Druglord

by Graham Johnson

  In all, Howard went on to get ten years’ ministerial experience under his belt, seven in the Cabinet, mostly as home secretary. He served, briefly, as Employment secretary under Margaret Thatcher before being promoted, via Environment, to the Home Office by John Major in 1993. Were it not for the prime minister’s strong Euroscepticism, John Major might even have appointed him chancellor or foreign secretary. He reached the Cabinet in 1990, in which he served until the meltdown of May 1997 – one year after he released John Haase from prison.

  Howard then spent years in the political wilderness after a miserable bottom-of-the-poll showing in the leadership contest of 1997. That is when Ann Widdecombe made her famous ‘something of the night’ comment about him. The phrase will always be associated with Michael Howard even though the row that created it has almost been forgotten. It arose from Howard’s decision to sack Derek Lewis, the then head of the prison service, in the light of an official report into escapes from Parkhurst prison in January 1995. Widdecombe, then Howard’s junior minister for prisons, disagreed violently with that decision and almost resigned over it. It was a very difficult time for Howard, and only his parliamentary skills and a disastrous performance by his shadow, Jack Straw, in the key debate saved Howard’s career. Matters rested until the Tories went into opposition, and it was then that Widdecombe coined her special nocturnal sound bite. It was seen by many as a faintly anti-Semitic smear of the nasty, whispered type that Howard has had to cope with throughout his career (‘oleaginous’ is another). Widdecombe denies this and says that it was in fact taken from the title of a thriller by the American author Mary McMullen. She adds that, ‘The further you get away from God and heaven, the deeper the dark. My picture of hell is complete with devils and tridents and burning lakes and darkness . . . my image of badness is dark. You hear a lot of people saying “there is a dark side to a character”. So if I’m saying somebody’s been bad, yes, there is a dark image there.’ All that, damaging enough, was followed up by a Commons speech by Widdecombe that demolished Howard’s reputation. His attempt to regain ground with an appearance on Newsnight turned to disaster when Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question 12 times, an exercise that succeeded in making him seem shifty and evasive. Even now, Howard is reluctant to discuss the Widdecombe–Paxman experience. However, it sank his leadership ambitions at the time. He received only 23 votes from his fellow MPs. Howard switched allegiance to William Hague, who rewarded him with the job of shadow foreign secretary, although he did have to serve for a time in Hague’s team with his tormentor Widdecombe. In March 1999, he announced his voluntary retirement from the front bench. And that was that for Michael Howard, until his surprising recall later by Iain Duncan Smith. He went on to become Tory Party leader in 2003.

  Friends say Howard is an urbane man, who enjoys watching baseball on Channel Five and is still capable of jiving to The Crickets. John Major said in his memoirs that:

  Michael is clever and able, but in private is a shy and charming man, with an unstuffy, self-deprecating manner. He was always at his best without an audience; in public he could not help stirring things up. Too many people saw the polished barrister on the surface, and took against what they saw. They missed the substance underneath.

  7

  THE TURKISH CONNECTION

  John Haase was released from prison in 1992 after serving the greater part of a 14-year sentence for the Transit Mob robberies. Immediately he launched back into a life of crime, recruiting Liverpool’s most feared enforcer and arming himself to the teeth. Springing back onto the scene sparked resentment from some members of the Liverpool Mafia, including the supervillainous Tommy Gilday.

  THE ENFORCER: I was a best friend of John Haase from early 1992, having met him shortly after he came out of prison having served a lengthy sentence. He became close – we went on holiday and socialised regularly. We saw little of one another during the day but saw each other at night. I introduced him to my friends and work colleagues.

  The first time I had concerns about Haase was when I was at his house and he asked me to guess which hand a gun was hidden in. I guessed – he showed me a .22 handgun and revealed he had three of them. He had only been out a few months. I remember him being stopped by the police outside his home and having the gun taken off him.

  I knew people – a lot of people. He was trying to involve me in his business and asking me to enforce for him. Two people who I recall he had problems with at that time were someone called Hannah and someone called [Tommy] Gilday.

