 90% of my GS analyst class got let go.Rational decision making. After arriving in San Francisco for my new job, I decided to live like a pauper for a year and a half because I didn’t know anybody and didn’t know where to live. In 2003, at the age of 26, I put down $120,000 and bought a 2/2 condo in a nice part of town for $580,500. I figured, best to turn funny money (VCSY profits) into a real asset. Today, the condo is a paid off rental generating $4,300 a month and worth ~$1,300,000.Went all-in again. At age 28 in 2005, I bought a single family home I didn’t need on the north side of San Francisco for $1.52M. The $300,000 downpayment took ALL the cash I had. I needed a $50,000 bridge loan because it was December, and bonuses weren’t paid until February the next year. Things were good for a couple years until the financial crisis happened. I was sweating bullets with my $1,200,000 mortgage. So I rented out a room for several years.Super lucky. I tried to sell the house I bought in 2005, for $1.7M in 2012. NO TAKERS after 30 days. It was embarrassing, so I took it off the market. My agent said a couple people were willing to offer $1.5M, and I said heck no. I wanted to sell because I had just left my job and we had just recovered from the financial crisis. I needed to lock down costs. I ended up selling the house for $2.74M in 2017 after my PITA tenants gave their notice. I couldn’t believe how sentiment turned so positive just five years later. Now the market is softening in 2018 as inventory is up 45% YoY and mortgage rates are at least 1% higher.Unwavering consistency. Real estate has made me over $2.5million, but it is Financial Samurai, my personal finance site that has done the most for my net worth growth. I started the site in 2009 during the middle of the financial crisis and made a promise to publish 3X a week for 10 years in a row. I figured, if I could stay consistent all these years, the site would grow, allow me to leave my job, and earn me some online income and equity in the process. Almost 10 years later, it has done just that. A couple of my peers just sold their websites for $6M - $7M, but I plan to keep going because running Financial Samurai is fun!So much of my wealth has been created through luck. The key was not taking my luck for granted and continuing to save and invest aggressively, as if my luck would run out.I got crushed during the financial crisis and made a poor investment in a Lake Tahoe property in 2007, but I have kept on going no matter what. I expect misfortune to fall upon me again, but hopefully I’ll be better prepared.It’s hard to keep the faith, but you must during the most difficult times. If you continuously put yourself out there, sooner or later good things will happen!Below is a snapshot of my various passive income investments to hopefully hold us over during the next recession. I’m focused on building my Alternative Investments, since I have more control over their outcomes.Real estate crowdfunding is the investment I’m most excited about after reinvesting $550,000 of my SF rental house proceeds in lower cost areas of the country with much higher cap rates (2.5% vs 10%). I’ve got a total of $810,000 invested in real estate crowdfunding and plan to slowly build a larger portfolio for passive income because I no longer have time managing rentals as a stay at home dad.Remember, you only need to get rich once. Once you’ve achieved a level of wealth where you never have to work again, focus on capital preservation. The last thing you want to do is return to the salt mines!Related: In Search Of FIRE: Financial Samurai Retirement Portfolio Review (2019 latest figures)Fight on,Sam, Financial Samurai

In last year’s edition of our annual cryptocurrency predictions we predicted the following. We want to openly indicate what went well and what not in last year’s cryptocurrency predictions.Institutional money as the catalyst for the crypto bull market. It turned out that the crypto bull market continued, but it was not yet institutional capital driving it. This process of institutional money pouring into cryptocurrencies is going slower than expected.Bitcoin’s upside capped is what we said a year ago. This might still be the case longer term but for now it appeared that Bitcoin was the cryptocurrency that was most solid in its retracement in the 2nd half of 2019. Most cryptocurrencies fell back to their early 2019 lows while BTC is ending the year almost twice as high as its open.XRP becomes the new BTC. Here it becomes very interesting. XRP clearly is the cryptocurrency with most traction in real life. In terms of ADOPTION there is not any other cryptocurrency that comes even close to what XRP is doing, at scale. However, the XRP price has not reflected this potential. Admittedly, a big disconnect between the XRP price and our expectation a year ago.Only added value cryptocurrencies would do well. This appeared to be partially true. It is true that no value add cryptos did outperform, and are facing existential risks (rightfully so). However, several value add