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

by Graham Johnson

  Eventually Curtis was given a full-time contact within the Cali Cartel. He was a newly arrived ‘salesman’ called Mario Halley, who smuggled his money back to South America by exporting new BMW cars there. At around this time, Curtis’s pal Colin Smith was no more than a preferred distributor. He was given first dibs on Warren’s consignments, taking ten kilos a time for local distribution in south Liverpool. Scarface and Kaiser retained their more senior contacts in the Cali Cartel.

  However, Curtis Warren’s excesses had not gone unnoticed. The police might have been losing the war on drugs, but one officer was determined to revolutionise the way they fought. In 1989, the Analyst was coming up through the ranks.

  The Analyst said, ‘Some of the older officers didn’t understand what was going on. But drugs was something that interested me. I’d gone into the world of being a detective in 1989 and decided that this was the world I wanted to be in. I enjoyed the different kinds of policing. There was the proactive and the reactive. The reactive was all about working the clues. The proactive was going out to make our own clues and catching the baddies that way. As far as career progression in the police goes, you do your burglaries, and then you do your robberies, and then you’re on to the drugs. That’s where I was now. Ironically, that progression mirrored the career path of someone like Curtis Warren, who had gone from being a street thief to being an importer.

  ‘I started to lean towards a more progressive approach. Proactive policing is much better. I started to have much more success with a good team of the right people than I would have had with a bigger reactive team that just plodded on.’

  CHAPTER 16

  LUCIO

  1990

  PONCHO SOON BECAME a crucial link between the Cartel and the Colombians in Holland, a kind of smugglers’ mobile Mr Fixit. One day Lucio introduced Poncho to a low-ranking female Cali trafficker who’d lost track of a container containing 20 kilos of coke in Amsterdam port. Poncho had grown up breaking into containers around Liverpool port – he was considered an expert at retrieving goods.

  Poncho said, ‘We were established by then. There were 20 firms in the Dam: Triads, Yardies, Russian mafia, Albanians, Moroccans, Turks, you name it. But we were now considered the main boys, because we had all the gear. With that status came other things. We had a little team who knew how to solve problems, and the Colombians respected that.

  ‘We were Scousers. We weren’t going to sit around Amsterdam and wait for the work to come to us. We were competing with firms from all over the world, so we wanted to show that we were up for anything, to make sure that everyone came to us. We never stood still. We didn’t want the Colombians drifting off to become mates with anyone else. So we treated them well, just like they’d treated Scarface and Kaiser well on their farms.

  ‘For instance, we had a Dutch lad on the firm who was a creeper – an expert burglar. I got him to break into the port, over the wall, but on the first go he couldn’t find the container.

  ‘We also knew a lad whose dad worked as a crane driver. We gave him the tracking number of the container, and a few days later he said that he’d found it. But the bad news was that it wasn’t near the outer wall, where we could have broken it – it was being stored in a special compound near the harbour area, deep inside.’

  Poncho didn’t want to lose face and pull out – it was important that the Colombians respected the Cartel for being game. But he faced two problems. First of all, there was a risk that the whole thing was a police trap. Had the container been moved to a secure area because Customs were suspicious? Were they waiting to pounce when the owners came to collect their merchandise? The second problem was simpler: how could he get into the secure area?

  Poncho said, ‘I’d been robbing freight out of Liverpool port since I was a kid. We used to call containers “loadies”. The big lorries used to park up near Chinatown. We used to cut the bolts and clean them out of stuff. But sometimes they were police set-ups. So you had to be careful.

  ‘There’s a simple test to find out whether the container has been opened and rummaged in by Customs or whether there’s a policeman waiting inside. Each container has a seal on it – a loop-shaped piece of aluminium. If it’s a new seal, then it’s obviously shiny and clean and you know someone has broken it the day before. But if it’s an old, unbroken seal, you can rub your finger on it and it will taste of sea salt and grime and diesel – because it’s been in the hold of a big fuck-off ship for months.