  On another two occasions, when I accompanied him to meet people, he was carrying a gun. I had asked him not to. I said I would talk to the people as I knew them well. After the first occasion, I had said that it was better to talk to people. He said he wouldn’t take a chance and showed me the gun that he had been carrying, even though I had asked him not to.

  On the second occasion, I told him we were seeing two people over a problem I had and we were meeting them in the Adelphi Hotel. John phoned ‘Ben’ up. He said he had a few quid that he needed. Again, when we left the Adelphi, he showed me another gun. He said he wasn’t rolling around the floor with anyone.

  After this incident, I didn’t see as much of him, although we still spoke on the phone. The two people we went to see at the Adelphi, he became friendly with. After settling in, Haase then turned his attention to his new job – drugs.

  Haase recalls: ‘When I came out of prison in the early 1990s, the world of crime had changed. Suddenly all of the big firms had switched from robberies to drugs. So I got involved in heroin. Again, it was all down to money; no other reason.’ On this score, Haase had an ace up his sleeve, potentially worth millions of pounds – an introduction to the Turkish Connection promised by his old Long Lartin lag pal, Mustafa Sezazi. But the cunning Scouser was in no rush to get involved in a trade he wasn’t quite master of. Haase didn’t make contact with the Turks immediately. He wanted to find out more about dealing drugs himself, to get a feel for the market. He hung up his shotgun and picked up the tools of his new trade – a purity-testing kit, a pair of surgical gloves, a handful of resealable plastic bags, a roll of brown package tape, a holdall for the gear and black bin bags to carry the stacks of cash he was going to make. Haase teamed up with his errant nephew Paul Bennett, who was busy dealing kilos of cocaine – or whatever he could get hold of – to and for the rising stars of the next generation of Liverpool mafiosi. Haase and Bennett began buying drugs off Chris No-Neck. No-Neck was Bennett’s pal, supplier and partner. When Haase got out, he made Bennett more ambitious – but some say at the expense of caution.

  CHRIS NO-NECK: Before John came out, Ben was doing stuff. Me and Ben had been doing it for five years. We made sure no one fucked with us. We did it our way. We fucked people off. For years turned them away [refused to sell them heroin because they didn’t know them]. But Ben turned when John got out. He wanted what John had. However, he never really had the bottle. He’d never pull the trigger himself. That’s why he’s got little Joey [a well-known hit-man linked to at least six hits] to do it for him.

  The relationship between No-Neck and Haase reversed when Haase later became big and No-Neck went to work for him.

  Haase was spending a lot of time in Bennett’s flat in the upmarket Woolton area of Liverpool. Many of the city’s criminal fraternity were to be found coming and going from the flat, talking shop, gossiping, partying. Interestingly, a young wheeler-dealer called Simon Bakerman was often to be found there, buying and taking drugs. He was a figure of curiosity in this Fagin’s den, being related to the esteemed Michael Howard.

  Another of Bennett’s visitors was cocaine baron Curtis Warren. Again, Haase’s timing was fortuitous. In the same year that Haase was released, Warren was taking his leap into the big-time narc scene as well. He had stopped trafficking 50-kilo loads from Europe and started to import 500- and 1,000-kilo loads direct from Colombia.

  In 1991, police first became aware of Warren’s independent smuggling operation a
fter an informant in Operation Bruise, a Midlands-based taskforce targeting organised crime, named him as a maverick middle-ranking operator who specialised in 50-kilo-a-time shipments. But in the winter of 1991, Warren brought in a 500-kilo load in lead ingots – the first consignment to be grassed up by Paul Grimes. Customs and Excise let this load go in order to catch a bigger fish, a 905-kilo load expected a few months later.