cryptos are ending the year on a not so positive note neither which is due to the crypto bearish bias in the 2nd part of 2019.Blockchain implementations would accelerate. This certainly appeared to be true, even though the number of crypto enabled blockchain applications were not the majority.So with all this in mind what is in store for 2020? We feature 7 cryptocurrency predictions for 2020 in this article.There are so many cryptocurrencies that people do not tend to pay much attention to. Investing in these cryptocurrencies would bring about maximum profits and also would bring less worries in the fluctuations of their prices as they have really stable prices. Cryptocurrencies like ripple,monero,dash,binance coin,bitcoin cash,bitcoin sv, litecoin,ethereum and so many more can be invested on the platform(www.libraforex,io) where you get from 25% to 100% ROI on whatever is invested and also offering cloud mining services.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: Giant Secular Bull Market ContinuesBitcoin remains the leading indicator for the crypto market. According to its long term chart BTC looks to be building a long term base.The long term chart suggests that the pace of the ongoing bull market #3 might slow down compared to the previous bull market #2. Note the emphasis on the word ‘might’. It is not a given, but it might happen.Based on how Bitcoin will behave around current price levels we might need to adapt our investing strategy: from buy-and-hold to a combination of holding for the long term with medium term trades. How, how much, when … all these questions are what we solve in our premium cryptocurrency investing service. We guide our members in a way not anyone else is doing.Presumably Bitcoin needs additional time before moving to a state of accelerated rise. That’s in our opinion the message of this chart.All in all the message of the long term BTC chart is this: the grand secular Bitcoin bull market is still in place, and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Similarly, the grand crypto bull market is still intact, in 2020 and beyond.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: ‘Risk On’ Markets Supportive Of Crypto Bull MarketThis may seem like a not very intuitive prediction but we feel strong that this will be a relevant as well as an important one for 2020.In order to understand this point we have to take one step back. BTC is increasingly connected to the rest of financial markets which is because of the introduction of futures. More than any time before are large traders able to switch their capital from non crypto markets (like stocks, currencies, commodities, gold) to BTC, in two directions.Because of this we believe crypto markets are more subject to the tactical risk cycles.As per our annual forecasts we believe that a new RISK ON cycle has started in November of 2019: Small Caps Break Out as well as our Dow Jones forecast.The likelihood of a continued bear market as well as big crashes in BTC in 2020 are decreasing expotentially.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: Institutional Capital Pouring Into Crypto InvestmentsAs said in the introduction the capital from institutional investors came into the crypto market but at a lower pace than expected. Institutional investors need to manage their crypto investments in a different way than the retail public, and have different legal obligations as well as specific restrictions and requirements.Case in point: Bakkt took almost a year longer than planned to launch to the public. Yes they are growing fast, but started from scratch.According to this Coindesk analysis there is a slow learning curve among institutional investors. This quote says it all:The reality is that institutional investors are slowly getting comfortable (learning), and this process will continue to take time. Despite educational progress through 2019, some institutions are wondering if it’s too early to be investing in this space, and whether they can potentially get involved in investing in digital assets in the future and still generate positive returns, but in ways that are de-risked relative to today. Despite a few other challenges imposed on larger institutional investors with respect to investing in digital assets, true believers inside these large organizations are emerging, and the processes for forming a digital asset strategy are either getting started or already underway.Institutional capital will make a difference, but it will take some more time to reach the tipping point. It may start in 2020 but also in 2021. One thing is sure: in 2020 there will be an acceleration when it comes to institutional capital inflows.