  ‘We sent the creeper back into Amsterdam port to do the test on the container in the secure area and it came back salty – the container was safe. No one had broken the seal. It was safe to go.’

  That night Poncho got his extraction team together: several Cartel foot soldiers armed to the teeth and wearing balaclavas. The plan was to covertly extract the cocaine. If they got rumbled, Plan B was to simply blast their way out, SAS-style.

  Poncho said, ‘We were waiting in the van ready for the go – it was tense. If we got caught, it was 20 years in jail, so we weren’t going to get caught – the police were getting shot and we were off if necessary.

  ‘But as we were getting into the zone, suddenly a gang of five or six Colombians came into view. We knew they were Colombians because they were dressed in white coats and mad shirts, even though it was fucking freezing.

  ‘Alarm bells began to ring: they were walking right up to the gate and looking around and we knew they were going to crash the place – that’s how they do it, they don’t give a fuck.

  ‘We realised that the woman in charge had double-crossed us and played us off against another gang. So we stood down and fucked the job off.

  ‘But it didn’t damage our relationship. That’s what you’ve got to do: you’ve got to make sure everyone knows that you can do anything and you’ve got the arse if necessary. That’s how it is: it’s a rough-and-tumble game and them’s the breaks.

  ‘When Lucio found out, he was grateful to us for just showing we were loyal. Lucio kept supplying us with gear.’

  The Cartel settled down in Amsterdam to a life of Ancient Roman-style pleasure. Poncho spent his days having sex with high-class hookers on a sun lounger next to a sunken pool underneath an upmarket brothel. The girls cost 3,000 guilders a time. Poncho said, ‘They were better than the Page 3 girls in The Sun. We were snorting cocaine off their arses and all that.’

  Scarface’s tastes were more eclectic. He liked Enya, ethnic music and ambient house. Meetings took place against a background of New Age meditation music. Afternoons were spent browsing the galleries in the artisan Jordaan quarter. One day he bought eight New Age paintings for 250,000 guilders. Weekends were spent ice skating and water skiing. Kaiser was a movie buff who liked going to the cinema and listening to Led Zeppelin on his state-of-the-art hi-fi.

  Back in Britain, the conditions were right again for market innovation. For the first time in a generation, there was a collision between popular culture and drug use. Drugs went mainstream across the UK. The phenomenon was called rave or dance. Once again, the Cartel was able to lift itself to a higher level by piggybacking on the latest trend.

  Helped along by Scarface and Kaiser’s Colombian connection, cocaine prevalence in Britain and Liverpool rose sharply. For the first time, cocaine had become socially acceptable within the working classes. The Cartel began investing in dance clubs. New licensing laws allowed clubs to open later.

  Economic improvement stimulated demand. With the help of Tory minister Michael Heseltine’s regeneration programme, parts of Liverpool were starting to recover from the early ’80s bust. Money flowed in. The Albert Dock complex, a London-style riverside development, was up and running. The Beatles museum opened. Two years earlier, ITV’s This Morning, hosted by Richard and Judy, began broadcasting from the banks of the Mersey. Wasteland was being turned into something more reasonable.

  Punters at raves and dance clubs took ‘cocktails’ of drugs. No longer did they see themselves as either pot-smokers or Class A users. They
were both. Dealers boasted of selling between 100 and 1,000 Ecstasy tablets per night.

  The Analyst said, ‘So you’ve got a whole new marketplace that has suddenly been created. The net effect for drug dealers was that you were increasing your number of consumers. Cocaine had pushed the niche market for heroin and cannabis wider. Alongside that, the distribution networks were becoming wider because they could bring cocaine from South America. The relationships are starting to build, as Liverpool criminals become established in Europe. So they’re realising it’s not just Pakistan and Afghanistan. So you’ve got another conduit of cocaine going into Amsterdam, where our criminals are becoming established. By their nature, some of our Merseyside criminals were quite forceful in establishing their territory and their position in the hierarchy.