  It was cocaine from the first 500-kilo load that almost certainly started John Haase off as a drug dealer. As they got to know each other, Warren began to like and respect Haase. He felt sorry for the legendary armed robber who had just got out of prison and was skint. Warren, like all career criminals, knew the feeling and was sympathetic. Poverty was an affront to a big man’s pride. Magnanimously, he offered Haase the ‘arse end’ of the huge consignment to help him get back on his feet. Most of it had already been sold, but Warren gave Haase a parcel of about 20 to 30 kilos ‘on tick’. The young buck trusted Haase because he was old-school with a fearsome reputation. At about £30,000 a kilo wholesale, Haase’s stash was worth between £600,000 and £900,000. He would have to pay back Warren for the initial amount after it was sold, but the profits were staggering. By ‘dancing on’ or ‘cutting up’ the powder with a bulking agent such as glucose, Haase could turn the 20 kilos into about 25 immediately. Then, by ‘bagging it up’ or splitting it into ounces or quarter- or eighth-kilos, he could increase the profits by mind-boggling multiples until it ran into millions. And that’s exactly what he did. He told Bennett to take care of these production details and also relied on Bennett to use his contacts to sell it.

  Bennett enjoyed the lifestyle of the new drug-dealer elite: champagne, Cream nightclub, Chinese meals, snorting, hotels, glamorous women, clobber from Wadies (an expensive Liverpool clothes shop). But little is known about the secretive trafficker, referred to as the ‘Pimpernel’ because of his frequent moving around.

  His family’s twee home in Norris Green, Liverpool, was the image of respectability masking the shameful truth. On the front window sill stood a neat row of porcelain figures alongside pictures of the children. However, there were a few clues as to the occupation of the owner. The house was surrounded with security gadgets. A spotlight and closed-circuit television camera were trained on callers.

  Bennett was laid back about selling the cocaine that Warren had given to Haase. However, Haase was impatient. To him, he was in direct competition with the city’s numerous other drug dealers. When Bennett wasn’t selling the cocaine fast enough, Haase discovered a new technique: bullying dealers lower down the chain to sell his cocaine exclusively and stop selling drugs from a rival. Haase began bouncing around the city bashing people up if they didn’t sell for him rather than others. Other mobs had tried this method but it seemed to cause more hassle than it was worth; the threats led to bitterness and arrangements soon fizzled out if not policed. But Haase had the power and the violence to pull it off – to make the new rules stick.

  The £20 notes began to roll in, enabling Haase to get back on his feet – new clothes, car, apartment, etc. Then, once Haase had learned the basics of drug dealing, he wanted more. Enter the Turks. Haase remembered the promise made to him by Mustafa Sezazi in Long Lartin. Contact was made with Kaya and arrangements were made for him to travel up to Liverpool for a get-to-know-you session.

  Both men liked and trusted each other. Kaya, who was now one of the Turkish Connection’s senior bosses, welcomed John Haase in. Within the hierarchy, at first, Haase was offered the role of being the Turks’ north-west distributor of heroin – but he soon outgrew the position and was so good at his job that he had quickly eclipsed all of the other salesmen the Turks had on their books in the UK. He became their number one UK distributor. But he was still not satisfied. Within months, Haase got involved in trafficking the heroin, insisting that his men help the Turks transport their cargoes on the last leg of their journeys through France to the UK. Then he pushed for a role in manufacture back in Istanbul.

  In the early days, Haase was given 10- to 20-kilo loads. Kaya and Bulent Onay would travel to Liverpool to make arrangements and collect the cash. (Onay was Kaya’s right-hand man who ferried money and drugs to all parts of the UK before Suleyman Ergun replaced him.) During 1992, as trust increased, Haase’s ‘tick’ increased to 30 then 50 kilos and beyond. Haase was selling it as fast as the Turks could bring it in. They were flabbergasted.

  The Turks quickly realised that Liverpool was now the hub of Britain’s drug distribution network, a fortuitous fact they were delighted to discover because they now had one of the city’s top men working with them. They began giving the vast majority of their imports directly to the Liverpool gang, bypassing London and other cities.

  From this point on, a loose structure began to emerge. With a flexibility that was key to its strength, the shape of the Turkish Connection’s outfit began gently to morph. It changed from a triangular hierarchy with The Vulcan at the top, overseeing his deputy Yilmaz Kaya and third-in-command Suleyman Ergun, to more of an axis of power. The Vulcan was still in overall charge at the centre of the see-saw, but at one end were the Scousers and at the other the British Turks led by Yilmaz – two gangs joined at the hip with roughly equal standing. The business became so huge so quickly that it had a momentum of its own. Even after Onay was arrested in Christmas 1992, following a roller-coaster but bumper year, the operation steamrollered on without a care in the world. Suleyman Ergun blossomed into an even bigger player.

