After a few hours, the coach found its destination, which was San Sebastian in the deep south near the border with Spain. We met the driver and had a chat. He said he wouldn’t be able to get the gear ready until the next day. For fuck’s sake, it was four in the morning and we’d had no kip for two days and now we were being told to pick up the gear the next day at four in the morning! We didn’t have anywhere to sleep so we made off to Paris again because all our stuff was in the hotel, which was the Holiday Inn. We made our way back from San Sebastian to Paris.
When we got to the hotel, we had a munch and got a few hours’ kip. We got up, showered, dressed and set off again for San Sebastian. The journey back was about 500 km. We got there around two in the morning. We spoke to the driver and he said pull the car up to the coach at three in the morning. So we went down to the seafront and parked the car and waited till three in the morning. Then we made our way back towards the coach. We pulled up right next to it, opened the boot. The driver and two men had two massive sacks full of gear. We put them both in the boot of our car. Then the boot wouldn’t stick. There was so much gear in there we couldn’t shut it. Then we had to force it and slam it very hard.
We did it in the end. We gave the driver an extra drink of £1,500. He was getting paid in Turkey but as it had gone well he deserved it. We had 111 kilos of pure heroin in the boot. We drove down country lanes. As we were driving, I could hear and feel the wheels hitting and going over things. It felt like little stones so I put the full lights on. Fuck me! The road was covered in rabbits and hares. I pulled the car over and got a torch out to look over the car. The wheels were covered in rabbit skin and blood. We carried on driving. It was pitch black. No lights on the road and no chance of dodging these rabbits.
There was so much gear in the boot that the car began to smell of heroin. It stank but there was nothing we could do. If we got a pull, we would be fucked. At one point, we decided to test the quality of the gear. As we were driving along, Kaya took a small sample from one of the bags and we got a bit of foil and chased it. It was beautiful, pure high-quality 100 per cent heroin. The car was full of fumes; it was the middle of the night but we didn’t give a fuck.
The job now was to get the gear back to England. We got back to Paris, got our stuff from the hotel and headed for the Channel coast. On the way, a few strange incidents happened. We were getting followed. I don’t know how but the French had got on to us. Maybe it was a routine pull or a traffic offence or whatever, but someone was on to us. We didn’t care – we just wanted to get away. I thought we were going to get nicked so we had to make a split-second decision. Do we give ourselves up or make a run for it? I put my foot down and got up to about 120 mph. I couldn’t believe it. I was going into a high-speed car chase with 111 kilos of gear in the back. Whoever was following us mustn’t have expected it because we gave them the slip and after a while no one seemed to be on us. I pulled over at the side of the road just in case. I had a gun on me so I got it to hand and made sure it was ready. The plan was simple – if the police pulled over and approached the car, I was going to open fire, kill as many as I could and make a run for it with Kaya and keep on firing at whoever was stupid enough to come after us. We had 111 kilos in the boot and no one was going to get their hands on it. That was going back to England no matter what, and anyone who stood in the way was getting it. I was mentally preparing myself for a shoot-out. I knew the French police carried guns, but if it came to it I’d have shot 20 to get away. What did it matter? I had 111 kilos in the back. If I got caught, I was going to jail for a long time anyway. The wait was only a couple of minutes but it seemed like ages. Nothing happened. I’d lost them. So I pulled out, made a few moody turn-offs and that, and everything calmed down. That’s how determined we were to make sure nothing interfered with the runs. Needless to say, we got the gear safely back to England.
Kaya had made plans to switch the gear to Haase’s transport in France before the coast. That all went smoothly and we transferred the heroin to them in Paris. Ten kilos were taken out along the way as payment to the various people who’d been involved. One kilo was stolen by a contact of ours in Paris. Haase’s transport collected the remaining 100 kilos in France and both Kaya and me went our separate ways. He flew back from Paris. I drove back. Job done.
