Druglord Read online

  In later life, Haase’s pals blamed his violent and jealous tendencies on his father’s influence. Chris No-Neck, an extremely violent criminal who cannot be named for legal reasons (because he has only two very minor convictions), said, ‘Haase had a rough upbringing with his auld fella [father] beating him up. That made him think, towards other people, “If I haven’t got it, then why should you have it?”’

  Despite his new job, Haase continued to commit crime on the side and his eventual refusal to stay away from trouble upset and embarrassed his parents. He spared them the shame by moving into a flat of his own. He spent much of the time in the nearby house of a pal called Jim Thomas (not his real name), who lived in Toxteth. The boys were like two peas in a pod. Like Haase, Thomas had got into crime early and grew up to be one of the city’s top gangsters, eventually helping Haase as an international drugs courier. Haase said, ‘I was brought up well but my dad was just too strict. So at 16 I left home and got a flat on my own.’ No longer under the watchful eye of his parents, Haase’s life spiralled downwards into a cycle of petty crime.

  Like many a youthful scallywag before him, Haase invaded the relatively peaceful pastures of North Wales to pillage the rich pickings and run amok. In March 1964, he was sentenced to 14 months in Borstal and given two years’ probation at Llangollen Juvenile Court for unlawfully taking a mailbag. It was an unlucky collar. Haase had stolen the bag from a village post office and made his getaway on foot and at speed – right into the arms of the local bobby. Years later, after Haase had been convicted of being Britain’s number one drug kingpin, he would relate this story to his gang as an example of how bad luck had plagued his criminal life from the outset.

  One of his top heavies, a contract-violence specialist known as The Debt Collector, recalled, ‘Haase was from a well-gotten background, a nice family. He wasn’t dragged up like most poor kids in those days and he had no need to get into crime. But the badness was just in him from birth. John was a one-off, a tearaway. He used to tell us this one story – that he should have given up being a criminal after his first job went wrong. He robbed a post office in North Wales, put the money in a bag and ran round a corner – straight into a copper riding a pedal bike. He knocked the copper off the bike. But the copper got up and arrested him on the spot. John used to say that he should have stopped being a criminal there and then. That he’d had bad luck ever since.’

  On the same incident, Haase remembered, ‘When I was 16, I was arrested for larceny and burglary in North Wales. There were five of us in a gang and we all went down. It was my first court appearance and I was sent to Borstal.’

  Complaining about the severity of the sentence – a theme that would be recurrent in his criminal life – Haase blamed everything other than his own dishonest behaviour for the sentence. He said he had been unduly punished for being a Scouser by an anti-Liverpudlian court. Like many of his peers, Haase had a chip on his shoulder about being a Scouser, a perceived persecution which stayed with him through his later life but bonded his gang closely together. He went on, ‘I think the court wanted to make an example of a gang of thieves who had gone to North Wales from Liverpool. I got Borstal because I was a Scouser who got caught out of town. Borstal was like a holiday camp, except you could not come home. I was there for 14 months.’

  Haase has always maintained that this was the turning point in his life, the criminal record marginalising him in society and forcing him to commit more serious crimes. He said, ‘One thing I learned was that once you had been inside, it was hard to get a decent job. People did not want to know you once they discovered you had been inside. Would things have turned out different if the judge had given me a chance and released me? I’ll never know. I was on my own again when I came out and I got a labouring job building 22-storey council flats in Cantril Farm [a ’60s development in Liverpool].’

  But no sooner had the two-year probation period for the post-office theft expired than Haase was back in court, this time for stealing a box of grapes. In 1966, he was fined £5 at Liverpool Magistrates Court. Later that year, in April, he was back in court for another offence, this time larceny of lead. At Denbigh Quarter Session, Haase was handed down a six-month suspended prison sentence.

