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

by Graham Johnson

  At the same time, Paul turned his own home into a labyrinthine fortress, a maze of corridors, some of which led to dead ends, others to exits. Paul lived at the centre of a large commercial building. The fortress contained several secret escape chutes. Every door had been deliberately made to squeak in order to alert him to intruders.

  Paul soon learned that doorman Kevin ‘Mad Dog’ Maguire had become an enforcer for a Cartel drug dealer. Maguire had been given the moniker ‘Mad Dog’ in honour of a particularly gruesome Northern Irish terrorist with whom he shared personality traits. With the Cartel’s backing, Maguire felt confident enough to use extortion to win security contracts. His main strategy was called ‘taking over a door’: survival of the fittest in the cut-throat quasi-business environment of nightclub security. Put simply, it meant that one day a stronger company would oust a weaker one from a nightclub or pub using brute force, sometimes with the blessing of the venue’s owner, sometimes not. The ‘taking over’ process often involved guns, knives, savage attacks, torture and, on occasion, murder. For Maguire and his allies, it was their bread and butter. Bullying was his stock-in-trade, the way in which he grew his business. It made Paul happy for, by now, Maguire had a list of enemies a mile long, which meant a lengthy list of potential allies for himself.

  As Maguire expanded his business and the door wars grew more violent, he found himself mixing with a heavier class of villain: some allies, some enemies. George Bromley was a Bentley-driving gangster known as ‘the Taxman’. Taxmen were the self-appointed duty collectors of the underworld, extracting tribute from drug dealers using torture. Bromley’s modus operandi often involved bursting through the front door of a heroin trafficker’s house with his three-man torture team. The targets were often independents, but sometimes rogue Cartel bosses used Bromley to attack rivals, or at least tacitly allowed him to do so, due to boardroom disputes and internal squabbles.

  The target would often be stripped naked and tied up in front of his wife and children. Bromley’s torture weapon of choice was the household steam iron. Why? Because every home has got one and steam irons do not need to be carried to and away from jobs, reducing the risk of being caught with an offensive weapon. In addition, steam irons were an extremely effective device for causing pain. In front of the terrified victim, Bromley would plug in the iron. His spine-chilling pay-off was: ‘You have got until the iron warms up to tell me where you keep your money or drugs. If you don’t, then I’m going to iron your bollocks off.’ Bromley had no qualms about carrying out the threat and many victims who couldn’t raise the money were burned. Other trademark methods of torture included stabbing victims up the anus, sexual abuse using a broomstick and shooting the calf muscles clean away from the bones of the men under his duress. Bromley made hundreds of thousands of pounds from taxing drug dealers.

  Senior members of the Cartel were becoming worried by the antics of Bromley and his cronies. After all, it was their drug dealers whom Bromley was taxing, or at least some of them. It was their business that the out-of-control doormen were disrupting. A few Cartel members that had been hit were now being fed information of the identities of those who had hit them, now Paul’s helpers were being fed inside information of certain people’s movements. Paul soon learned of nearly all of Kevin Maguire’s and Bromley’s movements.

  Maguire had turned into a full-time drug dealer. He had also become a born-again Christian. Later on, the church-going family man formed an alliance with Bromley, and then, along with his partner Nathan Jones, took up as a marauding taxman himself. They ensured that they didn’t hit one another’s intended victims. Their wider circle included Stephen Cole, a former Liverpool Football Club player turned security consultant. Another associate was Charlie Seiga, a safecracker and armed robber turned alleged contract killer. Though Seiga was not a Cartel drug dealer, police had wrongly linked him to a string of murders and accused him of carrying out assassinations for high-ranking traffickers. Though he was arrested and charged in connection with one high-profile gangland hit in particular, the police could not prove that he was a contract killer and the Crown Prosecution Service could not get a conviction at trial. Today he is a reformed character.

