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

by Graham Johnson

  He sent round a man on a motorbike to collect it. Paul took a small package containing £10,000 off the courier before pointing out where the large holdall was: underneath a mobile betting office on the car park of the Bow and Arrow pub. Crime author Peter Stockley revealed the full story in his book The Rat They Called a Dog.

  Fred started to invest in property and businesses to wash his drugs money. He employed an accountant to manage his portfolio. Soon the accountant became a powerhouse within Fred’s empire and was involved in key decisions, becoming the kingpin of his laundering operation. It was nothing for the accountant to have £1 million plus in dirty cash in the loft, not to mention the rusty old cement mixer in the corner of the garden, which often housed the weekly rake-in from the accountant’s businesses, usually totalling some hundred thousand pounds.

  The accountant ran the managers whom the Rat hired, men of pristine character who had also run doors, so they had the experience of both sides of life. However, there were many altercations between them, and one of the doormen, the Brum, began to dig into the accountant’s past. He came up with evidence of the accountant’s dishonesty and showed it to the Rat, who replied, ‘What do I want an honest bookkeeper for?’

  One day, the Rat upset Paul Burly again. They fell out over a debt of £15,000 that Paul said Fred owed him due to some building work. Fred refused to pay. Paul couldn’t find Fred to exact payment. Weeks passed with Paul looking and Fred dodging – then a terrible misfortune struck Fred. Both his house and the accountant’s, in Knowsley and Ormskirk respectively, were burned down by arsonists. Luckily, however, the cement mixer had not been tipped up. Paul smiled as he denied involvement. Fred was furious: the £1 million in dirty cash reputedly stored in the accountant’s loft had also gone up in flames but not even a crispy bit had been found by the firemen!

  Fred wore many hats; none, however, had ‘roughneck’ written on the rim. As usual, he stood back while the police gave Paul a terrible time, but they could not pin anything on him. The Rat continued to import drugs. Paul couldn’t believe how openly he did it without being targeted by their special squad, due to the damage the drugs were doing to society.

  Paul Burly said, ‘During my life some things have glared out at me as being abnormally sinister. I first noticed such things as a drug cartel being formed, almost publicly and with nothing being done about it, until the hold it had on our society became much too strong to break and those hooked on drugs were too far gone to be withdrawn from it. The rot had set in before any really big arrests were made; then it was only the underlings.’

  Paul found himself in an inexplicable pickle soon after that and ended up in prison for six years for manslaughter; he had been forced into defending himself against a yo-yo who had a gun. Paul took the gun off the young man, but during the ensuing struggle the gun went off and Paul was left standing over a lifeless body. Had the Rat been involved? Paul had no idea and swears that the trouble-causing young man had forced the fight. From minute one, he suspected the Rat strongly, but as his sentence passed he found himself promising only to extract the type of revenge that was called for if pushed hard when he got out.

  CHAPTER 7

  CONSPIRACY

  1983

  AS WELL AS the ideological changes to crime, there was also practical help on hand for the Cartel. The community in Toxteth began to see itself as a no-go area for police. Street dealing began to flourish. The interface with the outside world – a street on the district’s border – became known as ‘the front line’. A main thoroughfare called Granby Street became a free-for-all drugs hub, attracting punters from all over the north of England.

  Conspiracy theories began to flourish in the ghetto, fuelled by a sense of isolation and powerlessness. Community leaders warned drug dealers and punters that they were playing into the hands of the ruling white elite.

  Carl John, the brother of a world karate champion and club doorman who was later shot dead, said, ‘Suddenly people – local people – were dealing drugs on Granby Street without fear of the police. There was a big surge in cannabis and heroin. The theory was that the politicians were turning a blind eye to drugs, to calm the population, similar to the tacit agreement that occurs in prisons, when the screws allow drugs onto the wings.’ Carl John went on to become an award-winning documentary maker: his film Crackhouse (2003) showed the terrible effects Class A drugs were having on his community.

  In the white areas, the conspiracy theory was less sinister but equally shocking. It was claimed that the city had been abandoned by the rest of the country. Depopulation was not an accident, according to locals, politicians and community leaders: it was the result of a political decision made somewhere, even though they could not quite put their finger on it. The government’s lack of enthusiasm to prop up the port and industries were cited as evidence of a secret deal to slowly kill off the city.

  Thirty years later, some of the theories were proved to have at least some basis in truth. Newly released government documents revealed that Mrs Thatcher’s then chancellor Geoffrey Howe suggested ‘the option of managed decline’ towards the city, warning her of the dangers of over-committing ‘scarce resources to Liverpool’ in a futile attempt to save the city’s economy. Such a policy, he thought, would be akin to throwing good money after bad. Howe argued that Liverpool was almost beyond help, in terms of economic stimulation.

  ‘I fear that Merseyside is going to be much the hardest nut to crack,’ Howe said. ‘I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.’

  Of course, such a policy would have to be kept secret: the discussions, and the documents that described them, were confidential. Howe acknowledged that the suggestion that the city could be left to decline was potentially explosive.

  ‘This is not a term for use, even privately,’ he warned Mrs Thatcher. ‘It would be even more regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey.’

