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

by Graham Johnson

  To make it seem more inclusive, sellers didn’t target the underclass: the main market was among the solidly working-class punters that frequented the pubs and the clubs, including women and 20-something men. To observers, they didn’t seem like the kinds of people who wanted to throw their lives away: these people wanted to enjoy themselves; they had hopes and ambitions. Ironically, they were the same strata of C1 and C2 voters that in the south of England had formed the backbone of Mrs Thatcher’s support, the same core of voters that had been targeted by the Murdoch press to sweep the conservatives into power: ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’.

  However, up north the story was different. Coma-inducing opiates started to become popular with doleites desperate to make eight hours of boredom pass in two, without spending a fortnight’s worth of giro at the bar. Users even celebrated the arrival of heroin on the streets.

  ‘It was all “laughing” at first,’ recalls Simon Murphy, who later became addicted for 11 years. ‘It was something to smile about, share with your mates – there was nothing seedy about it. Really sound people were taking it, lads who you respected or girls who you fancied.’

  People started smoking heroin on foil openly in pubs and in parks, as though it was normal. In each bar, Dylan encountered groups of ‘shiny, happy people’ chasing the dragon and listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall on the jukebox.

  He recalled: ‘The old fellers at the bar were joking to the younger ones sat around the tables: “Are you on the heavy gear today?” Then they’d roll about laughing, as though it was all one big joke. It wasn’t at all taboo. So I was watching this, thinking: “There’s loads on it and I’ve got to start selling it instead of cannabis.”’

  Within weeks, Dylan switched to openly knocking out heroin on a quiet close in Bootle. Within a week, he and his partner were trading an ounce of heroin per day. Each ounce cost Dylan £1,100 but generated £2,800 in sales, leaving £1,700 profit.

  Dylan said: ‘I sold around 560 bags at £5 each every day – each one is 50 mg. Sometimes the lot would go in about two hours. It was like selling socks on a market stall. I was dressed in a Fred Perry T-shirt and a pair of Adidas shorts. I was making so much money I was giving the notes away – I didn’t know what to do with it.’

  A wholesale supplier of heroin hadn’t been hard to find. Dylan’s cannabis dealer had quickly linked him up with a low-ranking member of the Cartel. Fred the Rat and Comerford were still bringing it in – and a lively network of middlemen had set up as distributors on the key estates. One distributor was a local hard man called Tommy Gilday. After scoring his ounce in the early evening, Dylan would ‘work’ through the night, cutting the brown powder into £5 bags.

  However, the changes were not only on a personal level. The explosion of Class A drugs began to change the criminal landscape as a whole. Even villains who refused to get involved had to prepare for a future where the old codes didn’t matter. Shaun Smith hailed from a traditional crime family that valued fist-fighting and looked down on drug dealers. As a young 17-year-old buck, Shaun became a bouncer to learn the ropes.

  Drugs had made the underworld more cut-throat. Shaun was given a criminal apprenticeship that his elders told him would stand him in good stead for a dog-eat-dog life. A known hard man called Dom schooled him in the art of debt collecting. One day Shaun was shown how male rape could be used as a weapon.

  Shaun said, ‘We went to collect a £20,000 debt from a house in Bedford. As soon as the punter opened the door, I hit him with a little scaffold bar and he stumbled back into the hall. He was a big fat cunt, 18 or 19 stone, with baggy trousers on and grey hair. He wouldn’t pay, so I started looking around the house for cash.

  ‘Then I heard Dom saying, “Go on, go on,” coming from downstairs, and when I walked into the kitchen, he was getting stuck up the big fat feller from behind. Dom was also taking pictures.

  ‘Afterwards, we just left a number for the punter to ring. It was blackmail: “You don’t pay up and we send the pictures out.” I got £50 for that. Six months later the fat feller hanged himself out of shame.

  ‘I thought: “This must be just the way life is.”’