  By the late 1960s, the juvenile court system was losing patience with Haase’s repeat offending. The leniency he had been shown because of his youth was rapidly drying up. In March 1969, the courts got tough and he was sent to adult prison for the first time after breaching the conditions of his six-month suspended sentence. Haase had been caught taking a car without consent – a rather insignificant offence, but in criminal terms it was another turning point. By going to prison proper, he had stepped up a rung on the ladder. Haase enjoyed jail; he learned to network with other villains and was introduced to more serious crime. Shortly after he was released, he was back inside again. In March 1970, Haase was jailed for 18 months at Liverpool Crown Court for burglary and theft. Then, for a string of similar offences, he was given two years’ probation at Preston Crown Court in June 1972.

  In 1973, encouraged by the seasoned criminals he had met in prison, Haase made a quantum leap into the semi-big-time and became a professional armed robber. Haase said, ‘I upgraded to armed robbery and had a shotgun. I turned to crime because I wanted money. I cannot blame anybody for leading me down that path. It was all down to me.’ It was the beginning of a lifelong love of guns and an addiction to the adrenalin buzz of violent crime. Years later, even after fulfilling his ambition to become a multimillionaire druglord, Haase refused to hang up his beloved balaclava. He still went on raids ‘just for a buzz’ right up until his late 40s, boasting that drug dealing was easy money compared to armed robbery. He considered ‘blagging’ to be the premiership of gangsterism and the only ‘real crime’ left, the best test of a criminal’s bottle.

  On 1 March 1973, on his 24th birthday, Haase’s first wave of terror as a full-time blagger came to an end. He was sentenced to seven years and three months in jail for his part in five raids on post offices, two assaults on police officers and breach of probation. Passing sentence, Judge Rudolph Lyons was to express himself in terms that would become familiar to Haase in subsequent trials: ‘The time has come for your reign of terror in Liverpool to come to an end. You are an evil, dangerous man.’

  During his early post office raids, Haase had demonstrated a singularly callous side to his nature, particularly in the aggressive use of what would become his signature weapon: the single-barrelled shotgun. One female victim who came face to face with Haase during a raid on her employer’s office suffered a nervous breakdown. In the words of an investigating police detective, she was so ‘totally traumatised by what happened to her’ she feared she would never recover from the ordeal of gazing down the barrel of Haase’s shooter. By the time he got out of prison, Haase’s reputation as a gangland hard-man was set in stone. Ambitious and smart, he was now a rising star in the Liverpool underworld, despite the fact that his personality was becoming unstable as a result of being locked up. A darker side was beginning to emerge, touches of evil that were noticeable to his friends and family.

  Incarceration had increased his aggression and shortened his temper. On the street, he was getting a reputation for being a bully, prone to bouts of psychotic fury. His rivals began to fear his love of violence. Paul Grimes, the supergrass who eventually brought down Haase’s drugs-and-guns empire in the late ’90s, had first met him 20 years earlier, shortly after he had got out of prison. Grimes revealed the story in the book Powder Wars. Haase was trying to bully his way into a nightclub where Grimes worked as a doorman.

  PAUL GRIMES: One night a man called John Haase was trying to get into my club. He was giving all sorts of abuse to the girl on the door till but none of the other doormen would intervene in case he shot the place up – he was one of these new generation of gangsters who were mad on guns. I just said to him, ‘Listen, I don’t give fuck who you are but you are going to have to leave now.’ Haase was a viciou
s bully, but if you stood up to him, he respected you. Eventually, we became mates.

  As I got to know him, I found out he was an armed robber into post offices and security vans. He wasn’t a chancer; he was a pro. People were afraid of him. Physically he was nothing, but people were afraid of what he could do with the hardware.

  I taught Haase how to wash money. I taught him the value of using straight businesses as a cover for criminal activities. He later went on to use these tricks to great effect when he became a drug dealer.

  I was a villain but I also had a legitimate waste-disposal company on the side. John Haase invested £170, just a token gesture, so he could say to the police that the money he was robbing was straight.

