Within minutes of ordering a drink at the Farmers Arms pub in the Fazakerley district of Liverpool, a mob of 20-plus assailants burst through the pub doors and chopped him to death with machetes and meat cleavers. The attack was not only horrific, but there was also a touch of the surreal. The weird thing was that the killers chopped up their victim in front of his screaming wife. Even stranger was the fact that some of the other punters in the pub simply looked on as though it was normal. Some of them were gassed with CS spray, so they were not in a position to do much. But others who were unaffected looked on or moved out of the way. After the savage spectacle, they carried on drinking as though nothing had happened. People were learning to ignore, to normalise, criminality in communities where once it would never have been tolerated.
Cole was dead. The underworld tom-toms began spreading the news far and wide. Within hours, Poncho’s phone was ringing.
According to Poncho, the caller said, ‘I’ve got some bad news for you.’
Poncho was expecting the worst: that Scarface or Kaiser had been nicked abroad somewhere with a ton of cocaine on them.
Poncho said, ‘What is it, lad?’
The caller said, ‘Stephen’s been macheted up in a pub: he’s dead.’
Poncho was devastated. Stephen Cole, a father of two, was a trusted ally. Poncho didn’t wait for the details. All he could think of was what Scarface and Kaiser would do. Would they take revenge and declare war on his murderers?
Later, detectives investigating the murder believed that a tightly controlled death squad of gangland mobsters had been ‘called out’ to carry out the slaughter. Officers believed that the hit team was an A-list gangster outfit that included several serial killers, a few professional hit-men and members of a notorious crime family. Most of the team had close links to the Cartel in one shape or another. Police managed to pick off some suspects later: a 42-year-old jobless hard man called Robert ‘Evil Roy’ McCarthy, a 48-year-old Kirkby bouncer called John Riley and a 37-year-old about-town toughie called Raymond Navarro.
Underworld watchers believed the hit was planned not only to kill Cole but also to send out a message to the wider community. Cole, who was head doorman at the world-famous Cream dance club, had been hacked to death in public in front of his wife and numerous witnesses. The message was simple: a new benchmark of violence had now been reached. The perpetrators were unstoppable and untouchable. The new bucks would stop at nothing to punish enemies and were so powerful that they did not care how they did it or who knew it or who had seen it.
No one would dare to testify against any of the attackers, named, rumoured or otherwise. No one could challenge the supreme power of the doormen on the street: not even the law. Door teams were now unstoppable in their marauding savagery across the cityscape. A well-known national crime figure from Liverpool who knew both parties revealed that the attack was a turning point in underworld lore, signifying the zenith of the door team as the most powerful organised-crime unit on the streets. The villain, who refused to be named for fear of repercussions, said, ‘The attack on Cole was like nothing that had ever happened before in its ferocity, but also, more importantly, in its arrogance.
‘It changed the face of things in many ways. In the vast majority of hits, the attackers try to disguise their identities and do the actual murder with as much secrecy as they can, for obvious reasons. With Cole, they chopped him to pieces in front of a packed pub, knowing that people would not report anything to the police.
‘Even though it was premeditated, they chose to do it that way. The message was: “We don’t care about the police. They are an irrelevance compared to our pull in the local area.” That’s very scary.’
Cole was 36 but back in the day had played for Liverpool reserves in the ’80s. After his football career fizzled out, he became a security consultant for several pubs and clubs in the Kirkby area. The tension between his operation and a rival outfit exploded into open warfare over a seemingly trivial incident, but the underlying battle was about control of lucrative contracts. Cole had gambled on a pre-emptive strike, savagely assaulting an enemy boss in a surprise raid on his turf. In addition, it was alleged that he had shot a friend of the gang in the mouth. He was convinced that his quick actions had won a decisive blow and that the rivals would be too terrified to retaliate. On the night of the murder, he was quietly celebrating his gangland victory, enjoying a drink with his wife in a local pub. But Cole had become too confident: he’d forgotten that his main allies within the Cartel, Scarface and Kaiser, were abroad and weren’t around to protect him. Little did he know of the incredibly horrific fate that awaited him.
