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

by Graham Johnson

  The fact that Curtis Warren, John Haase and Ian McAteer had all beaten cases caused morale to plummet in some parts of the police. The Analyst remained stoical: he concluded that the police weren’t tackling drugs as well as they should have been because the top brass were from a different generation who hadn’t experienced the problem.

  He said, ‘Organisationally, we had people of Chief Superintendent rank who wouldn’t have seen the drug problem as a priority simply because their organisational memory wouldn’t have known drugs. Police officers tend to dwell on their early years of service probably more than their later years. They form opinions about crimes and what is important to them. The problem was that the men at the top at the time wouldn’t have seen drugs as a problem, because in their early years drugs hadn’t been a problem. That’s because drugs had come upon us quickly in the 1980s.

  ‘So the younger officers like me were seeing the changes at street level, but the senior officers probably didn’t see it the same way. They weren’t completely naive, but they didn’t have the same understanding as others had.’

  After having beaten his big case, within a year Curtis Warren was back dealing drugs. He’d learned a lot from the Customs investigation that had nabbed him a few years earlier and which later fell apart at his 1993 trial. Both the run-up to the trial and the case itself had been a fiasco for the authorities. Rot had set in early after an informant called Brian Charrington, Warren’s former partner, turned out to be corrupt and unreliable with respect to the help that he had given the police. Moreover, to Warren’s surprise, the case had been the subject of much high-level discussion between the Attorney General, the Paymaster General, a chief constable and an MP. Curtis was learning about politics. He understood that his newly acquired wealth and power could indirectly influence normally straight people in important positions. He had a certain mystique, which he began to use to his advantage. Staying cool and not saying much had the effect of making him seem more powerful than he really was.

  Warren had also learned how to manipulate the press, employing a former con and tabloid journalist called John Merry to tip off the News of the World about stories that worked in his favour. The articles smeared both an MP, by linking him to backroom deals, and a rival gangster, by planting a story that he was a paedophile. After the trial collapsed, Warren went on holiday with the Banker’s daughter. Colin Smith, who had been charged with the same offences, also got off. Their Cali contact Mario Halley was less fortunate. Halley had been nicked in Holland and got eight years in jail. But Warren and Smith weren’t too bothered. They were confident that with their new power they could attract new Cali contacts at a higher level. Word had spread that even though they’d been arrested for 1,000 kilos, they hadn’t said a word to the police. They were staunch, and that commanded a lot of respect.

  When he returned to Liverpool, Warren reformed his drug-dealing network into a cell structure. He invested in a door-security company to cover his money. And he stepped up to become the Cartel’s front man. He was going to jump right back on the horse – and this time he was determined not to get caught.

  CHAPTER 24

  CANNABIS KING

  1995

  FORMER HEROIN DEALER Dylan Porter was finding it difficult to make ends meet building sheds. Personal and family debts were mounting. One spring day in 1995, Dylan decided to dip his toe back into the drugs world. He told himself that he’d just do one or two deals – no more than three – to get himself clear financially and back on his feet. As an extra disincentive from getting too involved, he vowed not to deal Class A drugs.

  Dylan said, ‘I started getting back into it bit by bit. I didn’t want to – but I needed money. I had realised how hard it was to make a living as a straight-goer. Plus there was pressure from the underworld. Every two weeks someone would come up to me and say: “Come on, Dylan, let’s do some business.” They knew I was decent and they knew I had the contacts, so they wanted to make money off me. So in the end I just gave in.

  ‘At first, I was just doing weed: a little 40 kilos from Spain, here and there.’ Though 40 kilos might seem like a lot of cannabis to a member of the public, to a smuggler, especially one as prolific as Dylan Porter, it is not a huge amount.

  Business was also good for Poncho and his brother Hector. While Kaiser and Scarface were in Holland, he set about growing his mid-tier cocaine franchise back in England.

