‘Make your own mind up as to why he was never killed, as he opened the biggest chain of nightclubs in Liverpool and shit on people from that great height . . . Lord knows, I came near to doing it myself once or twice, and the Twins stabbed him when they got out. Lots and lots of people have hit him but left him prostrate on the floor rather than taking him away and burying him. He’s had the luck of the Irish as far as his life is concerned, because he just loves to fuck his friends and belittle them. He can’t throw away his car-salesman hat, that’s his trouble.
‘As for his dealing in the drugs world, he was very successful . . . Maybe that was his saving grace. Those who relied on his imports didn’t mind him being hurt, but they didn’t want him killed. Who knows?’
CHAPTER 10
TRANSPORT
1986
1986 WAS A critical year for the Cartel and the police. Both sides got more sophisticated in their struggle for dominance. The starburst of heroin across the city turned into an epidemic.
The Analyst said, ‘It was simple – the change mostly came down to transport again. One kilo of compressed heroin, unadulterated and uncut, was much easier to ship than one kilo of cannabis – and much more profitable.
‘Established crime groups started setting up in Toxteth. They became more visible and Granby Street became a supermarket for drugs.’
The boom was underpinned by more complex methods of sale. Dylan Porter set up the first dial-a-dealer service, partly out of shame. By putting the handover at arm’s length, no longer would he have to come face to face with his punters or the public. He employed several runners to ferry drugs anonymously from a mini call centre. The only rule was that punters had to have a verifiable land-line number. The huge profits were attracting investors keen to get a slice of the action. A property developer from London offered Dylan a partnership. As the dial-a-dealer service expanded, the partner sourced secure houses and flats.
Dylan said, ‘I was doing good business, so people were lining up to back me. I had enough money to self-finance, but taking on another partner was about much more than that. It was about going up a level. I was a salesman. I was successful. But I was just selling the wrong product.’
In Toxteth, a young armed robber and blackmailer called Colin Borrows found a sachet of cocaine that had been hidden near the Toxteth’s front line. He took it to a yardie he knew, who washed up the base into crack cocaine. Colin Borrows went on to officially become Britain’s first crack dealer. He was the first peddler to be arrested for manufacture of the drug.
The public were rapidly losing trust in the police’s ability to hold back the tide. Increasingly, they were turning to vigilantes to stop the drugs. Enter Shaun Smith, a rising star in the world of doormen and freelance enforcers.
On one assignment, a rich scrap dealer paid Shaun £3,000 to cut the ear off a drug dealer who had beaten up his son.
‘Me and my partner booted the door off the dealer’s house,’ said Shaun, ‘and there were four of them sitting there having a weed. When someone is that frightened you can’t knock them out. But I cut the top of his ear off, wrapped it in a bit of wallpaper and showed it to the scrap dealer.
‘Suddenly, in my world, you had to be a bullying, backstabbing twat, just to get through the weekend. But I refused to go down that route – although I was violent, I refused to be a backstabber. I was always totally upfront about what I did.
‘People would ask me to plug people for debts. If it was justified, it would be strongly considered or passed on if it wasn’t. Life’s too short – there’s too many wolves in sheep’s clothing.
‘That’s the effect drugs was having on everything.’
In Toxteth, the heroin epidemic had created a gold-rush atmosphere. Young villains were desperate to raise the money to invest in heroin. Like pyramid salesmen, the older members of the Cartel egged them on.
Poncho said, ‘It was a case of, “If you can raise the money to buy a kilo, you’re in. And if you get in now, you’re in at the ground floor and we’re going right to the top.” People were panicking; they realised that there was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for ordinary villains to join a big firm and make it big. No one wanted to miss out.’
It was a cute move by the Cartel: a way of recruiting general criminals into their ranks quickly.
As a young PC in the Toxteth section, the Analyst noticed a young tearaway known as Cagey running around in a stolen car. A few weeks later he understood why – in the latter half of 1986, ram raiding took off.
The Analyst said, ‘If you could fundraise to buy a kilo of heroin then you were up and running. You couldn’t go to the Prince’s Trust to get a loan. Consequently, there was a real push on opportunist crime. Smash and grabs at jewellers’ shops became very lucrative. Then ram raiding became the crime of choice in 1986 and 1987.’
On the streets, there was a run on high-powered stolen cars. The stakes were high, so the ram-raiders morphed into sophisticated criminals. The cars used back-to-back radios and decoys to fool police during high-speed chases. While a raid was taking place, raiders used ‘second cars’ to ram police vehicles, to cause a distraction. Venues that sold desirable consumables were targeted with precision: ski shops (particularly those selling the Berghaus brand), leather goods, sportswear and high-quality clothing shops of every description.
The Analyst said, ‘They’d load it into the car and hit the city with a decoy to take the chase. On one level, it literally changed the fashion. But the main purpose was making money to get on the ladder. Ram raiding suddenly became the economic driver for the drugs industry.’ The clothes the ram raiders stole became fashionable because either they were designer labels that were generally out of the reach of normal people or they had a certain novelty value. For instance, on one occasion the raiders stole hundreds of high-end ski suits, which became an instant style hit on the streets. Soon the stolen clothes achieved must-have cult status. People wanted them because they had a certain kudos.
