The Turkish babas were experts at getting 10- or 20-kilo parcels of heroin into the UK. But what was the point if they couldn’t shift it en masse once it was within these shores? Selling dribs and drabs, ounces and half-kilos, to opportunists over a period of months and months would not sustain the production-line throughput the ambitious Turkish Connection was aiming for, nor generate the profits to sustain such a well-organised network. The bottleneck thrown up by imbalanced distribution, of having large amounts of supply but little demand, also posed security risks. The longer stocks remained unsold in the UK, hidden in safehouses or in transit, the more chance police and Customs and Excise had of finding it.
Enter John Haase – a potential solution to the problem. In Haase, Sezazi recognised an ideal business partner for the Turkish Connection, even if he was in jail. Haase was intelligent, fearless and hungry for riches. He had a bona fide reputation as a gangster and was as respected in Liverpool as in other parts of the country. The penal system had allowed him to befriend senior cons, such as London’s most notorious enforcer Mad Frankie Fraser and leading figures from all over the UK. At that time, Haase had a reputation for being staunch, refusing to grass on his fellow criminals even when faced with long stretches in prison.
In addition, Haase was one of the new breed of gangsters who understood the potential of narcotics. Mostly former armed robbers, these upstart villains were completely amoral and had none of the old-school, Godfather-style hang-ups about dirtying their hands with drugs. To Haase and his contemporaries, it just came down to cash. Dealing in death was no different from harming the public during an armed robbery. It just made more money. They understood that theirs was a dying trade. The police now had armed robbery under control. Better security, improved intelligence, specialised squads and lengthy sentences were bringing to a close the glory days of blagging. Drugs, however, were virgin territory, in which the underworld had stolen the idea wholesale from the hippies and stolen a march on law enforcement at the same time. The villains were streets ahead of them all.
Hitherto, the drugs trade in the UK had been controlled by small-time opportunists and cannabis-smuggling long-hairs in the mould of Mr Nice, Howard Marks, a hangover from the 1960s. At first, the Turkish Connection tried to befriend the hippies, but they found them unwilling to diversify into Class A drugs. And when they did, some of these dealers were flaky and risk averse. In contrast, the new breed of armed robbers turned drug barons had no such inhibitions; they thought big and acted big and were vicious enough to stamp their control over the existing networks and flood them with heroin.
In their Long Lartin cells, Sezazi struck a deal with the Turkish Connection’s new-found protégé, and appointed him de facto head of UK heroin sales for the organisation on his release. Sezazi promised that when Haase got out of prison, even though Sezazi himself would still be inside finishing his longer sentence, he would arrange for an introduction to leading members of the London-based Turkish Connection so that business could get started. It was fortuitous for everyone. Haase’s plans to turn the Turkish heroin racket from a cottage industry in the UK into a multimillion-pound business coincided with the rise to power of the young Turks. Some of these next-generation smugglers were British-born, making it easy for Haase to do business with them. It was a match made in heaven, timed to perfection.
While Haase was in jail, a young north London hoodlum called Suleyman Ergun and his brother-in-law Yilmaz Kaya were both making their mark on the Turkish underworld. Ergun was a highly energetic, fast-talking wheeler-dealer in the rag trade. Kaya had interests in sweatshops manufacturing clothes.
Ergun lived in a 1930s council tenement block a stone’s throw from Euston station with his Turkish immigrant mum, dad and younger sister. He was a street kid at heart, as much a Londoner as he was Turkish. He spoke with a cockney accent and ruled the notorious Somerstown council estate in Camden with a heady mix of violence and charm. Though slight of frame, he was a tough fighter and a natural born risk-taker. He was known to be stubborn, fearless and trigger-happy, if need be. The fast-moving 21 year old, known as Slay on the street, was loved and feared in equal measures by everyone he did business with because of his infectious nervous energy and quick-fire intelligence. He was a doer, not a talker. Ergun had an egalitarian approach to the underworld, an ability to do business at all levels of the gangland hierarchy. On the one hand, he could sit down with the top bosses of the Adams family, London’s gangland ruling elite, or international drug smugglers from Turkey, Sicily or Colombia. On the other hand, he had no problem doing business with Jamaican yardies or scallies from Liverpool and Manchester. It was a quality that served him well on his meteoric rise to wealth and power beyond his wildest dreams.
