Now, if he had done a bung: eleven fucking years. Don’t you think he would have been pinched over it? Don’t you think there would have been an inquiry? The three drops – don’t you think that money could have been off the DTOA? Who have they given it to? They have given it to the solicitor and he’s gone down to pay it. There was no bung. They got a DTOA, yeah? Before they got released, they had to give money in. I know that because Ben told me that.
He could have paid someone off but he isn’t going to tell me. No business of mine; he isn’t going to tell me.
As I see it, he’s gone down and they’ve gone, ‘You’re going to have to pay x amount of . . .’ Got to be the brief, the bird, whatever.
Nick me all day long because I haven’t done fuck all. If I did a bung, I wouldn’t tell them. They aren’t going to get fuck all out of me. This situation never went through me. It could have gone through someone else. They aren’t going to entrust me with shit like that. It jeopardises their situation.
Go after the bung but it’s been given to the Cussies. After ’96, they threw bodies in. They are legitimately supergrasses. His bird must have been the only one who sent money anywhere. What kind of a man would do that?
KEN DARCY: No-Neck knows everything. He’s prepared to admit to the gun plants even though it’s a conspiracy to pervert because that isn’t such a big thing. And everyone was a winner – both Haase and the Customs. And at the end of the day it makes him look good, because he hasn’t dobbed anyone in. But he won’t put his hand up to the bribes because that is fucking heavy. It goes very deep and you don’t know who you’re messing with. He knows that’s a very big charge if the busies ever catch up with him – messing with the powers that be. Why would he want that? He’s got a wife, kids, a nice house, a business, wages coming in. He’s set up for life. If it comes out, it will be the end of that.
18
BAKERMAN BACKGROUNDER
Simon Marc Bakerman was born on 8 October 1962 at the privately run Lourdes hospital in Sefton Park, Liverpool. This was in Liverpool south’s sub-district of Edge Hill – the constituency in which the young Michael Howard would unsuccessfully launch his national political career four years later. In 1966 and 1970, Howard stood as Conservative candidate in the area and lost – a bad omen for the relationship he would have to this day with his young cousin Simon who was born there.
Howard and Simon Bakerman are related and are most probably second cousins. The exact relationship is unclear because some records are not available and some accounts of the link do not go into detail. But the most probable explanation is that they are related through their great-grandparents, the Landys. The Landys’ daughter Ada Landy is the mother of Howard’s mum, Hilda Kershion. Ada’s brother, Mr Landy, is father to Simon’s mother, Freda Gloria Bakerman, née Landy. Therefore, Freda and Hilda are first cousins, making their sons Simon Bakerman and Michael Howard second cousins.
Freda runs a ladies’ clothes boutique called Landys, just like Hilda did in Llanelli, in the upmarket district of Woolton – the neighbourhood where Paul Bennett once had his drug-dealing HQ. Simon’s father is Warner Bakerman, a 39-year-old chartered accountant at the time of his son’s birth, now retired.
Simon enjoyed a middle-class upbringing in the leafy district of Aigbuth in Liverpool. His family moved from Fawley Road in swish Calderstones to a newly built bungalow in a solidly suburban cul-de-sac tucked behind a synagogue. Simon was brought up amongst the thriving but conservative Jewish community which tended to live quietly in this tidy corner of the city. He probably attended the local Jewish secondary school, the well-respected King David school in the Childwall district, coincidentally the school attended by the current Lord Chancellor Lord Goldsmith.
The Bakerman family often visited Michael Howard’s family. Bakerman gives a fascinating insight into Howard’s background.
SIMON BAKERMAN: They [Michael Howard and his family] haven’t always got on. I always remembered when he got married, all the family saying what a terrible thing it was, him marrying a non-Semite. ‘Poor Michael. Terrible. Terrible,’ they said. In a Jewish environment, they were very displeased he had married a non-Jew. Suddenly Michael’s home secretary, though, and it’s ‘Nice guy, Michael.’ The way of Jewish thinking, once he became a politician, was that he was someone again.
Michael is a member of a liberal synagogue. He couldn’t be a member of a conservative one. Liberal Jews – because he has married out, hasn’t he?