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: Integration with Real World ApplicationsWe will increasingly see integrations between the ‘real world’ and the crypto world.If you think about it so far the crypto and blockchain world has been pretty isolated. A world that stands on itself.We believe that 2020 will be a pivotal year in which blockchain / crypto moves closer to the real world. Especially in the enterprise world we will see ways to open up real life data integrations with blockchain / crypto applications.Case in point: Chainlink is doing amazing work in this field. The list of Chainlink’s partners is pretty impressive, and it illustrates our point. Companies like Google, Alibaba, Oracle, etc are interested to connect data applications ‘offchain’ to the blockchain through Chainlink.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: Adoption Will Beat Non AdoptionAdoption is the what will make the difference ultimately, also in cryptocurrency prices.However, we did not see an adoption driven price discovery mechanism in 2019. And given the evolution of the crypto market it will not be the key driver for all cryptocurrencies neither in 2020.The one exception that might start making a difference is XRP. The adoption of XRP in transactions starts becoming really significant. The demand for XRP is growing significantly. With the partnership between Ripple and Moneygram (one of the largest money transfer services worldwide) it is clear how fast the volumes are growing that XRP is transferring from one currency into another currencyThere are only a handful of other cryptocurrencies that come close to similar signs of growing adoption. But 99% of cryptocurrencies show no sign of adoption whatsoever. Sooner rather than later they will disappear.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: XRP Consolidates in a Wide Rounding Bottom FormationFrom a price perspective the breakdown of XRP was an important event of 2019, which came half a year after the amazing crypto rally of April/June.We believe that XRP is setting a giant rounding pattern. A major rounding bottom or ‘saucer base’ in more technical terms. Eventually this will resolve to the upside, and we believe that XRP will set a major bottom in the first half of 2020 before starting its steady rise.Our longstanding price target of 20 USD is still valid. XRP will not trade at 20 USD in 2020 obviously, that’s a bit too ambitious, but it will set the stage in 2020 for an accelerated rise later down the road.Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2020: Ripple’s Swell to set the Bar for AdoptionLast but not least we believe that Ripple’s annual event ‘Swell’ will increasingly set the bar for adoption.The type of conversations and evolution that was presented at Swell in 2019 is amazing. Again, no other cryptocurrency comes close to achieve what Ripple is doing, which in turn helps realize the full potential of the XRP ecosystem.Cryptocurrency Predictions Log: Weekly updated throughout 2020This is a weekly log to keep track on our crypto predictions for 2020. We update this log on weekly basis with short bullet points to highlight whether the crypto market in 2020 is developing according to our cryptocurrency projections outlined in this article.First week of January: we see encouraging signs on the BTC chart as the leading indicator for the crypto market. The odds favor a reversal to take place which should help BTC as well as the entire cryptocurrency market tremendously.Second week of January: a great start of the week for the price of BTC and other cryptos. They are rising along with BTC. We couldn’t imagine it better than this, great start of the year 2020.

Who really funds the trade in narcotic supply, and causes the violence required to keep it going.I thought I was a man of the world when I joined the police. I was 31, served ten years in the army, a couple of years on the news desks and a few more in drama production all over the world. A few weeks into my first beat I realised most of my assumptions of police work were Hollywood. I had a better idea of the ground situation in the Balkans than I did my own city.The yellow line is the boundary of City Road and Hoxton beat, Hackney, East London.This was my first beat in 2002. To the south were celeb and banker heavy clubs, bohemians and bright young things flaunting their success in the drinking squares. The remnants of the Curtain Theatre where Shakespeare learnt his trade sits squarely in the middle. It was a veneer factory when I attended it after a burglary and got to stand on the last 3ft of original stage.When I first walked it the Prime Minister’s home address was just off the top left corner of this map in Islington. