The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang

by Graham Johnson

  Comerford had taken up the baton from Fred but was now outrunning him. He was doing bigger heroin deals, pushing the boundaries of the Cartel a little bit further.

  A daring former safe-blower, Comerford understood the need to take risks. While carrying out heists, he had pioneered the use of precision planning and new technology to steal a competitive advantage on his victims and rivals. He was the first bank-robber to use oxyacetylene burners to tunnel into an underground vault. The booty from robberies was then put up as capital to invest in drug smuggling.

  Business models that he had developed as a professional bank-robber were imported into the drugs business. A ready supply of money was always on hand to fund the rapid expansion of the Cartel. A docker turned greengrocer known as ‘the Banker’ took on the role of informal financier. His job was to loan out vast amounts of cash, in different currencies, to underwrite drug transactions in the UK and on the continent. Ten years later, the Banker would be described by Interpol as Europe’s biggest narcotics profiteer and its most successful money launderer.

  In addition, Comerford found new methods of smuggling that complemented the Cartel’s traditional expertise in running drugs overland and through ports. So far, it had enjoyed excellent contacts within the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and through family members and corrupt officials. But now heroin and cocaine were being muled in through Heathrow airport in multiples of half kilos. Unlike the good burghers of Liverpool, the drug runners understood that the port’s prominence was fading. Air travel and the Common Market were the future.

  The route quickly became profitable: so much so that on many occasions, the gang had more heroin than mannitol, the cheap baby laxative that was used to cut the powder prior to distribution. Couriers were often flown to Amsterdam first class to clear chemist-shops’ shelves of mannitol, which was more freely available in Holland than it was in the UK. Comerford and his gang began to spend more time in the Dutch capital, which became known as ‘the Flat Place’. For the first time, the Dutch courts found that British criminals were appearing regularly before them.

  Just like on a robbery, Comerford handpicked his team on the Heathrow connection – buyers, mules, runners and hard men to secure the merchandise once it had ‘got home’. Ostensibly, they lived in council houses on windswept estates and drove bangers to mundane jobs or to the dole office to sign on. But behind the scenes they cruised the world on the QE2, used posh hotel suites as their offices and partied with some of the biggest bands of the time. Ironically, Comerford refused Mrs Thatcher’s offer to buy the council house that he lived in. The portly smuggler and his wife still pretended to reside in a two-up, two-down terrace while really living in a six-bedroom mansion on a millionaire’s row in an upmarket district. His neighbours included Liverpool football stars and the founder of the Army and Navy Stores.

  But for all his nous, Comerford was a bigmouth. Several members of the Cartel suspected that he was an informant. Drug dealing had brought with it a new phenomenon – large numbers of police snouts who were prepared to trade information with the authorities in return for privileges. This led to heightened levels of paranoia. The ancient codes of silence that had bonded old-school villains together were rapidly disappearing in this harsher world. But one source, a rich businessman who’d grown up with several Cartel bosses, wasn’t so sure. The businessman said, ‘Some people were saying: “Tacker’s a grass.”

  ‘I said: “Well, if he’s a grass, he must have grassed himself up, because he’s spent half of his life in prison.”’

  Comerford may not have been an informant, but his loose lips and extravagant lifestyle had brought him to the attention of Customs and Excise investigators. A secret operation had been launched to put the flamboyant street criminal under surveillance. Now officers were plotted up yards from his parked Granada near Heathrow, observing him making calls from a phone box in a car park. Later, they photographed him meeting a man who had been followed by a second team of Customs officers from the airport’s arrival lounge. It was the rendezvous they had been waiting for. Comerford and his mule were then followed back to Liverpool.

  In a rare moment of insight, the senior Customs and Excise officers were able to reflect on the bigger picture, to put what they were seeing into context. Instead of concentrating on the specific deals, Customs suspected Comerford was part of a much larger operation, one so far not seen on these shores. One shrewd investigator correctly identified Comerford as being part of Britain’s first and only drugs cartel, as defined by them.

