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

by Graham Johnson

  Dylan said, ‘But it’s a false feeling, earning 30 to 40 grand a month. I’d’ve felt better about myself earning £2,000 a month, in a normal nine-to-five, I really would.

  ‘But the overwhelming feeling you have, the first feeling that stays with you, is the relief you experience when a parcel has landed. It’s home: you’ve put money on it, and now you’re happy because the investment is in safe hands.’

  One of the key couriers bringing the drugs in was a 53-year-old disabled family man called Carl Emerson Frederick. Registered disabled, he exploited his condition as cover. Frederick even used a car he’d bought on Motability finance to travel to France. As an added distraction, he took his wife and children with him and placed his wheelchair – which he did not use – in the boot.

  Dylan said, ‘Twice a month the gear got dropped off. But the strange thing was, when you’d get the profit in a few days or weeks later, it would be an anticlimax. I’d come home with a Tesco bag full of cash. I’d say to my wife: “D’you need anything new? Have we got enough three-piece suites and tellies? Do you need any new clobber?” I still lived in a council house because we didn’t want to show out. By then, the days of buying a house for cash were over. The police used to let you go if they caught you with cash; now it was criminalised, and if you went into a bank with cash, it triggered an alert. So I made sure my house was done up inside like Dallas. All in all, it was a pretty hollow way of life.’

  Dylan said that he never had the ‘brain’ to invest in money-laundering scams.

  'It was a false economy in the sense that you never really benefit fully from the money because either you waste it, people charge you more for things such as cars because they know it’s black money or you have increased expenses because you can’t pay the bills in the normal way. Or you can’t spend it: it doesn’t seem real.

  ‘I had spent tens of grands on the back kitchen, had all the back turfed. I’d done it up boss. I couldn’t buy a bigger house with cash and I was too paranoid to go and see a money launderer. I just thought the money would be there for ever. So you just spend it on shit, sit down on the couch and change the channel. Just waiting for the next call from someone saying: “All good, lad,” meaning that the last consignment had made it home.’

  By now, Dylan’s cell was a well-organised and tightly run operation. Within months, they felt comfortable enough to expand. Smuggling was stepped up to bi-monthly trips to the continent. After returning to Liverpool – to depots mainly located in the Toxteth and Dingle areas – the bulk of the heroin was sent to Cartel hubs in West Yorkshire and Scotland.

  Dylan organised his end like a small business. Each member of the gang had his own role. Some were couriers, others arranged cars and accommodation. The top individuals, like Dylan, acted as ‘facilitators’, ensuring everyone knew what to do.

  However, unbeknown to Dylan, there were already dark clouds gathering. The new policy of intelligence-led policing was reaping its first harvest. A new branch of the police called the Major Crime Unit was set up specifically to go after the big guns: dealers just like him. The net was being drawn tighter. After a tip-off, officers began to collate data on suspected heroin gangs. Within weeks, they identified a number of separate drug-smuggling cells, which were acting independently but had close links. Basically, they had mapped out one section of the Cartel that revolved around Dylan.

  The investigation was soon formalised under the banner Operation Kingsway. Simultaneously, the MCU were targeting another branch of the Cartel, the crew that was meeting the Cali Cartel in London. But in Liverpool they concentrated on identifying the hierarchy around Dylan.

  Bingo! It didn’t take long for the MCU to hit pay dirt. They locked on to the Cartel boss above Dylan and quickly put a name to him. He was ID’d as Paul Lowe, a shadowy businessman figure that lived on the Wirral. The bonus was that the police soon discovered Lowe’s smuggling route: he brought the drugs in through France. Dylan and Martin Neary were soon identified as his lieutenants. Below them, the police uncovered an elaborate chain of couriers and go-betweens that did most of the dirty work, making Lowe stand out but, at the same time, making him a difficult man to take action against.

  At first, it was hard to believe that they used a disabled courier. Carl Emerson Frederick looked the most unlikely candidate to be a heroin smuggler, but soon the police had linked him to at least 11 trips to the continent, bringing heroin back to the UK and up to Liverpool.

  Astonishingly, the police had been able to follow the trail even further. Once in Liverpool, the drugs were stashed away in two safehouses. The main one was the sparsely furnished home of a 30-year-old called Anthony Ellis on Toxteth’s Upper Parliament Street, smack bang on the edge of Toxteth Triangle and a post-riot haven for drug activity. A second safehouse, run by a courier called Jason Smith, was found in a place called Wood Lane at the opposite end of the city, in Prescot. Under instructions from Dylan, Smith also acted as a local courier, taking the drugs to meeting points to hand over to link men from other cities.