He has been dedicated to the [political] cause. He went to a good school. When my mother took him to the doctor’s when he was a child, the doctor used to call him ‘Mr Prime Minister’. Just the way he was, very advanced for his years, precocious. Intellectually precocious. But cold and distant. Whereas the other members of his family are very warm hearted.
At family gatherings, we often speak of how Michael used to shrink his jeans so that he could look like Elvis. He was big into the Rolling Stones, too – not that you would think it to look at him now with his suits and his shirts and ties. Mind you, he was always into politics, even when he was wearing all that gear.
Me and my sister often visited them at their home in Llanelli as children and I remember how well ordered the place was. We used to play in the big garden and often saw Michael roaring about the country lanes in his blue Lotus. He always had a smile and a wave for us as he drew up. His parents were obviously very proud of him. You could tell he was on the up and up. I used to visit regularly.
I was only about six at the time when I first met him. I was playing in the garden when I saw this big flash blue Lotus roaring up the driveway. It was Michael and he looked every inch the country squire even then. I think he was training to be a lawyer at the time, but even then his main interest was politics.
I looked after his mother for a few years. I used to take her food twice a week when I lived in London. When she was in hospital, he would ring her but I never bumped into him visiting her. I remember he was always on the move. Busy, busy, busy.
He started off as minister of Environment. Then he progressed through the Thatcher years. He wasn’t popular over the poll tax.
While Howard had a deeply conservative personality, Bakerman had a rebellious nature. Though polite, bright and well spoken, he was drawn to lads from the wrong side of the tracks. Where most of his contemporaries in the friendly, close-knit young Jewish community of the 1980s opted for yuppiedom, he opted for a bit of scallydom. But he didn’t fit into either camp completely and regarded himself as an outsider. He was also a bit of an eccentric. He spoke with a deep voice, and though his conversation was interesting, he was often regarded as slightly odd because of his mannerisms. The underworld, though accepting, viewed his education and middle-class background with curiosity.
A family friend said, ‘Simon is a well-educated, well-spoken gentleman, but he was always something of a rebel and was prone to fall into bad company.’
Simon had his first brush with the law when he was 18. He was arrested on several occasions for being drunk and disorderly. Then in 1983 he was charged with deception and received a £50 fine. That was the year that Michael Howard entered parliament as member for Folkestone and Hythe. The thrusting Howard went on to become a junior minister in 1985 – the year after Simon Bakerman was convicted of deception for putting a false signature on a consignment of goods.
SIMON BAKERMAN: When I was seventeen/eighteen, I was gambling madly and the debt accumulated until it was a quarter of a million pounds. My family paid it back. It was my inheritance that was coming to me. I was a playboy, a man about town. That’s how I got to know all the gangsters. I was a Champagne Charlie.
Bakerman’s family had used some of his inheritance to pay off the bookies. They refused to give him more in case he frittered it away. Simon tried to con money out of them by faking his own kidnapping. He roped in one of the city’s biggest gangsters to make bogus kidnap calls to his father. In January 1985, this article appeared in the Liverpool Echo.
/> SON TRIED TO CON WEALTHY PARENTS
A greedy son spun a web of lies to con his wealthy Liverpool parents out of money, a court heard yesterday.
Simon Bakerman (22) claimed he owed £2,700 for a business deal that had gone wrong.
And to back his story up, his parents received threatening phone calls and were told their son would come to harm if they did not pay up.
Bakerman inflicted injuries on himself, slashing his arms and legs with a razor. He also wore a plaster cast on one arm, claiming it had been broken by his disgruntled ex-associates.
His worried parents even wrote him an open cheque to pay off his ‘debtors’.
But Bakerman was finally unmasked when, in a phone call to his mother, Freda, he said he was being held in a warehouse and tortured. Mrs Bakerman heard the sounds of a child in the background and accused him of lying.
When he was finally arrested by police, Bakerman, of Fawley Road, Calderstones, made a full confession, saying the whole story was a fiction.
Yesterday at Liverpool Crown Court, Bakerman pleaded guilty to attempting to obtain money by deception from his parents.
Accountant Mr Warner Bakerman said he had met his son while in custody and they were reconciled. He said, ‘I think that the episode of the incarceration has left an indelible print on his mind.’
