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

by Graham Johnson

  In a bar near Cartagena in southern Spain, Dylan Porter was sweating, his milk-white English legs reddening unevenly, embarrassingly. He had flown to Spain from Manchester airport to go for a drink with an old Moroccan friend. They chatted over a beer, Dylan sporting white nylon tennis shorts. Wimbledon was on the telly above the bar.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Dylan asked the Moroccan.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Dylan.’ They made small talk over olives and tapas before Dylan got down to business.

  ‘What’s the price on the weed?’ Dylan asked.

  ‘It’s £475 on the kilo,’ the Moroccan replied. ‘How many do you want?’

  That’s how easy it was for a Cartel guy to get back in the game. Dylan was up and running in the big time again. For a few months previously, he’d been bringing in small 40-kilo loads to pay off his debts. Now he was preparing to upscale again, back into respectable amounts that’d get him back his throne within the Cartel. If he couldn’t do that, then he’d settle for smaller, more frequent loads. It was swings and roundabouts. Dylan Porter didn’t worship money like his associate Gray, but he was determined to make his new cannabis-smuggling operation a success.

  Dylan said, ‘Within months my cannabis business was booming. The price of rocky started going for £2,300 per kilo here in England, so it suddenly got very worthwhile. I could get it in Spain for £475 a kilo and get it home for £675. The transport cost me £200 a box.

  ‘I knew people over there who were well established. My contact was a Moroccan guy I’d met at random years before. I’d saved him from getting a hiding from a bouncer once, and after that we became mates. The Moroccans wouldn’t touch Class A’s, but when I started again, he agreed to get me my pot. Another mate in Liverpool had the transport, so all the bits were in place. I flew over to Spain to sort it.’

  The money to pay the Moroccans for the cannabis was sent out to Spain in a wagon or sometimes in a car. The cannabis was smuggled from Morocco to Tariffa. A Liverpool freelancer who worked for the Cartel drove the consignment up to Madrid. From then on, Dylan’s transport would take over all the way back to the UK.

  Dylan said, ‘I was doing it in conjunction with my mate. He brought half a ton of cannabis back and another mate had another half a ton on the same lorry. When it got back to Liverpool they would lay half a ton on – that’s give it to someone on credit. He killed it. They threw half a ton at you, just like that, as though it was nothing. I doubt anyone would do that today.’

  Sometimes Dylan would monitor the consignment as it entered the UK to make sure they were not being followed. Just before Christmas 1996, Dylan went down to Dover to watch a lorry going through Customs. He travelled on a coach to avoid detection and then observed from a nearby hill. He was desperate to feel the old kick, the buzz of seeing a parcel ‘get home’.

  Dylan said, ‘I was there to watch this kid bring in a ton of weed. It was exciting. We were all wanking on this. There were eight or nine of us on it, who’d invested in it: that meant someone would get 200 kilos, another 100, another 50 and so on. I didn’t even know five of the other partners, but they were all Scousers. Basically, every one of us who was involved had a little bit of the parcel on the wagon. As usual I would get 40 kilos off this big amount.’

  But just as the lorry was pulling out of the port, Customs officers stopped it, suspicious that the vehicle’s load was heavier than the paperwork implied. The driver was ordered to put the trailer on the giant weigh station. According to Dylan, the driver asked the Customs officer, ‘Can I go and get a cup of coffee?’

  As soon as he was out of sight of the weigh station, the panicky driver phoned Dylan and his mate. They were on a hill watching from a car, but they couldn’t be seen.

  The driver asked Dylan’s mate: ‘It’s on the bay – what should I do?’

  The mate told the driver, ‘I know; we’re watching. You can fuck off now – but if you do and they don’t find it, it looks guilty as fuck. Or you can go back, and if they find it, play daft. Say it’s been put on by someone else at whatever warehouse on the way, nothing to do with you.’

  The driver mulled it over and there was just silence on the other end of the phone. He was in a catch-22 position: there was the added pressure that if he walked away and lost the load, he wouldn’t get paid. The truck would be confiscated and there’d be a lot of pissed-off drug traffickers waiting for him when he got off the train at Lime Street station back in Liverpool.