  There was no evidence that ‘managed decline’ involved a conspiracy to subdue the population with heroin. But at the time, many believed that the rumours were true. The Cartel lost no time in playing on the story to further its aims. Lord Howe later denied that he was ‘in any sense advocating managed decline’.

  In 1983, a twenty-year-old mixed-race doorman called Curtis Warren was jailed for five years for armed robbery. Like most young bucks from Granby Street, he was trying to enrich himself to hoist his standing off the floor, where surviving is to live and you live to survive. He kept trying various things to make wads instead of settling for wage packets. In Frankland Prison in County Durham, he bumped into a fellow Scouser: hard man Paul Burly, who had been jailed for manslaughter.

  ‘When I met him inside, Warren was wondering just what he had to do to get the start to build on,’ said Burly. ‘He was one of those swinging-spider robbers who kept doing lots of petty things without really learning from them; something like a brickie wanting to start laying his bricks from the eves down. On the out I had helped a few such kids: they had ended up shitting on my doorstep, but that didn’t change my attitude to helping if I could, especially as they had literally nothing going for them. You could tell they’d be in and out of jail for the rest of their lives because those lads had no idea how to avoid it in their attempts to get on. No others in their area seemed to care, because they wanted out themselves. They reminded me of coal miners who didn’t want their kids to be coal miners but taught them the job anyway.

  ‘I sat him down in my cell and said: “You’ve got to stop being a dickhead. You’ve got to stop being a fucking robber, because you’ll never make any money and you’ll keep getting nicked. Stop acting on impulse and plan the rest of your life now, while you’ve got the time to think.” I told him that if he wanted to be a villain, so be it. “But use your fucking brain,” I sa
id.’

  Paul Burly had a friend who was known as the Banker. He told Warren to contact the Banker once he got out. The Banker could set him straight by lighting up the pathways.

  At around the same time, an 18-year-old school leaver went for a job interview as a salesman. Dylan Porter was gangly and wore glasses. Nervous energy made him appear twitchy and agitated. But he was no geek. People warmed to Dylan because he was open, funny and unthreatening. But his easy-going nature masked cunning and street wisdom beyond his years.

  Dylan said, ‘At the job interview, the man goes, “You’re born to do this job. You’re a natural salesman.” But it was the usual story – he turned round at the end of it and said: “Sorry – you’re not qualified enough.”’

  Dylan was from the wrong side of the tracks. ‘I learned from an early age that alcohol was the worst drug in the world. I didn’t want to waste my life – I was ambitious.’

  The aspiring salesman did what government minister Norman Tebbit had urged the unemployed to do. He got on his bike and searched for work. Tebbit, the then Trade and Industry Secretary, had refused to believe that rioting had been a natural reaction to unemployment. He urged the jobless to be more resourceful – and more mobile. Dylan found that Tebbit’s words were out of touch with reality. He went to Jersey but struggled to find work. Returning to Liverpool depressed, he ended up on a Youth Opportunities Programme for six months.

  ‘It was at that point that I said, “Fuck it.” It was then that I started to see things differently. Instead of being optimistic, I started to view life a bit darker. That’s what happens when you’re young and you can’t get a job. For instance, I began to look at the government as being the biggest criminal, as though I had been betrayed by it: not only in a jobs sense, but in other ways as well. For instance, I thought the authorities’ view on alcohol was hypocritical. They promoted it, but I saw the bad effects of it. There was a lot of anger around, blaming politicians for this and that.

  ‘I started selling a bit of weed – if I couldn’t get a job, then it was justified in my mind. I was buying an ounce of rocky and selling it to my mates. Harming nobody, I thought.’

  Throughout 1982, smaller riots erupted across the UK and into the following year as the monetarist vice tightened. In Liverpool, street-fighting gave way to political battles. The hard-left Militant tendency, led by a well-groomed, fast-talking ex-fireman called Derek Hatton, took control of Liverpool City Council. The city was the only one in the UK to offer resistance to Mrs Thatcher and the Labour Party, which many socialists believed had lost its bottle. On a ticket of jobs and services, Hatton began building council houses and extending social care. But the cost of struggle was high. The city sank further into debt, and 49 councillors were eventually removed from office by the unelected District Auditor for refusing to sanction redundancies.

  Meanwhile, another trafficker was bringing in heroin using the Heathrow connection. Unlike the rough-looking Thomas Comerford, Paul Dye cut a James Bond figure on the international smuggling scene. He was friends with diplomats, sported a black tie at official functions and loved technology. Dye was the first known villain to use a hand-held computer to record drug transactions, according to Customs and Excise – a habit that would eventually lead to his downfall. Though he was London based, some of Dye’s heroin was sold on into the Cartel and Dye would later become friends with several of the organisation’s main players. Within a year, he became fabulously wealthy – suspiciously so. Even Dye thought so himself. It seemed too easy. He kept hundreds of thousands of pounds lying around his house. Dye was at a loss to explain why it was so easy to smuggle heroin into Britain all of a sudden. Then he claimed he’d found out the reason why. Dye boasted that he had been given safe passage to smuggle heroin into Britain. He was telling members of the Cartel that the British government was tacitly allowing heroin into the country to suppress the youth.

