Druglord Read online

  About the Author

  Graham Johnson is former investigations editor at the Sunday Mirror newspaper. His first book was the bestseller Powder Wars: The Supergrass Who Brought Down Britain’s Biggest Drug Dealers. He is also the author of Football and Gangsters: How Organised Crime Controls the Beautiful Game.

  NOTE: Several individuals in this book, who took part in very serious crimes, have not been named. Their identities cannot be revealed for legal and security reasons. In such cases, they have been given false names. However, their real identities are known to the author and the authorities.

  Druglord contains an account of John Haase’s criminal experiences given by Haase himself. The information was gathered in a taped interview with Haase at Whitemoor prison, during which he swore an affidavit. Both the author, Graham Johnson, and Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle were present. Haase made the confession freely and without duress in the hope that he would receive credit from the authorities, possibly in the form of a reduced sentence, even though no guarantees were ever made.

  Some of the quotes attributed to Haase about his background and childhood are extracted from interviews he gave to the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post newspapers.

  First-hand accounts from other sources quoted in this book were gained in a variety of ways, including formal interviews, covert surveillance and witness statements.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781845968953

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  This edition, 2007

  Copyright © Graham Johnson, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 9781845962401

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE – HEROIN DEALING

  1. Introduction – The Greatest Escape

  2. Haase Backgrounder

  3. The Transit Mob

  4. Jail and the Big-time

  5. The Liverpool Mafia and the Drugs Revolution

  6. Michael Howard Backgrounder

  7. The Turkish Connection

  8. The World is Yours – Britain’s Biggest Heroin Gang do the Business

  9. Bang Ontop – Customs Close In

  10. Busted – Haase and the Turks are Arrested

  PART TWO – THE GUN/POWDER PLOT

  11. The Con

  12. Informers

  13. Gun-planting

  14. The Strangeways Gun Plant

  15. The Tax Men

  16. The Trial and the Report

  17. Bribe Allegations One (the Insider Pay-off), Two and Three (the London Payments)

  18. Bakerman Backgrounder

  19. Bribe Allegations Four and Five – The Alleged Bakerman Bribes

  PART THREE – SCANDAL, CONSEQUENCES AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

  20. Release and Conspiracy Theories

  21. Scandal and Controversy

  22. Ontop to Death – Haase’s Second Crime Spree

  Epilogue – Campaigns for Justice

  PART ONE

  HEROIN DEALING

  1

  INTRODUCTION – THE GREATEST ESCAPE

  On 3 July 1996, Britain’s biggest drug dealer, John Haase, was secretly released from prison by Royal Pardon after serving just 10 months and 13 days of an 18-year sentence for heroin trafficking. His nephew and partner-in-crime, Paul Bennett, was also freed as part of the same deal. More than 17 years had been wiped off their prison terms overnight – an unprecedented act in over 1,000 years of British judicial history.

  The decision had been brokered by the highest powers in the land, a Holy Trinity of senior lawmakers and enforcers: Customs and Excise, a top judge and home secretary Michael Howard, who went on to lead the Conservative Party into a general election. Nothing like it had ever happened before, and, not surprisingly, the extraordinary event was shrouded in secrecy. The big question was, and still is, why did it happen?

  The official explanation was simple, but again kept under wraps: Haase and Bennett had turned supergrass while in prison and their freedom was a reward for disclosing sensitive information about the underworld to Customs and Excise and the police that enabled crimes to be solved. Unfortunately for the authorities, the story leaked out – despite the government’s attempt to prevent newspapers, TV and MPs from talking about it – immediately scandalising Michael Howard and raising a series of important issues. The questions thrown up were the key to unravelling the mystery, because the answers, piece by piece, led politicians and journalists closer to the full, astonishing truth.

  The first question – posed by an MP – was the most obvious: why was the government putting the public at risk by freeing from jail two of the most dangerous criminals in Britain? Haase and Bennett were no ordinary villains – they were top-five UK gangsters who trafficked drugs on an industrial scale and ran guns as proficiently as the IRA. The serious threat to public safety was blindingly self-evident. Blood-curdling violence, kidnappings and torture were their stock-in-trade. They were rootin’-tootin’, shoot-’em-up outlaws as ruthless as anything that had come out of London, Chicago, Moscow or Sicily in the last 50 years. Before his capture, Haase was the UK kingpin of the Turkish Connection, a gang that pioneered the mass importation of cheap Afghani heroin across southern Europe and into Britain. During his reign between 1991 and 1993, the gang had flooded the streets with Class A drugs, triggering the first measurable drug epidemic in the UK, quickly followed by an exponential rise in the number of drug addicts. Haase’s outfit was Sigma Six efficient; it did for opium what Motorola and Vodafone had done for mobile phones. It was the first to replace piecemeal heroin smuggling with systematic mass importation. Under his instruction, regular 100-kilo loads poured into the UK, causing the market to reach saturation point quickly, which led to the biggest single fall in the kilo price of heroin on Britain’s streets ever. Allowing Haase back onto the streets was to unleash a vicious, one-man crimewave back onto an unsuspecting public. Granting his freedom was tantamount to government-sponsored organised crime.