  Poncho said, ‘My brother and I started selling more and more in Birmingham, using the West Indian connections from the old days. We were selling cocaine to the kids of the fellers my dad used to sell weed to 20 to 30 years before, when the whole thing had started.

  ‘This was now my full-time job. I had a hire car on permanent contract, three months at a time, up and down the motorways moving gear, twelve to eighteen hours a day. The money grew on trees: the best clubs, restaurants, silly-money clothes; we were bang at it. You think it’s never gonna end. Even when bad things happen, you just think, “Not me.”

  ‘In 1995, we lost a few of our partners: they got nicked and got serious jail time. But we carried on. By that time, we’d both been traffickers, we’d been involved with smuggling at the international end with the cream of the crop, and now we were distributors, so we got a lot of respect.’

  However, dark times for everyone were just around the corner. In May 1995, the Cartel was blown apart by an internecine gang war. Two rival factions from neighbouring areas were locked into a power struggle. One wing was predominantly black and headed by Curtis Warren. The other was mainly white and led by David Ungi. Both gangs wanted dominance in the drugs trade. But they were also fighting to retain their status on the street and within the Cartel. Both gangs saw themselves as top dogs and would not defer to each other. But there were also underlying tensions and it wasn’t long before the anger on both sides soon brought long-held racial divisions to the surface. On the black side, street enforcer Johnny Phillips, who was one of Curtis Warren’s deputies, was making most of the play. Phillips had been closely watched by the Analyst, so he was well known to police. Behind the scenes, Warren was more Machiavellian. He preferred to stay in the background, manipulating both sides, black and white, to his own advantage. While firing up Phillips on the one side by insisting that he didn’t back down, secretly he remained friends with the white rivals, even serving them up with ten-kilo parcels of cocaine and heroin as a show of his commitment, showing them which side their bread was buttered. But soon even Warren’s diplomatic skills were put under strain. As the threats escalated, Warren began spending more time in Amsterdam to stay out of the firing line and concentrate on business.

  In April 1995, the DEFCON level went off the scale. Both sides had tried to stop all-out war by arranging a series of ‘straighteners’ between David Ungi and Phillips. But Phillips insisted on trying to buy a pub called Cheers, which Ungi argued was out of bounds because it was on his patch. Cheers was one of Ungi’s locals.

  On 1 May, David Ungi, one of the leading members of the South Liverpool Crime Group (a name given to them by the police), was shot dead at the wheel of his VW Passat as he drove through Toxteth. The father of three was killed after being ambushed at 5.30 p.m. The shooting was the catalyst for a string of tit-for-tat incidents. The murder sent shockwaves through the underworld and in many ways changed policing for ever.

  The Analyst said, ‘The murder of David Ungi was over a geographic power struggle. David Ungi used to drink in Cheers, which was perceived as a white area. They believed that the businesses that they grew into in that area were theirs. For instance, they bought another pub in a nearby street because that was owned by their own people there. There was almost a recognition and acceptance that you had your own area, that you worked it.

  ‘Then Johnny Phillips comes along to buy Cheers from under their noses, and that’s the reason for the straightener.

  ‘That caused murders.

  ‘Neither side realised the effect a gang war would have on business, because we en
ded up with a situation where the tit-for-tat shootings got completely out of hand.’

  Gangsters started to behave differently. According to police they were influenced by the ‘world of violence’ on television, a false reality in which gangsters were running around with guns. Low-level criminals wanted to be perceived as gangsters because they were prepared to use a gun. Police recorded 32 firearms discharges in a matter of weeks. Opposing forces let rip with machine guns behind the Ungi HQ, a run-down pub dubbed ‘Black George’s’ in Liverpool 8. However, it was the police that benefited most. Within a matter of months, the force was dragged out of the past and into the future. The irony was that the killing forced officers to switch to what are known today as disruption tactics.

  Chief Constable James Sharples ordered armed police onto the streets: the first time armed routine patrols had been deployed on mainland Britain. Armed response vehicles became prominent.