  The political situation in Liverpool became extreme. Gangsters and politicians formed alliances. The Liverpool 8 Defence Committee was set up by local people and community leaders after the Toxteth riots to protect black people from the rise of the far right. Many members’ motives were genuine, but two drug-dealing brothers called Delroy and Michael Showers became influential. Michael Showers rallied community support to mask his illegal activities. In the guise of a community leader, he even appeared on BBC’s Question Time programme.

  In 1984, the BNP staged a national rally on St George’s Day at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool city centre. The Liverpool 8 Defence Committee attacked the far right. Ironically, some of the neo-Nazis that they fought included enforcers used by the Cartel. In Toxteth, the Militant party that controlled the city’s council attempted to pay off another gangster and future Cartel enforcer called Stephen French in a clumsy attempt to gain influence. He ripped up their £500 bribe in front of them. Many young Cartel members began to train in martial arts and Thai boxing.

  Meanwhile, at street level, Poncho was trying to impress an uncle known as Scarface. Scarface’s partner was known as Kaiser – they were inseparable. Despite being relatively young, Kaiser and Scarface had moved up the criminal ladder quickly. Poncho was still on the bottom rung: selling weed on the front line and on Granby Street. But he was keen to catch the eye of Kaiser and Scarface, with a view to getting some proper graft under his belt.

  Kaiser and Scarface cut a dashing pair on the crime scene. They were both keen sportsmen and were charismatic, striking figures. Poncho was mostly skint. He liked smoking weed and dropping acid but was keen to learn.

  Scarface made his money as a ‘facilitator’ for older criminals. The dealers in Toxteth were resisting the pressure to sell heroin. On the front line, a message had been daubed on the wall: ‘Newsflash! This is Toxteth not Croxteth. Strictly ganja.’ There were stories of vigilantes attacking heroin dealers and self-appointed ‘taxmen’ stealing their money. Kaiser took a dislike to heroin after his home was burgled by smackheads. One day, Poncho, who liked taking LSD, had mentioned that he was going to experiment with heroin. Scarface hit him and said, ‘Don’t ever go on that smack.’

  A few miles away, Colin Smith was being brought up in a council flat in the Allerton area, near the childhood home of John Lennon. The local beat bobby was the Analyst. Colin’s dad John had been a boxer, but he preferred talking to violence. He’d started selling cannabis while a pupil at New Heys Comprehensive school. By the age of 17, Colin was a middle-ranking distributor, handling drugs smuggled in from Amsterdam and Morocco through Liverpool docks. An old school pal said that he’d bought a new top-of-the-range VW Golf for cash. The same day one of his mates wrote it off, but that night Smith went out and bought another. ‘That’s when you started to realise just how much money he was making,’ said the friend.

  The second generation was up and running.

  CHAPTER 9

  PAVED WITH GOLD

  1985

  ACROSS THE CITY in the North End of Liverpool, Dylan Porter was now rich enough to pay for all of his mates to go on holiday. It was 1985, and Dylan had been in the heroin business for just one year. He bought a string of fast cars. Grafters returning from Europe with holdalls full of stolen designer clothes came straight to him, because he bought the lot with cash.

  Business was booming because there were few risks. Guns were rare and the worst thing that happened was that someone would bump him for £5. The police posed little threat. There were no mobile phones so interceptions didn’t happen.

  Dylan said, ‘The police could see you openly selling but not catch you with the gear on you. Even if I had a bundle of 40 bags, if I saw a busie, I’d throw them in my mouth and swallow them. Be sick five minutes later. One day, I got nicked with money in all my pockets, but
they had to let me go. Today, you just get nicked for having cash.’

  As a new market, the business was still relatively straight – only a minority of dealers ‘bashed’ the gear up with additives. A £5 bag could last an average user two days, according to Dylan, because the heroin was high purity. Some dealers were proud of the fact that they sold heroin, as though they were doing themselves and the community a service.

  ‘If people asked me how I was doing,’ recalled Dylan, ‘I would reply cheerfully: “I’m selling the brown on Jersey Close.”

  ‘And they’d say, “Is right, are you making a few quid?” as though they were talking to a joiner or a car mechanic or something like that. It was good news at a time when there was no good news.’

