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

by Graham Johnson

  To top it all, they had got in a day earlier than scheduled. A few days earlier, Scarface had sent a UHF signal to a ham-radio enthusiast who was being used as an intermediary and was on the payroll. The message was simple: the time of arrival. But Scarface had overestimated the amount of time it was going to take. He had banked on the entry into the official port taking longer and having to hang around for the day, taking care of permissions, paperwork and passports. Having bypassed the harbour, this timetable had become irrelevant. Consequently, when they did arrive a day early, Kaiser wasn’t at home – he’d gone to collect two mid-ranking drug dealers who represented notorious Liverpool crime families and senior Cartel members. They’d just flown into Schiphol, invited by Kaiser to have ‘first dibs on the gear’.

  The Cartel overlords would have first refusal on the load, getting in on the ground floor to pre-order however much they wanted. Kaiser knew that they had the money to pay for the amounts that were being negotiated. Crucially, in addition, their brothers-in-arms within the Cartel had the manpower and skills to get the consignment back to the UK and the muscle to distribute it once it was on the street. The pressure was on: soon the Colombians would be arriving, cash bags at the ready.

  Poncho said, ‘What you have got to realise is that to be invited to share in the load is a big privilege. That’s the beauty about being in the firm. You’ve got to be very lucky to have a contact who can get gear in. And basically, if you are chosen to take some of it to sell, it’s like being blessed: you are getting handed the chance to become very rich, very quickly. It’s kind of like winning a contract, but you don’t have to tender. You just have to be part of the bigger picture, someone who’s got a track record.’

  Kaiser also needed workers. The following day, Scarface called Poncho back home in Liverpool saying, ‘Send a couple of our lads over. There’s a bit of graft there for you – we need a hand.’

  Poncho and his cousin called Ronnie decided to go. But like so many aspects of organised crime, the reality was less Mafia and more Mickey Mouse. The Scousers could be unreliable and immature.

  Poncho said, ‘We were told not to fly, as that would make a fuss, bearing in mind that crime families were flying into the Dam to get served up their parcels. We were less important, so we headed south to catch the ferry. We stopped off in Aldershot to visit our mate in the army. We were surprised how mad and violent it was – we didn’t know army towns were that rough. Even for us, fresh off the front line, the whole place was like the O.K. Corral. There were army lads fighting the townies and pub windows going in every five minutes. I got into the madness straight away and bunked into a nightclub, pretending to be a dancer. We got pissed, then went back to the barracks to play cards with the squaddies.

  ‘We missed the boat twice. Finally we got on the crossing. Got pissed again. I shagged a girl in the bogs, who was on holiday with her mum and dad. But we’d got the wrong boat and all that. We ended up in a beach resort miles away from Amsterdam, popular with day-trippers and no one else.’

  Poncho called Scarface for a lift, but during the wait the rock ’n’ roll continued. Poncho got into a row over a game of pool with a gang of Scottish tourists. In revenge, he spiked one of them with an Army-issue morphine tablet that they’d been given by the squaddies back in Aldershot. Two hours later, a mysterious Dutchwoman turned up dressed in a beret, sunglasses and trench coat. She saved them from a potential hiding – the angry Scots had discovered that they’d been hustled and drugged.

  Poncho added, ‘The girl who came for us looked like someone out of the French Resistance. But she was beautiful – totally fit. It turned out that she was Scarface’s new wife. He’d married her before he’d left for South America and she’d waited for him.

  ‘On the way into Amsterdam in the car, I kept seeing billboards with a girl on them. I was thinking: “I know that face.” And it was her: the woman who picked us up, Scarface’s new bird, who was in the front passenger seat.

  ‘It was then that I realised that Scarface and Kaiser had hit the big time. They were already living like superstars.’

  The driver was a straight-goer employed as the firm’s courier. Kaiser had paid for a runaround Ford Fiesta XR2 to be modified to make it faster; it cost £8,000.