  The door wars continued. One gang was known as the Wolf Pack. The firm was owned by a hard man called Stephen Clarke, a big operator and a very tough doorman. If club owners knew that their own door was weak and that doormen weren’t throwing the troublemakers out, they often went to see operators such as the Wolf Pack to take over the door. Obviously, the existing team didn’t like it, but their removal was carried out by force.

  The culture of the door business was becoming more and more enemy-based. Nearly every firm treated competitors as enemy combatants to be destroyed at the first opportunity, their contracts gobbled up. Virtues such as extreme competitiveness, getting in there first and stealing the contract by force, were highly prized.

  Then, after the admin was taken care of, the big pay-off was often selling drugs. Even though the divisions were internally destructive, several wings of the Cartel fuelled the door wars in a bid to sell more tablets and cocaine. They couldn’t help themselves; it was easy money. The Cartel was often the ulterior motive behind a war.

  It took many years for the police and the licensing industry to stamp out the door wars. Eventually authorities insisted that security firms had to have contracts with big brewery and leisure companies. In addition, the police began to inhibit drugs supply onto the dance floor. The resulting lack of big drug turnover, combined with a fall in the price of E tablets, meant there was less motivation for violence.

  But for now, that kind of resolution was too many years into the future to worry about. By 1993, there were many doormen on major rave clubs making two grand a night selling tablets. Police found that convictions were hard to pin down. Evidence was near impossible to gather in the chaotic, close-knit world of loud music, laser shows and industrial-scale dry-ice machines. Costly, complex undercover investigations were set in motion. Nightclubs were raided and punters kept waiting for hours while their details were processed. Licences were withdrawn. Doors went in, Cartel bosses were nicked, seizures were made. But frustratingly, just before many of the cases came to court, witnesses mysteriously reneged on their evidence. Cartel drug dealers became experts at routinely perverting the course of justice by paying off witnesses. One Ecstasy dealer who’d been attacked by rival doormen was paid £40,000 to drop the charges.

  In other cases, police got the wrong man. Former world champion kick boxer Alfie Lewis was convicted of supplying E at the Cream nightclub after 30 undercover police stings. But after three trials, the case eventually fell apart and he was released. Police had to settle for lower-rung doorman Amir Khorasani, who got seven years.

  As the threat of conviction fell away, the bonds between the doors and the dealers strengthened. Drugs flowed into a club down a strictly controlled chain of command, just like a very efficient business. Some doormen formed mini-syndicates and started buying 50,000 tablets at a time in Holland for one pound each. The retail price was ten pounds each. Soon the doormen were eclipsing the bar take in the clubs that they worked on in terms of turnover. If they were lucky enough, if they could continue to shift drugs and keep a lid on the violence, some were invited to join the Cartel on an equal footing with traffickers and wholesalers. But this was a rare accolade: doormen were, in general, considered to be irrational and unreliable. In addition, it upset the balance within the hierarchy. Doormen were considered low level. The apex was reserved for traffickers. It would be a dangerous precedent to relinquish power downwards.

  The dance scene seemed to march on and on. Millions of pounds poured into the coffers of the bullet-headed gatekeepers. A kind of rough career path was rationalised. First, doormen started selling the E. Once they’d got together a ‘kitty’ to fund bigger deals, they moved onto powders such as cocaine, heroin, speed and ‘magic’. Next came the kilo batches. The graduation was often mirrored by the accumulation o
f showy assets. Suddenly, the old banger was traded in for a US-style super pick-up, a Ford Probe GT or a Lexus SC and paid for in cash.

  Then with excessive surpluses of cash came the houses on the new estate, bristling with giveaway CCTV cameras, which became a signature fitting on gangsters’ houses in the 1990s when few people could afford them. Investments in building firms were paid for, restaurants and hairstylist shops for their girlfriends acquired. Many invested in sunbed shops so they could wash their money. The Inland Revenue found it difficult to prove how many customers had been under the lamps.

