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

by Graham Johnson

  The ascension of the security firm was also timed nicely to coincide with society’s new gun culture. For the first time in criminal history, a large number of villains had access to cheap firearms flooding in from places like Eastern Europe. Tokarev handguns, AK-47s, MAC-10s and Mini ERO 9-mm sub-machine pistols became near standard-issue weapons on the street, to those in the know. They were often smuggled into the UK by a shady network of Balkan dealers dubbed the Croatian Connection.

  Security firms quickly got armed to the teeth, adding to their deadly repertoire with weapons of choice such as machetes, samurai swords and meat cleavers. Opponents were given no quarter.

  With the new underworld warriors came new battle rituals and tactics. The most bizarre was the ‘call-out’. In response to a threat, usually a dispute with a rival firm, the security boss would ‘call out’ his bouncers in a massive show of force. Some call-outs were nothing more than pumped-up muscle-flexing on a grand scale, the gangland equivalent of a military parade. The security firm would march through clubland in a convoy of cars and 4 × 4 jeeps, before alighting en masse and snaking like an army through a no-man’s-land of pubs and clubs, looking for confrontation. The message was clear: ‘My troops are ready for battle if need be.’ The Cartel bosses had not banked on such an axis of power, one that they suddenly realised could, if need be, overthrow them, in the underworld equivalent of a military coup. Unnaturally and against the grain, power was moving down the hierarchy from the apex to the base.

  Other call-outs were sudden calls to arms, in which a gang of doormen were brought together quickly by pager and mobile phone for a sudden attack using their favourite tactic: overwhelming firepower. The old guard was caught off balance by this new phenomenon. Like special forces on a conventional battlefield, door teams were able to cut swathes through their enemy’s ranks with ease.

  Their battles for power and influence were bankrolled by drugs profits earned under the motto: ‘Whoever controls the door on a club controls what goes into that club and what gets sold inside.’ Basically, door teams were the new gatekeepers of the Ecstasy trade. If a dealer wanted to sell pills at a rave, he would more often than not have to give the doormen a piece of the action for the privilege.

  This happened especially when confronted by the growing number of powerful black gangs that were emerging from Liverpool’s Toxteth ghetto and Manchester’s Moss Side. They were mean-looking mobs that were equally determined to extract their tribute from the gold-rush dance floors and would not allow anyone to stand in their way. For the first time, black villains started to form security companies and take doors from predominantly white gangs. The conflict led to racial tensions within the Cartel, the success of which hitherto had been built on an easy-going alliance between middle-aged white villains and young black drug dealers.

  Some lower- and middle-ranking members of the Cartel recognised the new power of security firms and were determined to build bridges between the importation arms and distributor doormen. One such face included Stan Carnall, a haulage contractor who sometimes acted as a go-between between the bosses and major-league Colombian suppliers such as Lucio. Carnall was part of a Cartel cell run by Curtis Warren. Carnall had grown rich providing Warren’s transport. He was also linked to nightclubs and door firms. The power and money that he made available to his doormen allowed some of them to leapfrog to the top of the league.

  The downside was that doormen were hotheads who turned to violence for little or no reason. For instance, they often fought each other to win security contracts, and the violence disrupted drug sales and drew attention from the police. Cartel bosses who worked together – the whole reason for having a Cartel was to form a loose alliance of groups with shared interests and goals – found themselves dragged into disputes over wide-ranging differences because of the doormen they indulged. The murder rate was alarmingly high.

  Shaun Smith refused to sell drugs in the nightclubs he worked in, but he started getting dragged into call-outs. He said, ‘It was basically a show of force, a display of strength and weapons and how far you were prepared to go. Some people weren’t getting paid, but they went along because you worked for a company or you were loyal to your mates. It signalled the start of a new era, and if you could control loads of doormen, then you could get a lot of power.

  ‘Sometimes the call-outs were against gangsters who’d been involved in trouble in a club. But the packs of doormen would have no respect for reputation or position. They’d just dish it out. Up until then, these armed robbers and whatnot had ruled places, but that changed and it was a kind of land-grab and the old fellers lost.’