9
BANG ONTOP – CUSTOMS CLOSE IN
The 100-kilo load was successfully smuggled into the UK, but unfortunately for the Turkish Connection and John Haase there was a problem. The parcel had been under constant surveillance by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. Oh, dear! Every movement the gang had made had been tracked by the service’s crack Lima 3 undercover anti-drug squad. Even worse for The Vulcan, Ergun, Kaya, Haase and Co., this was not the only occasion the gang had been watched – they had been under close-quarter surveillance for over a year as part of a wide-ranging investigation called Operation Floor. According to Customs documents, the observations had started in June 1992 and finished 13 months later in July 1993 – shortly after the 100-kilo load arrived in the UK. During this period, almost every significant event had been monitored. Flights to Turkey, trips to Liverpool, bin-bag cash handovers at the Black Horse pub, heroin deliveries, meetings, phone conversations, pager messages – the lot had been observed, taped and, what’s worse, photographed. Perfectly framed, full-colour photographs of The Vulcan walking along the street in Liverpool without a care in the world alongside some of the most hardened criminals in the UK were amongst the images available in the booklets of surveillance shots. It looked like a drug dealers’ convention – which actually it was – complete with happy snaps for the folks back home. Customs and Excise had a ring-side seat on the greatest criminal show ever to roll up into town – better than the Feds at Appalachian, better than the Sweeney at the Great Train Robbers’ farm, because this crime was happening real-time in front of their very eyes. John Haase and the Turkish Connection may have been amongst the most prolific drug dealers in the world at that point, but they weren’t good enough to beat the law.
Ergun would later kick himself. He should have trusted his Star Wars-style instinct and his eyes and ears on the three occasions his surveillance team had, in the parlance, ‘showed out’ – the times when he had spotted or ‘got on to’ the fact that he was being tracked and watched. Remember the occasion during an early visit to Liverpool when he had spotted a man in a blue Ford Sierra observing him? Remember when he had become suspicious of a couple drinking at the Black Horse pub, to the degree of feeling specifically uncomfortable about her handbag? Remember more recently the shadowy pursuers whom he had outrun in France? Ergun should have forgone his almost godlike reverence for his seniors and fought harder with Kaya and The Vulcan to go along with his instincts – to close down the operation for a bit.
Though the exact chronology is difficult to piece together because of the secrecy surrounding the operation, the following timetable is as accurate as can be. Haase got out of prison in early ’92. Kaya and Haase started to trade heroin one or two months later. According to Suleyman Ergun, they started dealing together between February and April 1992. Customs began their operation some time after, scoring their first success at the end of the year with the arrest of Bulent Onay. (He was immediately replaced by Ergun.) Ergun believes, though, that by the time Customs got a grip on the gang they had probably missed several months’ worth of traffic, which could have amounted to a lot of heroin. But they were on to them early enough to catch them red-handed at the height of their power over the 13 months between June 1992 and July 1993.
The tip-off which led police and Customs and Excise to launch an investigation into Haase and the Turkish Connection is still a mystery, over which there is some dispute. Sources in the Merseyside Police claim that their officers were the first to identify Haase as a drug dealer, which led to surveillance on him. The tip-off allegedly came from a woman spurned, one of Bennett’s ex-girlfriends, who took revenge after being dumped. Ironically, she claimed Bennett had
got rid of her after discovering that she was using heroin. Customs and Excise were then able to work back and pick up the Turks and begin to widen the probe to include The Vulcan. This version is backed up by a newspaper article from The Independent on Tuesday, 3 September 1996. Based on sources in the police and security services, the story reveals that ‘Haase and Bennett were arrested in 1993 after [a female friend of Bennett’s] began using heroin. The woman informed on him to a Merseyside Police detective-constable.’
The head of the 100-man heroin-investigation team at Customs and Excise who was in charge of the case has two different versions. At first, Assistant Chief Investigator Phil Connelly claimed that Customs and Excise teams had got a lead into Haase after picking up wire taps from the Turks in London. Then he claimed that the tip-off might have come from a female source in Liverpool. As with many of these complex operations, there were probably several sources of intelligence and possibly more than one mole within the Turks–Haase gang reporting back to Customs. One of the prime movers in the case was Customs Officer Paul Cook, who moved from London to Manchester, helping Connelly track Haase and Bennett. In total, two squads of Customs officers were assigned to the operation.