  Dylan said, ‘Then the driver thought, “Fuck it.” We could see him from our vantage point on the other end of the phone, going through the options. Fair play to him: his arse didn’t fall out and he decided to front it out. And he went back to the weigh station.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ the driver asked Customs.

  The Customs guy nodded and said, ‘Yes, mate: there’s the keys.’

  The driver snaked his way out of the port, and Dylan and his mate followed the load all the way back to Liverpool at a discreet distance.

  Even though the cannabis took up a lot of volume, the bulk was hidden deep inside the truck within a 40-ft container. The process was repeated every month like clockwork. Each load made £22,000 for Dylan alone.

  Dylan said, ‘The beauty was that I never even saw it most of the time. After the first few goes, when I’d nursed it into Dover or gone to see it land in the warehouse, I didn’t bother even getting involved with the transport side or going to pick it up at the end – I just took a back seat. When it landed, I was simply told the location of where it was being uploaded by my friend, which was usually at a place in Huyton. Then I rang up a third party, an employee of mine who did the running about for me. I told him the address, and he went down there and picked it up and stashed it until he got further instructions. Even before the cannabis had physically arrived in the UK, I’d usually sold it over the phone, like the way a trader would sell a ton of grain or something and reserve it. Then, after it arrived in Huyton, I’d simply phone the two lads who I sold it to, and I’d tell them it had landed. Then they would either collect it from my runner there and drop the money round to me the next day, or sometimes it got so that I didn’t even need a runner. If I trusted the buyer, I sent them direct round to where it was being unloaded and they would take it off the wagon. It got so much like clockwork that I never even touched a bar.’

  Meanwhile, Curtis Warren had relocated to a Dutch commuter town called Sassenheim. It was just far enough away from Scarface and Kaiser so as not to step on their toes but close enough to the action in Amsterdam to keep dealing drugs. He got a strong team of criminals around him from all over the UK and soon became the number-one trafficker in volume terms within the UK. It was another string to Dylan’s bow: Curtis started supplying him with cannabis and other things as well.

  CHAPTER 26

  ROUND TWO

  1996

  THE HANDS-OFF APPROACH was common among Cartel operators. Once they had established their reputation, they could sit back and let others do the legwork without fear of being double-crossed, robbed or grassed up.

  Dylan said, ‘To do business that way, to have the confidence to delegate, you’ve either got to be physically tough, well liked or have an army behind you. I’m nothing special, but I’d like to think I was a combination of all three, in degrees at least. I’m not stupid and I am well known. I could have called on help quite easily, but I hated violence and I hated bullies. I’ve never been robbed, or bumped on a parcel, because I fly straight. And people saw goodness in me.

  ‘It sounds mad, to use words like “good” and “genuine” in the drugs trade, but it’s not all about being evil. People liked the fact that I was good, and they were attracted to it because there were bullies everywhere.’

  But the virtues didn’t wash with Dylan’s wife. At night she used to say to him, ‘It’s dirty money: no good will come of it.’ She was looking after six kids and hated the fact that her husband was a drug dealer. But the motivation was money, because Dyl
an was skint and he was too lazy to get a proper job.

  Dylan said, ‘You get used to a lazy man’s lifestyle – always ordering food from the chippy or going to restaurants. Now I love cooking. But when you’re a big drug dealer, nothing is a challenge. Book that holiday: three times a year, when you like. When my daughter was six months old, she had Moschino boots on, Moschino coats – and she couldn’t even walk. It was fake. I was being showy but not realising it.’

  Dylan’s life was sedate, insulated from the outside world by a cushion of cash usually reserved for the highest-paid executives or top-performing professionals. Like a senior manager, he didn’t have to deal with strife or get his hands dirty. For the successful Cartel member, it was like living inside an empire where the fruits of labour were available to the few.

  But on the streets, an unprecedented gun war had been raging for almost a year.