  A nightclub called Quadrant Park in Bootle, one of the first superclubs to open up in Liverpool, became a big market for Ecstasy tablets. More than 2,000-plus people enjoyed an all-night entertainment licence until 8 a.m. But the atmosphere was sometimes dark: people were robbed, several girls claimed that they were sexually assaulted or raped, and a young lad died there. However, for most, the crowd was a family, elevated to cult status. They went there, swallowed their Es, and forgot all about the real world outside the Quad’s four walls.

  Punters recalled some girls not being able to remember having sex, let alone who with or with how many men. Young men didn’t dance: they ran on the spot and gurned their faces in ecstasy. Some remembered urinating in their pants. Teams of street thieves known as ‘have-offs’ roamed the dance floor stealing expensive coats. The heat and sweat made wearing breathable Gore-tex Berghaus jackets practical and fashionable: a trend that would stay with Liverpool’s street gangs for 20 years. Only the bright colours would change. By 2005, teenagers wore nothing but black. But back in the early 1990s, these were the consumers who would pay for the Cartel’s next big expansion. With this in mind, the drug dealers were forced to bring the doormen under the umbrella. They became part of the networks, their entry a shrewd political move to keep control.

  CHAPTER 18

  DANCE

  1991

  BY 1991, THE Cartel was raking in hundreds of millions in windfall profits from dance drugs, cocaine and the old staples of heroin and cannabis. The big question was where to invest the money. The answer was staring them in the face: Britain’s new and burgeoning underclass.

  Despite the pockets of synthetic prosperity in the local economy that were helping to boost the Cartel, the wider picture was bleak. In 1991, the British economy as a whole slumped into recession, having shrunk by nearly 4 per cent in the previous quarter. The early 1990s recession officially became the longest in Britain since the Great Depression some 60 years earlier. Unemployment in Britain rose from 1,600,000 to nearly 3,000,000 between April 1990 and February 1993. The unforeseen consequences were devastating. A second generation found themselves jobless. With the trade unions broken, working-class communities found themselves defenceless, even more vulnerable than they had been a decade earlier. A new underclass was born, cut off from the rest of society. For the first time, law-abiding citizens who would have never thought of dealing drugs got involved. As disaster capitalists, the Cartel saw another opportunity. The Cartel was only too happy to fund and franchise these start-ups in the poorest communities, a kind of underworld Dragons’ Den. Affiliated drug gangs began to spread out across suburbia and further afield into towns and villages.

  In 1990, a groundworks firm owned by a wide-boy builder called Frank Smith collapsed during the property slump. Frank lost all of his money and his health declined. In desperation, he decided to go into the drug-dealing business.

  At first, Frank started growing skunk cannabis in his house in Thatto Heath, St Helens, with his mates. His punters included lads from the Wirral with loose connections to the Cartel. After a tip-off that his house was about to be raided, Frank joined thousands of jobless grafters and underclass entrepreneurs in the 1990s black economy of choice. He got into smuggling tobacco from the continent.

  But the foot crossings to Calais were tedious and often unprofitable. During the long coach rid
es and night-time ferry crossings, he started to read up on how to make synthetic drugs, such as speed and MDMA. What resulted was a kind of narcotics version of The Full Monty. But instead of becoming strippers, the hapless doleites became industrial manufacturers of amphetamines. The venture started off as a kind of amateurish chemistry set, a comedic cottage industry. When the Cartel muscled in, it ended in a nightmare for everyone involved.

  Meanwhile in 1991, Kaiser and Scarface landed several big loads and grew richer. Keen to expand further, they returned to Liverpool to check out the burgeoning rave scene, with a view to playing the market.

  Poncho said, ‘Bars were opening at a fast rate. The criminal element seemed to rise. There was a crossover between the legit business and the drugs side like I’d never seen.

  ‘Scarface and Kaiser came back. They got loved up in the whole acid house thing. They started seeing new birds, building new relationships with other underworld people. In the end, like all the other villains, they bought a nightclub.’

