The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Read online

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  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 THE BIG BANG

  CHAPTER 2 CANNABIS

  CHAPTER 3 THE RAT

  CHAPTER 4 RECESSION

  CHAPTER 5 DISASTER CAPITALISM

  CHAPTER 6 IMPORT

  CHAPTER 7 CONSPIRACY

  CHAPTER 8 HEROIN

  CHAPTER 9 PAVED WITH GOLD

  CHAPTER 10 TRANSPORT

  CHAPTER 11 SURVEILLANCE

  CHAPTER 12 CRACK

  CHAPTER 13 VOYAGE

  CHAPTER 14 RELOADED

  CHAPTER 15 THE PARCEL

  CHAPTER 16 LUCIO

  CHAPTER 17 REPRISE

  CHAPTER 18 DANCE

  CHAPTER 19 CURTIS

  CHAPTER 20 RETURN

  CHAPTER 21 THE SEQUEL

  CHAPTER 22 KILLERS

  CHAPTER 23 REPEAT

  CHAPTER 24 CANNABIS KING

  CHAPTER 25 SHADY GRAY

  CHAPTER 26 ROUND TWO

  CHAPTER 27 COLE

  CHAPTER 28 BROWN

  CHAPTER 29 SETTLING SCORES

  CHAPTER 30 DYLAN MARK 2

  CHAPTER 31 MAJOR CRIME UNIT

  CHAPTER 32 SET UP

  CHAPTER 33 MAD DOG DOWN

  CHAPTER 34 OPERATION PIRATE

  CHAPTER 35 SPEED KING

  CHAPTER 36 THE BUST

  CHAPTER 37 DOOMSDAY

  CHAPTER 38 OPERATION KINGSWAY

  CHAPTER 39 SEIZED

  CHAPTER 40 WARREN SELKIRK

  CHAPTER 41 A NEW AGE

  CHAPTER 42 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  CHAPTER 43 GUERRILLA WAR

  CHAPTER 44 POTTED OFF

  CHAPTER 45 URBAN TERRORISM

  EPILOGUE

  Also by Graham Johnson

  Powder Wars

  Druglord

  Football and Gangsters

  The Devil

  Gang War (originally published as Soljas)

  Darkness Descending

  Hack

  THE CARTEL

  The Inside Story of Britain’s Biggest Drugs Gang

  Graham Johnson

  To Lenny and Norma, Emma, Sonny, Raya, Connie and Clara

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A big thanks to Jon Elek at AP Watt, and to Bill Campbell and all at Mainstream Publishing.

  I would also like to thank all of the interviewees for the information they have provided, particularly the policeman known as the Analyst. I would also like to thank the sources known as Poncho and Hector.

  I sourced information mainly from interviews and research. However, to get what I felt to be the truth of a lot of things, I reviewed four of Peter Stockley’s books: The Little Man Who Always Had a Busy Day, The Reluctant Vigilante, Extenuating Circumstances and The Rat They Called a Dog. I would like to thank Peter Stockley for helping me co-write several chapters of this book. I feel that Mr Stockley has, in his own words, ‘helped draw back the blinds on an otherwise obscure period and its happenings’. Sections of The Rat They Called a Dog have been copied with Mr Stockley’s permission. Mr Stockley refused to name anyone in connection with these events and their identifications have been made by the author from his own research.

  I also read The Belly of the Beast by Dylan Porter. Dylan Porter refused to identify or name anyone connected with his crimes and this information was pieced together by the author from newspaper cuttings and additional research. Shaun Smith also refused to identify anyone connected to him, particularly those who were involved in attacks on premises he was connected to, and their identities were made by the author and not Shaun Smith.

  I have used information published in the Liverpool Echo.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BIG BANG

  1973

  ON A COLD winter’s morning in 1974, the richest crime group Britain has ever known was founded in a rain-lashed lorry depot by a man named Fred. The story began with a heavily loaded BMC flatbed truck turning sharply into a disused cargo bay. The freight, stacked unusually high, swayed gently as the wheels creaked over the potholes, but luckily the crates didn’t topple. Just like the men who were waiting for it, the rigid-base 7.5-tonner had wide sideboards.