  Based on official Customs and Excise reports, the role of each member of the gang was as follows:

  1. THE VULCAN

  The Vulcan was one of the world’s biggest heroin dealers, supplying most of Europe, including the key markets in Britain, Germany and Italy. He was vastly wealthy and owned a Turkish travel firm with a fleet of coaches – in which he smuggled drugs – a huge property empire and a hotel chain.

  The Vulcan survived because of his anonymity. He was middle-aged, short and non-descript. Despite his millions, he dressed like a dad who bought his clothes from Asda: patterned polyester crew-neck jumpers, shapeless suit jackets and dark, cheap slacks. He had bought off powerful connections in the Turkish police and government. He had bought himself out of prison in Turkey several times. He was always armed, sometimes carrying two heavy-calibre pistols, and travelled in a fleet of bullet- and bomb-proof limos specially made in Italy. Whenever he landed at Istanbul airport, he was whisked through security at a police checkpoint. If he was flying out again, before he took off he was able to deposit his guns in a special safe with airport security for collection on his return. On one occasion, when a rookie cop threatened to arrest him for carrying the guns, The Vulcan threatened to have him sacked if he didn’t do as he was told. On finding out who the passenger was, the copper begged for mercy.

  The Vulcan had his HQ in a faceless office block in the capital. One visitor recalled that it was stacked with military boxes of Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and bombs – ammunition in his ruthless quest to get and keep control of the heroin business. He was powerful enough to have one-on-one meetings with the godfathers of the Italian Mafia. He arrived at hotels in southern Italy flanked by men with machine guns.

  The Vulcan trusted few men. One of the exceptions was Yilmaz Kaya. They had met when Kaya was staying at his relatives’ near a secret safehouse used by The Vulcan. The godfather was impressed by his old-style sense of honour and the calm way he dealt with people.

  One of the strangest sights observed by Customs officers investigating the Turkish Connection was The Vulcan’s appearance in a suburban street in Liverpool. What was one of the world’s biggest drug dealers doing in Liverpool on a summer’s day walking down the road without a care in the world, his jacket tossed casually over his shoulder? It was a bizarre image, and one which symbolised just how important the city had become in the international drugs market. The scene got even more surreal when he was greeted by Haase and Bennett dressed like a pair of scallies goin
g to the match. Haase was sporting a pair of tennis shorts, a stripy T-shirt and a pair of blue Reebok trainers. They were discussing a drug deal worth £10 million.

  2. YILMAZ KAYA

  Kaya was the Turkish-based suppliers’ main representative in the UK. He was in charge of the heroin-distribution organisation, the collection of the money and its transmission back to Turkey.

  Before drugs, Kaya worked as a storeman and delivery driver for a Turkish-owned clothing business in the Green Lane area of north London. One day, he told his colleagues that he was leaving to make his fortune. He accompanied them to the local café on Green Lane which they had frequented every work day for years. The café was popular with workers and Kaya and his pals enjoyed one last bite to eat together. He was well liked, always polite and helpful to everyone he knew within the Turkish community. As he got up to go, he told the assembled crowd, ‘The next time I walk past here, I’ll be carrying a suitcase full of money.’ Two years later, he returned to keep his promise, showing off his new-found drug-wealth to his astonished pals.

  Kaya travelled extensively throughout Europe on a number of different passports in various names. He first appeared on Customs’ radar after being linked by observations to other members of the Turkish Connection in the second half of 1992. Customs connected him to large amounts of cash that were being exported from the UK to Turkey, and also the heroin seized from Bulent Onay in December 1992. Kaya was observed personally transporting large amounts of cash through Heathrow and was seen many times at meetings with the principal conspirators in Liverpool, when money was handed over.

  3. SULEYMAN ERGUN

  Ergun was Kaya’s UK-based lieutenant, responsible for the organisation’s interests during Kaya’s visits abroad, and a constant companion of Kaya on meetings in Liverpool with Haase and Bennett. He was usually seen carrying the bags of money that he and Kaya collected from Haase and Bennett.