Ergun rose to become the effective number three in one of the world’s biggest heroin-smuggling gangs. He was the right-hand man to his brother-in-law and deputy boss Yilmaz Kaya. Kaya reported directly to the main man, the Turkish boss of bosses and Istanbul-based baba The Vulcan. The Vulcan’s real name was Zulkiv Topuz (also spelt ‘Topaz’, by Customs, amongst others) but he frequently used the alias Nuri Yazici. He was one of the world’s biggest heroin dealers, near the top of Customs and Excise’s hit list. But in the late ’80s, while Haase was in jail, Ergun was still a petty criminal.
SULEYMAN ERGUN: When I first got into dealing, it was only with small amounts, nothing great. The reason was we couldn’t really find someone to take the amounts we were bringing in. Ever since I was young, I’ve known heroin comes from Turkey. I knew that Turks – the underworld – were the main heroin dealers in other countries. It was all done by word of mouth. Eventually, Turkey became the main supplier to the world.
They get the opium base from Afghanistan and Pakistan, transport it to Turkey through the mountains or sometimes by boat, oil tanker or cargo ships into the Black Sea ports. The base is brought in in tonnes. Then five chemicals are used to break it down, refine it into heroin. I believe most of the chemicals – the acids – come from Belgium and Germany.
In the late ’70s to early ’80s, it really took off. Although the transport and technology wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, the business routes suddenly opened up, with trucks and wagons able to ship it west in bulk. The routes out of Turkey were the same as they’ve always been, just over the old routes by land and sea. By land from Istanbul through Bulgaria, sometimes to Greece and into Yugoslavia. Then into Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), Hungary, Austria, then you’re in Germany and Italy.
These countries have got the key roads. One good route, which I used many times, is from Bulgaria through Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, Belgium and into France. Then straight over here. You can miss one country and go to another. It’s dead flexible. Getting from Istanbul to France or Belgium is easy. No one stops you.
In the 1970s, when the Turks were just getting it sussed, it was just brought to England in small amounts. They were doing it [hidden] in clothes or by post. For instance, someone works in the post office and knows it’s coming in, how and everything else about it, when and where from. Then they intercept it before it goes to the main sorting office. Or you can post it to someone’s address and they sign for it. Customs don’t go into the post office, only if they get a tip-off. And the Customs in the other countries en route don’t mess with it either. Royal Mail regulate everything – even overseas. Because a parcel is on a transit route, just passing through a foreign place to its destination in England, they don’t open them up in other countries. The back doors of the mail trucks are sealed, preventing Customs from getting into them. At least, that’s how it used to be.
Overland, if you take it yourself, you could seal it in a Land Rover or the roof of a transit van or in door panels, in the gearbox, tyres, dashboard, inside the sashing. A transit van could store 150 kilos in the roof – but those big amounts only came later in the late ’80s/’90s when we got involved and Haase was involved. By that time, we had become very good, very efficient, but at first it was all pi
ecemeal.
Later, once we made it big, we even planned to bring it here in an oil tanker along with the Italian Mafia and some cocaine people in Colombia. That was the biggest vessel. It was going to be a superload – heroin, coke and hash in an oil tanker.
But before we made it into a big business, it was only being brought in kilos; ten-kilo parcels at the most. Individual Turks would bring in a little lump, sell it for a few grand, buy a shop and never do it again. But they were still quite clever. The most sophisticated I ever knew about in them days was inside a suit – a suit with heroin soaked into it. You put heroin in water, dissolve it and then put the suit in it. It’s sort of washing it in heroin and then letting it dry out. The suit gets heavier but you just wear it. When you get it to the destination, put it in water again and the heroin washes out. The wet heroin powder is then laid out on an absorbent cotton cloth to dry in a warm room or, if possible, outside in the sunshine. A kilo and a half could be done that way. The Pakistanis started that off, but I’ve seen that done by Turks.