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony video was still popular and was filmed on Hoxton Street along the eastern boundary.The Provost estate sits in the top right corner of the beat. I entered my first crack den there: Two toms (prostitutes), a street artist (beggar) and a small business owner (distribution of car tyres) all cooking up while a half mummified dog was still chained to the radiator in the back room. The floor had been used as a toilet and newspaper put down to cover the mess, a four inch duvet of human waste.You could see the back yard of the Police Station from the window.At the end of my first year I had to turn in a file on my beat - an intelligence and ground picture of: prom nom sightings (prominent nominals - the bigger players in crime); PYOs (persistent young offenders - much the same but under 18); gang nominals; street dealers; drug prices; robbery hotspots; burglary trends; vehicle crime methods; drug dens and stairwells. The names of homeless and street drinkers; bouncers; shop keepers; prostitutes the lot.It was a record of what you had been up to and what you’d taken notice of.One important aspect was to build a map of your ground: active crack houses / drug dens were a big part of this picture, my bosses loved closing them down and getting pictures in the papers. Wherever they sprung up anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, robbery, theft from vehicles, snatches and begging would spread out like ink blots on a map.This is why drugs are bad - whole estates reduced to stinking derelicts as the locust-zombies meander around your patch devouring goodwill and community relations. So we closed them down on a regular basis. We’d push them onto the next beat and three months later they got pushed back to us and you started collecting the evidence again.The most common venues for drugs dens were the homes of vulnerable adults. Long ago it was decided that people with severe learning disabilities or chronic mental health issues would get more from life if they got their care in the community. The officials running this policy swiftly became inundated and the locusts descended in lieu. Nice little cash cows are folk on disability benefit. You can trash their house and the council will get them a new one.In my annual report I had found evidence of maybe thirty drug addled locusts in four squats. I may have missed some but they are not covert. Let’s say those addicts are using twice a day (the upper scale of use) thats 30 x £40 a day = £1,200 a day - £438,000 a year to be made supplying crack and heroin to the locusts in this small square of London.The yellow stars are where we would find the street dealers. The orange stars are where we found our drugs dens, stairwell shooting galleries and open air venues for the summer months. The lime stars are where our homeless alcoholics spent the day begging, drinking or shouting at street furniture.So the dealers were clearing around £438,000 a year. An NYPD study I have faith in looked at the economics of the sale of drugs in their city: They had the suppliers taking 70% of the profit (£306,600), distributors (Tier 1 gang nominals) taking 70% of what's left (£91,980). The Top Boys (Tier 2) on the corners got the rest of the money to run their crews. (£39,420)Top Boys do the graft. It’s their area to control and sustain. Overheads like knifes, packaging and shop floor space are fairly cheap and plentiful. Guns and silence aren’t. Everyone got families and folk to keep happy, less they snitch on you. Yet only a fraction of your silence budget goes out in cash, the remainder is bought though fear and intimidation. You do as you're told or you get perforated.You got to get word out you're selling, but not so far that Police hear. You gotta show you’re the one to do business with - lest you get attacked by another crew. So another 70% goes on marketing, hospitality, silence money and payroll. Your armed lieutenants will be on a retainer else they get ambition, but your runners and couriers will be on commission and most will be working for protection, from you.The estates provide the cover, refuge and vulnerabilities to exploit for the necessary security. He gets his car lease and insurance paid for by the social thru motability finance because he claims to be the carer for one of the vulnerable disabled people on his estate that he’s using as a shell company.Kids get chased off their playgrounds, curtain twitching neighbours get their windows get put in, homeless alcoholics are beaten and a teenager stabbed every so often to curb ‘disrespect’. They’re sink estates, we turn up, report it and no one speaks. Because no one really cares what happens on them.The locust zombies do an excellent job soaking up police work and provide enough stats to keep the coppers from looking any further. Their effects on the neighbourhood can be increased with a hot supply or decreased with a call to police. Very useful and expendable thermostat in your estate management.But still for turning an estate into your petty fiefdom, selling to just the addicts you have a net annual profit of £11,826. 