But sometimes Frank’s theories did not always work out in practice. One day, the makeshift laboratory exploded.
Frank said, ‘We took the container outside and poured in sodium hydroxide and ran away just before the container erupted and cleared the height of the bungalow in a massive reaction.’
The explosion set the team back and much valuable product was destroyed. To make up the loss, the gang worked on another container of liquid and ended up working through the night.
Frank said, ‘We weren’t tired at all. This was because the steam escaping from the apparatus and the amphetamine mix was intoxicating us. Through the night we had completed about three “cooks” and had to separate the amphetamine oil from the water using separating funnels.’
But the operation was beset with more problems. The bungling chemists had bought the wrong acid, which would not turn the oil into the required paste. The Cartel was becoming frustrated with Frank and his chaotic gang.
Frank said, ‘Charlie Corke was so annoyed that he started to threaten us. He told us that the people behind the financing would not be happy at all if all the amphetamine sulphate wasn’t produced and told us what they would and wouldn’t do if we weren’t successful.’
For Frank, the venture had started out as a bit of a laugh and a chance to earn some money on the side. Now he was finding out what happened to civilians who got mixed up with Britain’s most ruthless drug dealers. The Liverpool gangsters blamed Frank’s technical consultant Roger Benson for the mishaps and threatened to attack an elderly lady he was living with at the time if he didn’t pull his socks up.
By now, Charlie Corke was getting really angry with Roger Benson. He was shouting about what was going to happen when the main men found out that there were wastages and delays. In desperation, Frank and Roger then tried some different acids to turn the oil into paste. Luckily, the reaction worked. Their fear was overwhelming, so much so that they tried some of the speed themselves, to make sure the Cartel would be happy. When the substance worked, and proved non-poisonous, they began making more for their Liverpool bosses.
Meanwhile, in Liverpool officers began to put intelligence-led policing into practice. They launched an investigation into a businessman called Phillip Glennon, who had close links to Curtis Warren. The police suspected that he had evaded £1 million of tax in a fraud operation that involved burying money in his garden.
The 66-year-old former docker lived in a beautiful house in West Derby, an area popular with football players and showbiz stars. According to intelligence reports, police suspected that he was involved in tax evasion, money laundering and false accounting. More than £3 million worth of assets under his control could not be linked to legitimate income. When the police raided his home in September 1997, they were proved right. Officers dug up nearly £1 million in used and foreign notes buried in his garden. Many were guilders from Holland.
The raid led them to an acquaintance called Robert Jarvis, who was also involved in tax evasion, money laundering and false passports. Almost £500,000 of Jarvis’s property could not have been purchased legitimately, police said. The police were on to something, even if it skirted the main issue. But they were ordered to keep on going. Gently they started prodding further, to see if they could properly infiltrate the Cartel.
CHAPTER 29
SETTLING SCORES
1997
THE SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRE Paul Burly now knew that things were in place for Bromley’s demise, and he waited. He now worked on the other two suspects by informing their enemies of misdemeanours that had affected them perpetrated by Maguire or Sinnott. To be on the safe side, he had whispered truth and stated actions that had left victims, and now he was passing times and whereabouts to those who were clamouring for the chance to even things up.
A Liverpool mafia godfather called Charlie Seiga had befriended Bromley. Seiga had told Bromley that he was selling his big house, knowing that Bromley had become obsessed with it. The property had a heated indoor swimming pool. Cynical underworld sources have suggested that this was a ploy by Seiga to lure him into a trap. For the people who wanted him dead, this was an ideal scenario. One underworld source said that there would be an extra benefit for Seiga. By pretending to sell the house, Bromley would have to come up with the money. This would give Seiga an opportunity to steal the cash as well as kill him. That was the reason, underworld sources suggested, that Seiga was dangling a false transaction in front of Bromley. The theory was straightforward: Bromley would have to sell his assets to raise the cash to buy the house. The cash would then be hanging around until the deal was done – ripe for the taking. Bromley could not purchase the house in an orthodox way. He would have to purchase it under the table using untaxed, unwashed money. Whatever the underhanded scenario, gangland watchers said that Seiga was pulling a classic, convoluted, streetwise double con to set Bromley up, with a view to taking his money, and Paul helped fuel those rumours by having his friends add to them. In the meantime, Seiga continued his friendship with Bromley totally unaware that he was in some way aiding the forthcoming execution.