The main eyewitness to the slaughter was Lorraine Cole, the deceased’s wife. To stun her, the assailants sprayed tear gas in her face. Other drinkers were also deliberately gassed and couldn’t see. Mrs Cole later stated that even though the gas went into her eyes, she had repelled most of the chemical by putting her hand in front of her face, thus enabling her to witness John Riley, a middle-aged man with greying hair, attacking her husband around the ‘the bottom half’ of his body. Fighting back the tears in the interview room, she also described how a young dark-haired male aged between 25 and 30 attacked her beloved husband, delivering the coup de grâce with a baseball bat. This was the killer blow. According to the pathologist’s report, Cole died as a result of a blow to the head from the bat, as well as multiple stab wounds.
Later, at the trial, Preston Crown Court heard that Riley and McCarthy had led the 20-strong gang, armed with knives, machetes and baseball bats. They’d laid into Cole and carried on hitting him even after he was dead. His leg was nearly severed and his arms were mangled by deep incisions and slashes. Many of the weapons were never found. As the assailants sped off in a convoy of cars, many drinkers in the Farmers Arms who had witnessed the murder simply picked up their drinks and took them to the pub across the road called the George.
Although the pub was busy at the time, police initially found a wall of silence created by witnesses’ fear of the killers. This was the new code of the street. Omertà, the code of silence originated by the Mafia, had now spread from the underworld into the lives of ordinary people. The grip of the Cartel on everyday communities was tightening. One politician privately likened the Cartel bosses to ‘warlords’ and ‘feudal kings’ who carved the city up into a ‘mediaeval fiefdom’. Later he spent many years campaigning against organised crime in the city.
After the case, Detective Superintendent Russ Walsh, who led the inquiry, described the murder as ‘barbaric slaughter’. He said: ‘We will not tolerate the gratuitous use of violence by any members of the public and will diligently pursue anyone who resorts to this type of behaviour.’
However, the constant feuding and debt settling meant that the city became a magnet for hit-men from further afield. Assassins flocked to Liverpool from London and Glasgow to help the Cartel godfathers solve their problems. A crack team of former IRA button men known as the Cleaners – because of their reputation for devising innovative death plans and for removing all compromising evidence from crime scenes – reputedly carried out six hits in one spate of contract killings. One of their alleged victims was Warren’s right-hand man Johnny Phillips. Phillips had been accused of helping to murder David Ungi. According to underworld sources, his personal cocaine supply was allegedly laced with poison. It is not known whether the alleged murder attempt was successful, but Phillips was eventually found dead in a safehouse in mysterious circumstances.
The Cleaners were awarded the contracts not because they were better than everyone else but because of simple logistics: they lived in Ireland and were able to get in and get out of the UK fast, vastly reducing their chances of being caught. A clean intro and getaway is the key to a successful underworld hit, according to a former Cartel enforcer. The conditions were right for criminals like the Cleaners to make a fortune. A leading assassin for the Cleaners allied himself with Warren’s number two, Colin Smith.
But n
ot everything was going well for Curtis Warren. Even though he was well out of the way in Holland, he was unexpectedly dragged into what he’d been fearing the most: a war with out-of-control doormen back in Liverpool. Senior detectives believed that Warren had put out a £100,000 contract to kill a doorman enemy. The alleged target was called Joey McCormick. Joe Mac, as he was known, worked the door of a Beatles-themed bar called Rubber Soul, among others. The row had erupted after the Banker’s son had pulled a gun on McCormick in a drunken dispute. As the Banker’s main protégé and now virtually his son-in-law – Warren was living with the Banker’s daughter – Warren had felt obliged to sort out the situation. In the end, the contract was withdrawn and Warren paid £50,000 to keep everyone quiet. McCormick withdrew a police statement he had made incriminating the Banker’s son. The matter seemed to be settled and everyone was preparing to move on. However, during the complicated negotiations that had taken place between various members of the Cartel and other criminals, a serving police officer had been asked to help tamper with evidence relating to the case. Inadvertently, the corrupt policeman, named Elmore Davis, was dragged into the mess. Davis had become well known on national TV after taking part in a reality show about Merseyside Police’s murder squad. No one knew, including the senior officer, that the anti-corruption branch of Merseyside Police had been tipped off and had been listening in to the phone conversations. It was a relatively minor indiscretion by the Cartel, in their terms at least, but it had allowed the police an opportunity to get deep inside.