  But by the end of the year, the tide had begun to turn. The attitude had changed. The first signs of heroin’s ravages started to surface. Young girls started selling their bodies in suburban streets. Previously well-behaved young men suddenly turned into serial burglars, robbing their neighbours’ houses. Stick-thin addicts known as ‘creatures’ began to roam the estates like zombies. Mothers had to lock their kids in their bedrooms until they had gone through cold turkey.

  Dylan said, ‘It started to go dark and I was like, “Fucking hell, is that what heroin does to you? Surely not . . .” But it was – it was like a fucking bomb had gone off out of the blue. It was a genuine shock.

  ‘I didn’t know – people started saying that I was selling poison. Vigilantes started forming, and people began snarling at me. The same people who’d politely enquired about business six months before would shout across the bar, “Are you still involved in that shit?”

  ‘And I’d go, “Fuck off. No way, mate – I’ve sacked all that now,” out of embarrassment, and I’d drink up and get off quick. But it was a lie. I was panicking and ashamed.’

  In July 1985, jet-setting heroin dealer Paul Dye was caught smuggling heroin through Heathrow. He was eventually convicted of trafficking £100 million’s worth, after Customs officers retrieved details of payments to Pakistani suppliers on his Psion HC 100 personal organiser. Dye was bitter, claiming that he’d had tacit immunity from the government. He argued that the establishment no longer feared a rebellion from Britain’s jobless youth. The government had defeated the striking miners. The police had developed a new public order policy to deal with disturbances. He said that they were now confident they could withstand any revolutionary tendency. The miners had been roundly defeated. Therefore the authorities had, according to Dye, reversed its short-term policy of allowing drugs into the UK.

  Meanwhile, bouncer Shaun Smith’s underworld apprenticeship took a sinister turn. One day Shaun and his friend nearly killed a man while testing out terror tactics.

  Shaun said, ‘One night, I was sitting in my nan’s having a cup of tea with my mate and we went out because we were bored. We found this feller crying after the pubs had let out, saying that he was going to kill himself. We pretended to be good Samaritans, but it quickly turned nasty.

  ‘We took him back to my nan’s. My mate broke his fingers and he was saying to him: “I’m going to shag you,” just to see what effect it had on him.

  ‘Later we walked him out dead quiet – he was sobbing, and then we knocked him out and ran away.

  ‘The next day he was found right outside the police station with serious head injuries – we guessed that the police had put it down to falling over when he was drunk or something. They didn’t get on to his fingers or head wounds. He was on a life support machine for three weeks.’

  Paul Dye might not have been right about a heroin conspiracy theory, but he was right about the police being more prepared for public disorder. In October 1985, low-level riots kicked off in Toxteth once again. The disturbance was a potential nightmare scenario for Merseyside Police. A reveller from London had been stabbed at the annual Toxteth carnival, which led to the arrest of a local youth. The suspect’s family and friends said that the police had got the wrong man. Within hours, hundreds of angry people laid siege to Admiral Street police station demanding his release. The police station was bricked and bottled.

  Rumours abounded that the local gangs were planning to ambush a police patrol and start a full-scale riot. But this time the top brass had a plan. They referred to their recently published, but secret, public order manuals on how to proceed. To provide context for the course, a raft of reports had been commissioned by the Home Office to explain why citizens suddenly rose up. In one called ‘Policing Problems on Housing Estates’, the Home Office Police Research Group said that the ‘common themes’ behind disturbances were high levels of unemployment, deprivation and poor policing relations. The public order manuals outlined how officers should respond to riot situations. The tactics had been quietly developed behind the scenes since the first wave of riots in 1981, and many senior officers had been through the programme.

  The technology used on the training courses was crude: a curious mixture of early computer modelling and lo-fi ‘situation room’ maps that looked more like board games. The scaled buildings were made up of miniature wooden tower blocks and toy cars that represented police vans. A set of ring binders contained the instructions, a step-by-step guide on how to deal with riots.