  In a series of reports, the officers described the gang as a small but tight-knit group of middle-aged men from a run-down regional city who specialised in importing heroin and cannabis resin. The members of the cartel, they said, were a mixture of ex-dockers, corrupt hauliers and career armed robbers, and if they weren’t stopped now, they had the potential to grow into something much more sinister and hard to control.

  CHAPTER 5

  DISASTER CAPITALISM

  1981

  IN THE SUMMER of 1981, the Cartel benefited from yet another unforeseen boost: riots erupted in the Toxteth neighbourhood, close to the Liverpool docks. Many within the predominantly black area called the nine-day disturbance an ‘uprising’. For the first time in the UK, outside Northern Ireland, tear gas was used by police against civilians.

  For the Cartel, there were several advantages. Since the mid ’70s, many black youths had become politicised, partly influenced by the Black Power movement in the States and partly as reaction to the rise of the far right in England. The riots galvanised an anti-establishment view of mainstream white society, an attitude that had been simmering covertly for years. But without a political outlet, the radicalism lost impetus. Much of the anger was channelled into different areas. Villains started to justify their crimes by saying that they were part of an attack on the economy that deliberately excluded them.

  In the same year, the Tate & Lyle sugar works, previously a big player in the city’s manufacturing economy, shut down. Many black working-class people, with no links to the criminal world, began to think radically. If the system couldn’t provide them with a job, then the underworld economy would. Needs must.

  Poncho said, ‘Up until the Toxteth riots, my family had options. My dad was both a tradesman and a cannabis dealer. The dealing was very much a sideline: a little bit on the side to give my dad a head start. We could have gone either way. But after the riots it was like, “There’s no choice – we can only go one way.” Even straight-going families started to think like that. The battle lines had been drawn.’

  Meanwhile, the Analyst was a young beat copper patrolling south Liverpool. Allerton was a leafy suburb made up of pre-war semi-detached houses. The neighbouring district of Woolton was longer established. One evening the Analyst stopped to talk to a group of rowdy teenagers outside a shop. The area was middle class and there was little violence or thuggery: just high jinks and scallies sporting their latest pair of expensive trainers. Some of the kids were acting up and showing off as usual. It was the Analyst’s job to calm them down and get to know them, to build up a picture of the local area, to identify any future troublemakers and pick up some local intel. But one lad in particular stepped into the background and did nothing. He wouldn’t engage the Analyst in any conversation. His name was Colin Smith. Smith wasn’t a tough guy – he’d lost several fights in school. But he was very streetwise. He would later become known as ‘King Cocaine’.

  On his beat, the Analyst tried making some contacts on the street. Later, as he moved up the ladder, he tried to turn some of these sources into informants. This grassroots experience would become invaluable. The registered informant would, in the future, become the police’s single most effective weapon against the Cartel, at least for a period. Those officers who were good at handling covert sources, as well as those who, crucially, were smart enough to know what intelligence was good, what was bad and when they were being manipulated, went on to become the successful ones.
The Analyst made it his business to become an expert at handling intelligence.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, Paul Burly and his criminal associates were becoming aware that more informants were being groomed. In the late 1970s, Paul Burly was jailed for violence and firearm offences. For the first time, he became aware that many criminals were being groomed to become Cartel lieutenants.

  Paul Burly said, ‘This could mean many things: for example, people who would hire yo-yos in order to give one to the police to allow more laden-down carriers to pass by with what they had.’ Otherwise known as ‘plants’, yo-yos were drug mules who were deliberately sacrificed to the police and Customs by their controllers to distract them from other mules who were usually carrying the bigger consignments on the same flight or ship or who were at the same port.

  Paul added, ‘Or there were those who would willingly give a kid a gun and prompt them to use it in such a way that it would benefit the outfit they worked for, disregarding the danger they would be putting the youngster into by getting the kid lifed-up or even killed.’