McCormick had a son: he turned out to be the teenage gunman who would shoot Rhys Jones a decade later. McCormick’s son was a fourth-generation Cartel foot soldier.
Then things went from bad to worse for Curtis Warren. In October 1996, as he prepared to take possession of a massive load of cocaine, Warren and his gang were arrested in Holland. Six houses were raided in the ‘Flat Place’ and twenty in the UK. Among goods recovered were 1,500 kilos of cannabis, 60 kilos of heroin and 50 kilos of E’s, as well as several caches of weapons and hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash. Just a short while later, Warren was named as Britain’s 461st-wealthiest person in the Sunday Times Rich List under the banner ‘property developer’.
CHAPTER 28
BROWN
1997
AFTER A COUPLE of years of trafficking weed, Dylan Porter was feeling comfortable – too comfortable. He itched ‘for a new challenge’. He was battling to control his inner demons. The temptation to get involved in heroin again was strong. Soon his mind was made up for him. The cannabis operation went ‘tits up’ after Dylan’s partner got into an argument with the transport boss.
Dylan said, ‘I was working with a feller on the pot and he got into a dispute with the main man with transport. And the transport man turned around and said: ‘‘Fuck that. I’m sacking it.” And he walked away from £100,000-a-month wages, just like that. My cut was between 20 and 30 grand a month, and I lost it. The cannabis was no more, just like that.’
Dylan went to see his brother-in-law, a senior Cartel smuggler close to Curtis Warren.
In June 1997, Warren was jailed for 12 years in Holland for drug smuggling. Even so, the cell structure of his organisation had survived. Warren was still running drugs from behind bars. Soon the remnants on the outside were back up and running.
Dylan had been introduced to Curtis Warren before his arrest, as well as to the other lads that formed part of the South Liverpool Crime Group. Through Curtis Warren, Dylan had then started getting ‘bits’ over from ‘the Dam’. When Curtis Warren was jailed, Dylan switched to dealing with his underlings.
Dylan said, ‘I had a link over in Holland for heroin, but, crucially, my mate had the wheels. On the first one, we got twenty-seven kilos home and I got five or six kilos of that, and my partners shared the remaining twenty kilos. We agreed that was the deal, and my brother-in-law and Curtis’s people were happy.
‘As usual, we set it up for a monthly import and as usual, it was run like a military operation. And we smashed it, month after month after month. Even though only five or six kilos were mine, I organised the distribution of the lot so that there’d be no fuck-ups.
‘Eventually, I took over the other 20 kilos and where that went. I franchised that out to a contact in West Yorkshire. So even before it landed, all 25/26 kilos were spoken for. My original five would go to someone I’d sold it to, and I would send twenty to Bradford. But I would never touch any gear personally. It was all guided by me over the phone and physically moved by workers.’
Dylan’s profit from his own six kilos was £36,000 a month. But he also had a silent partner, a financier who’d helped put money up initially and helped with logistics, who got six grand of that. That left Dylan with net wages of £30,000 a month.
Dylan said, ‘But soon I got another cannabis link in the Dam. On top of my £30,000-a-month take-home pay, I would get home 200 kilos of “wood” [cannabis resin] – that’d get me a little extra £5,000 a month.’
But soon, all was not well. Dylan’s new transport boss was doing deals on the side. He was the brother-in-law of a notorious Cartel boss known as Cagey, now based in Amsterdam. With the help of his relative, Cagey was loading up Dylan’s transport with extra supplies without anyone knowing. Later, Dylan found that Cagey had swindled him out of 27 journeys’ worth of heroin and cannabis, without paying.