  The smell of hot rubber and diesel fumes hung thick in the air. Droplets of damp sizzled off the hot engine, adding to the sense of urgency that animated a small group of tough-looking men huddled in the gloom. One donkey-jacketed warehouseman got busy closing the main gates, to screen off unwanted onlookers. Two others went off to keep ‘dixie’ on the reed-lined approach roads, making sure that the ‘transport’ hadn’t been followed. A fourth man warmed his hands near the spitting radiator grill before telling the terrified driver to ‘fuck off to the pub for an hour’.

  ‘No problem, boss,’ the haulier replied, mindful not to ask questions and glad to be out of the dark storm rolling in off the Atlantic.

  The cab hadn’t even had time to cool down before the owner was busy scrambling onto the trailer behind, impatient to recover his riches. Fred lifted back the green tarpaulin, sending rivulets of rainwater carelessly splashing back onto sacks of foodstuff. But he placed little value on the lorry’s legitimate load. Fred pulled away more sacks to reveal a ‘parcel’ that had been hidden among the wagon’s cargo of coffee and tinned fruit.

  The heavy wooden cases were pushed off the side clumsily – there was no forklift and no time – then dragged across the loose coal that littered the yard’s weed-cracked concrete. The adjacent warehouse, constructed of great flaps of asbestos tiles, had a leaking roof and a pigeon problem. Rays of winter sunlight streamed through the holes and cracks in the tiles; they were the only source of illumination. Decrepit though it was, the structure at least offered some shelter from the elements, and from prying eyes, too, if only for a few minutes, while the graft was carried out. Since the decline of Liverpool’s Empire-linked sea trade, this outpost of the distribution yard had been little used. But the area was still well known to the corrupt dockers and their relatives who smuggled stolen goods out of the port regularly. Isolated by surrounding waste ground, the facility was ideal for transferring the contraband that would later revolutionise the fortunes of their dying city.

  Fred was incongruously well dressed for the task, sporting high-waisted dark-red flares and brown, spoon-shaped shoes. But he ignored the splashes of mud and oil on his threads, manhandling the cargo roughly until he’d reached the shadowy innards of the covered area. Brainwashed by and high on avarice, Fred was experiencing the adrenalin rush of seeing a parcel ‘land’, or ‘get home’ as the process later became known. It was a feeling that would become familiar to the many who followed in his trail, a buzz so addictive, it was claimed, that men would risk long sentences just to be in on it: even more addictive, some boasted, than the stock-in-trade itself.

  Feverishly, Fred jemmied open the lids of the crates with a crowbar, revealing a sickly sweet-smelling dark mush wrapped in stained muslin bags and layered crudely in crinkly coloured plastic. Heroin – three kilos’ worth.

  A celebration was in order – this was the first consignment of Class A drugs that Fred had successfully smuggled through Liverpool docks. Fred headed for one of the nightclubs he owned in the city centre, took off his dripping sheepskin coat and drank to the future of his new venture. Thirty years later, the Cartel that he had inadvertently founded in a grimy post-industrial goods yard had a turnover of billions, employed thousands of people across the world and boasted of a hierarchical structure similar to that of a global corporation.

  But the success was no accident on Fred’s part. His character was ideally suited to his new job. By day,
he was a commercial burglar turned wholesale fence, buying and selling stolen lorryloads of consumer items. By night, he was a pioneering drugs trafficker. On the one side, he was a meat-and-two-veg gangster known on the street for ‘fucking’ his underworld rivals – betraying them on transactions and bumping them for money. His double-dealing had even earned him the moniker ‘Fred the Rat’.

  ‘Because at the end of the day,’ a contemporary called Paul Burly revealed, ‘he was a rat.

  ‘Around that time, I was sent to jail, and when I was inside, Fred kind of took over a nightclub of mine and he stripped all the equipment from it – the kitchen, the big steel ovens and work surfaces, the fridge etc. When I got out, I went to see him and “took” £27,000 back off him, as compensation. I just walked into his place and took however much was there, in cash.