  ‘Your Liverpool criminal has a reputation, going back to the ’70s: the low-level jokes about the wheels disappearing off your car. But in reality they were good at moving in on crime and taking it over, even in places abroad.

  ‘So in Liverpool there was a multi level of criminality starting to establish itself, depending on market forces and consumers: the bottom line is that society had the money to pay for it.’

  The Analyst noticed that there were groups, such as those behind Operation Swagger, bringing in drugs from everywhere. Ecstasy that wasn’t made locally was being trucked in from Holland. Heroin flooded in from North Africa and Turkey. Cannabis was coming across from Spain, cocaine from South Africa and Colombia via the Dam.

  For the Analyst it was the first time that the shape and structure of the Cartel became apparent. The more successful members were those with a number of elements to their business. By now, Colin Smith was Warren’s deputy. Colin Smith and Curtis Warren evolved into CEO-type figures. But there was room enough for many like them within the Cartel. The Analyst noticed that the newcomers were learning the trade from the people who had set up the networks in the 1970s and ’80s.

  The Analyst said, ‘It’s easier to develop an existing supply chain and enhance a going concern than to start a drugs network from scratch. No one started on their own without any historical associates such as Thomas Comerford.

  ‘The Banker is an example. Curtis was in a relationship with his daughter, so is that how he started to build up? I don’t know whether the Banker was a hands-on drug dealer. But the police recovered a lot of money from him, so how did he get his hands on that?

  ‘The more established ones like him got into the money laundering and financing. But how do they get to where they are? There had to be that progression.’

  The Cartel began to adopt a hierarchy.

  The Analyst said, ‘It’s like the police, which has its own hierarchical structure with ranks and roles. You could break it down into an organisational chart that shows you’ve got your CEOs at the top. You’ve got your MDs, who meet with similar MDs from supplier crime groups and talk about the wider implication of drug importation: how do we get the commodities across?

  ‘So we now need a distribution network below them. How do we break that down? How’s it going to get from Colombia to the coast in Venezuela? Once it gets to the coast, how’s it going to be hidden in the ship? Lead ingots or welded into the superstructure? Or is it going to be a parcel, hidden in the ship itself? We will weld it in to a plated area on the ship, because no one will find it in its own partition.

  ‘So you need managers below the MDs to organise these options. OK. So we decide we will fly the welder out to South America to build the compartment on the ship. Or in some cases, they will have it first built in the UK and fitted here too. So, if they knew, for instance, that a ship they are using is going to be in the UK a few weeks before it’s going back to Venezuela, then they would have a compartment built here and fit it while it’s here in the UK, then fly the welder out to make sure that it’s fitted correctly and it’s finished.

  ‘So below the managers you need professionals and tradesmen to do these jobs, and below them the runners and fixers, who are keeping it ticking all over.

  ‘The hierarchy rapidly starts to embrace a lot of people.’

  Specialist marine engineers and underwater welders were approached by the Cartel. They were flown out to Colombia and Venezuela to cut secret compartments into the hulls of ships. One specialist contractor even helped build an unmanned submersible unit that could be bolted onto the outside of a ship or towed underwater.

  The Analyst said, ‘It’s incredibly long-term planning. “If that ship comes in every two months, then we will bring 1,000 kilos every two months rather than take more risks when we bring in 200 kilos every week.” That’s the kinds of decisions they started to make. They realised that greater planning and sophistication leads to larger quantities, which in turn meant you’re in a better position to negotiate with the Colombians.’

  The Analyst found out that some members of the Cartel were buying for as low as £9,000 a kilo in Colombia and selling in Liverpool at £34,000 a kilo, wholesale. So that would generate a profit of £25,000. However, some dealers were selling it cheaper into the ‘general market’ – in Amsterdam or to cut-price distributors in Liverpool – at £17,000 a kilo. Even though this was selling at half price, it was done to boost high-volume sales or to reward preferred customers or to undermine rival independent dealers. The Cartel liked to push smaller wholesalers out by undercutting them. The reduced selling price meant lower profits: buying for £9,000 and selling for £17,000 left a profit of £8,000 per kilo, but such was the nature of the drug market.