  Meanwhile, back in Liverpool, doorman Shaun Smith still refused to deal drugs – and still refused to join the Cartel. But he was extremely tough, so few would even think of messing with him. The drug lords respected him, even though he wouldn’t allow gear to be sold in any of the venues he protected. The bosses, ironically, saw his influence as helpful. Non-druggie gangsters like Shaun Smith and the old-school hard man Paul Burly acted as a counterbalance, keeping a check on the power of certain unruly wings of the Cartel that were now flaunting their wealth and coming into the firing line. In doing so, they were also alienating themselves from the general flow. If need be, the Cartel felt that Shaun and Paul could be manipulated as enforcers, each backed up with small armies of foot soldiers. However, neither would get involved with drug dealers or fight for them under any circumstances. By now, the Cartel had decided to try and become part of a conservative underworld establishment.

  Shaun joined forces with a well-known nightclub-owning family who’d built up a reputation for being good with their fists. Shaun had built up a company providing security to over-35 venues in the leisure industry all over the north-west. He was totally independent and didn’t need anyone else’s help. But the family asked Shaun to run and oversee their nightclubs because they couldn’t handle the headaches in the increasingly violent drug-ridden underworld. Shaun’s reputation provided a big boost to their empire. Soon he married into the family and became close to his brothers-in-law. His door-security company began to police lots of new nightspots.

  Shaun said, ‘I bought a pub in Kirkdale, which is like Beruit. The pub was called the Halfway House. I ended up running that for sixteen years while I built up my door business into one of the biggest around.’

  A couple of local kids called Sidious and Kaim used to come in and play on the one-armed bandit. Shaun had known their dad since he was 12. The dad played in his pub’s footy team. Shaun was even friendly with their grandmother. Though they looked harmless enough, the lads were third-generation Liverpool scallies who had been brought up in one of the city’s toughest areas. Kaim and Sidious’s mum and dad had never worked in their lives, preferring petty criminality and shoplifting. Some of Kaim and Sidious’s mates had mums and dads who hadn’t worked for 20 years either. And their mums and dads hadn’t worked before them. This new generation was wild and unsocialised, cut off from much of what mainstream society had to offer. They didn’t recognise hierarchies, or reputations, or old-school codes of conducts. They weren’t scared of anything. They were fearless and ruthless to the point of inspiring terror.

  Little did Shaun know that the mischievous rats who had once sneaked in the saloon bar door to play on the fruit machines and scavenge ciggies were growing into monsters. One day, they would turn on him. One day, they would turn on the Cartel. One day, they would threaten the existence of the biggest and most powerful crime machine that the UK had ever been burdened with. One day, they would even threaten the police with an unprecedented display of shock and awe.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE PARCEL

  1989

  WHEN THE GANG linked up, it was straight down to business. When he arrived in the Dam, Poncho hadn’t seen Scarface for a couple of years – he looked older and more distinguished. He had a ‘sailorish air’ about him, according to his nephew.

  Poncho said, ‘He’d lost his youthful look, even though he was only 29ish, 30ish.

  ‘Outside the safehouse, there was a white van with a window at the back. There was a guy with a ponytail, loading up oversized cardboard boxes containing the gear – each one was about the size of a washing machine box and contained one hundred and twenty kilos of cocaine.

  ‘Kaiser was there with us, overseeing. He was cautious – it
was his idea to load the van up. He wanted to keep moving the gear around and had lined up a second safehouse. I don’t think he fully trusted the German silent partners. The boxes were heavy and awkward, and that’s why it needed me and the ponytail guy to load them up.

  ‘Scarface then drove me and Ronnie to the second safehouse, where security was much tighter. Only us three would know about it – because we were family. He told us to not even tell Kaiser – not out of disrespect. That’s just professional – everything is on a need-to-know basis. Everything is compartmentalised, in case someone gets nicked. Kaiser had organised the safehouse, in terms of paying someone and getting a scout etc., but he’d left the final choice of location to Scarface – so that even he wouldn’t know where it was.

  ‘When we got there, Scarface told us to put the gear in a loft, which had a pull-down ladder, and then we would meet him in a bar round the corner.’

  Before Scarface got off, he opened one of the cardboard parcels and pulled out a ‘box’ – the trade name for a kilo of cocaine. He threw it to Poncho and said, ‘We’ve made it, kidder – that’s yours.’