Meanwhile, in Thatto Heath, St Helens, hapless petty criminal Frank Smith had finished his research into the manufacture of designer drugs. He’d spent years reading books, doing test runs and supporting himself by small-time drug dealing. Now he felt confident enough to approach the Cartel for backing. His plan was to manufacture speed and methamphetamine on an industrial scale. He needed money and the Cartel’s distribution network.
Smith was introduced to a mid-ranking member of the Liverpool mafia called Charlie Corke, from Huyton, in late summer 1997. Corke agreed to approach the Cartel with a proposal. In early November 1997, Frank Smith met up with reps of the Cartel to discuss a potential business deal.
‘We make it – you sell it,’ Frank told the godfathers. The Cartel was not convinced that Frank had enough practical experience to pull off the venture. To close the deal, Smith told the Cartel that there was a man called Roger Benson, a convicted speed maker, who would act as a consultant. Now the backers were happy: there was an expert who could produce the big quantities required to make the venture viable. The Scousers agreed to finance the venture with an initial £20,000 investment to buy base chemicals and glassware. They would also supply illegal ingredients. More importantly, they agreed to provide protection and a sales force to shift the product in Liverpool and London once it was completed. The Cartel’s rep was a mysterious fixer known as Mr Big. He was described as one of the main men in Liverpool and that he would be supplying the BMK, the key chemical involved in the process. Benzyl methone ketone is a forensic chemical that is not available to be bought on the open market without authority. BMK is one of the main ingredients of amphetamine.
Charlie Corke reassured Frank Smith that the main gang behind the finance had access to 50 gallons of BMK: a huge quantity that would make a vast amount of amphetamine. To disguise the illegal operation, Frank set up a company on an industrial estate. The firm posed as a soil-testing laboratory and would be used as a front to buy restricted chemicals and equipment.
Frank said, ‘I needed a building where all the chemicals would be delivered and no one’s suspicions would be aroused.’ Most of the people involved were poor or pretended to be poor. Charlie Corke owned an anonymous maroon Ford. The offside headlight was smashed, a small transgression that was a common problem with criminals involved in much bigger illegal activities. Research later carried out and taken on board by Merseyside Police found that serious criminals involved in drug dealing and firearms offences often engaged in petty crime. For instance, a specialist anti-gun unit found that hardened organised criminals would often not pay for road tax or insurance on expen
sive cars. This gave the police the opportunity to carry out stop-and-searches and later formed the basis of a tactic called ‘disruption’.
The lab was used for the preliminary processes of the speed production. But the second stage of production was often moved to a rural ‘venue’ because the strong smell of ammonia would risk giving the game away. Coincidentally, a travelling network had become established in Cumbria, where it was selling drugs and getting to know the local villains. A small village called Wigton was identified as an ideal venue for the speed factory.
Frank said, ‘To save time, I decided to carry out the first process at the laboratory. This process is called refluxing and involves boiling a number of chemicals in a reaction vessel until they react together and turn into a golden-orangey colour. The reflux mixture was then put in plastic petrol containers and transported up to Cumbria.’
The Cartel had roped in a local publican to supply soft-drinks containers to store chemicals. He also acted as a general dogsbody on the job. The publican agreed to rent a holiday cottage in Bowness-on-Solway for £5,000 a week. The cottage was isolated and the chemical smells would be easily dissipated.
The Scousers offered Frank £90,000 for every ten gallons of pure amphetamine produced. Frank was confident that they would pay because the Scousers always boasted that they had the market to sell the finished product. Two other members of the gang included BJ and Trapper. Trapper was to pose as a gardener at the cottage so he could keep a look out.
A steam-generating machine was bought from an industrial caterer. Frank was proud of his technical prowess: ‘The Instanta machine was required to carry out a process known as steam hydrolysis . . . which involves passing steam through the mixture and lifting the amphetamine out.’
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 17
