A new, trendy profession echoed the views of the old coppers. In the lingo of the sociologists, crime in the 1970s was still largely ‘relational’: based on family ties and close-knit communities. The average villain was still spurred on by traditional ‘motivators’, such as fiddling the system and earning a bit on the side. Dockers robbed the ships and commercial burglars plundered the warehouses. It had been going on for centuries, and the fact that it had been growing rapidly since the war was just a blip.
But one new recruit into the new Merseyside force had already seen the writing on the wall. Crime was changing rapidly. The inner-city slum dwellers had been shipped out of their prefabs and Corrie-style terraces and starburst into a constellation of new towns that circled the Second Port of Empire like a fortress. High-rises dominated the skyline around the newly erected estates in places like Speke, Kirkby and Cantril Farm. In Croxteth and Norris Green, acres of factory-built units formed a new no-man’s-land between the suburbs and the countryside. A minority of newcomers had migrated their crime with them but applied it to new opportunities, the most obvious one being the fresh network of motorways that connected them to a whole new market of victims and criminals in other cities. Rather than looking inward at crowded central areas, they were looking outward to counties such as Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria, which offered easier pickings. The IRA had blown up the M62, killing 12, in the same year Merseyside Police had formed. The thinking was, ‘If the terrorists can exploit the new system, so can we.’
The new generation of gangsters no longer looked at the port as something that would sustain a subsistence living; the eight miles of quayside were now seen as a gateway to the world and all its vices. The young police recruit intuitively understood how ‘opportunities of transport’, as the police would later describe the process, were revolutionising crime. He noticed that the young Scousers were effective at migrating crime to wherever they went in the country: for example, to Torquay, Bournemouth and Eastbourne, where they took up summer jobs, or to Glasgow, where heroin flowed through links established by religion and football. But the police force, still run along military lines, was static and slow to catch up. The senior and middling ranks were filled with ex-army types, veterans from the Second World War, Korea and Malaysia. Every morning the young recruit had to line up on a parade ground. The shine on his boots was checked for reflections. His whistle was tested to make sure that it still worked.
But the constable wasn’t put off. Quietly, behind the scenes, he was determined to make changes. Later, he would become known as the Analyst: partly because of his systematic way of approaching crime and partly because he loved to read law books.
Thirty years later, he would go on to be Merseyside Police’s number-one asset in the fight against the Cartel and Britain’s top spy in the War on Drugs.
CHAPTER 3
THE RAT
1978
MUCH OF THE old-school gangland missed out on the emerging drugs scene because they looked down on it. Most of them were armed robbers who valued their status in the old underworld hierarchy. According to Paul Burly, the self-styled elite were known as the ‘dream-doers’, because ‘other men could only dream about how they lived and never had the bottle to take the risks themselves’.
He continued, ‘They were the men of business who had never held a gun to anyone or worn a ski mask for anything other than its true purpose. They were men who knew what was going on because they were alert and kept their fingers on the pulse of things, especially things which buzzed around the city, like bees do in a hive of honey.
‘This is not about the plastic gangsters who frequently got caught but the more subtle ones who managed to stay one step ahead of those elite cops who find detective work so hard that they have to rely on words from the right places.’
He added, ‘In those days, drugs were mainly frowned upon by those who flouted the law by hijacking wagons or robbing banks and post office stations – the dream-doers. Those dream-doers frowned on the creeping introduction of drugs, which were being sold by the more affluent yobs, even though they were down the hierarchy. The street yobs who sold drugs regularly rubbed shoulders with the dream-doers as they flashed their hard-earned but highly illegal bundles of money. Those thieves, who so often boasted that they did what lots only dreamed of, were entrenched villains. They would do almost anything to make money but somewhat frowned on the emerging drugs scene.’
Fred did not share the dream-doers’ qualms. As far as he was concerned, if other villains didn’t want to sell drugs, it just left more for him to make money off. Fewer than five years after starting in the drugs business, Fred the Rat was a millionaire several times over. He’d come a long way. A decade earlier, in the late ’60s, he had been little more than an overweight hustler who lived day to day on the stolen goods that he could buy and sell. Before that, he’d been a penniless petty thief who, according to those who knew him, went to church in order to take money off the donation plate.
But in the late ’60s he’d struck lucky. A Jewish businessman he knew gave him a loan to start up a used-car lot. From the off, Fred had no intention of flogging low-margin bangers to the working families who lived on the local estate. He had a knack for identifying gaps in the market. He would target the only people he knew who had cash to burn: the gangsters, the serial armed robbers – the dream-doers.
The strategy paid off. Fred’s bangers started to move off the forecourt. He charged his criminal clientele over the odds for souped-up Jaguars and top-of-the-range Triumphs, and they lined up to take them off him. Fred had more success selling cars to the underworld than he did to members of the public.