  Gyms were also favourite assets of the poor doorman made good. One door firm became so rich that they bought a theme park in Spain for cash. Another used a well-respected estate agent to buy nearly 40 dilapidated properties. The portfolio was bought through a front company with tax paid. However, the renovations, materials and labour were all paid for in cash. The profits on the sale and the rental incomes were all declared as taxable income. The property scam was a common money-laundering technique.

  But with the Wild West-style land grab came pressure. With easy riches came easy losses. Security contracts were lost overnight. Clubs changed hands; new managers were employed; new gangsters came on the scene. The roller coaster lifestyle saw doormen go from penniless boxers to steroid-head multimillionaires back to drug addicts as the late nights and stress took their toll. The majority of players went on drugs, lost the contracts, were killed, maimed, blown up or shot at or just plain faded away. Some went back to living ordinary lives on council estates or in the suburbs. Many of them went under when the price of E’s dropped.

  One of the ones who had been determined to strike it rich was Kevin ‘Mad Dog’ Maguire. He had started in Quadrant Park taxing small-time dealers and selling Ecstasy. Maguire was short and stocky. His build was muscular and he had a ponytail.

  Around the same time, there were calls in some quarters of the Cartel to have George Bromley killed. However, Bromley was a friend of Tommy Gilday, a Cartel legend who was allied to Scarface and Kaiser, Curtis Warren and a heroin baron called John Haase. Gilday was well connected within the Cartel, and to kill one of his mates would be a serious diplomatic problem. To some extent Bromley was protected, but it was also clear that he was living on borrowed time. Cartel members who’d been robbed by him repeatedly claimed that Bromley was too sly to have around. Ordinary street criminals complained to the godfathers that Bromley had stabbed and beaten them for little reason. Independents complained to their Cartel suppliers that their people had been shot in the legs by Bromley. He had been witnessed running into dealers’ houses and battering them in front of their wives. One day Bromley had kicked a doorman to near death in front of his heavily pregnant wife. To prove how bad he was, she got battered as well.

  The godfathers became more concerned when Maguire and Bromley became pals. It was double trouble. Maguire began carrying a snub nose Smith & Wesson pistol for protection.

  Bromley and Maguire’s behaviour went against the new look. The Cartel had spent a lot of time trying to create a business culture. Respect and trust were the new watchwords, underworld values that made giving and granting credit easy. But Maguire was only interested in spreading fear, which was considered bad for business. Other gangsters sprang up trying to emulate them. E culture meant that there was enough money around to sustain many gangsters who liked being nasty. The downside was that they were always getting killed. The door wars were even bad for the local papers. When a gangster got shot, there were usually hundreds of sentimental tributes posted in to the obituary section. When a family leader called David Ungi was shot a year later he had received so many columns of messages from the underworld that extra pages had to be added. But few felt sorry for the new breed of monsters when the time came. Few memorials appeared. Even close friends signed off tributes anonymously, out of embarrassment.

  As the body count rose, a lot of people speculated that the doormen were being wiped out by professional hit-men. But most were just quarrels between individuals, disputes that were irrationally resolved, as opposed to contract killings. Hit-men had no empathy and often no association with their intended victims. It just came down to money. But most of the modern murders seemed gruesome and gratuitous: the new breed of taxmen had just stepped on the wrong toes and come a cropper.

  Meanwhile, 550 kilometres away in Holland, a parliamentary committee had been set up to investigate organised crime. The Van Traa inquiry found that there were 11 foreign gangs operating in Amsterdam. Although the Brits weren’t prominent, they had managed to enter into a partnership with a home-grown Dutch gangster called Klaas Bruinsma.

  CHAPTER 23

  REPEAT

  1994

  BY THE MID ’90s, it seemed as though the authorities were losing the battle against the Cartel. Three cases exemplified the sense of defeat. John Haase, Curtis Warren and Ian McAteer were drug dealers and gun runners from three different factions. In three separate cases they’d faced justice. And in all three incidents, they had won and walked away free men. The trend illustrated not only how hard it was for the authorities to build complex cases against drug dealers but also how easy it was for a handful of incredibly wealthy people to play the system and in some cases pervert justice on a grand scale. For some, the cases of Curtis Warren and John Haase proved that the drug barons were now more powerful than the police.