PHIL CONNELLY: To the best of my knowledge, we came across them [Haase and Bennett] in the operation. We were working with the Regional Crime Squad, who obviously did know. They were based in Birkenhead.
I was an assistant chief investigation officer between 1990 and 1997. I ran the heroin branch primarily based in Customs House in London. This involved the management of approximately seven teams incorporating in excess of 100 people. During this time, one of the people who worked for me was Paul Cook. He was initially based in London, where the Haase and Bennett investigation began. Cook then moved to Manchester and a decision was taken that, as case officer, he would retain the case there. Cook would coordinate a team of approximately five people and he would probably report to John Furnell.
I myself would have had a working knowledge of the case in general terms, as opposed to each and every nuance of the case.
During an investigation, if Customs and Excise know that the targets are in possession of a large amount of heroin, they are duty bound to swoop and take it off the streets. Obviously, there is a risk that other parts of the operation, particularly undercover surveillance, may be compromised, but it is more or less policy to stop gear reaching the marketplace if they can. And that is exactly the call they had to make in December 1992 when, six months into the investigation, officers discovered that a large importation had just gone off and Bulent Onay was sitting on top of nearly 40 kilos of gear. The investigation against Onay was called Operation Salina.
The wider probe into the Turks and Haase was officially a joint one between Customs and Excise and police officers of the regional crime squads. These newly formed syndicates had been set up by Home Secretary Michael Howard to specifically target big drug dealers, bringing together resources from different agencies. When he established the five syndicate groups attached to various regional crime squads in the autumn of 1992, the directives for their operations were directly in line with the government’s tough war-on-drugs approach. Howard said, ‘These syndicates would develop operations against persons suspected of being involved in criminal activities with an objective of securing evidence to effecting their arrests.’ Howard wanted to see a robust, proactive law-enforcement body, with better collaboration with Customs and Excise. The investigators looking at Haase and the Turks’ heroin gang consisted of officers from syndicate no. 3 and Customs and Excise. Syndicate no. 3 was attached to the South East Regional Crime Squad (SERCS), its headquarters based at Dulwich in south London. Customs and Excise offered up officers from its Lima 3 team at Customs House near Tower Bridge in London and from the National Investigation Service at a northern base at Aldyne House in Manchester.
Phil Connelly said, ‘I think somebody at some stage decided that it was better to run it as a joint operation because at the beginning it was being done from London. We had a national responsibility.’
Five years later, more than 40 detectives from the SERCS team were investigated following allegations of criminal offences and serious breaches of police regulations. The officers are alleged to have stolen heroin, cannabis and money during raids, lost evidence causing the collapse of a big drugs trial, unlawfully used confidential police information, threatened witnesses and planted and falsified evidence. One of the allegations was related to Bulent Onay’s case. A detective-sergeant was accused of stealing between 3.5 and 4 kilos of heroin from the 40-kilo parcel during Onay’s arrest. This officer was later dismissed from the force on a number of disciplinary offences, though records do not show whether he was found guilty of this offence. Several SERCS officers were convicted and jailed for corruption, while the rest were cleared.
But in 1992 the operation was still running smoothly. At first, officers found it technically ‘very difficult’ to tap into the gang’s analogue mobile phones. Phil Connelly said, ‘There was phone surveillance. It cost a fortune to get it up and running.’ Officers were initially using a scanner but they asked government scientists at a research facility at Sandwich in Hertfordshire to develop a system. They came up with the answer quickly. Officers were also specially trained to speak Turkish so the most could be made of the new gadgetry.