  On returning to the UK for a break from Amsterdam, Poncho realised that it was now just as profitable to sell cocaine by the gram in the UK as it was to smuggle it by the kilo across borders. The sheer number of new consumers had flipped the market: well, if you were a middle-ranking ‘worker’ anyway. Poncho wanted to run his own operation. Rave culture had injected cocaine into consumer culture. His younger brother, a business student called Hector, had set up a discreet ‘round’ delivering gram wraps to posh girls, footballers and glamour models in the north-west.

  Hector said, ‘I started off by buying an ounce and giving each of the lads who sold for me seven grams each, which they’d sell on for £100 each. Then it suddenly mushroomed because cocaine went mainstream. Acid house brought drug culture to middle-class people and they wanted Class A’s – and they had lots of money.

  ‘The upshot was that I got used to partying and shagging. I was making £3,000 a week in between snorting and fucking the girls I was selling to outside in the car.

  ‘Then we started selling to people all over the country – all we had to do was meet them at service stations in Knutsford, Sandbach and Keele. I remember driving back from Birmingham with 26 ounces of coke in the boot and £30,000 in cash. But I was more interested in getting back to a bar called Kirklands for last orders. When you’re grafting, you have a sixth sense that you’re not going to get caught: it felt comfortable even though I was doing 130 mph on the motorway.’

  The combined effect of dance and the second recession saw the crossover between Class A drugs and a greater number of working-class people who wouldn’t have previously been involved with them. The Cartel’s organisation got more complex. For the first time, the police encountered crime groups with 100 people involved in distribution alone.

  Demarcation between jobs and responsibilities became more defined. The Cartel appointed specific negotiators and transport managers in the UK.

  The Analyst said, ‘There was an incident where someone flew out to South Africa, so we knew that they were expanding. They developed protocols such as “green copy”, which is the paperwork relating to a police raid: that would be an insurance policy to prove that the police had intercepted a load. So if you’d taken a consignment on credit and it got confiscated by police, then if you could show the bosses the “green copy” then you had a good excuse. Business got rationalised.

  ‘They started to learn from mistakes. For instance, if a load went down, there was a steward’s inquiry into what happened and what weaknesses there were in the organisation. It was a second criminal’s gold rush, in which they were clamouring to make their fortune in a very lucrative market, but at the same time they wanted to manage the risks.’

  As the Analyst looked on, he realised that in some ways the police were struggling to catch up. The drugs squad was still insular to the force and had few powers outside Merseyside, never mind abroad. The theory was that the Regional Crime Squad would pick up villains who went outside the city. The traditional methods relied on reactive policing, which was all about ‘working the clues’. Officers were stuck in a time warp in which crimes had to have a deposition site with evidence that could be followed through with an evidential investigation.

  The Analyst said, ‘It was a one-dimensional approach as opposed to the multi-dimensional approach we have today. So we had a situation by the end of the 1980s where officers would have a choice. Do they investigate the armed robbery, the tie-up, the aggravated burglary? Or do they investigate the travelling networks? It was almost “spin a coin” as to which was causing the most harm. Of course they would go after the aggravated burglaries because there was an immediate, tangible threat, but there was this firestorm that the travelling networks were causing.

  ‘The dealers were making associations in obscure places like Whitehaven in Cumbria and then sending drugs up there to sell in towns. They were making hostile takeovers in all different parts of the country. And we were watching this, thinking: “What is going to be our response? We’ve got to get it right.”’

  CHAPTER 19

  CURTIS

  1992

  BUT ALL WAS not lost. BANG! Door goes in. The dreaded ‘Knock’ – the term used by Customs and Excise for a raid. In early 1992, the authorities struck the first major blow against the Cartel. Curtis Warren and 27 other members of his outfit were arrested in connection with a 1,000-kilo shipment of cocaine. His de facto deputy and preferred distributor Colin ‘King Cocaine’ Smith was also captured. For the first time in a decade, the authorities had a chance to destroy the Cartel once and for all.

  But all was not won either. By now, the Cartel, if not Warren’s own bit of it, was operating a terrorist-style cell system. If one cell got taken out, theoretically the others could keep on going. One member of the Cartel had copied the idea from the IRA. The gangster was effectively Warren’s boss – or at least allowed him to operate in Liverpool in return for old-fashioned-style tribute. The secretive villain took a share of the profits in return for strategic protection of Warren’s cell within the Cartel. It was known that this man had close links with Dublin gangsters and the IRA.