  Since the murder of David Ungi, around 44 shooting incidents had happened on Merseyside. The shots had started even before the funeral had taken place. Outside the Black George’s pub in Toxteth, where the younger generation of the Ungis drank for two days after his death, a machine gun was fired into the building. It was an ominous portent of the bloody year to come.

  In one incident, a hooded gunman had burst into a popular meeting place called Vic’s Gym in Kensington and opened fire, wounding a 25-year-old fitness fanatic called Ricardo Rowe. On another occasion, a 31-year-old was found lying in a pool of blood in a road in Netherley, suffering from gunshot wounds to the leg. Five days later, a man called Paul Foster was shot at his home in Toxteth. The Cartel was imploding.

  Police then issued an appeal for calm after five people were injured in another two shooting incidents. But it was roundly ignored: later that day, shots were fired into a house in Anfield. The tit for tat went on. Four days later, a man called Lee Parry was shot by gunmen in Toxteth. Things quietened down for a short while until shots were fired at the home of Kevin O’Rourke, then wanted for questioning in connection with the Ungi murder.

  The net was closing on the main suspect, Johnny Phillips. When gunmen finally caught up with him, five shots were fired into Phillip’s car, as it was parked outside his home. He had been charged with trying to kill Ungi, but, true to form, the case had been dropped.

  In revenge, David Ungi’s brother Ronnie was attacked and his home sprayed with bullets. A man named Jason Speed was shot at his home in Huyton. Unlike the First World War, there was no lull over Christmas. Instead, a full-scale gun war erupted, with five people being shot, one fatally, and a gun attack on a police shop. The new year started with a 16-year-old boy being shot four times in Princes Avenue, Toxteth. Hours later, a 27-year-old was badly wounded in nearby Upper Warwick Street.

  Cartel godfathers took sides. All drug sales were put on hold as the police stepped up interceptions. Many Cartel members fled abroad. With the onset of the campaign season (drug dealers’ slang for when business picked up in spring), full hostilities resumed in March 1996 when Phillips was shot again. This time he was fired at four times in Toxteth in front of his three-year-old daughter and his wife. He survived, but it was only a matter of time. A twenty-one-year-old woman was then shot in Granby Street, followed by a gun attack on six people. Even a copper was shot: PC Stephen Hardy was knee-capped after two masked men burst into his home in West Derby, and he was also shot in the arm. Police believed it was a case of mistaken identity. Four more attacks left three more victims shot. Finally, events came full circle. To mark the anniversary of Ungi’s murder, a man called Owen Graham was shot dead in a betting shop – almost a year to the hour that Ungi had been killed.

  The police needed to find a solution quickly. The new joined-up thinking that had been introduced after the Ungi murder had helped to stop things getting even worse. But disruption was only a tactic. Now a full-scale strategy was required. No longer could the police rely on backwards-facing, reactive policing. A new generation of coppers came to the forefront with new ideas. The time was right for a policeman like the Analyst to take up the reins from the old guard.

  The answer lay in a fresh-out-of-the-think-tank philosophy called intelligence-led policing. Tested in the US, the new doctrine was built around risk assessment and risk management as opposed to individual incidents and types of crime. The jargon in a training manual defined ‘a strategic, future-oriented and targeted approach to crime control, focusing upon the identification, analysis and “management” of persisting and developing problems or risks’. In canteen speak, it simply meant that the intelligence-gathering part of the police would, in future, guide operations. No longer would surveillance solely be called in to gather evidence after the fact. Now officers like the Analyst would scan the city in realtime and find out what was likely to happen next.

  Calls for intelligence-led policing had started in the US after it was found that a conflict between law enforcement and intelligence had driven a wedge between the FBI and the CIA. As a consequence, cops were urged to become ‘more like spies’, according to Mark Riebling in his 1994 book Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA. That suited the Analyst just fine. Within ten years he would become Britain’s top drugs secret agent, a kind of James Bond of drug enforcement, pitting his wits against the underworld, with a permanent target in his sight: the Cartel.