  The Analyst said, ‘Before then, we’d had firearms officers who’d only come out on specific firearms operations. But now we had armed units on the streets. That’s what changed.

  ‘We didn’t go in for the “let’s arm everybody” strategy. But we adopt a coordinated approach: a very sophisticated approach, in fact. We’d bring all of our assets together from a number of different disciplines. We’d have a meeting with everyone there, all chaired by a chief super or an assistant chief constable.’

  Each ‘asset’ was given a specific piece of work to do. One group of community intervention officers was sent to reassure a frightened neighbourhood. Disruption tactics against the criminals, like ‘stop and search’, were stepped up. Simultaneously, in the background, the murder investigation was taking place. Firearms units responded quickly. Key impact players (a policing term that refers to high-profile criminals with proven links to firearms) were dragged out of their cars at gunpoint on main roads so that everyone could see. They were searched roughly and questioned; Heckler & Koch weapons were pointed at their heads. A media strategy was formulated to deal with the national papers and TV that had declared Liverpool the capital of UK gun crime.

  The Analyst said, ‘We brought it all together under one banner heading, so everything was coordinated and everybody knew exactly what they were doing. It was the first time this had happened. The goal was simple; the message to the criminal was clear: we will disrupt the living daylights out of them by doing whatever we do.

  ‘An intelligence picture began to emerge, to inform everybody of what they needed to know. We brought all that together: and all that came about because of the murder of David Ungi in 1995. It was a case of: “Now we have a good-to-fighting chance of defeating the organised networks,” and we were determined to keep it up, not for it just to be a short-term measure. That was the view of the younger officers anyway, who saw this method as the future of fighting crime.

  ‘We’ve fine-tuned that system over the years. No longer do we have a “knee-jerk” reaction to an incident.’

  As a result of the police heat and underworld attacks, Johnny Phillips retreated into Toxteth to hide. His gang still believed that they controlled the ghetto. But by now the police had made sure that Granby Street was no hiding place any more. Officers boasted that they were ‘all over it’. In August 1995, frustrated and under pressure, Curtis Warren vanished. He’d had enough of the gang war and its downward pressure on drug profits. No one could move gear about the city, never mind get drugs in, with so many armed patrols on the street. He went in search of a new, more low-key HQ.

  His lieutenant Colin Smith decided to front it out. He stayed in Liverpool and opened a pub-cum-nightclub with his brother John Smith. The venue attracted the cream of the city’s gangsters. At closing time, there were often fights outside. Lines of cars were smashed up, guns were pulled and gangs were chased through the streets with knives and baseball bats. Colin and John Smith had persuaded a TV soap star to front the business. As a high-profile criminal, Colin Smith could not have his name on the licence. But when the News of the World got wind of the set-up, they planned to expose both the sham and the celebrity frontman for selling cocaine and his links to organised crime. Smith had learned how to handle the press from his dealings in the Warren case. He knew the value of PR and had put a well-known PR firm on a retainer a few months earlier to keep his name out of the limelight. When the News of the World threatened to publish a story, his gang trapped their reporters in a hotel and forced them to negotiate with his PR representative. Smith’s father John Smith Senior and his brother John Smith Junior also took part in the negotiations. The News of the World asked John Merry, Curtis Warren’s old reporter friend, to negotiate on their behalf. He was flown to Liverpool to speak to the Smith family and ensure the safety of the reporters. The reporters were told they could go only after they promised not to run the story. Merry told them they were lucky. He said that Curtis Warren had offered to fly back from Amsterdam himself to sort out the problem.