  Dylan organised distribution of the heroin throughout the Cartel’s network. His contacts book was a Rolodex of Britain’s underworld. His buyers in Glasgow included one of Scotland’s most feared gangsters, a 40-year-old hit-man called Ian McAteer, who was also friends with another wing of the Cartel run by John Haase and Paul Bennett. Dylan had got to know McAteer through another Cartel bagman called Warren Selkirk. McAteer and Selkirk had met in prison. The incestuous spiderweb of connections was a sign that the Cartel was maturing, but it was also a weak spot that the police could use to knock down cells like a row of dominoes.

  In Bradford, police learned the name of Dylan’s link-up. He was supplying to gang boss Mark Davey, a 35-year-old operator who’d carved out a niche among the Asian gangs and the white mobsters from nearby Leeds. Often Dylan would cut them a deal. If the Glasgow and Bradford gangs sent their own couriers to Liverpool, he slashed a discount off the top of the kilo price: anything between £500 and £1,000 on a £20,000 wholesale purchase. Dylan didn’t need the hassle; drivers were notoriously flakey. ‘Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap’ was his motto.

  At the coalface, the intelligence-led police operations were going well. But the Analyst never took his eye off the big picture. The property boom of the late 1990s was affording the Cartel an unmissable opportunity to legitimise their money on a grand scale. A new phenomenon appeared on the streets: sunbed shops, strings and chains of them on posh parades and in the middle of sink estates, kitted out to an incongruously high spec with few paying customers. The Banker was believed to have set up 30 sunbed shops in a money-washing scam. He also bought a large proportion of a city-centre site in Bold Street, including a shopping arcade.

  A Cartel godfather called Dennis Kelly began working on a plan to import huge amounts of cocaine from Spain. As an in-joke, he bought a pub for a laugh: it was called The Dealers. He was based in Garston in south Liverpool. Garston was well connected because it was between Liverpool airport and the docks. The area was well served by several Cartel heavyweights, including Colin Smith, Stephen French, a notorious crime family and a professional hit-man. The locals were known as ‘mudmen’ and the Sunday League football teams turned out with boots full of guns in case it kicked off.

  The Analyst said, ‘More and more people in the criminal hierarchy were becoming more and more established. So across the city, there were a large number of individuals becoming more and more involved. For instance, if you look at just one example, Dennis Kelly, who was later locked up for a big importation of cocaine, he was gearing up in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, he brought himself into a police investigation called Operation Copybook, the job that eventually brought about his demise.

  ‘He was a first-generation drug dealer and then he brought his son into the family business. You looked at these people, who seemingly haven’t had a lot of money, but then you started to see more and more wealth. First he bought the Dealers pub in Garston. I was thinking: “H
ow are they able to buy a pub outright? Where’s that money come from?”

  ‘Then they started to live in nice houses in places such as Menlove Avenue, as opposed to back-to-back terraced houses on Heald Street in Garston.’

  The Analyst knew what had to be done. He was determined to rise through the ranks, to attain a position where he could start using his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Cartel to more effect. He wanted strategic control.

  He said, ‘Everyone aspires to get to the rank where you can make those decisions that will bring down the likes of Kelly. I kept at it because I was confident that one day I could really go at the networks like they’d never been attacked before.’

  CHAPTER 31

  MAJOR CRIME UNIT

  1998

  ON A WARM mid-September day in 1998, a 34-year-old businessman walked into a gym in the Waterloo area of north Merseyside to work out. Darren Becouarn was not a member of the Crosby Health and Leisure Studio, but he seemed respectable and pleasant enough, so the manager allowed him to pay a visitor’s fee for a one-off session. A quick round of exercise was all that he wanted. A harmless-enough request.

  Becouarn quietly got on with using the machines and the free weights, casually chatting to regulars in between sets, politely following gym etiquette by asking other weightlifters if benches were free before using them himself. Everything was cool and he fitted in.

  No one really noticed that as Becouarn pumped iron, he was discreetly eyeing up the layout of the building, paying particular attention to entry and exit routes. In street (and police) terms, he was ‘casing’ the joint to understand how the gym worked and who did what when. Were there any CCTV cameras? Was there any security? Were the exit doors locked with chains? Or could he break them open in the event of an emergency? All the time he was smiling, letting on and swapping pleasantries. Now and again, he even lent a helpful hand to fellow bodybuilders. Becouarn seemed like an ideal customer. Afterwards he had a shower before saying goodbye and leaving.

  Over the next fortnight, Becouarn returned two or three times more to work out. He became a semi-regular, becoming familiar with the ebb and flow of the club: the punters, the culture, the floor map.

  Meanwhile, Merseyside Police’s Major Crime Unit was running several concurrent operations: a bid to swarm the Cartel by attacking drugs activities on several flanks. The Analyst noted that the force was becoming much more sophisticated in targeting criminals.