2.7% return for your efforts.Huh!Unemployed seventeen year old Top Boys, can’t put their funds in a bank, that raises questions and leaves evidence. Can’t keep it in cash, they’ll get turned over by rivals.So you stream it, another word for launder. Buy and sell big ticket items, invest in local cash business and get a slice of the results. Think of it as a stock option portfolio if they survive their apprenticeship.The purchasing power can often halve again through this process. Not a lot of people sell big ticket items in cash anymore so Top Boys find themselves buying from those who know where their money comes from. Cars, rims, club entry, drinks, jewellery all come at double price. The value of your work now a miserly £5,913 p.a.And when we catch you, and we do quite often, we seize your money under the proceeds of crime act. But you still have to pay for your silence, your lieutenants and suppliers. You can find yourself in big debt, big time.I once took £5,000 off an eleven year old courier at the top of Hoxton Street. My Sgt warned me all I had done was put the shop floor into debt. Perfectly good arrest but be prepared - best result was the Top Boy legged it, or doubled up next week with aggressive marketing - by which I mean chase another crew off their turf or better still rob another crew.Most likely he would send lieutenants and wannabes out to snatch some mobile phones at knifepoint and raise my robbery stats. Less useful outcomes were to pimp out an underaged regular truant (boy or girl) or a stabfest on collection day.So all that effort, risk and graft for £113.71 a week. Unemployment benefit back then was £60.19 a week. Which they were probably claiming as well.And yet he’s wearing £550 trainers, a girlfriend wearing three times that, spends a couple of grand a night in the clubs, and has a two year old VW Golf with spinning rims. Gets everything replaced within the week.Huh!One night shift I was buying a snack from a 24hr convenience store, a fifty year old partner in the enterprise behind the till, a thirty year old employee outside among the fresh veg on display, another hanging around the drinks fridge and a twenty year old in the back drifting between the stock room and the cereal. All smiles and nods of the head.‘Wow I had no idea the 3am Tuesday economy for fresh tomatoes and artichoke could support the wages of four grown men?’ I wondered to myself.‘It can’t’ I realised half way down the road with some sugar in me.‘So what the hell is?’If I walked from the knick to the end of Hoxton Street along the main roads I would pass four such shops in a leisurely 15 minutes. Competition in the late night cucumber and washing powder markets was high.Every fourth or fifth 24/7 would be a Western Union outlet. You could pick up and send money anywhere in world while simultaneously buying your canned goods or buying flight tickets for your holidays. They used to have a nice little sideline in blue plastic transportation barrels. You could fill them with clothes and presents for family back home and they get collected by the same vans that delivered the next night’s kiwi fruit and lemons from Spain. Apparently it was a very cheap way to send stuff abroad.We found a blue barrel alone once, quite by accident, addressed to Lagos. We had to check inside to see if the owner had left contact details, make sure nothing had been stolen. 20 stolen mobile phones, hidden inside second hand clothes bought from the local charity stores. They didn’t even bother to mask them incase they went through an X-Ray, easier to write it off, the addresses were always bogus.Across from my beat and there were five more 24/7s before you got to the canal, which is when the restaurants that were always open and never full and the endless chicken and kebab shops began to stretch all the way up the A10 to Stoke Newington three miles up town.These stars marked in red are the major clubs, the blue stars are venues where temporary licence events were held on a semi-regular basis.Clubs are obviously full of drugs, the temporary licence venues were wholesale markets for streaming. They usually sprung up when a surplus was left over, funds were needed quick or a bad batch needed thinning out. When you tried to follow the money - it all ended up in cash, if you found someone holding the licence they were patsies paying off a debt with silence or vulnerable through influence, language and education.If you discovered drugs being sold at their event - well maybe they’d get a fine, maybe they wouldn't be allowed to run a temporary licence for a while.The red star directly above the blue star in the bottom right is where many years later on CID I responded to the rapper Professor Green when he had his throat ripped open by an angry glass.Thursday to Sunday night, peaking Friday and Saturday it wouldn't be uncommon to find 10,000 people milling around that area between 19:00 and 03:00. In and out of the pubs and clubs, standing for eons in queues for venues that boasted of the draw of celebrity sightings, while bouncers decided who was good enough to come in and join them.Oh, and they were all in and out the 24/7s for hydration and munchies, before heading to the chicken shops for dinner, or breakfast depending on how you view nocturnal sports.If only a fifth of them bought one gram of cocaine, or two tabs of ecstasy, thats: 2,000 people spending £30 a night for four nights, or £60,000 a weekend. £3,120,000 a year. I’m purposely taking the lower figures, it was easily treble.Huh!So the drugs industry made their coin at the weekend among the queues. We were talking big money now, something worth protecting with some ultra violence.I developed a plan. We used the council CCTV to playback the