  The second question – raised on the front pages of several national newspapers – was more political: why was hang-’em and flog-’em home secretary Michael Howard putting his career at risk by freeing exactly the type of criminal he had sworn to stamp out? Why was he blatantly going back on his right-wing ‘prison works’ policy, putting the credibility of Prime Minister John Major’s government on the line with a scandalous decision, ahead of a general election?

  Howard was a Tory golden boy who had made his name as a hard-line crime fighter. He had come to the Home Office job on a ticket of longer prison sentences for drug dealers and violent criminals. He had rallied the grass-roots membership in a series of vote-catching law-and-order speeches at conferences. Destroying Haase and Bennett’s gang was the big
gest single success that Customs and Excise had ever achieved against international heroin traffickers. To authorise Royal Pardons for them was an unusual U-turn for Howard that would not go down well with the blue-rinse brigade. So what exactly had motivated him to do it?

  The plot thickened when the Sunday Mirror newspaper unearthed a remarkable link between Haase’s underworld gang and Howard. Astonishingly, Howard had a relative in Liverpool who knew Haase’s mob bosses and had allegedly been in touch with Haase himself in the days following his release from prison. The man’s name was Simon Bakerman. He was Howard’s cousin. He even carried a picture of the home secretary in his wallet. He was also a cocaine-snorting drug dealer and petty criminal with strong connections to Haase’s Liverpool 8 gangland manor. It is unclear whether Bakerman had known Haase personally before he went to prison for the heroin offences in 1993, but there was definitely strong evidence linking him to Haase’s partner Bennett.

  Bakerman had met Bennett through contacts in the world of drug dealing and had visited his flat in the Woolton area of Liverpool before his imprisonment with Haase. In the same story exposing the link between Howard, Bakerman and the drug dealers, the Sunday Mirror sensationally revealed that Haase and Bennett had been in contact with Bakerman just days after their release. This underworld link between the serving home secretary and the criminals he had just pardoned begged the next question: what role, if any, had Bakerman played in the scandal?

  Howard did not comment on the Bakerman allegations but finally defended the extraordinary decision to release Haase and Bennett, amid growing conspiracy theories, by confirming publicly for the first time that the pair had indeed turned informants in jail and helped in the fight against organised crime. However, the statement did little to dampen the outcry nor draw a line under the scandal as Howard had intended. Instead, it raised a series of other questions, the most important being: just how big a supergrass was Haase and what crucial information had he supplied to Customs and the police to warrant an exceptional, 17-year discount on his sentence? Royal Pardons are rare. Most have been granted to convicts for helping to save the lives of prison officers in jeopardy. Again, the details of Haase and Bennett’s informant value were kept secret, but a leaked Customs memo revealed that the pair had led police to a string of massive arms caches all over the UK, crucially including a gun hidden inside Strangeways prison, where Haase was on remand. Preventing an armed hostage situation inside a prison was the key to clinching a Royal Pardon, as set down in legal precedent.

  However, this raised another question, this time posed by some of the UK’s most feared crime bosses and IRA terrorists: if Haase and Bennett were supergrasses, which underworld figures had they betrayed to the police? To be freed from prison so remarkably early, in such mysterious circumstances, many senior criminals assumed that Haase and Bennett had fully cooperated with the law, and had inevitably ‘grassed up’ some seriously heavyweight villains into the bargain. How else could such a good deal have been achieved? For instance, it was assumed that Haase and Bennett had led police to the underworld owners of the gun caches that they had so accurately located, some of which were linked to Republican terrorists in Ireland. Only supergrasses of the highest calibre are rewarded with a Royal Pardon. Just who exactly had Haase and Bennett named in their statements to the police? These were the chilling questions that UK gang-bosses began to ask themselves.

  This led to another question, this time asked by a sharp-eyed underworld watcher in Liverpool and switched-on reporters at the Liverpool Echo and Sunday Mirror newspapers. If Haase and Bennett were supergrasses, then they were dead men walking, as laid down by the underworld code. If they stayed in Liverpool, they were living on borrowed time. Why, then, were they walking around their home town ‘without a care in the world’, as reported in the Sunday Mirror? In many ways, this was the most important question, and the answer is an important clue to unlocking the mystery.

  As supergrasses, Haase and Bennett would have to face the wrath of their underworld peers on the street, and that usually meant execution – the traditional punishment meted out to informants big and small. The alternative, in similar cases, had been for the authorities to spirit away supergrasses into the witness-protection programme, where they were given a new identity and a new life in a faraway place. They were protected by armed guards.