Mr Bakerman said his son had several times tried to start business opportunities, ‘which I have had to finance and am still financing’.
Bakerman was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, forty-four days of which have already been served in custody, and the rest suspended.
SIMON BAKERMAN: I was blowing money left, right and centre. I spent half a million quid eventually. Had money. Was working. Money in the bank. Money left to me. At 18, casinos, out, Charlie. Had a few girlfriends at the time.
I’d get up at ten in the morning, sell clothes stock for a few hundred quid, which was a lot of money then. Be in the pub at twelve o’clock with fellas who are all millionaires now. Go gambling then end up in the clubs. Just a circle. Get up and do the same thing again. People knew me.
I only wanted eighteen hundred pound off my family, but because my family said I was spending it too quickly, they said no. They were right, in a way. It wasn’t a staged kidnapping. It was money I wasn’t allowed to have which was mine and which I wanted a lot earlier. But it backfired on me.
In the family, we had people who were connected to the police. They thought: we’ll teach him a lesson. They bloody locked me up for four weeks to teach me a lesson. They told me mum and dad not to withdraw the charges and left me hanging in limbo on a charge. They put me in Risley.
To escape the bad influence of Liverpool, Simon then travelled to Israel. He went to work on a kibbutz to get his head together, encouraged by his family. Almost as soon as he arrived, he joined the Israeli Army and was involved in action on the Golan Heights and Lebanon. He said, ‘I was a gunner in a tank and had some very hairy moments. There were times I thought I would die.’ He got an Israeli passport in 1987, adopting Israeli citizenship.
After an 18-month stint with the Army, he went to work in Tel Aviv, mainly in finance. Returning to London in 1991, he used his contacts to set himself up in business as a financial wheeler-dealer. He became a millionaire, drove a Bentley and looked after Michael Howard’s mum at weekends. But he started snorting cocaine after seeing someone using it in his office. His compulsive personality ensured that his habit got out of control and he let business slip.
SIMON BAKERMAN: I blew a million pounds in two years. I would think nothing of spending £2,000 a week snorting coke and splashing out £5,000 on call girls. I funded it by arranging credit with banks for retailers on a commission basis. I was completely off my face most of the time. If it wasn’t drugs, it was booze – mainly champagne. I was keeping four women on the go; my love life was a tangled mess. I was constantly struggling to make sense of my world. Eventually it all got too much for me and I lost everything, and when I arrived back in Liverpool, I didn’t even have a penny to my name.
Gripped in a downward spiral of drink and drugs, Bakerman returned home and drifted back into his criminal lifestyle to fund his habit. But he was always on the lookout for the chance to make a quick buck.
THE BUSINESSMAN: When the Soviet Union opened up, Simon went to Moscow to try and sell jewellery over there. He went with some well-known Liverpool fellas, some of whom had connections with the underworld. One of them was a very well-respected, very tough man nicknamed The Pugilist. Very old-school. He ruled Liverpool at the time. But these fellas were mostly just like lads who go the match and graft when they’re abroad and whatever. They flew all round the world doing deals. They were real Scouse go-getters, very sharp – fences, touts, market-trader types. That kind of mindset. They were selling British produce to the Russians just after the Berlin Wall came down.
It was very poor over there and the Ruskies just wanted anything that was cheap. There was old women outside the hotel where Simon was staying selling just one potato or an old cardie. That’s how skint they were. Simon and the lads knew it was going to be hard graft to make a profit over there. But they stayed the course. They had samples of clothes, all kinds of stuff, cheap jewellery, even ice cream.
Simon was brought in because he was very intelligent. He also had contacts in the clothes trade and he was Jewish, which was good at breaking the ice over there because there was a very big, very lively Jewish community. For instance, there was an Armenian Jew who they did business with over there.
They met fellas in the Russian Mafia who put them in touch with other businessmen. Funnily enough, they found out that ice cream sold very well over there. They had taken samples on spec. You wouldn’t think it would, being so cold, but the Russians loved it. Eventually, an ice-cream manufacturer in Liverpool started sending three container-loads of ice cream over there every week. He had to double his workforce to keep up with the orders.