  But Poncho threw it back and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to do that – we’re family and I’m not expecting anything. It’s your graft.’

  Scarface told Poncho to bury the kilo for a rainy day. If he were to get it back to Liverpool, then cut it up and sell it in bits, it would be worth around £100,000. But Poncho knocked it back, feeling embarrassed. He knew he’d make a lot of money in the Dam anyway.

  He added, ‘But when we got to the bar, he gave me a line anyway. It was 100 per cent pure and mind-blowing. I was stuck to the chair, it was that powerful.’

  On his second day in Amsterdam, Poncho was given the job of liaising with the Colombians, who were now in Amsterdam. Gradually, as Scarface and Kaiser arranged shipments back to Liverpool, the money would start flowing back to them. Poncho’s job was to ferry repayments back to the Colombians.

  But the majority of the revenue was pure profit. A few days later, Kaiser bought a brand-new Ferrari Testarossa for more than one hundred grand in cash. The gang began washing its money through the exchange bureaus near Dam Square in the city centre. Poncho took the money in bags containing tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of pounds in cash and changed it into high-denomination guilders.

  Poncho said, ‘One day I spotted some Moroccan street rats who’d tried to have me off when I’d first arrived in Amsterdam. Scarface jumped out of the Ferrari and put a hammer in the main guy’s head – right there, in the middle of Dam Square, in broad daylight. The message was: no one is going to fuck with us. He was fearless.’

  Scarface also splashed out on a Volvo 750 Turbo and a Mercedes SLK. In a bid to conceal their illegal income, Kaiser and Scarface invested in front companies. The most successful was a commodities trader that sold computers to Russia. The legitimate businessmen involved soon took a shine to Kaiser and Scarface – and their cash pile – and invited them to invest in other ventures. Ironically, they started to make lots of money legally. It seemed that crime paid, at least for now.

  Meanwhile, the profits from the sale of the cocaine began to roll in. On average, each pure, uncut kilo was sold for £20,000. The total turnover was approximately £20 million, out of which Kaiser and Scarface drew a first tranche of ‘wages’ totalling £3 million each. The Colombians were given £5 million for the cocaine. Poncho didn’t know what happened to the other £9 million but strongly believes it went to several ‘family’ members directly connected to the two principals and high-up members of the Cartel.

  Poncho: ‘The Dutch aristocrat was given enough to pay off his debts, but the operational costs of the boat and the crew were minimal compared with what the main men got. Basically, between Scarface and Kaiser, and other direct members of the family, their cut was £15 million. That was just from wholesale revenue.

  ‘But one day, Scarface told me that the total amount generated by the inner circle – that included them, plus several family players, plus several Cartel bosses – was nearer £50 million. There was the initial £20 million generated by wholesale transactions alone, which didn’t take into account the revenue made by the next layer of distributors, which also formed part of the inner circle. Then a handful of senior Cartel members back in Liverpool, who were the high-ranking middlemen, made £30 million by cutting the 1,000 kilos into, say, 2,000 kilos and then selling them on.’

  Following on again, there were huge multiples made by the lower distributors, who cut the drugs with adulterants up to six to eight times, retailed in street weights known as halves, quarters and ounces.

  Poncho said, ‘In the first tier, wholesale deals, they were very flexible about price. One kilo on its own was £28,000. If you were buying four or five kilos, it was £25,000. They would never go below, say £18,000. If you were buying 20 kilos – it’s £19,500. It’s not like corporate business – it’s informal and a bit mysterious, and it’s not uniform. For instance, you can get a good deal if you are mates with us or you have a good reputation in the underworld. If you’ve got your own transport, a £25,000 kilo will come down to £20,000, just like that.’

  Not long after the parcel had landed, the German backers were forced out of the deal. They had expected £25 million of the profits from the first- and second-tier sales. But they were paid off with between one and two million quid’s worth of cocaine, according to Poncho, and £100,000 in cash. The Germans were furious, but there was little they could do because they feared the growing power of the wider Cartel. The Germans swallowed the deal after they were placated by other members of the Cartel. If they could supply the Cartel with a new drug called Ecstasy, they would be compensated with a bigger share of the profits. Rationally, they went along with the plan and did not take revenge on Kaiser or Scarface.