  However, for Haase there was no such arrangement. Following his release from prison, Haase had returned to his home in Liverpool almost immediately. Instead of hiding from his underworld pals, Haase threw parties for them to celebrate his freedom. In other cases, he visited the homes of rival gangsters he believed had taken liberties while he was in jail, to settle old scores. Haase had a hit-list of top villains he wished to confront. One after another, he knocked on their doors and asked, ‘Have you got a problem with me?’ The answer was invariably no – many of the gangsters were too shocked that he was out of prison and too scared to stand up to him. For Haase, this lack of resistance was a green light to go back into business – as a Liverpool Mafia godfather specialising in heroin smuggling and gun-running. This was not the behaviour of a man who had informed on his peers and was in fear for his life.

  Bennett was more cautious. After prison, he flew to Mexico for a three-week holiday to ride out the media storm that had blown up following his sensational release, before returning to Manchester airport. On touchdown, he was debriefed by his Customs handlers before returning to join Haase in Liverpool. Neither Bennett’s nor Haase’s behaviour was in keeping with that of a supergrass in danger. Quite logically, Britain’s top gangsters concluded that they weren’t ‘real’ supergrasses after all. This led to the final question, the last piece of the jigsaw: if Haase and Bennett were not supergrasses, then how exactly had they won their Royal Pardons? Finally the killer question had been reached. Possible answers to this, and many other questions, are revealed in this book.

  The evidence suggests that Haase and Bennett were never supergrasses – they simply conned their way out of prison, pulling off one of the most audacious and devious escapes in the history of British prisons and at the same time orchestrating one of the most evil miscarriages of justice.

  The plan seemingly had three phases. First, they pretended to be informants by organising the pardon-clinching gun plants themselves, setting up phoney arms caches and then directing police to them in an elaborate self-serving scam. The second part of the plan was aimed at covering up the deception by making sure their web of carefully choreographed lies was not exposed. Testimony is given in this book that certain officials were bribed with a string of payments from a ‘war chest’ containing a staggering £3.5 million. Certainly, the bribes would have enabled awkward questions to be avoided, and sceptical investigators were prevented from digging too deeply into the quality of Haase and Bennett’s ‘supergrass’ information. The third phase was apparently to ensure that the Royal Pardon process went through quickly. Once again, testimony is given in this book that illegal payments were used from the war chest to grease the wheels of justice.

  For Haase and Bennett, any such pay-off would have been a double whammy. They got their freedom and their criminal credibility remained largely intact, hence they escaped retribution from the underworld. Although they were officially registered Customs and Excise informants, the evidence they had supplied to police had been fabricated and no arrests had resulted from any of their phoney crimes. Far from being maligned, their status in gangland shot up. Haase and Bennett had pulled off the perfect crime.

  In legal terms, such a con is likely to amount to a massive perversion of the course of justice. As a result of evidence first unearthed in this book, the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Crime Directorate immediately set up a probing investigation called Operation Ainstable, spearheaded by one of its most senior officers, Tarique Ghaffur. At the time of going to press, one member of Haase’s gang has been charged with serious criminal offences and between six and eleven others, including Haase himself, are fac
ing a similar fate.

  2

  HAASE BACKGROUNDER

  John Haase was born in Liverpool on 1 March 1949. He was raised in the slum-ridden district of Everton, in the north of the city. He was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters in a family of respectable working-class Scousers of German origin with no criminal history. Haase was the black sheep.

  Along with many of his childhood pals, Haase followed a well-trodden career path to narco superstardom: juvenile petty criminal to armed robber to drug dealer. However, the descent was not necessarily inevitable and his family tried hard, and not without initial success, to stop it. Until his teens, Haase was largely kept on the straight and narrow by a disciplinarian father and even landed a job as an apprentice plumber. He attended Calder Street infant school in Everton and went on to Major Lester Primary. Though bright and articulate, he finished his education at Breckfield Secondary Modern with little more than the basics before leaving to get a job. None of his family had criminal tendencies. One of his brothers, who was close to him during childhood, later moved away from Liverpool and did very well in life, having little more to do with his wayward sibling. Haase lost touch with the others but stayed close to one sister.

  Haase went off the rails in his early teens, carrying out small-time thefts and burglaries. He was prevented from escalating to more serious offences for a period by his no-nonsense father. At 14, he picked up his first conviction for minor offences in December 1963. He was given a conditional discharge at Liverpool City Juvenile Court. One year later, he was arrested for larceny and breaking into a shop, and in January 1964 he was sentenced to probation for the offences, again at Liverpool City Juvenile Court.

  Haase’s father was convinced that his son was under the influence of a bad crowd and was determined to put a stop to his deterioration. He made him get a job. At 15, Haase won a trade apprenticeship at a firm in the Dingle neighbourhood, a tough dockside area in the south of the city with strong criminal ties. The Park Road and Granby Street areas would go on to be world centres of excellence in drug trafficking and gun-running, churning out some of the biggest gangsters on the planet. But in those days, all that Haase wanted to do was go out with his mates and blow his wages in the docker pubs, getting to know some of their seedier customers in the process. ‘But I had a very strict father who made me be in early. All my mates were out until 11 and 12 at night,’ recalls Haase.