The successful candidates – gangsters like Johnny Phillips, Curtis Warren, Stephen French and Cagey – ploughed the money they’d made from robberies into drug dealing and became fully paid-up members of the Cartel. However, though they were sophisticated on the street, they hadn’t yet figured out how to get to the next level, how to secure themselves within the Cartel, to make national and international contacts and to wash their money. The wealth they were generating was very much seen as short term and for showing off.
These problems had largely been solved by those at the very top. The most senior members of the Cartel, several of who were now millionaires, were taking their first tentative steps into money laundering. Several opportunities had just presented themselves. First was the Big Bang on the London Stock Exchange and banking deregulation. This allowed the Cartel to invest in stocks and shares, especially in the newly privatised utility industries. In addition, they were able to wire bank deposits around the globe with few questions asked.
Changes in the property market also helped. Gangsters were now snapping up ex-council houses under Mrs Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. In addition, the housing boom outside of Liverpool offered golden opportunities for investments. The rise of package holidays and closer links with the EU had led to proliferation of currency-exchange shops. This DIY money-laundering service became the method of choice for the higher echelons of the Cartel.
But on the street, entry-level Cartel members continued to spend their money on cars, clothes and women. The culture of ram raiding turned high-powered cars into status symbols. Drug dealers would hire cars for months on end.
The Analyst said, ‘When the new Orion Ghia came out, I spoke to the manager at Avis on Mulberry Street in Toxteth. He told me that there was a queue out of the door and that they had three loaders stacked with Orion Ghias all on order.’
Once they had made more money, the dealers started buying the cars outright for cash. An up-and-coming gangster called Johnny Phillips – who would later team up with Cu
rtis Warren – bought an RS Turbo Cosworth with a private plate.
The Analyst said, ‘It was a superficial image that represented superficial wealth.’
The Analyst began to study the structure of the gangs. At the bottom of the hierarchy, there were street runners who earned £100 a day. Their responsibilities included moving the stashes of drugs around to the middlemen and keeping the street dealers supplied. Predominantly young, the runners were disillusioned foot soldiers who’d been tempted to pack in their YTS schemes and take up a ‘cultural education’ under the wings of the Cartel.
The Analyst said, ‘If you weren’t educated officially, this was a real opportunity. They’d started out robbing cars, then doing burglaries, and now they were running drugs. Even being a runner was a gargantuan leap into the big money; the spoils were far greater than kicking in a door and stealing a telly.’
CHAPTER 11
SURVEILLANCE
1987
THE BORDERS OF Toxteth melted into a gently sloping neighbourhood called Dingle, a predominantly white dockside area. An influential crime family with Filipino heritage dominated the area’s crime scene and quickly became affiliate members of the Cartel. Their HQ was a run-down pub, affectionately known as Black George’s, on a Coronation Street-style estate built in Victorian times to house dockers and Irish immigrants. Two brothers, the de facto leaders of the family, often spent their days drinking in another nearby pub called the Pineapple. At lunchtime, the bar was busy with straight-goers pouring in from the docks and nearby shops sneaking in for a quick pint. The brothers would hold court at the bar, sipping champagne and snorting cocaine. Dom Pérignon was a bestseller in the pub, a surprise hit in a traditional boozer with little to celebrate other than a good Sunday League team. But the brothers were generous, often standing rounds of drinks for the ordinary punters ‘because they were working’. The anecdotes spoke volumes to the Analyst. For all his insight, he refused to buy into the liberal idea that poverty caused crime.
According to the Analyst, ‘People drive crime. Even in poor areas, people can choose whether they want to commit crime or not.’
However, he did believe that two changes in lifestyles had helped persuade increasing numbers of young people to join the Cartel. The first was the growth of consumer society and the second was a culture of expectation about social security benefits.
The Analyst said, ‘It’s about personal values: how you’re wired up and whether those morals are in there. But there was suddenly a lot of pressure on ordinary people in society to have the trappings of wealth. They began to see extreme luxuries being advertised on the TV and they didn’t think: “I don’t need that.” Instead, they thought: “How can I afford that?” In the adverts on telly, you didn’t see anyone in a little kitchen any more. People saw this, so they aspired to having the big kitchen. That led to a world of debt, which pushed people towards crime. That was one of the factors that was weaving its way through the population then. Society was changing.’
In Toxteth, Scarface and Kaiser were able to afford American-style kitchens with fitted Hygena units, the latest Formica tops and a state-of-the-art ice-water dispenser in the fridge. Thanks to them, the drugs supermarket on Granby Street was now selling a new line – heroin.
Colin Borrows was offering crack cocaine alongside them. One time, he got stopped with a bootful of cash by the police. ‘Where did you get this?’ the coppers asked.
‘I’m a drug dealer,’ Borrows said, knowing that they couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have any crack on him. Those were the Wild West days. Cash had not yet been demonised: criminalised, some would say later. Some police officers didn’t quite know where they stood or how to react to the changing criminality. There was still trepidation around the concept of a no-go area.
