The (ex) Biggest Heroin Dealer in the Whole Wide World

Photo: Stuart Griffiths

By the time Suleyman Ergun was 21 years old, he was the world’s most prolific and powerful seller of smack. Known throughout the junkie and police communities as the North London Turk, Ergun and his gang flooded Britain and Europe with heroin for five years.

For his pains, the former factory worker got mansions filled with cash and unlimited underworld cachet. At the height of his powers he was a multimillionaire and his favorite tipple was a bottle of champagne with eight grams of cocaine dumped into it. Today, he is almost penniless and lives with his mum. He’s 39. What happened? VICE: Tell me a fond memory of your drug-dealing days.
Suleyman Ergun: Did you serve an underworld apprenticeship? How does one go from selling coke in a bathroom in Camden to being the king of all heroin in Europe? babas It’s that simple, eh? What was your role? Where did it all go wrong? What was the upshot? Did that teach you a lesson? How did you get your heroin in jail? Didn’t the prison wardens ever find out? Couldn’t anyone smell you smoking it? How many bent screws did you know? I suppose when you got out of prison in 2003 you gave up drugs? What’s crack like? What was the lowest point? Some people would say that it was natural justice—that you were being punished for selling heroin by becoming a drug addict. How did you finally get off drugs? Would you ever go back to being a heroin baron? Why? Are you scared?

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