previous half hour at x 20 speed. Cars became streaks of light, the punters in the queues shuffled towards the doors and the dealers in the queues - the dealers stayed still - and stood out like street furniture.I watched one set up and start selling, ran down to the club and twenty minutes later I hauled him out of the queue. A bit of stop and search Sec.23 and I find 50odd tablets and £1,400 in twenties. Cuffs. He was a graduate student doing a masters in Pharmacology and selling fake ecstasy. Makes for a good story, but I've told it before:Next night the sped up footage shows one chap in an orbit that takes him in and out of the queue and round the back of the building three or four times. We grab him and he's got a money belt full of Ketamine and a sock full of £20’s. He tried to run and I ripped the knee of my trousers bringing him down the rascal.We get to search his flat share, not too far away in a rapidly gentrified area. Flatmates all young professionals with degrees and opinions on why we should ignore a ‘bit of K - it’s not like it’s bad’. Another half kilogram was found in a lovely hand carved ethnic display box on his mantlepiece.He was a freelancer in media/marketing. Times were lean and he had taken on a bit of event promotion. Handing out samples to encourage others into a temporary licence venue.We went back into the queues all weekend and got eleven arrests in two nights. One might be described as criminal class, the others all had jobs, education and the right attitudes to the emotive issue of the day. Estate rats look out of place in swish clubs, you need a trojan.The top boys were watching us from their corners. There is no way those stabbists were allowing these guys to work the queues without their permission. Which meant money flowing back to the gangs. If you followed the queue dealers and gang couriers long enough they always seemed to frequent - the same all night shops and chicken joints.The red circles are (to the best of my memory) where we had stabbings during my year on the beat in Hoxton. At least the ones I responded to. The black circles are where we had shootings. One shooting, one stabbing ended up dead, one stabbing ended up blind.Predominantly these were the younger elements of the dealer gangs getting hit. They were mainly people who lost something valuable, sold their own, got ripped off in a deal or were getting too mouthy. Quite often it was a promotion ladder exercise based on winner takes all. Two shootings were Tier 1 gang nominals from out of area settling debts, saving face or giving a proactive board meeting pep talk to their shop floor.Years later we got a call that a well-known member of a popular girl band had been stabbed in one of our temporary venues, so we piled in there, turned on the lights and once we had satisfied ourselves it was LoB (load of bollocks) we turned over some of the event promoters, found some drugs and the party thinned out.I later learned from some loose tongues the call had been made by a rival promoter looking to increase his market share. There is just no honour in events management these days.In and out of the all-night stores this little parade of humanity went, suppliers, dealers, clubbers and of course the ordinary civilians about their artichoke and chicory needs.The next year I went onto response team and started attending the houses of the local gentry. I would often see lovely little hand carved ethnic boxes on mantelpieces and I always wanted to look inside them. Unfortunately when you've been called to settle a neighbour dispute you can’t search houses. Eyes only.They would be complaining of burglary, stolen mobile phones, criminal damage, nasty looking people outdoors near their kids, dog crap on the street “aren't you going to get rid of it?”Sometimes they put their joints out before we got there and sprayed air freshener. Sometimes - especially the semi-retired - didn’t even bother to do that. It helped us really. A street notice warning for cannabis possession for personal use counted as an all important stat for the end of the month.One night we spotted an ageing transit van dragging it’s rear axle down the road. After a short foot chase produced two well-known local opportunistic thieves (they had more years in jail between them than I had breathing) we discovered where they found the two ton of authentic, antique London yellow clay brick (£60 a brick) they had thrown in the back of their van.They came from the driveway of a house under gentrification around the corner. A middle aged IT CEO answers the door in linen shirt, drawstring trousers, barefoot. You know the sort, thoughtful and kind with a well stocked mind and burgeoning house equity value. Buying free-trade coffee, responsibly sourced sandals and a three grand bike so he didn’t put money in the hands of oil cartels.“Good morning sir, sorry to bother you at 3o’clock but I believe we’ve recovered some property stolen from you! Are you having a party?”