  The Cartel also made job offers to members of rival drug gangs, enticing criminals to switch sides in return for cash rewards. In some cases, the Cartel paid the gang members for information that would help the Cartel kill their rivals. Or sometimes they would pay for commercially sensitive information, such as the names of suppliers and buyers, so that they destroy their rivals in an economic way by undercutting prices or limiting supplies.

  Paul Burly said, ‘A person would turn against his lifelong peers for the rewards offered by the now rich Cartel – greed to kill the seed, or at least its DNA!’

  Burly said, ‘I met one such candidate for that rat’s lifestyle in jail. On the outside he had been a no-mark pimp, but now he was acting like he had been reborn, as if he knew he was heading for a better and more prosperous life with the heavy tag of “murderer” to back up any shout he was to make. His existence behind bars was so cushy and full of favours that we – his fellow inmates – felt he was being looked after by people on the outside, such as the fast-growing Cartel. To test this theory, we tried to discredit him with a plant of his own stuff . . . only to find out that we could not, because although the screws had been advised of the plant, they did nothing about it! Then we watched later as he glided his way with ease through the remainder of his ever-so-short life sentence and was released.

  ‘Upon his release, that man was allowed to work on, and run, nightclub doors with impunity even though the conditions of his licence forbade it. His trial defence of “stress-related syndromes” just did not add up. After all, what could be more stress-related than working on nightclub doors and dealing with troublemaking drunks? Whatever door he ran always had the same distributor coming and going, but they never spoke. Everyone thought it uncanny that these two, who were known associates through previous work, never spoke and yet they passed by one another every day.

  ‘Then, as if that were not most unusual and bad enough, he was allowed to open a security firm, which became engulfed in stories of protectionism. Panorama even did a documentary about it, but the police took no action to stop his heavy-handed practices.’ Once again, Burly was convinced that the Cartel was using their influence to get the police to turn a blind eye.

  During the years before drugs and the Cartel, the likes of Tacker Comerford used to set up yo-yos to drive stolen wagons that would be ambushed by the police while the stolen wagon they really wanted a safe passage for sailed past and on to a successful journey. Burly had seen all this and knew from talking to the yo-yos who had been in prison with him that the Cartel was adopting those very policies. He had his suspicions that Fred the Rat was the one feeding information to the police in exchange for the freedom to carry on his operations. The Twins had been arrested with a third accomplice while robbing a main sorting office. The police had been tipped off and armed officers were lying in wait when the gang stormed into the mailroom to steal tens of thousands of pounds in cash. The Twins had been blindfolded, cuffed and rolled onto the floor, while an officer wearing flared trousers pointed a gun at one of their heads. They were jailed for a very long time.

  Paul Burly said, ‘I started making some enquiries. The Twins had been my mates and I had respected them. The third guy was called the Patchwork Quilt, so named due to the cuttings he had received and the holes that bullets had left.

  ‘I even got hold of a photograph from the crime scene that shows them lying on the floor at gunpoint. I could never understand why they’d walked into a trap so unawares. It was so unlike them. They had to have been set up. They’d been nicked at around the time Fred the Rat had started setting up his big drugs deals, deals that would net him millions.

  ‘The Twins had given him a million quid to mind by hiding it safely within a straight trading company. Fred had wanted to invest it into his imminent drugs deals, which involved tanks of beer. They hadn’t approved. Those twins – like most of the old-school robbers – could genuinely say: “We don’t touch drugs.”

  ‘Fred had finally got what he wanted when the Twins got put away. He was already minding their money; now he had full control of it. I, along with most of my friends, was 100 per cent sure Fred had grassed on them to get them out of the way, so he could invest their money into his ideas.’

  The Twins sent a message out from their high-security cells: ‘Don’t touch the Rat: if he dies, our money disappears!’