  At the core of the manual was a fictional British town called Sandford in a county called Sandfordshire. The poor part of town was called the Carruthers Estate. It was here that the best and brightest from constabularies all over the country were invited to pit themselves against an unfolding public order situation. The aim was to make decision-making more effective, and to standardise riot control across the country. The course taught officers to look for ‘tension indicators’.

  The result of the new research and the policing policies that grew out of it was two-fold. First, the 1985 riots were quashed because riot training improved police effectiveness and understanding. Second, Merseyside Police were no longer prepared to pussyfoot around sensitive issues. Officers became bolder and took more risks. It gave Merseyside Police the confidence to go back into Toxteth and take back the no-go areas. A new officer class of thinking-men’s coppers were drafted in. It wasn’t long before one particular officer was headhunted to take up the challenge. The Analyst had been recruited to a new section called the Toxteth Team, a designated policing unit that had been formed in 1982 but was only now coming into its own.

  But it was like fighting fires: as one was put out, another one flared up. On the street, police tactics were working, but on a strategic level, the Cartel was stealing a march.

  In late 1985, Scarface and Kaiser dropped their resistance to selling heroin. They wanted money and they were no longer scared of the backlash from the local community. In addition, other dealers started selling heroin and they saw no point in not doing the same. One of the Cartel’s newly prosperous dealers, a gangster called Tommy Gilday, was looking to expand his patch. He had flooded the mainly white North End of the city with drugs and was now keen to strike up an alliance with the black gangs in Toxteth. Granby Street and the front line offered great potential. Punters came from as far away as Hull, Leeds and Cumbria to score, because Liverpool wasn’t as policed as their own areas. But until now they had only been able to buy cannabis.

  Gilday’s opportunity to enter the market was an unlikely one. One day, one of his gang stole a car belonging to a friend of Scarface. Scarface tracked down Gilday and bashed him up. But bizarrely, as is common in the underworld, they struck up a mutual respect, which grew into a kind of friendship based on how useful they could be to each other.

  Gilday started selling cut-price heroin to Scarface to distribute in Toxteth. Poncho started selling the cut-up wraps on Granby Street. The alliance set a precedent. The predominantly white, middle-aged members of the Cartel began forming partnerships with younger black villains from Toxteth. A former bag snatcher turned armed robber called Curtis Warren became friendly with the Banker, an emerging boss in the Cartel, who was set to take over from the likes of Fre
d the Rat and Comerford when their time was up. The Banker took to Warren immediately. Warren had come with some good references. Warren told the Banker that Paul Burly had advised him to make contact. In addition, Warren had been ‘grafting’ with a convicted armed robber and drugs importer called Stan Carnall. They had done some drug deals together in Amsterdam. Carnall was on the Banker’s firm. There was also a connection through one of Warren’s girlfriends. All in all, Warren was well connected and ripe to be groomed for a top slot. The timing was also fortuitous. Fred the Rat had opened up his contacts book to the Banker. The Banker now had the power to buy cocaine direct from the Colombians and heroin direct from the Turks. In time, he would pass some of these numbers to Curtis Warren. Curtis would be working for him and Fred the Rat.

  Another example was a taxman called Stephen French, who struck up a relationship with the network of nightclub owners, bouncers and cocaine traffickers that fast-tracked him into the business.

  A black gang called the Solid Gold Posse, mainly involved in heists, also began doing business with the Cartel. It wasn’t long before the main black players were absorbed into the Cartel, forming influential factions in their own right.

  Meanwhile, Fred the Rat was still the king of the Cartel. The underworld and Paul Burly, who now walked the twilight zone, estimated that of all the drugs in the UK, Fred had brought in 60 per cent. Yet despite Fred’s enormous wealth and power, the old-school gangsters weren’t afraid to beat him up. Fred had ripped off so many people that he became used to being accosted and punched at almost every party he attended. But he had thick skin. He let it wash over him by claiming that at the time of whatever deceit he was being accused of he had been playing a certain role that had been suited to the circumstances of that particular deal. Paul Burly said, ‘He let things go by blaming the hat he had been wearing on the occasion of the aforesaid trespass. For him, the most important thing was making money.