PHIL CONNELLY: If it was in Turkish, you used an interpreter. But we actually sent officers to Turkey to learn Turkish, where they went for months living with a Turkish family. They call it immersion. So they live with a Turkish family where they don’t speak English all the time. The Haase case was a big case. I can’t think of one like it before it. Before, it had been Turks working with Turks because Turks don’t like working with Brits usually. Turks like keeping with their own. They’re a nightmare to get into because they are close-knit. The ones involved in organised crime tend to stay at home all day sleeping and about midnight they’ll go out and go to a gambling club till about four in the morning. You can imagine what that’s like. First of all, the hours you’ve got to work. Secondly, the fact that you can’t get anybody inside; you can’t get an undercover officer in because the Turks will know if there’s a strange fella around.
We got around that by being on the outside of it and looking at where they’re going in the meantime. I think it was one of the best jobs we ever did because it was difficult; it was a very big operation. There were people moving an enormous amount of heroin. Ergun and Kaya were bringing in hundreds of kilos when everybody else was bringing in twos or tens.
Haase and Bennett seemed to be fairly uninfluential people. Bennett was no Al Capone or anything like that. But they were very bright. I met Bennett and you know when you’re talking to somebody [bright]; you know when you’re talking to an idiot or when you’re talking to somebody who’s sharp. You don’t just have to speak with an Oxford accent to be very sharp. They were good. They were very surveillance conscious. They’ve got a picture. Really it was just the size of the operation that made them stand out.
I don’t think that it came to mind that we were never going to nail them. It’s just that you’re never sure. Even when you do the job, you’re usually not 100 per cent sure the heroin’s there. On jobs before that, we’ve stopped Turks at Euston station and thought they were carrying heroin down from Liverpool to London, but it wasn’t heroin at all, it was money.
Official documents give an insight into just how detailed the surveillance was on the gang and just how much Customs and Excise knew. Customs had learned a staggering amount about them. It was as though every member of the gang were keeping a diary of their day-to-day lives – or at least Customs were. The dates and times on the surveillance logs are mind-boggling. A few months after Haase and Kaya hooked up, Customs and Excise were on to them.
CHRONOLOGY
26/06/92: 1st meeting observed by Customs. The gang were talking about a load of heroin that had just come in. Manuk Ocecki was observed at his house with Kaya and Onay.
04/07/92: Onay starts to take the profits from this importation back to Turkey.
At 1243 Onay was seen taking a lightweight suitcase into [an address in north London]. Joey the Turk and Manuk Ocecki made various movements in and around [the house] and at 1608 Onay, carrying a heavy suitcase, and Joey and Manuk left the house.
At 1723 Onay was observed at Heathrow airport talking to an unidentified male of Mediterranean appearance. This man showed Onay a white carrier bag. Both men board a Turkish Airlines flight at departure gate no. 11. Onay’s suitcase was examined and amongst the items of clothing were two large packages. Both packages were examined and found to contain sterling but the amount could not be confirmed.
06/07/92: 1146 Onay left flight no. TK979 and carrying a white plastic bag went through immigration, where he talked to the immigration officer briefly. He went to the baggage carousel and spoke to a Middle Eastern male. Both men walked over to the carousel. Onay used a payphone within the baggage arrivals area. When Onay emerged from the channels, he was pushing a trolley with a rigid brown suitcase on it. At one point, he stopped and rummaged around inside the case. Onay left on the underground with the suitcase.
08/07/92: Manuk Ocecki also takes money to Turkey – was also observed carrying approximately £100,000 to Istanbul on another trip.
20/07/92: Kaya flew to Milan from Heathrow (possibly to arrange a drug deal with the Italian Mafia).
14/08/92: The money keeps on flowing back to east – Onay checked in for a flight to Istanbul with one piece of luggage, a dark soft-sided suitcase. The suitcase was examined and found to contain two tape-wrapped packages amongst items of personal clothing. One of the packages was examined and found to contain bundles of used sterling notes.
08/09/92: Onay was picked up at Heathrow airport by an unidentified female and they left in a [Vauxhall] car.
Druglord Page 13