  In between robbing post offices, he’d turn up for work, as though to prove he was a regular blue-collar guy. Even though it was shite-removing, he’d wear an expensive suit and an ironed white shirt. He insisted on rubbing barrier cream on his hands to keep them smooth. He was vain but he wasn’t scared of hard work. When he did commit crime, he’d disappear for weeks on end robbing post offices. Or sometimes it was because he’d been nicked. The business was sound for him in this respect because it provided him with alibis and that. I’d vouch for him when the busies came, asking where he was on such-and-such a date, but one time a private detective I knew turned up and said, ‘I believe you’ve said Haase was working for you on the day such-and-such a warehouse was robbed. Just to let you know, we’ve got him on camera doing a robbery. You’ll end up going inside yourself for perjury if you are not careful.’ So I had to pass on that.

  Then I remember he went to prison on some charge. I was starting to realise that Haase was too hot to handle. He was too ambitious, too dangerous, and I started to put a bit of distance between myself and him. After he got out of prison, I gave him £300 and told him that that was his stake in the business. There was no point him being involved in my legitimate businesses. He was too ontop. I didn’t want him fucking me up.

  Among the many gang-bosses and crime families in Liverpool, Haase was a loose cannon, hell-bent on challenging the old order. Even minor slights would launch Haase into hellish rages, leading to all-out gang war, triggering shootings, stabbings and beatings. He was given the nickname ‘Loony Tunes’ for his unpredictable bouts of violence and his almost suicidal bravery in confronting other gangsters face to face regardless of their reputations. In 1980, Haase went to war with members of a tough south Liverpool gang made up of two notorious families, the Ungis and the Fitzgibbons.

  The Ungi and Fitzgibbon families hailed from the dockside area that Haase had made his home. The Ungis were descended from Filipino sailors and the Fitzgibbons from Irish immigrants. But in the melting pot of Liverpool’s slums, they had formed a strategic alliance based on close familial and marital ties and driven by a desire to be the number one mob in south Liverpool. Over the next 30 years, they would outperform their own local ambitions and grow into a national syndicate with international links, pursued by Britain’s top serious-crime policemen and intelligence agencies. But on the face of it, to the outside world, they remained no more than petty, unpredictable criminals with a penchant for street-gutter violence.

  In 1969, 18-year-old Tony Martin Ungi was sentenced to Borstal for killing 16-year-old drinker John Bradley at the All Fours Club in Liverpool. Ungi slashed the main artery in his neck with two broken pint glasses. Twenty years later, twenty-three-year-old Colin Ungi was jailed for five years after blowing the head off his best friend, Nathan Jones, with a sawn-off shotgun as they played around while smoking cannabis.

  The family’s history was littered with hundreds of such incidents, most of which went unreported. But such bouts of inexplicable violence formed their power base. On the streets, they were feared. This fear was systematically exploited to racketeer. By the mid-’90s, their hunger for power had landed the Ungis at the centre of one of the bloodiest gangland feuds ever to take place on the mainland, against drug smuggler Curtis Warren, the wealthiest and most successful criminal in British history, worth an estimated £200 million. The war cost the family their nominal leader, David Ungi. The 36-year-old father of three was gunned down in a hail of automatic bullets as he drove his low-key VW Passat through the streets of Toxteth. Scores of gangsters were killed and maimed in revenge.

  In 1980, Haase took on the full force of the Ungi/Fitzgibbon crew. The feud had been bubbling along for some years, perpetuated by a series of failed deals and rip-offs for which both sides blamed the other, but it needed a reason to explode into fully-fledged warfare. One soon presented itself: Haase’s wife, Vera Aldridge, claimed she had been slighted in a local pub by a member of the opposing gang. It was a pretext which Haase used to seek revenge for a dodgy deal that had recently gone wrong. Haase kicked off the feud by slashing one of their gang. Another associate, John Fitzgibbon, was attacked with a baseball bat and a senior adviser called Tony Murray was shot at point-blank range.

  PAUL GRIMES: One night I was on the door in Caesar’s Palace and I got a call from Haase. He was looking for one particular member of the Fitzgibbon family. He asked me if this lad had been into the club that night.