  On the party island of Ibiza, the Cartel was making inroads into the lucrative Ecstasy trade. For years, the Basque terrorist group ETA had secretly controlled the underworld on the island. Like the IRA, they used the drugs trade and protection rackets to raise money for the cause. But they understood little about the new dance culture and the superclubs that were popping up all over the island. Two senior Cartel members offered to take on the contract and front the sales for them. If ETA could help with security – including paying off corrupt officials – then the Cartel would flood the island with coke and E. A deal was struck and mid-level Cartel importers established themselves on the island. Some of them took advantage and did little to hide their operations, causing considerable embarrassment to the authorities. As a warning, one Liverpool-based trafficker was jailed in Spain for eighteen years for importation. Another Cartel member based in San Antonio got seven years but decided to inform on his associates. Back in Liverpool, his boss’s house got shot up badly as a warning. One superclub owner, based in Ibiza but with strong Liverpool links, challenged the criminality. The proprietors were sick of having to pay huge amounts of protection money and having unwanted security companies thrust on them. When they sued the security bosses, the only information they had was the address of a Spanish solicitor. It turned out to be an unregistered PO box in the Basque stronghold of San Sebastián. The club did not pursue the case.

  CHAPTER 25

  SHADY GRAY

  1996

  IN LIVERPOOL, A senior Cartel boss called Eddie Gray embarked on a spending spree that would put a footballer’s wife to shame. Gray was known as ‘the Bear’ because of his six-foot, seventeen-stone frame. In many ways, Gray was a typical drug dealer. He was driven by extreme levels of greed and ambition. His thirst for status, both within the Cartel and in wider circles, meant that he could not help showing off the trappings of his wealth. He spent lavishly on houses, cars and clothes, but behind the scenes he was a penny-pincher who shopped at discount stores and bartered over pennies with the grafters who sold him knock-off gear for cash. Eddie liked to feel like a big man amongst the normal people who lived in his neighbourhood, but in his mind he also believed that by mixing with the local scallies he was a man of the people. He could regularly be seen shopping at Aldi and Netto, loading plastic bags of discounted food into his £100,000 red Ferrari F355 Spider convertible, then squeezing into the bucket seats puffing and sweating like a man about to have a heart attack. Eddie wasn’t suave, but he was known in the Cartel as a ‘money-making machine’.

  Another drug boss who had been around at the start of the Cartel with founding father Fred the Rat had several run-ins with Gray. He said, ‘The thing with Eddie was that he was tight: every pound was a prisoner with him. That was unusual with that crowd – most of them had so much money that they could be generous. On one occasion, when a mate of ours was raising money for a good cause, to help local children, one of them gave me £100,000. The drug dealer didn’t want to appear soft so he pretended it was a loan to get the scheme up and running.
But he was never given it back and he was happy with that.

  ‘But Eddie was a different story.’

  Gray was also known as Fast Eddie, partly because of his fleets of sports cars but also because he could deliver large consignments of heroin and Ecstasy quickly and efficiently. Merseyside Police had him down as a ‘top five’ Cartel member. Millions of pounds flowed through his cricket-glove-sized hands. He regularly kept £50,000 in cash around the house for bits and bobs. Cartel bosses advised him to retire. But he was suffering from a disease that would take him and many of his associates down: greed.

  The Flash Harry gangster spent money like water – but only on himself and his wife. Police officers who later put him under the microscope estimated that he blew nearly £500,000 over a 20-month period. His capital assets included a £250,000 villa in Spain and even stretched to £23,000 worth of personalised number plates on his cars. On the path of his five-bedroom house in Liverpool there was always a different car: an Alfa Romeo, a BMW convertible, a Lexus or a Toyota Land Cruiser. But Eddie was addicted to dealing heroin because he loved money.

  Another Cartel criminal owned so many vehicles that he bought a private car park to house them. His fleet included a Ferrari, two boats, three jet-skis, a luxury caravan, a Winnebago mobile home, three motorbikes and seven 4 × 4 jeeps. But when it came to doing drug deals, Eddie would count his cash, and if it was £20 short on a £10,000 load he would wait until the full amount was paid up. A friend remarked that Eddie was so mean that he’d gone ‘gray with greed’.