“THE COCAINE QUEEN.”

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 159224, 13 September 1923, Page 4

“THE COCAINE QUEEN.”

DRUG TRAFFIC IN LONDON. DOUBLE LIFE OF A “DROPPER” With the conviction and .imprisonment of Alexander lassonides, a Greek cafe-keeper in Soho, for dealing in cocaine, there is closed a remarkable criminal chapter in London’s drug traffic. Its most conspicuous figure was Helen lassonides, wife of two notorious foreigners in succession, and the brain of the drug dealing enterprise in which both were engaged. Alexander lassonides and his supposed wife, Helen, first took to trafficking in cocaine during the war — about the beginning of 1916. They carried on their business with such skill that it was only last year the first of them fell into the clutches .of the law.

Helen lassonides, the wife, was a strikingly handsome, black-haired woman, 20 years her husband’s junior. She was known in every shady resort in the West End as the Cocaine Queen. She deserved the title. The wife ran all the risks, buying the cocaine, selling much of it, and organising a regular corps of saleswomen. Supplies of the drug were obtained from foreign seamen in the East London dock area. But the Chinese and Lascars who smuggled the drug into London did not even know the identity of their best customer. Madame lassonides went personally to fetch it. She left home a fashionably dressed beauty of the night clubs, but after touring some of her usual haunts she would suddenly disappear for a few minutes into the private office of the manager of one of the clubs she frequented. Disgqised in Dockland.

When she came out no one would have recognised her. She was dressed in cheap flashy clothes, and with her highly coloured cheeks looked a typical paramour of the dockyard type. Thus disguised, she took a cab to Limehouse. dismissed it at a busy corner, and then hurried through a maze ,of side streets till she came to a small Oriental cafe right on the waterside. These visits were made at set, arranged times, and there was no waiting. Half an hour after she arrived. Madame lassonides would leave for the West once more, carrying three or four pounds of cocaine secreted about her person. Exact figures are naturally unavailable, but Madame lassonides herself confessed that at the most prosperous period of her partnership with her husband they were clearing £l5O to £2OO a week. In 1919 the woman lassonides met a man who fell in love with her striking face and figure. She left her husband, and went to live with the other man. She did not remain long in hiding, and after a lapse of a few weeks she reappeared as the proprietress of a cafe in Church Street, Soho. There her old customers flocked to her. and she might still have been carrying on a profitable business in drugs to-day but for the hatred her husband entertained for the man who had robbed him of his wife. Alexander, by secret and circuitous means, caused information to be given to the police which enabled them to obtain enough evidence against this man to convict him as a drug trafficker, and he was duly arrested.

Madame lassonides was with him at the time, but managed to escape the clutches of the law herself. Her immunity was short lived, however. Alone, possessed only of her courage, she soon made that fata 1 ! slip which most evildoers make at some time ,or other, and last year the police pounced upon her. This misfortune softened Alexander lassonides, and there was something in the nature of a reconciliation before she passed from the Police Court dock to prison. Alexander then moved into a Soho cafe in the same street as that in which his wife had done business. But fate seemed to have turned against the family, and the nephew was arrested, imprisoned, and deported.

They had many narrow escapes, but for months they escaped actual detection. Then the authorities called in the aid of a police patrol woman, who became a regular diner at the place. After some time she ceased to be an object of suspicion, and gradually ingratiated herself with the proprietor. At last he actually sold her cocaine.

Now, sure of their ground, the police raided the cafe, and after arresting its proprietors searched the building. They found packets of cocaine hidden under the linoleum on the stairs and a large supply of the drug secreted in a violin case thrown carelessly behind the,bar. That raid ended the career of the last of the lassonides. He and his partner were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment* with h°rd labour, and Alexander lassonides was recommended for deportation.