  In order to harvest raw data, the police began to recruit more informants. One such was a criminal called David Parsons. In the summer of 1996, the middle-ranking heroin dealer claimed that he had become an informant for the senior officers and this would eventually lead to his working as a secret agent for the National Crime Squad (NCS). The NCS was a new initiative that was to lead the charge in the new era – and the attack on the Cartel. But the pressure was on. There was no time for grooming and vetting of the new army of narks: intelligence-led policing needed to be sorted now. Bargains needed to be struck. Devils needed to be danced with. Parsons suggested that his deal with the police was simple. He’d set up Liverpool drug barons for them to arrest, and in return the police would turn a blind eye to his own drug-dealing activities, as well as sweetening him up with cash rewards.

  In effect, Parsons said he was ‘pressurised’ into becoming what is known as ‘a participating informant’: one that would not only feed inside info on drug deals but actively take part in the deals, and possibly steer them in the right direction. It was a dicey game for everyone concerned.

  The first target was an out-of-town dealer called Mark Lilley. Lilley was an intimidating figure. He was six feet tall, powerfully built and had two prominent scars on his right hand. The informant said that he was allowed to buy drugs from Mark Lilley’s gang and then with the knowledge of the police, he would sell the drugs on, so that the profits could be recycled back into the investigation, to cover the informant’s expenses. David Parsons said that the budget for his operation would be self-financing from the sale of drugs.

  On one such deal, David Parsons targeted a low-level Cartel-related dealer. Before the police busted the dealer, Parsons scored off him, so that the ‘hand to hand’ – a police term for the part of a drug deal in which the negotiations have finished and the physical contraband is handed over – could be used to draw him into the police’s net. Parsons said, ‘I told [my cop handler] after the deal what I had bought and he told me to keep what I had.’ The lines were getting blurred.

  Meanwhile, a secret agent of a different nature was putting the final touches to his plans to involve people who would, inadvertently, be carrying out his wishes while reaping their own revenge. Friends of the taxmen’s victims were whispering names into their ears during a complex operation to incriminate. Crime author Peter Stockley has written about the plot in his book Extenuating Circumstances.

  Target number one was George Bromley as far as Paul Burly was concerned. After finding out that a leak was dribbling through to Bromley about death threats, Burly began to send messages out via his trusted people hinting that Bromley was planning something retaliative.
This made those who wanted revenge very wary but also very much more determined. It was near the end of 1997 that Burly received a request for a bit more information, which involved finding out who Bromley’s close associates were, along with telephone numbers and such. Conveniently, George Bromley had become friends with a former safe-cracker called Charlie Seiga, whom Burly knew well. Seiga had bought a second-hand car for his daughter from motor dealer Eddie Kelly: a close pal of George Bromley. At Kelly’s garage, Bromley and Seiga had met and hit it off, and they began meeting regularly at Seiga’s upmarket detached house in the West Derby area. Like an Italian mobster, former restaurateur Seiga was a good cook, and Bromley enjoyed popping round for a ‘scran’ early evenings, often to discuss the sale of stolen goods or contraband booze. Seiga began advising Bromley on property matters, and the Taxman revealed that soon he would be coming into quite a tidy sum of cash. Bromley boasted of selling up everything so he could live abroad. Liverpool was becoming too hot to handle after the Ungi killing and the tit-for-tat shootings that followed. The plot thickened.

  Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Amsterdam, and the Hague, UK police, Customs and Excise and the Dutch politie launched a joint investigation to catch Curtis Warren again. The Cartel superstar was now Interpol’s ‘Target One’.

  CHAPTER 27

  COLE

  1996

  ON WITH THE body count. It was a quiet Sunday night in May 1996. Like most doormen, Stephen Cole reserved Sunday nights for his other half: a quick drink in the local then off to town for a Chinese. The city centre was deserted on a Sunday night, and there was less chance of bumping into any wannabe gangsters: the bane of a doorman’s life. But Stephen Cole was no ordinary doorman. He was a former Liverpool football player. He was the head of a very successful security company. However, of late he’d been dragged into one of the internecine gang wars that were threatening to destabilise the Cartel.