An excited Bromley started planning to remodel Seiga’s house. The mountain-bike-riding fitness fanatic envisaged a sauna and a gym. He drafted in none other than Kevin ‘Mad Dog’ Maguire, the nightclub doorman and physical-training obsessive, to help him design the gym. Their world had become incestuous.
Just after Seiga and Bromley had agreed on a price for the house, the tax extortionist revealed a sinister secret. The Serious Crime Squad had told him that there was a £100,000 contract on his head. Had someone got wind of Paul’s efforts to set him up? The police are often duty bound to tell potential targets if there is a serious death threat against them. There was some speculation that it was a separate contract placed on his head by cocaine baron Curtis Warren. On the same night that Seiga and Bromley went out to celebrate the house sale, in a casino they were forced to repel an attack with a 12-inch knife and a gun, for which they were arrested.
However, Seiga and Bromley’s friendship continued to blossom. Tuesday, 18 November 1997 was a typical rainy Liverpool winter’s day. Just after 3 p.m., an underworld acquaintance popped in to see Seiga at his home for a chat and quick read of the early edition of the Liverpool Echo. Ironically, the murder trial of the men accused of killing Stephen Cole was going on. The story had gripped the underworld. Local gangsters were desperate to see if there were any stories about it in the paper. Charlie had a laugh and a joke with his visitor then asked him to leave because Bromley was coming over and didn’t like sharing his private moments with anyone.
At 4 p.m., Seiga phoned Bromley to confirm that he was coming for tea as usual at around 5–6 p.m.
Bromley duly arrived at 5.50 p.m. and carried his mountain bike into the hallway, saying, ‘This is worth a couple of grand, and I don’t want to leave it outside in case it goes missing.’ As Seiga went to put the kettle on, Bromley sat at the kitchen table and got stuck into the Cole story in the local papers. According to an account given by Seiga, Bromley declared: ‘This crowd are going to get life for this murder. They’ve got no chance.’
Little did George know that his last words would be about a gangland murder. Little did he know that while he was reading that story he would undergo the same fate as Stephen Cole.
What happened next is a mystery, but later the police came to the conclusion that a hit-man had got into Seiga’s house and shot Bromley in the head. The police initially believed that Seiga was in on the act, and that he and others were working as a contract-killing team that had set Bromley up.
But Seiga denied involvement, claiming that three to four minutes after Bromley sat down there was a ring at the door. Seiga opened it and was told by a masked gunman to get back into the lounge. The gunman then ran towards Bromley in the kitchen and fired three shots. Seiga heard the discharges as he was making his escape through the patio doors into his own garden, in which he hid until the scene went quiet. He assumed the gunman had
fled.
‘I saw George Bromley lying on his back on the tiled kitchen floor,’ Seiga later told police. ‘He was in a right mess. Part of his head had been blown away. There was blood all over the floor. It was a miracle he was still alive. He started making gurgling sounds, still breathing heavily. I picked up my phone and called 999.’ Seiga also revealed the events in his 2002 book Killer.
Bromley’s execution was cold, clinical and silent: three taps to the head, end of story. It was a textbook contract killing that was a world away from the blood-curdling frenzy of the Cole murder. The police found it hard to believe Seiga’s account of the murder, especially when they started to examine his intelligence files. The records stated that Charlie Seiga was a known gangland hit-man, a 57-year-old tough guy whom Merseyside police intelligence had dubbed a ‘killer’. His planning was known to be militarily precise.
The police had no idea of Paul Burly’s secret plot to incite Bromley’s enemies. Neither did they know of Paul’s game of ‘swaps’ with Bromley’s enemies, who also wanted him dead. They believed that the motive was simple: as usual it came down to money, police concluded. Intelligence reports stated Bromley had a £100,000 price on his head for upsetting cocaine baron Curtis Warren. They suspected that Seiga had taken up the contract on behalf of the Cartel. In addition, police had already warned Bromley that a second and separate execution order from a different gang had been issued. This contract related to Bromley taxing a local drug dealer. Only the real killers knew.