A very close associate of Simon’s, who was nicknamed Hyman Roth because he thought he was a bit of a gangster like in Godfather II, then asked the ice-cream guy to store two container-loads of jaffa oranges from Spain in his yard. By then, Simon and Hyman Roth had been importing cheap stuff from Spain to sell to Russia. They had returned from Russia to the UK but were now busy exporting stuff back there to make money. They had bought a load of oranges to go to Russia but they said the Russians didn’t want them. So Simon’s friend Hyman was then going around asking the other fellas who’d been on the Russian trip if they wanted to buy them for sale in the UK. But Hyman Roth wanted too much money. So the other fellas was a bit thingy about it. But he kept trying to get someone to go down to the yard and have a look at these fucking oranges. Then Hyman asked one of the fellas, The Pugilist, whether he wanted to go and have a look at oranges. The fella said to him, ‘Why would I want to do that? They’re jaffas, aren’t they? They all look the fucking same. I’m not interested.’
That’s what got him thinking that Hyman Roth was trying to set this fella up [The Pugilist]. I knew that Hyman Roth had been investing in cannabis deals with a friend of mine cos he was skint. Basically there was a load of gear inside this container full of oranges and Hyman wanted some fucking joey to go up and open up the containers to see if the Customs would pounce. He wanted someone to test the water – a very old trick in the drugs game. Hyman was a cunning fella.
As it was, that’s what happened. The Customs were on it and in the end Simon’s dad got nicked. Simon’s dad was called Warner. He was innocent but he was their accountant. One day, he went down to the yard to look at the produce. Customs thought it was his and he got arrested. But he got let off because he had nothing to do with it. Wrong place, wrong time. At one point, Simon was going to say the gear was his just so that his dad wouldn’t be implicated. But Warner was released, so in the end Simon didn’t have to put himself on offer.
Simon was always bringing trouble to his dad’s doorstep. Just before the cannabis thing, Simon had
borrowed £5,000 off The Pugilist. Simon was setting up a video shop in Liverpool but he never paid it back. So every morning, no matter what time The Pugilist got up – whether it was 3 a.m., 4 or 5 – he’d go to the Bakermans’ house. He’d ring on the bell, not knock on the door, so he wouldn’t wake the neighbours, and say, ‘I want my fucking money.’ Warner didn’t have the money so The Pugilist kept going back to harass him until he came up with the money. After about six weeks of doing this, Warner decided to have a word with a mutual friend who knew The Pugilist as well, with a view to getting him to mediate. This mutual friend lived in Spain, so Warner phoned him and explained the problem. After making enquiries, the mutual friend decided that there was no alternative but to pay The Pugilist, and as a favour to both of them this man in Spain settled the debt. He gave The Pugilist the £5,000 and he got off Warner’s case.
The Sunday Mirror reported Warner Bakerman’s unfortunate brush with the law under the headline:
RELATIVE OF HOWARD GETS OFF DRUG RAP
Today, we can reveal that Bakerman’s father, Warner, was arrested in a drugs bust in Liverpool but charges were dropped.
Accountant Warner, 62, was held after the discovery of a consignment of cannabis in a lorry-load of oranges. A local underworld figure said, ‘He had heart problems and the next thing was let go – but he soon seemed fine.’ A Customs spokesman confirmed, ‘The charges were dropped before it reached the committal stage.’
SIMON BAKERMAN: That was mine. It was me who ordered everything. He [Warner] had nothing to do with it. I was away at the time; he went down for me. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And even I was innocent of it all.
Bakerman was soon mixed up in the underworld drugs scene in Liverpool and counted some of the city’s biggest dealers as his friends, including heroin baron Tony Murray – once shot by Haase’s henchman – and many who had close ties with John Haase. Astonishingly, at the same time Bakerman was working closely with some of these godfathers, they were supplying guns for Haase’s phoney plants. Bakerman was a junior partner in crime with a big gangster who helped supply 80 shotguns for the second plant in February 1994. Bakerman also knew members of a notorious gangster family on Haase’s Southend patch. Ironically, this family had also supplied guns to Haase.
Druglord Page 26