The Turks also brought it in dissolved in whisky, rum and brandy, inside women’s heels and inside people’s bodies. A human can swallow about a kilo. That was the kind of thing the old Turks were doing before we took over.
My introduction into heroin came because I knew Yilmaz [Kaya] through the rag trade – the factory business. Yilmaz wasn’t involved with gear at first. He got involved in Turkey. We knew each other. I was only young but Yilmaz trusted me, knew my family, liked me. Yilmaz had always liked me when I was a little kid. He was 15 years older than me, about the same age as Haase. He was like a brother to me. Trust, honour and respect is what I had that Yilmaz liked. I wanted to go into it, the heroin business, but at first he didn’t want me to get into it. He was trying to dissuade me. But I was stubborn; I said I would do it anyway and I’d rather it be him than anyone else.
Haase and Mustafa Sezazi were together in Long Lartin doing time, Haase for armed robbery and Sezazi for heroin. They became jail friends. Sezazi was an ex-policeman from northern Cyprus. Yilmaz got to know him through the underworld, and when he was in jail we would send in money to him so he could fund his appeals. He would be visited by his son and we would give the money to his son beforehand. To return the favour, Sezazi introduced Haase to us when Haase got out of jail. We gave Sezazi a ‘drink’ for introducing Haase to us. At that point, Yilmaz was giving heroin to too many people, in small amounts, so he wanted someone who could take more at once, in one go.
The less people that were involved, the less chance of getting nicked, so he was looking for someone who could handle a lot in one go. Sezazi was still in nick at the time but Yilmaz went to Liverpool for the first meet with Haase when he got out. They talked about how much Haase could move, then shook on a deal. Kaya offered to supply Haase with as much gear as he could take.
Haase had no experience of the drugs business but when he got out of Long Lartin, he found out that his nephew Paul Bennett was doing brown at the time in Liverpool. That was pure coincidence. Bennett was not getting it off us and they were only doing small kilo loads. But the point was Bennett knew about drugs, the technical side of it. So Haase was able to tap into his knowledge. It was a good partnership. Haase was the muscle and the brains. Bennett was the doer, the dealer.
Immediately after he got out of jail, Haase told Bennett that the business was going to change from now on, that he was taking over. He told him that they were going to get bigger. Bennett’s partner at the time, a villain called Chris No-Neck, was muscled out by Haase. So Haase became the boss and Bennett his sidekick.
The first amount Haase moved was 90 kilos. Yilmaz gave it to him. I wasn’t with Yilmaz at the time. I came on board a bit later to collect money. It was only after a good few months of Yilmaz working with Haase that I was introduced, after trust had been established. Collecting money was my first job.
It started with a phone call out of the blue, then going up to Liverpool – that was my first meet with Haase and Bennett. Bennett was a loudmouth – immature, he was. But Haase was cunning. I would be collecting money from now on. I was told not to give it to anyone. Until then, Yilmaz had been using a gopher called Joey the Turk (not his real name). Haase and Bennett didn’t like him because he was a boaster. He got off on being in the underworld, liked to tell everyone. But Haase and Bennett did like me. I could speak better English. At the end of the day, Joey, like his partner in crime Manuk Ocecki, who also worked for us, was just that: a joey. When I took over, I saw the job of being Kaya’s number two as important. I got more involved in managing things. I took on more responsibility.
The first meet was in the Rocky Lane sauna in Liverpool. I collected £68,000 that day. You are told when and where to get it from. Even in those early days, a million pounds’ worth of business had already been established. Haase and Bennett had been given, say, 50 kilos at £20,000 a kilo. We became Haase’s single supplier. For 18 months, it was big business.