  During the previous year, on 27 July 1993, John Haase and his sidekick Paul Bennett had been arrested while trying to escape from a big heroin bust in Liverpool. They were charged with possessing and distributing 50 kilos of heroin, which was part of a much larger consignment. But during their time on remand, they pulled off an extraordinary escape plan. Instead of breaking out of jail by digging tunnels or scaling walls, they used a more cunning method. They ploughed hundreds of thousands of pounds into a corrupt scheme to obtain two Royal Pardons from the Home Office. It worked. The then Home Secretary Michael Howard was duped into granting the pair their freedom just 11 months into their 18-year sentences. The con involved smuggling a gun into Strangeways Prison and blaming it on a fellow inmate called Thomas Bourke to qualify for the Royal Prerogative, an ancient loophole which decreed that prisoners could win their freedom if they prevented prison officers from being attacked. Haase and Bennett falsely claimed that the gun was going to be used to kill guards during a breakout by Bourke, who was then on remand for murder – even though they had smuggled the gun into Strangeways in the first place. Haase and Bennett also fabricated 35 other gun caches and paid bribes, at various points fraudulently linking them to the IRA and phantom gang bosses.

  Underneath the layers of lies and deceptions, there was also betrayal of their underworld pals. Haase and Bennett had been secret police informers, providing some legitimate intelligence, since 1992. They had been supplying the police and Customs and Excise with information on dozens of Cartel bosses, including Curtis Warren and one of his associates known as the Rockstar. Their role as agents of the state had helped them twofold: first, the help that they were giving the authorities in turn helped them to get a Royal Pardon each; and second, by taking down some of their rivals within the Cartel, the field was left open for them to take over themselves.

  John Haase and Paul Bennett were released back onto the streets of Liverpool. They took up their positions once more within the hierarchy and began dealing drugs. To secure their power on the street, later they set up a door-security company called Big Brother. In addition, they began running guns and drugs to Scotland after linking up with Glasgow assassin Ian McAteer.

  Like Haase, McAteer should have been in jail. But like Haase, McAteer was a master at manipulating the evidence against him and beating cases. Despite being one of Britain’s most dangerous criminals, according to police, he had recently walked free from court. McAteer had recently been inside. He’d fallen out with a 26-year-old criminal associate called Jack Bennett (no relation to Paul Bennett) while in jail in 1994. Bennett’s family claimed he w
as targeted because he rejected McAteer’s homosexual advances. At first, McAteer put out a contract on Bennett’s life offering ‘2 oz of tobacco and 50 temazepan tablets’ to any inmate who killed Bennett on the wings. According to witnesses, these were McAteer’s own words and they were later reported in court. No one took up the offer. So McAteer swore that he would do it himself on the outside.

  Both of them were released a short while later. By then, McAteer had become obsessed. Once he was out, McAteer hunted Bennett down. In broad daylight, Bennett was stabbed 57 times in a Glasgow street. The case against McAteer went to court, but the jury was not convinced by the evidence. They returned a ‘not proven’ verdict.

  Overturning the odds had convinced McAteer that he was now untouchable. In the same year, just yards from where Jack Bennett had been stabbed, McAteer shot another man, blasting him badly while he was waiting at traffic lights. McAteer went on the run but was later arrested in Merseyside after going to seek help from the Cartel. But, once again, he escaped possible jailtime when the victim refused to make a complaint.

  ‘His extreme violence made him notorious in the criminal underworld,’ said Detective Superintendent Julieanne Wallace-Jones of Merseyside Police at a press conference reported on by the Liverpool Echo. Wallace-Jones later investigated McAteer for yet another murder. In Liverpool, McAteer repaid the loyalty shown to him by the Cartel: he used guns, knives, knuckle-dusters and baseball bats to suppress its enemies, according to police. McAteer became known by John Haase and the Cartel as the ‘Mad Jock’.