Fred was hungry, but he knew that timing was everything in sales. Instead of pounding the tarmac on the forecourt, Fred went out into the nightclubs and made his pitches over the bar. He made his patter sound casual, as though he wasn’t trying to sell anything at all. The main reason it worked was that the punters were drunk and off-guard. The gangsters liked the approach. Soon, Fred was offloading overpriced saloons and junky sports cars to armed robbers. The deals were shaken on over a bottle of whisky that they were paying for in an after-hours drinking den in the early hours of the morning. By doing the rounds in the nightclubs, Fred made contacts in both drug circles and with the armed robbers. The armed robbers were at the top of the criminal tree. Others looked up to them because they took risks. But by the early 1970s, Fred also began to make friends with the small number of cannabis importers and sellers that hung around the fringes of the underworld.
Paul Burly said, ‘Fred was a somewhat slovenly car salesman and he mixed a lot with the affluent yobs, and he saw the tsunami of drugs approaching. He could see that in the future society would have more leisure time, and this displayed the need for something else besides alcohol to be introduced.’
Fred was a shrewd salesman. He knew exactly which gangsters he could rip off and which ones he had to be straight with. It was this cunning that would serve him well when he became a drug dealer.
According to Paul Burly, ‘He wasn’t a particularly successful car salesman, but he made enough to wriggle his way through the expensive club nights, which he had become accustomed to, due to the need to sell his cars to people. The kinds of punters he sold them to exchanged the cars regularly and paid good money to do so – they were the dream-doers.
‘Being the conniver Fred was, he could see those who made cash regularly, then he judged them on how they splashed their money about. They all liked to spend big, but some only spent cautiously, just buying drinks for their friends – not the hangers on – drawing the line at over-tipping and checking their bills instead of just paying them. He knew these ones had to be dealt with fairly or he would lose their custom.
‘But most of all he loved those who bought drinks for everyone and over tipped – they were the ones who he could sell the rips [bangers] to, and blag them whenever a breakdown would occur. When his cars packed up, Fred lent them a run-around but charged th
em for it.’
In the early ’70s, as he moved between the armed robbers and the drug dealers, Fred had an idea. They were worlds apart, but what if he could combine the two? Use the criminal nous of the dream-doers, and their cash and their back-up to monopolise the drugs market that his other contacts knew about. A wholesale takeover, if you like. There was only one problem – most of the dream-doers wanted nothing to do with the drugs scene.
Fred had a solution – if he couldn’t find a willing dream-doer to do his dirty work for him, he would find one by other means. Fred bided his time until he could find the right partners – ones that he could deceive into thinking that they were investing in nightclubs and businesses when they were really ploughing money into cannabis and heroin deals.
The triplets became known as ‘the Twins’ after one of them was electrocuted on a railway line when they were kids. The Twins moved and thought as one. They were always noticed and stood well out from the crowds. They soon became the biggest dream-doers of all. Fred liked them because they were drivers of big cars.
It wasn’t long before Fred latched onto them. Fred was convinced that he could manipulate the Twins in the short term by selling them overpriced cars. But he was also convinced that he could reel them unwittingly into a drug conspiracy. Crime author Peter Stockley has revealed the full story in his book The Rat They Called a Dog, parts of which have been reproduced here.
Paul Burly said, ‘Fred didn’t think the Twins were easy touches, nor did he tag them as shrewd. He thought that he could manipulate them, after he had dealt them a few deals with cars and noticed their weaknesses.
‘Like most gangsters, the Twins liked to think of themselves as shrewd, and he certainly buttered that part of their toast, which satisfied their egos.
‘Fred played them – he even refrained from trumping them a few times in order to put them more at ease in his company and make them feel superior to him. And it worked: the Twins began to feel that they had become his mentor and – most important of all – they began to trust him.’
The Twins made their living by robbing post offices. The police noted that they were both prolific and choosey – they only targeted high-value post offices. Fred was too overweight to even be their getaway driver, but now and again he provided them with fast cars, and most importantly he offered to ‘mind’ their cash once the heist had been carried out. He told the Twins that he could ‘hide’ it among his car-sales bookwork. The Twins jumped at the offer because their booty was becoming too noticeable to manage. By the mid ’70s, the Twins had a million pounds in cash, a sum worth several times that amount in today’s values.
According to Paul Burly, ‘Now they felt more at ease, as they had a fat puppet to mind their money . . . Fred felt on top of the world. He had judged them correctly and wormed his way into their trust. At the same time, the road to the drugs world was getting wider. Now, there was the next stage – he had to find a way to take control of that money, not just be its minder.’
CHAPTER 4
RECESSION
1980
WITHIN A FEW years, the embryonic Cartel benefited from an unexpected boost. In 1980, the economy of Liverpool, then Britain’s second-biggest port, collapsed as though struck by an industrial tsunami. For most, the consequences were devastating. For some, it was a gold rush.