  In Amsterdam, Kaiser and Scarface were living proof that the cell system worked. They had been doing 1,000-kilo loads long before Curtis Warren, and carried on doing them long after. They have never been caught.

  Poncho said, ‘Curtis would not have got the leap into the big time if it wasn’t for those two. When Curtis got nicked in 1992, the police and Customs found photographs of Curtis together with Kaiser and Scarface at a boxing match in Los Angeles. They were always flying off round the world, trying to outdo each other. The police showed Curtis the picture and said to Curtis: “We know these two are European overlords, but we don’t know who they are. Tell us.” They were trying to get Curtis to grass on Kaiser and Scarface. Of course, he didn’t – he was staunch. But the point was that the police and Customs knew there were people even higher than Curtis and they wanted them.

  ‘They knew that the window was only going to open for a few months, that they had a limited amount of time to bust everyone before the barriers went up and everyone outside Curtis’s crew laid low.

  ‘They had heard about Scarface and Kaiser and had vague descriptions but had never ID’d them properly. The police actually thought they were from Holland or Spain: they didn’t even realise they were British. That’s how below-the-radar Kaiser and Scarface had become.’

  Kaiser and Scarface had learned three basic lessons to stay ahead of the law.

  Stay away from the Cartel’s HQ in Liverpool.

  Deal drugs remotely.

  Do what you say. If you say that you’re not going to be hands-on, don’t go near the gear. If you say that you’re going to stay straight, don’t party. If you say that you’re not going to show out, do exactly that. Stay low-key.

  Curtis Warren’s problem was that he hadn’t practised what he preached. Curtis told his underlings that he never showed out. But he could be irrational and c
ontradictory, according to Poncho. He refused to party, telling the lads that he was saving his money. He refused to buy new clothes, claiming he was cautious of ‘showing out’ by being flash. He hung around outside the International Cafe in tracksuits and Lacoste polo shirts. But by the same token, he then kept drawing attention to himself by driving around Toxteth in high-powered cars with visiting drugs dignitaries from various countries.

  Poncho said, ‘To us, Curtis was an accident waiting to happen. Scarface and Kaiser even regretted introducing him to Lucio, as Curtis getting nicked brought heat onto the Cali Cartel. Mario Halley got nicked.

  ‘But in fairness to the Colombians, they soon adapted and restructured, and the gear kept coming – and no one else got arrested from their side.’

  As Curtis Warren was entering jail on remand, Dylan Porter was coming out after serving three years for the shotgun. A reformed criminal, he vowed to stop dealing drugs. He set up a shed-building company. The hours were long, the graft hard and the general public were finicky about their back gardens. There were green shoots in the economy but not to the extent that planting concrete posts would earn Dylan the £3,000 a day he was used to: his wages from drug dealing before he went inside.

  In Holland, Scarface went to Antwerp to buy jewellery. On Savile Row, he bought racks of suits after flying into Biggin Hill private airport for the day. A small fortune was blown on solid platinum watches, rings and bracelets in Paris. At one point he offered £15 million to buy a private jet. But he settled on buying a cheaper share in a used Gulfstream jet.

  It was just as well. Alarmed by the arrest of Curtis Warren, in July 1992 Dutch police set up a specialist unit to investigate British criminals. To the Dutch, all English were Brits and they had not yet learned to differentiate between the Scousers and the rest. But within months they had identified 150 British drug dealers, the majority of them linked to the Cartel. The detail was uncannily accurate. A secret report said that the majority operated in the local market and were reasonably professional. Though they couldn’t identify Scarface and Kaiser by name, the report stated that they were involved in the large-scale trafficking of cocaine, LSD and E to the UK, Scandinavia and Australia – and even the US. While the Dutch controlled hashish from Cyprus, the Cartel controlled hash to the UK. The Dutch police also identified several currency exchanges that had washed tens of millions of the Cartel’s money. Scarface and Kaiser began to feel the heat. Their Spidey senses began to tingle danger.