The dealers didn’t want to lose the support of the local community, which provided them with cover in the form of the no-go area. So they kept the Class A drugs quiet, propagating the myth that the trade was a harmless outlet for Rastafarianism, ganja being the main supply.
The police realised that if they could break the myth then that would be half the battle. Officers had tried several tactics to take back the streets of Toxteth. First, they tried direct intervention: arresting suspects in small patrols along traditional lines. But the gangs deliberately blocked off the main thoroughfare at Granby Street. High-powered cars were double-parked back to back, so that police support teams couldn’t get to their colleagues if things went wrong. This was a deliberate ploy to make a no-go area more tangible specifically in an area known as the ‘Toxteth Triangle’ so that drug dealers and punters felt even safer. The impromptu blockades were also partly done to disrupt the police’s new public order tactics.
The Analyst said, ‘So what happened was that the dealers just stopped outside a popular haunt called the International Cafe. They just double-parked and started talking and traffic couldn’t flow: deliberate disruption to meet their intention of creating a no-go area. It meant that they could close it down at will, and if we went in there to police it, they could lock us down.
‘It made it very dangerous. One day we went in there to make an arrest. We pulled up outside the cafe to get the suspect. The plan was to grab this feller who was wanted by us in connection with a previous crime. But it all went quickly wrong. We were literally surrounded, and a car backed in behind us so we couldn’t move.
‘The reinforcements they tried to send in to get to us couldn’t get into Granby. And we ended up literally getting kicked up and down the street. There were eight of us and the gangs probably put two hundred onto the street. They were on the roof. It was a case of literally dragging everybody that was in the team back into the van at the same time as they were getting punched and kicked.’
Unable to move by car, the era of the Z-cars was over, at least in Toxteth. The patrols got back to basics and began walking around on foot. But the gangs’ spotters always seemed one step ahead and saw them coming. To get round this, the police installed a secret surveillance camera in a wall on the front line. But the dealers quickly discovered the ruse and signposted the lens with graffiti – ‘Police camera found here’.
Finally, after many setbacks, the police decided on a revolutionary tactic aimed at taking the fight into the heart of the dealers’ lair. A massive undercover surveillance operation was launched to film the dealers in action 24 hours a day. The police took advantage of the fact that much of Granby Street was still being revamped following the riots. Building sites littered the area. They hired a Portakabin and set up a dummy construction area right in the middle of Granby Street. Three surveillance officers were hidden inside the cabin at all times and could only come and go in the dead of night, when the coast was clear.
‘We thought, “Can we do this?”’ the Analyst recalled.
‘And we decided, “Yes, let’s give it a go.”
‘Then we found a couple of nutcases mad enough to do it. We soon gathered a whole load of evidence of street dealing. Then, after each buy, we tracked the punters as they walked off or drove away so that when they left the area, we picked them off – to prove that they had been sold drugs.
‘That was the first big operation to reclaim the streets for the public, because most people wanted something done about it. It finally broke the ganja myth, because we recovered heroin as well.
‘People tried to break into the cabin, but it was all locked up and secure. The lads were in there three days at a shout, and to minimise the risk of compromise, they came out in the middle of the night, and another shift went in. We had to be really careful round our times: different days, different hours of the night.
‘The dealers never suspected for one minute, because they were standing right outside the thing, sometimes deliberately hiding behind the cabin because they couldn’t be seen from the street – and all the time it was camera’d up.
‘Before the strike came, we moved the container out so that the street got back to normal.
Operation Eagle was a major blow for the Cartel and street distribution was turned on its head. The Cartel needed time to regroup and reorganise. But the hiatus gave the police time to take more ground. The Analyst spent the next two years walking the streets and winning back the support of the ordinary people. The Somali community were willing to engage, but some young black people literally stood in his way.
The Analyst said, ‘As a young officer, you couldn’t back down. You just had to stand your ground. The person may have been twice my size, so I wasn’t going to roll around the floor fighting. You’ve got to learn to talk your way out of it. Don’t rise to the bait, but don’t give in either. I just kept saying: “I’m going to walk down here, Granby Steet – it’s something I’ve got to do.”’
The police success signalled the end of the two-year heroin boom. But the effect was counter-productive. A large number of addicts, disparagingly known as creatures, suddenly appeared on the streets like zombies come back from the dead.
Dylan Porter said, ‘That’s when I started seeing smackheads for the first time – no one had ever heard of the term before, because when supplies of drugs were plentiful, they stayed indoors. Now they were in groups of 30 and 40, stood on the street, looking for gear. That’s when they started booting in doors and robbing videos in desperation. They were withdrawing because there wasn’t enough heroin to go around. That’s when I knew to get out of it. It had become shameful.
‘But for that window of eighteen months to two years, between 1985 and 1987, it had been good business. It was still a lucrative business, mind you, but now it had become a dirty business. Before that no one had known the consequences – prostitution, crime, lives wrecked.’
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 6