“You can’t come in here without a warrant!”Ok this went complianty in a hurry. The conversation went along the lines of ‘can you look at this giant pile of incredibly expensive brick you’ve left outside your house and tell me if any of it is missing’. His end of the conversation went: No, No, where? I don't live here all the time, no the brick isn't new, it’s been specially reclaimed from genuine east end buildings, no no no, yes, you can’t come in without a warrant!I wanted to put the baddies in the cells and at this rate I had nothing.“I tell you what sir, shall I come back in the morning to take a statement? When your eyeballs are back inside your skull and you can talk in complete sentences?” “If I may I would like to come inside and see the extension you’re building, just to check they haven’t damaged it? or I could wait until my colleague has got a warrant!”Flush go the toilets. “Yes they are brick! My brick, yes mine!”Good Morning sir!The only thing I hate more than scraping stabbed kids off their corners, trying to advise thirteen year old pimped out toms he doesn’t love you, and digging out locusts from their fecal mausoleums is the hypocrisy of the respectable middle classes who sustain the industry that keeps those children and vulnerable adults in hock to psychopaths.I volunteered to cover the Lovebox festival in Victoria Park for a bit of overtime. It’s a happy family event for white middle classes to listen to authentic ghetto music, drink wine and get their children's face painted. I was stood at the entrance just before opening and watched a tide of £300 sunglasses and £1,200 baby strollers assemble with their offspring.I told my skipper I didn’t like the middle classes. I felt they got away with too much of the shite we had to shovel round here. We hatched an idea, he called for a sniffer dog van. One was often skulking around the Shoreditch clubs in the early hours of a Saturday and over he popped for a quick spot of exercise.The first five people through the gates all got arrested for drug possession. A 13 year old thoroughly depressed grey skinned kid with £150 and a big bag of weed on him. A pair of yummy mummies pushing two kids, dragging two more with six tabs of E inside a lipstick tube and two more ingested. A couple of parents on day release and a minor celeb.When the crowd subsided we found bags and bags of cocaine, E and ketamine among the abandoned organic trail mix squashed into the soil where they had stood.I really wished I had got the mummies - they went way screaming as their children were taken into police custody and the social called. I got the ghostly sad sack.He was a lovely kid, very sad, very lonely and completely and utterly grassed up his mother for supplying him with the weed. It came from her exquisite hand carved ethnic wooden box on her mantlepiece.Mum was a bit cross when she arrived to take him home. Apparently I was a great number of bad things. My job was to find “real” drug dealers and the scumbags who vandalised her car not chase stupid tiny amounts of cannabis at festivals. The nature of my birth and my educational qualifications to stand in judgement on how she raised her child - whose father was a lawyer - were called into question.“There is absolutely no harm in a bit of blow!” She exclaimed so loudly the Custody Sergeant gave me the ‘get this over with now!’ face.“He hasn't got the size for it! madam, and neither do you!”I don't remember exactly what I said next but it was good. I asked where she bought the drugs, over the counter from the 24/7 shop that also fences your stolen phones, or direct from a 12 year old courier who your personal habits have pushed out of school and into the firing line of stabbists?Two nights ago, three streets from where you live, a 14 year old girl was violently sexually assaulted by members of the same gang that control drug supply in your postcode. It was most likely an initiation of a lieutenant, who was counting your money the next day.If you think your socio-economic status insulates your conscience from the horror your harmless hobby puts poorer families through when you fund the gangs who run their estates, I’m hear to tell you, I’ve been granted a Section 18 search of your home address as you are under arrest on suspicion of possession with intent to supply a minor with a controlled substance.The custody sergeant had a gaoler waiting.Felt so much better, and my skipper gave me a thumbs up. We had adana kofte with chilli sauce from Dirty’s on the way back.Honest to god, when it clicks and goes well it’s the best job in the world.This used to be called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, I have long been a member, and think it states my position on the drugs war well enough.About Us | Law Enforcement Action Partnership UKPolice, undercover operatives, intelligence service, military and a range of figures from the criminal justice system are joining together with civilians to raise awareness to the failed, dangerous and expensive pursuit of a punitive drug policy. Our main goals at LEAP are: To educate the public, the media and policy makers to the failure of current …http://ukleap.org/about/