  ‘Fred couldn’t see what he had done wrong. He couldn’t fight me either, so there was nothing he could do. But at the same time, he wasn’t that bothered. £27,000 was a lot of money back then, but it wasn’t a lot of money to him.’

  On the other hand, Fred was a shrewd and forward-looking villain. In his new profession, Fred wasn’t interested in being a Mr Nice. Pleasantries were for your Oxbridge international playboys. Fred poured scorn on the privateers, flakes and hippies that had hitherto dominated Britain’s fledgling drug economy. Fred’s ambition was to rationalise the piecemeal drugs trade. On the supply side, he hoped to smuggle in loads of tens, and, if possible, hundreds, of kilos in regular, controllable patterns as opposed to the small amounts of variable quality muled in by opportunists. On the demand side, Fred wanted to take drugs out of the cult scene and into the mainstream market – the housing estates and new towns that made up Merseyside’s bomb-cratered post-war topography.

  Unlike many of his contemporaries, and most drug lords that would follow him, Fred was not afraid of getting his hands dirty. His underlings and rivals were always surprised. Fred insisted on being present when a consignment of drugs was being unloaded: unusual behaviour, in hindsight. By the 1990s, the Cartel bosses had learned to remain in the background, strictly hands-off. Trails were covered, connections severed. Deals would often be done months in advance in third-party countries that had few obvious links to the point of departure and the final destination, or at least in places like Amsterdam, Istanbul and the Caribbean. In international hubs there was less chance of being caught.

  At the coalface, the criminality was conducted by a small army of couriers, middlemen and distributors, many on wages and retainers. The system ensured that the Mr Bigs rarely came into contact with the product. But for the founding fathers like Fred, things were simple and straightforward. As greedy former petty criminals, they were overly possessive. Like many self-made men, they obsessively refused outside interference in their empires and treated the drugs business like any other organised crime: they had to be kings of their patch, constantly on the plot, having to be seen and heard at all times. They wanted to protect their own assets. They discussed deals in person. They made the decisions, more often than not, in face-to-face meetings. For Fred, the risks were low. The authorities had not yet started handing down big sentences for drugs. Heroin had not yet been demonised for driving up prostitution, burglary, mental illness and family breakdown. For now, at least, there was no reason why he shouldn’t handle his own tackle.

  But like any entrepreneur, Fred had been careful not to gamble too much, too quickly on his start-up. Three years earlier he had begun small. In an effort to learn his trade, he had first experimented by importing cannabis. He’d soon struck gold, peddling his wares to the city’s melting pot of post-Beatles bohemia. The grant-fuelled student population was ballooning and the post-liberal Abigail’s Party crowd were dabbling in soft drugs. Fred also made contacts in Liverpool’s thriving West Indian community, links that would later become crucial to the future of the Cartel.

  However, Paul Burly proffered another theory that explained Fred’s early successes. ‘Fred the Rat was also lucky,’ he said. ‘It was 1971 when he’d started with the pot: the year of decimalisation and devaluing, and the authorities were distracted by all these things going on in the wider country. While they were looking the other way, Fred started bringing in weed – in truth, I don’t think Customs and the police cared that much. It was a very confusing time and people were stressed out – cannabis took people’s mind off things.’

  Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, a generation of young criminals were making their bones in different ways. In Glasgow’s tough Easterhouse district, 11-year-old Ian McAteer was dipping purses and robbing handbags. Dirt poor and effectively orphaned, McAteer was only doing it to buy food for his two brothers and two sisters. His mother and father had split up three years earlier. The family had been taken into care and were now back living with their dad. McAteer would grow up to be one of a huge number of contract criminals that would be drafted into the Cartel from all corners of Europe. By the time he was an adult, all traces of human empathy had gone: he had become a dead-eyed contract killer ideally suited to working for the Cartel as an enforcer, solving internal disputes and being paid in heroin. His services became so notorious that one day McAteer would even be suspected by the police of shooting TV star Jill Dando.