  In time, Ecstasy proved very profitable and the Germans grew very rich, very quickly. A few months after they had done their first big E deal, the Germans bought a luxury yacht and celebrated their fortune by throwing a party. Partly out of jealousy, Kaiser gatecrashed the event but was snubbed by one of the Germans. Kaiser picked him up and threw him in a bin – literally.

  ‘Don’t you dare ever blank me,’ Kaiser bawled at the man, who’d been pushed into a container on the deck; ‘I don’t care how much money you’ve got.’

  The superload firmly established the Cartel in Amsterdam. Other deals started moving Poncho’s way. Moving between different apartments and hotels, Poncho began ‘freelancing’ on the side, supplying two- or three-kilo parcels to small independent smugglers from Liverpool, who in turn distributed to Bradford, Leeds and Birmingham.

  The economics were simple. ‘I sold them a kilo for £25,000,’ said Poncho, ‘and on top of that, the buyers paid a mule £3,000 to get it into the UK. So, by the time it got back to Liverpool each kilo cost £28,000. Each was cut into 36 ounces of powdered and crack cocaine. Each ounce was then sold on at £1,250 an ounce in Liverpool and £1,500 to out of town.

  ‘But it was too strong what we had – it was like putty. Suddenly, I was getting pestered by a lot of the Liverpool dealers to serve them up. But you had to be careful because of the politics. If there was a drought then the price went up to £50,000 a kilo.’

  Meanwhile, at the top, Scarface began smuggling drugs to Russia.

  Poncho said, ‘He’d already set up a business selling second-hand computers, cigarettes and machinery parts to ex-Soviet Union contacts. So they just started to stash coke in the containers. Then he started smuggling weed in from Morocco and selling it to the highest bidder in the Dam, no matter where they were from. It was a case of, “We don’t need the UK any more.” They started to sell drugs all over Europe.’

  In the winter of 1989, a mid-ranking dealer from Liverpool called Curtis Warren was hanging around in Amsterdam. Warren would go on to be the richest criminal that has ever been caught in British history.

  The authorities could never work out how he got his break into
the big time. Warren had got a big leg up from the Banker and Fred the Rat, whom he worked for. They had given him some excellent drug contacts. But Curtis was ambitious. He wanted a separate channel so he could stand on his own two feet. He liked working with the Banker; they’d become close. But he didn’t want to be Fred the Rat’s bitch all his life. Warren had gone to Amsterdam to make a change.

  Poncho revealed how Kaiser and Scarface introduced Curtis to the Colombians, the brothers who had supplied them with the 1,000-kilo load.

  Poncho said, ‘Curtis was only doing bits on his own. He was doing some reasonably big stuff with the two Mr Bigs he was in with. But he hadn’t landed a big parcel as yet.

  ‘He met a doorman in Amsterdam who could get him a few kilos here and there, which he was doing on the side for himself. He was ambitious to do bigger deals but couldn’t get an intro to the South Americans we knew. Then one day we took him to a party in Amsterdam and he met Lucio’s brother. Lucio was the top man in Colombia who supplied us. Then Curtis started doing stuff with them. They did a couple of little ones and then they tried to do a big one.

  ‘We had a little competition going between Curtis and our kid. To be honest, we thought Curtis was a show-off. He even took Lucio’s little brother back to Toxteth, a mad thing to do. Riding up and down Granby with him, showing off.

  ‘Curtis was buying big cars while our kid stayed abroad well out of the way.’

  Curtis had missed the point, according to Poncho. Instead of looking inwards and sending cocaine back to Liverpool, the Cartel was now looking outward and exporting to other, ex-party countries. They were the markets of the future, where profits were high and the risk of getting caught was low. Meanwhile, Curtis was focussed on only smuggling drugs back to the UK, where he enjoyed the familiarity of operations and the status afforded to him by the criminal hierarchy there.