  ‘They’re scared of a revolution,’ he said. ‘The gates were opened after the riots. There were smaller riots in 1982 and 1983, and the government panicked and turned a blind eye while heroin was brought in. It was only a short-term measure to distract the youth.’

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, the Analyst was busy making his way as a beat bobby. The Analyst didn’t buy into conspiracy theories, but the young PC did believe in one criminal conspiracy. He was of the opinion that the new generation of heroin dealers were, for the first time, deliberately and methodically carrying out market research on the drugs market. The Analyst was convinced that the men at the top of organised crime had identified several specific subgroups. In simple terms, at one end of the scale they had identified a large body of low-level, passive drug users who mainly smoked cannabis. Pot was largely seen as harmless and sociable. At the other extreme, there were very powerful hallucinogens, such as LSD, that were taken by a minority of more daring and experienced drug users. Their numbers were small, but the niche was profitable: so much so that peddlers were setting up their own labs to meet demand.

  ‘Then in the early ’80s,’ the Analyst noticed, ‘the drug dealers did the market research and realised that there was a gap in the market. There was a place in the middle for an alternative drug. And that’s where heroin suddenly came in. At that time, it was very much seen as one of the next generation of drugs. The key thing was that it wasn’t viewed as being a nasty drug. Heroin was an ideal fit – seemingly both suited to consumers and the dealers. At that time, users didn’t know that it was addictive and destructive – they were just interested in the high.’

  At around the same time, the Analyst discovered that the Cartel was consolidating existing transport opportunities with new ones. First, the Cartel exploited the boom in package holidays. ‘Who owned the coaches? Would Customs bother searching a whole coachload of families coming back from Spain?’

  Second, the Cartel began relying on air travel that had opened up as a result of the founding of the European Community. The haulage industry boomed.

  Then, finally, they stumbled across an unexpected helping hand – Liverpool Football Club. ‘On a simple level, it had to do with football and the UEFA,’ explained the Analyst. ‘When Liverpool FC began playing abroad, it became the gateway to Europe for a lot of criminals. What resulted was the phenomenon of the “travelling Scouser”, these lads who would first go pillaging and then settle for periods of time in towns and cities and make connections.

  ‘The bottom line was that Customs didn’t see it coming, especially what happened in 1983 with heroin.’

  By 1983 all of these various factors converged. The conditions for the Cartel were right. The result was a heroin burst across Merseyside. The epidemic started on council estates in Croxteth. Deprivation and unemployment were high and the local villains had an ‘in’ with the Cartel. Croxteth was quickly dubbed ‘Smack City’. Other hotspots appeared on the Wirral and in Birkenhead.

  The Analyst said, ‘Suddenly, there was a definite contrast in the city. I remember going on police training courses and telling people that I’d arrested people for possession of cannabis. But they started telling me about heroin and a lively distribution network.’

  From his own research, he noticed that the Gorbals in Glasgow and towns in the north of Scotland were mirroring Croxteth’s problems. The ‘travelling Scouser’ was spreading his vices. In Scotland, Liverpool criminals had befriended career criminal Ian McAteer. By now, the ex-petty thief had graduated to the major league of Glasgow’s underworld. He was always in and out of court. The jury saw him as a smart-suited, well-groomed and courteous defendant. But the real McAteer was a different character altogether. He had become a ‘ruthless, evil, savage street fighter’ according to one Strathclyde detective. Like many criminals who would later enter the drugs business, McAteer had a curious but beneficial characteristic: he seemingly felt nothing for other people. He didn’t even feel anything about himself. The detective noted that McAteer was also a ‘highly dangerous organised criminal who appears immune to
human feeling’.

  CHAPTER 8

  HEROIN

  1984

  ‘ARE YOUSE ON the smack yet?’ the punter asked.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Dylan Porter replied. Dylan handed the lad his usual purchase – a black finger of oily cannabis, wrapped in cling film. He was doing his rounds, selling weed to jobless youths in Bootle pubs.

  But the lad persisted, blocking his way a bit. ‘Have you tried the smack yet?’ he asked again, a touch cockier this time. Making sure everyone could see, that he was in the know about the latest buzz, even when his own dealer was clearly out of the loop.

  ‘No,’ Dylan said, pushing further inside the smoky bar to order a pint and serve up some more of his £5 slivers of resin. ‘But I’ll find out about it, OK.’

  Dylan first heard about heroin in 1984. All of a sudden, the drug had become as fashionable as Reebok trainers and Ellesse sportswear.

  ‘After the lad had asked me about heroin in the pub, I started asking around about it, but no one knew what it was,’ Dylan said. ‘Except an older feller at the bar in one of the other pubs that I served up in, who I respected. He warned me not to get involved. “Stay away from that shit, lad,” he told me, “or you’ll end up in the gutter or in jail.”’

  But for the time being there was nothing to worry about for a young, ambitious drug dealer. In the early days, heroin was marketed by the Cartel as a harmless high: not exactly fun-seeking but a deeper alternative to pot that dealers claimed was cheaper in the long-run. ‘More buzz for your buck’ was the catchphrase.