Merseyside had been hit by a double whammy. First, there was an underlying structural economic problem. For the previous 25 years, physical trade into the port of Liverpool had been drying up. Economists blamed the malaise on three changes – shipping containerisation, air travel and Britain’s integration into the European Community. The port of Liverpool had been slow to invest in equipment to handle containers, compared to competitors such as Tilbury, Felixstowe, Rotterdam and Hamburg. Air freight took business away from ships. Experts also said that Liverpool was on the wrong side of the country to benefit from the increased trade with Europe that had been a boon to the North Sea and south coast ports. But the truth was much starker. The port’s decline could not be explained by these three reasons alone. The main problem was historical. Liverpool had been built for Empire and was now dying with Empire. By the 1970s, half of Liverpool’s dwindling volume of exports was still bound for Africa and Asia. Desperate shipping agents had failed to draw in new markets such as Europe, China and the US. As a consequence, Liverpool slipped to being the UK’s fifth-ranked port. Unemployment rates in the city’s waterfront districts shot up to 30 per cent. According to historian Nicholas White of Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool had become ‘ossified as a marooned imperial seaport in a post-colonial age’. Academic John MacKenzie described a similar process in Glasgow being down to ‘specialisation in imperial markets’.
The second blow was the wider recession that had hit the UK. A fifth of the country’s manufacturing base had suddenly been wiped out. To boost growth, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a near-suicidal course of extreme monetarist policies. The theories had been developed by a school of academics in Chicago who believed in free markets and the power of myths derived from a Wild West TV show. Enforced ‘structural reforms’, such as privatisation, deregulation and trade union dissembling, had only ever been tried in Third World dictatorships with the help of CIA and shadowy World Bank functionaries, known as Economic Hit-men. The experiment in Britain was the first to take place in a democracy.
In Liverpool, the policies were a resounding failure. Over the next six years, unemployment rocketed until, at its peak, one quarter of the population was out of work. Like economic refugees, an average of 12,000 people each year began to leave the city in search of jobs. Families would be split up across the north–south sociopolitical divide for generations to come. Young people abandoned their Youth Training Schemes for low-paid seasonal work on the south coast. To support their struggling families, redundant construction workers headed for weekday digs in London and far beyond.
Large areas of Liverpool’s landscape, parts of which later became a UNESCO World Heritage site, were literally reduced to smoking rubble by demolition works – 15 per cent of the land became vacant or derelict. From a busy population high of 700,000 in the 1960s, when the city rocked the world with the Beatles, Liverpool shrank to around 400,000 and the population continued falling. In the media, a once-proud powerhouse was being viewed as an embarrassing disaster zone. Scouse humour was about Liverpudlians being mocked by outsiders. The ‘pool of life’, as Carl Jung once described the city, became known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism’.
Today, if history repeated itself, the misfortune would no doubt be swarmed upon by the new elite of globalised disaster capitalists: the corporations and consultants that circle the planet, preying on victims of man-made and natural calamities, the catastrophe specialists that load up people with debt and profit from poverty and misery, ‘restructuring’ economies into sweat shops and social no-go areas. However, back in the pre-yuppified days of the early ’80s, the informal cartel of hedge funds, global corporations, think tanks and casino banks was in no position to administer economic shock therapy to a failing city.
But one emerging sector was looking on, surveying the ruined landscape with desire. Fortunately for them – and thanks to the foundations laid down by Fred, Poncho’s dad and their associates – they were also poised to take full advantage of the situation. That sector was organised crime.
Amid the abandoned nineteenth-century warehouses and armies of shuffling, under-confident youths, the criminal underworld immediately saw opportunities where others only saw deprivation and fear. Fred and his supporters had a somewhat warped vision: to rebuild a new economy in their own image. One that they would control. One that would make them very, very rich.
Now, at last, it was their turn. For once, it would be them, the uneducated outsiders, who would take all of the winnings: not the businessmen, or the establishment, or the elite. In effect, the Merseyside Crime Groups, as they became known to the police, thought th
ey could replace the legitimate economy that had just been taken away, filling the black hole with a brand-new system, albeit a black economy fuelled by graft and dirty cash. However, it was one that would generate jobs and wealth for anyone who wished to get involved. A loose alliance of gangsters, contraband smugglers, well-dressed football fans and armed robbers would attempt to remodel themselves as the first disaster capitalists: more right wing than Milton Friedman, more free market than Mrs Thatcher.
At the centre of their vision was an enduring and extremely profitable product: drugs. Still, it was a risky venture – no city in the UK had yet fully opened itself up to the international drugs markets. Never had a regional crime grouping gambled so much on a single venture. The rest of the country’s criminals were still largely interested in heists and protection rackets.
From the ashes of the recession-hit economy grew the Cartel: a global business that, ironically, would grow to rival any of the corporations that the new capitalism was throwing up, the extreme form of corporatocracy that was sweeping the world from Chile to London, from Buenos Aires to Java.
At a car park near London’s Heathrow airport, an acquaintance of Fred the Rat was waiting by a phone box. Thomas ‘Tacker’ Comerford was a middle-aged ex-docker with a pockmarked face so rough you could strike matches on it. In between phone calls, Comerford walked slowly back to his silver Ford Granada and smoked.
Comerford had got to know Fred through the nightclub scene, where he’d worked as a bouncer. He’d watched Fred grow rich. Fred had recruited Comerford into the Cartel. Comerford wore £70-a-throw Fila tennis tops that stretched over his beer gut, £100-a-pop Pringle jumpers draped Jimmy Tarbuck-style over his hulking shoulders, and tinted Carrera sunglasses.
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 2