Paul Burly was thankful: one of his worries was dead and there was not one piece of evidence that could be connected to him. He had used the information route wisely.
Bromley had upset so many people that there were a myriad of motives for his murder. He had been an underworld extortionist who had many enemies. One victim, Jimmy O’Callaghan, was confined to a wheelchair with a colostomy bag for life after he was disembowelled. Bromley had blamed the tough Irishman for shooting him, and another man called John White for setting up the attack. In revenge, Bromley stabbed O’Callaghan in his behind in a pub. He then blasted the lower half of White’s leg off so his leg was severely mutilated. They later became mates again and Bromley affectionately referred to White as ‘Skippy’ for his severe limp. Neither O’Callaghan nor White had anything to do with shooting Bromley. However, there were potential enemies who had a motive to kill Bromley all over Liverpool.
In another attack, Bromley and Kevin Maguire had fired more than 100 gunshots into a victim’s house, causing his pregnant wife to miscarry. Another pregnant woman was nearly kicked to death while her husband was tortured. Another of Bromley’s tricks was extreme psychological torture. On one occasion when he was trying to extract tribute from a young couple, he forced the female to lie down inside a body bag to give her an idea of how death felt. Another young man was kidnapped for two days and raped with a broomstick in a darkened cellar. Countless others were burned with irons, stabbed and shot.
Soon after Bromley’s murder, things started to calm down. Business got back to normal. Colin Smith took over Curtis Warren’s role within the Cartel. Another cell within the Cartel had discovered an excellent way of smuggling in drugs – bananas. Phillip Brown was a serial drug trafficker, later described by a judge as a ‘nasty piece of work’. But he fancied himself. He’d moved to an upmarket part of the Wirral and reinvented himself as an independent financial consultant.
Brown was the mastermind behind a travelling network heavily linked to Curtis Warren that had sealed a partnership between Cartel legmen from Liverpool and villains from London and Lancashire. They’d been bringing in cocaine, but the plan now was to do some groupage: smuggling in superload cocktails of every drug they could get their hands on abroad.
They put together the team. Michael Melia was an unemployed driver from St Helens. Melia was a main Liverpool distributor. Gary Hunter, from East Peckham, Kent, was the manager of a distribution depot; the warehouse was used to unload the drugs. Melvin Radford, from Burnley, Mark Riley, from Liverpool, and Charles Hoskins, from Basingstoke, were in charge of storage, transport and security. Joseph Noon, from Liverpool, was another dealer. The gang sourced cocaine and cannabis from Europe, hid it in crates of fruit and began driving it into the UK. Things were moving. Police believed that at least ten other Liverpool crime groups were operating similar schemes. The Cartel was prospering once again.
But it was a case of one step forward, many steps back. Halfway around the world, in Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, the Cartel was about to receive a major blow. One of its main suppliers was about to be unmasked and interned. Lucio, the Cali Cartel godfather who’d given Scarface and Kaiser their big break nearly a decade earlier, was about to be taken out. He was travelling on a false name using a fake passport in the name of Mr Lonzano. The Dutch police were pretty confident that they could identify him by his real name.
He was travelling from Bogotá, where he’d first met the Scousers, to the Caribbean, where he was to spend Christmas with his brother. But the Dutch authorities had been tipped off. When he landed in the Dutch colony, he was picked up on a hastily arranged warrant by spotters disguised as baggage handlers. On Christmas Eve, the DEA in Washington faxed over a set of fingerprints to confirm the ID of the suspect. It matched. The crack Dutch Prisma anti-drugs team had their man. His real name was Arnaldo Luis Quiceno Botero, known in the Cali Cartel as ‘Lucho’ and as ‘Lucio’ to the Scousers. To Curtis Warren, to whom Scarface and Kaiser had introduced him, he was known as Mr L.
Botero was put on a plane back to Holland and sent for trial on numerous international drugs charges.
Poncho said, ‘We were gutted. No one could believe it when we heard that Lucio had been nicked. But at the same time, we couldn’t believe our own luck, in as much as we’d seen it coming and trusted our instincts and got out before it all came on top. Me and my brother were in the UK, and Kaiser and Scarface had been laying low. They were still in Holland, but they weren’t doing anything with Lucio.