5
THE LIVERPOOL MAFIA AND THE DRUGS REVOLUTION
It was no coincidence that Haase had been able to take a leading role in Britain’s biggest heroin gang without much effort. A lot of villains who had gone before him had paved the way, laying the groundwork, grooming him for a top slot in the corporation without him really knowing it but for which he would gratefully take the credit. These villains came to be known as the Liverpool Mafia, and in the 1970s and 1980s the small group of Scouse gangsters pioneered large-scale drug smuggling and distribution in the UK. By the 1990s, the foundations had been laid for a second generation of Liverpool barons, such as John Haase, to take stewardship of this phenomenon – taking drug dealing to a stratospheric level, generating billions of pounds and spreading death and misery on a previously unknown scale. The ’90s drug-dealing boom was good timing for Loony Tunes. In 1992, he was just getting out of prison armed with a series of fortuitous introductions into the Turkish Connection, and all the pieces of the jigsaw were in place to make it easy for him.
Other narco superstars to graduate from this school of excellence at roughly the same time as Haase included drug legends like Colin ‘Badger’ Borrows and Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, today revered household names in the underworld and in popular culture. Like Haase, these two had started out as armed robbers. Borrows went on to become Britain’s first crack-cocaine dealer, responsible for introducing man’s most addictive banned substance into the UK and getting Middle England hooked. Warren rose from a rootin’-tootin’ scallywag to become Interpol’s Target One, moving up the Class A ladder from street dealer to wholesaler to importer. By the time he was successfully prosecuted, he was worth an estimated £200 million. The Observer had the following to say about the event:
The mythology of British villainy needs to be rewritten. Next to Warren, the Krays were pathetic minnows. The Great Train Robbers and Brinks Mat robbers, who were swaggering highwaymen from the pre-drugs era, were way down the division. The plain fact is Warren is the richest and most successful British criminal who has ever been caught.
Haase and Warren were at different times business partners, rivals and then bitter enemies – a normal relationship in the drugs world.
The second generation of drug dealers such as Haase, Warren and Borrows had 20 years of local narco heritage to draw on, knowledge that would be passed down from villain to villain, ensuring that the successors were even better at it than those who went before them. For instance, the second generation began to use professional enquiry agents, including private detectives and former special-services soldiers, to boost their counter-surveillance capability. Gangster Andy Shacklady regularly used former SAS soldiers to debug meeting venues and to spy on rival villains and police patrols. He used a former regiment soldier from Manchester – now serving in Afghanistan – to track down a drug dealer who had stolen a large consignment of amphetamine base. He was successfully traced to a caravan in North Wales and punished.
Ominously, the second generation were quick to rip
up the traditional gangland codes that had loosely defined the behaviour of the old-school. For the first time, police and Customs officers became legitimate targets for drug-dealing gangs who wanted them off their backs. The second generation thought nothing of putting out contracts on law officers, raiding their homes, firebombing their cars and even shooting them.
Gangsters in other parts of the UK were also dealing drugs, but the villains in Liverpool were quickly able to dominate the trade, turning the city into an international distribution hub, dubbed by one senior policeman the Amsterdam of Britain. The main reason was simple – Liverpool was a port and its underworld was well versed in trading in contraband; it had been doing it for hundreds of years. But a number of other factors also helped propel the Liverpool mobsters into the premier league, where they played alongside billionaire legends from shady places like Medellin, Sicily, Istanbul and Amsterdam to great effect. The emergence of a group of wealthy, white, middle-aged villains dubbed the Liverpool Mafia was one such factor. Most of them were former armed robbers looking to invest their winnings in a safer, cleaner industry. It was these perma-tanned, golf-clad underworld speculators who put up the money to underwrite the big drug deals, forming an alliance with a younger generation of Afro-Caribbean criminals from the city’s Toxteth ghetto – dubbed the Black Caucus by police – to help them run it.
Druglord Page 4