  The Analyst said, ‘When it’s sold at £34,000 a kilo, that’s even before the adulteration process has started. Of course, you have got to pay people along the way. But you are quadrupling your profits without even being involved in distribution.

  ‘In anticipation of the arrival of the cocaine, you will contact the wholesalers – the drugs equivalent of a firm like Costco – and say to them that the commodity is coming in and it will be batched in 200-kilo batches. You ask them: “Do you want to put your name to ten kilos of these?” So people do.

  ‘What did happen was that some wholesalers were given those 200 kilos on tick and then given a month to pay it back. At £34,000 a kilo you’d have to pay back £7.8 million. That came back in staged payments during the following month, which is easier than someone lumping a big load of cash back.’

  The pressure on the wholesaler to pay back the debt was eased by the ‘bashing’ process, which took place below him in his distribution network. One kilo became three. If they sold the weaker kilos on at £34,000, there was a clear profit of £68,000 on their original kilo. Multiplied 200 times, the inundation of cash allowed Cartel wholesalers to draw down their debt quickly. What started as 80 per cent pure cocaine ended up at 20 per cent by the time it was cut and bagged into ounces.

  CHAPTER 17

  REPRISE

  1990

  LIKE ALL CRIMINAL organisations, the Cartel needed an expression of power at street level. No matter how big the godfathers became, they had to be seen to be ‘kings of the patch’. Force and violence needed to be projected downwards to maintain the hierarchy to make sure that while they were busy abroad no one took liberties at home. Twenty years later, that power was put in the hands of teenage street gangs. But in the 1990s, when it all began, the job fell to nightclub security. In the long term, the practice turned out to be a lot less beneficial to the godfathers than they had expected.

  But for now, their use to the Cartel was not only based on blood-curdling violence: door security firms were also excellent distribution systems. Their tentacles reached deep into the nightclubs in which the new drugs were sold: door security provided hundreds of ready-made point-of-sale outlets that were secure and highly mobile.

  For many bouncers, the early days on the doors were a rite of passage into a previously unexplored universe of organised crime. In turn, the experience acted as a bridge between a closed, martial world and the Technicolor decadence of ’90s Britain. The trip was all the more
crazed because the rise of the foot soldier had collided with the rave phenomenon. Ecstasy culture was in full swing. Millions of ordinary people were getting off their heads. A drug-fuelled tectonic shift in attitudes and lifestyles was underway for an entire generation. Barriers were coming down and prejudices were melting away in the sweaty hedonism of underground clubs springing up all over the country. However, not all faces were smiley ones. In the background of the loved-up generation, sinister criminal forces were manoeuvring into position to take advantage of the shift in the new underworld order.

  Almost overnight, the security firms that provided doormen to police the exploding club culture became the building blocks at the foot of the Cartel. Old-style mobs bonded by family ties and heavily involved in relational crime, whose power bases had been built on the gangland manors they ruled, were jostled out of position. The message was clear: ‘You might control the importation, but we control the distribution: the Cartel needs us.’

  Security firms rushed to fill the vacuum. As discrete concentrations of massive firepower, often consisting of 50 or more steroid-fuelled hard men, they were an unprecedented force to be reckoned with. Though doormen were essentially mercenaries who were hired by the week or month, their loyalty to the firm that employed them often transcended the normal rules of work. A unique, regimental-style group bonding was their secret weapon. The unbreakable relationships were based on comradeship and competition.

  Another key factor was ‘back-up’. Doormen often felt invincible because they knew they could call on each other to fight as a united front. A doorman would often fight (to the death on some occasions) in a dispute that didn’t involve him directly or bring him any tangible gain. The reason was simple: because he knew that one day, he or his family might need to rely on his colleagues to fight for him in return.