  Meanwhile, Fred moved on, untroubled by his conscience and the underworld scuttlebutt. The Rat recruited a new member onto his team. The Banker had already established himself as an independent drug financier. Fred offered him a deal. Crucially, Fred would supply the contacts and some of the money to underwrite drug purchases abroad. The Banker would also put up some of the funds, but he would help with the import and distribution. Fred’s drugs racket had increased exponentially and he was desperate to share the load. For the Banker, it was a golden opportunity. It would give him access to the phone numbers of the Cartel’s main suppliers of cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

  CHAPTER 6

  IMPORT

  1982

  BY THE EARLY 1980s, Fred the Rat was looking to scale up his business once again. He had a good partner in the Banker. Now he needed a method of mass importation that was regular, consistent and secure. One of his contacts told him about a shipping line in the north-east that had a contract with a brewing company. Their job was to export giant metal vats of beer to Africa and then ship the empty containers back to the north-east for refilling, so that the process could be repeated. Fred’s contact described the empty vessels to him. They were like giant, cylindrical cans – only three at a time could be fitted onto a lorry trailer. They were spacious and cleaned before they left the port in Africa, meaning that they could be easily filled with contraband. They were sealed with lids and, once they were prepared for transport, difficult to search. But the beauty of the system was simple – the import–export link was so common and had been going on for so long that the authorities on both sides of the ocean paid little attention to the barrels. The contact said that they had been searched by Customs and Excise on only one or two occasions.

  Fred was over the moon. This would be an ideal way to smuggle drugs, he concluded. Fred had contacts in Africa who could supply cannabis in huge amounts. In addition, there was the possibility of buying heroin and doubling up.

  Fred’s gangs got to work. By this time, he was becoming more cautious. He didn’t want to go near the drugs himself. Instead, he put his brother in charge of handling the day-to-day operations. Soon the system was up and running.

  The beer scam worked like a dream. Fred had so much capacity and drugs were so cheap in Africa that he could smuggle any amount of drugs that he wished, at any time. Each consignment could hold a maximum of three tonnes. Hundreds of kilos of cannabis were being landed every month, as well as huge bales of heroin. Over the year, it added up to tonnes.

  Fred had so much contraband that
it was becoming difficult to keep the route a secret. It became common knowledge in the underworld. Associates like Paul Burly were amazed that the news hadn’t reached the police. But Fred wasn’t bothered. If anything went wrong, it was his brother who’d cop for it. Fred was by now strictly hands-off.

  Paul Burly said, ‘When the Rat did begin his importing, it was done so openly that I was convinced that he had a bent copper from the top of the pile, or someone higher, which meant an awful lot of people were going to go to prison, because with all such deals there have to be bodies. Suddenly there were drugs everywhere. The city was flooded with cannabis, heroin and everything else. When bodies were called for, the Rat threw in his uncle and brother during two separate operations. In his mind, nobody would suspect that he had thrown in his own family . . . they had been the starters.

  ‘One night, I went to visit a woman I know, and I found a large holdall in her house. Inside it, there were a couple of shopping bags full of cannabis oil tightly wrapped and bound in plastic, and packs of white powder, which I assumed was coke. To add to that lot, there were lots and lots of two-pound bundles of tightly wrapped grass.

  ‘I immediately knew whose bag it was; the woman’s daughter had a boyfriend who worked for the Rat. I phoned Fred and said: “Come and get your fucking shite right now.” At first, he denied it was his. But I knew I was right so I told him that he had put me in danger. “You prick!” I shouted down the phone. “You know that if the police were to find that stuff in that house my feet would not touch! Tell you what, wanker, seeing as I would have done the time, I’ll keep the stuff and sell it to one of your competitors. How much is it worth: fifty, a hundred grand?” At this point I heard him gulp, so I smiled and put down the phone. Then waited. Fred immediately changed his tune; he was stuttering when I picked up the quickly returned call. “Sorry, Paul, really sorry. Can I have the stuff back, please?”’