‘Luckily, after Curtis had got in with Lucio, they had taken a back seat and decided to find some more links. They’d known that they couldn’t ride Lucio for ever and they’d had a good run and decided to branch out to some new pastures.
‘After Curtis had got nicked they’d been doubly cautious. So by the time Lucio got done, they were well off the scene. Well under the radar.’
CHAPTER 30
DYLAN MARK 2
1998
DESPITE THE SECOND wind, by 1998 the Cartel was falling out of love with Amsterdam. Internal disputes had led to several shootings. Too many run-of-the-mill villains who were on the run were turning up in Holland looking for graft and a place to crash, expecting to find work within the Cartel. At one point, there were so many Liverpool criminals quartered in the city that they had their own football teams based around their postcodes back home.
The Cartel workers settled into a lazy life: shopping in Marks & Spencer for Chinese chicken wings and tea bags (they couldn’t do without home comforts) and drinking away weeknights at the City Bar. Saturday was reserved for the Escape nightclub, which made them homesick for Cream. Meetings were held in the nooks and crannies of the Irish bars and the bier kellers in and off Dam Square. Soon there was a surplus of young criminals looking for ‘work’. When the Cartel couldn’t oblige, they turned to street crime.
Poncho said, ‘I started to go back out there to graft. I didn’t want to, with all the commotion around Lucio, but I had to. My cocaine round in the UK was petering out, so I was back doing stuff with Kaiser and Scarface over there. But it had changed quickly in the time I’d been away. By that time we knew the Scousers had fucked Holland, because too many of them had been hiding out there and were doing snatches and robberies. We were one of few firms who saw the writing on the walls. Even our lads, who’d been there for a decade, were starting to stand out and attract heat. That was because of what had happened to Curtis and Lucio.
‘Our people were black and mixed race,
so we played the ethnic card and moved out of the city centre. We stayed anonymous in the minority districts. For instance, the Moroccans thought I was one of them when I was over there. By that time, the British police had spotters in Amsterdam and even they thought I was a foreigner, so it was OK.
‘Then I went to the Dutch Caribbean for a while and sat out there. I slipped in there easily because they thought I was West Indian, which I was.’
On another subject, Poncho, Scarface and Kaiser had decided to let the murder of Stephen Cole go. For a start, they didn’t know who had ordered the hit or carried it out. It just seemed like a load of grief between doormen. To go after the perpetrators now would bring heat on them at a time when the police were on them, or at least waiting for them to make a mistake, anyway. Now was the time to stay on the move, not to pin themselves down with a gang war.
Since the imprisonment of Warren, other Cartel cells had decided to give Holland a wide berth. They were now so powerful that the Colombians would come to them. The Cali Cartel sent a UK sales representative to set up shop full-time in London, to make it easier for the Scousers to place their orders. A former Venezuelan shipper called Ivan Mendoza di Giorgio started to get himself busy on the King’s Road in Chelsea. Two of his first and most trusted customers were Spencer Benjamin and Edward Serrano, hardcore Cartel drug dealers who had come down from Liverpool to talk shop over a light lunch. They agreed that London was a safer meeting point than the Dam. They frequently shared afternoon tea in a Bayswater hotel.
Meanwhile, Dylan Porter was watching the money roll in. Above him was a mysterious Mr Big, a senior Cartel drug lord who dressed like a businessman and lived on the Wirral. Dylan had acquired a partner called Martin Neary, and they were seen as lieutenants of equally high rank. Neary’s job was more hands-on than Dylan’s, but still he never carried drugs himself. However, Neary frequently travelled to Europe to set up deals using a stolen car with false number plates. The car was always a ringer: the phoney registration numbers matched those of a car of the same make parked legitimately on a garage forecourt in Liverpool. So, to anyone watching, it always looked like the car stayed local. Meanwhile, Neary drove abroad via the Eurotunnel. One of the gang’s main customers was Glasgow drug lord Ian McAteer. Every week he bought four kilos of heroin from Dylan’s outfit for £40,000. Like clockwork, McAteer sent down the money with a courier called Warren Selkirk, who Dylan knew, trusted and had even grafted with. The four kilos were sent back up to Glasgow using a separate courier. The whole set-up ran like clockwork, which was partly down to Dylan’s experience.
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 18