  CHAPTER 2

  CANNABIS

  1975

  SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, AROUND 1972/73, Fred approached two notorious armed robbers known as the Twins. He persuaded them to invest some of the money they had stolen from bouncing the counters at main post offices into a string of nightclubs. The Twins agreed, but Fred secretly siphoned off some of their capital to underwrite his planned upgrade into heroin trafficking. He rented, or possibly bought, some lorries and paid off contacts. When the armed robbers found out, they protested on quasi-moral grounds. But Fred didn’t share their old-school view that heroin was a dirty business. He carried on moving towards his goal regardless.

  By 1974, a wave of economic shock therapy had paralysed the nation. Inflation soared to a 34-year high, power cuts led to a three-day week and conflict in the Middle East had sparked an oil crisis. Two general elections and a miners’ strike added to a general malaise and a sense, at the worst of times, that collapse was imminent. If the worsening economy wasn’t enough, a fresh campaign of IRA terrorism spread fear across the mainland, leading to a backlash of emergency laws that were rushed through parliament.

  Fred saw his opportunity and acted. He sensed that he could make money amid the turbulence. The bonus was that the risk was low: the authorities were distracted. He put his heroin plan into action. Fortuitously, the Cartel had unintentionally discovered its growth model. Success went hand in hand with the phenomenon we now know as disaster capitalism, to use the phrase coined by Naomi Klein in 2007, whereby companies profit from others’ misfortune.

  His one-time associate Paul Burly explained: ‘Fred had looked into the future. He realised that being a gangster wasn’t about guns and robbing banks. Fred had realised that power came from money. It wasn’t a coincidence that he did well when the economy was going down. They [Fred, his gang and a few other pioneer drug dealers who were operating on the fringes] were just like speculators.’

  The other crucial factor in the drugs business was contacts. In the city’s Toxteth area, Fred had got to know an officious Afro-Caribbean engineer who wore a collar and tie under his navy-blue overalls. By day, the young family man was a contract fitter, working at the port and in the surrounding industrial units. By night, he secretly unloaded cannabis from docking ships and smuggled the loads out in his van. He then distributed the cannabis to West Indian communities in Manchester, Birmingham and London. His young son Poncho sometimes went with him.

  ‘Most of the West Indians in the different cities knew each other because they had come over on Windrush or on the later ships,’ Poncho remembered. ‘And a lot of them were up for it. Like my dad, they’d come over as tradesmen. But, unlike him, many of them could only get shit jobs, so they needed to make a
bit of money on the side. So it was a ready-made distribution network and it was a natural thing.

  ‘It just meant that my dad made a few extra quid. We were comfortable anyway – my dad had come over with a business, and made a good living. But selling weed gave us a middle-class lifestyle in a place where most people had nothing.’

  Despite his bourgeois pretensions, Poncho would go on to build on his father’s black-market success. Poncho became part of the second-generation Cartel. His gang would later claim the dubious title of being the first to smuggle a 1,000-kilo consignment of cocaine into the UK.

  Less than a mile away from where Fred’s and Poncho’s nascent Cartel was starting up, another organisation was taking root. In 1974, three local constabularies were amalgamated to form Merseyside Police. To the outside world, the force had a tough but modern image. The TV cop series Z-Cars had been based around Liverpool Police’s new panda patrols. With shiny cop cars linked by high-tech radio sets and set in a crime-ridden new estate, the BBC drama became a huge hit, combining kitchen-sink realism with police propaganda. The message from the top brass was that the old guard was using progressive technology to continue to maintain order. But behind the scenes, Merseyside’s new constabulary was slow to change. For many officers, the criminal world was still a simple landscape divided into cops and robbers.

  Crime-fighting technology, such as DNA tracing, didn’t exist. Fingerprints couldn’t be searched electronically. Burglar alarms were rare. Cocky watchmen were the first line of defence against a post-war tidal wave of property crime, a trend that led to 1964 being the worst year for crime in over a century, with more than a quarter of a million indictable offences in the UK. Police interviews weren’t taped. Courts took officers at their word, with few challenges to the prosecution. Conviction rates were comfortingly high. Organised crime was low-priority, in the view of chief constables, and could be dealt with by the newly formed Regional Crime Squads: elite units that had been specifically set up to bring down the soaring crime stats.