  ‘He’s just left now,’ I told him, literally watching this lad get into a cab and get off.

  Haase picked up his trail and followed the cab. When the man in the cab got out, Haase jumped him near his flat and cut him up ruthlessly with a Stanley knife. He always used a weapon. He never used his fists.

  Local hard-man James Turner (not his real name), who knew both sides, attempted to mediate to prevent the conflict escalating.

  JAMES TURNER: Haase beat up John Fitzgibbon and then went for Tony Murray over an argument with his wife, Vera Aldridge. An argument did take place; she was screaming at John Fitzgibbon. But John Fitzgibbon never said anything bad to her. Haaser was a good fella; it was just a case of he’d been told lies by his wife. That night, they [Haase’s gang] took a bulb out of the landing where Fitz went up to his flat [so he couldn’t see] and done him there with a baseball bat. It didn’t hurt him bad; it was just a baseball bat.

  Anyway, the next day we’re all in this flat with John Fitzgibbon and the discussion is ‘What are we going to do about it?’ A few of the lads was there, absolute toerags, all of them. I said, ‘John Haase is my mate, so the answer is nothing.’ I explained to John Fitzgibbon, ‘No one’s scarred, so it’s just one of those things.’ But John Fitzgibbon was there with that dirty fiend Tony Murray. Murray was giving it the big I am. I warned Murray, ‘You want to be very fucking careful. You don’t know this man, Haaser. Be very fucking careful.’ I told him to shut his fucking mouth [about a revenge attack] because if it got back to Haaser that he was talking like this, he would be in trouble.

  Sure enough, someone blew Murray up to Haaser and Haase and his men went down the next day and Murray ended up getting shot. What can you say?

  PAUL GRIMES: Haase roped me in on that hit. Six weeks after he was out of jail in February 1980, I got a visit from him. He turned up with one of his best pals, Bernie Aldridge, who was his wife Vera’s brother, and said that he needed me as back-up to help him sort out a dispute between himself and the Ungi/Fitzgibbon gang. Haase was fuming. He’s going off ’ve his head saying how he’s going to kill them.

  As far as the fight was concerned, I thought it was just gonna be a straightener with fists, iron bars and maybe the odd machete – but no shooters. So I grabbed a couple of pickaxe hangles off ’ve one of my wagons for good measure. But Haase was getting more and more angry. He then decided to shoot them, so he asked a mate of mine called Johnny One Eye to go and pick up a shooter from his house and to meet us in Kitchen Street, near the Dock Road in Liverpool.

  Haase found out that one of the senior members of their crew was at a mechanic’s garage owned by Tony Murray. When we got there, he and Johhny One Eye steamed inside and started smashing the place up. Haase was dressed like he’d just walked out of a Burton’s window as usual. Tweed jacket, black kecks and a nic
e white shirt. He was also wearing a balaclava.

  First, they smashed up Murray’s car. Then Haase pointed the shotgun at his head and threatened to blow him away. At this point, Johnny One Eye, who is a very trigger-happy bloke, got impatient with the talk, grabbed the single shooter off ’ve Haase and blew a hole in Murray. He was aiming to kneecap him from behind the knee, IRA-style, but he just ended up shooting him in the back of the leg. There was blood everywhere. Murray’s sidekick, a fella called Desmond Fox who was in the garage as well, also got bashed up. They smashed his kneecaps in with an iron bar because they were busy reloading the shotgun. All the while, I was stood outside in my ovies with the pickaxe hangles to make sure no one gets in. Suddenly, Haase and Johnny One Eye ran out and we get off.

  In the car, I asked Haase why he had done it. He just said that they had insulted his bird. Haase’s bird was called Vera Aldridge. They had a kid together. I thought Haase had gone way over the top, to shoot someone over basically pub talk.

  Anyways, we thought no more of the shooting. It was one of them. Allday. I went back to running my business. Haase went back to planning his bank robberies. Little did we know. The thing blew up out of all proportion. I mean, out of all fucking proportion. You’d have thought we’d shot the president by the way the papers were going on.