  In 1998, two members of the South Liverpool Crime Group were doing particularly well from cocaine and heroin. Brothers Ian and Jason Fitzgibbon were related to the family with the Filipino heritage. They were importing drugs with a gangster called Pepsi Smith. In May 1998, police intelligence experts identified the Fitzgibbons as key players on the crime scene. Operation Black was launched, aimed at bringing the pair and their cohorts to justice. The police soon established that the Fitzgibbon brothers made up one of the most ruthless and dangerous crime gangs within the Cartel. The police investigation would turn into one of the biggest operations ever mounted by Merseyside Police.

  Jason and Ian were second-generation Cartel bosses. Consequently, they were determined to be more violent in their approach than the older ones had been. The wars between rival door teams had led to a situation where each one tried to outdo the other in terms of who could be the most violent. Now everyone had to be bloodthirsty in order to penetrate the distribution cells and keep them in line. The police would have to rely on their own data gathering, such was the fear of giving evidence. People dared not complain about the gangs. To some extent, the brothers lived with omertà as an insurance policy.

  The police learned fast. Like predators, the behaviour of the police began to mirror that of its prey. They adopted a similar set-up to the Cartel’s structure. The MCU set up ‘syndicates’ of officers, which began a painstaking process of intelligence gathering that would continue for 18 months. The scale of the Fitzgibbon cell was bigger than anyone had imagined. They were supplying large amounts of heroin across Merseyside, Scotland and the Midlands, bringing it up from London, where they had forged their own links with Turkish gangsters.

  Jason and Ian had learned from the mistake of first-generation barons like Eddie Gray. ‘Don’t be flash’ was the motto. They bought themselves suburban homes in a middling area called Prescot, for around £80,000 each: hardly millionaire mansions but not bad for men with no declarable income.

  Their only weakness was expensive cars, which they changed regularly. Like Dylan Porter’s, their homes were modest but expensively furnished, and they travelled abroad a lot. At the heart of the cell was the sidekick gangster Peter ‘Pepsi’ Smith, who lived out in Runcorn.

  The trio were at the centre of a hub linked to around eighteen homes and business premises in Liverpool, three in Scotland, two in Manchester and one in Cheshire. In July 1998, police watched Ian Fitzgibbon as he picked up one load from a single address – ten kilos of cannabis worth £72,000.

  On the police side, the new watchword was ‘patience’.

  The Analyst said, ‘It took time to investigate them because of the way they lived and operated. Similarly, we would give the police teams time. So they had the ability to start building a case over time, to prove the wider conspiracy. We started taking out seizures and shipments along the way, until we got sufficient evidence to convict, when the time came. This is when we started to cross the geographical boundaries of our force and move across into Europe.’

  Merseyside Police was the only force outside London to have developed international capability: the resources, the know-how and the permission to carry out complex, cross-border investigations in foreign countries. For the first time, a new generation of coppers like the Analyst, who’d been brought up through the rank nicking drug dealers, were making the decisions that mattered.

  The Analyst said, ‘Before David Ungi’s murder, we knew about drugs and we did target it. But now we had to put ourselves in a position of saying that we couldn’t allow it to continue any more. I’m not saying that at any point in the past we ever acquiesced to it. But from now on, it was a case of saying: “Our focus is on this now – drugs – and we’ve got to stop this from developing.” We got to stop it potentially going to the stage that it could have done. That’s when the Major Crime Unit started targeting that level of criminality. I don’t think the timing was right to do it before then, if I’m being honest. But it was only when we hit that threshold, around the David Ungi killing, that we realised that things were different.

  ‘We started asking the questions: “How has it got to where it is? And what do we need to know?” So that led to a greater emphasis on intelligence. This coincided with being told by the government, in the late 1990s, that intelligence-led policing was the way forward.’

  The force stopped talking about drugs and started doing something. Community intelligence was prioritised. Beat bobbies were ordered to find people who were prepared to talk and groom them. The motto was: ‘Start small, then go after the big guys’: a bottom-up approach that hit the Cartel at its weak points – poorly paid street dealers. The Analyst was a pioneer in this new approach. The Analyst began to run teams in two police stations, specifically targeting street-level drug dealing. Every house that he went to, every person he arrested was now shaken down for secret information about the Cartel. Someone, somewhere was bound to fold – and when that time came, the police, for the first time, were in a position to do something about it.

  The Analyst said, ‘My role was to say to the team, every one of those arrests is a potential informant: start speaking to them and see what they’ve got to tell you. One in ten would probably talk to you about criminality. They would probably give you the person who supplied to them.

  ‘So then we’d step up a little bit and start looking at the first-level suppliers. And every one of them we did, we’d start to get a little bit bigger, and then those dealers would probably give you the person above them.

  ‘And by the time we’d
finished a piece of work, within 12 months we were taking out multi-kilo seizures as a little local team.’

  The system worked. The Analyst may have been like a minnow gnawing away at a whale, but at least it was a start. Little did anyone know that his system would be the beginning of a police campaign that grew into the biggest anti-drugs force the country has ever known.

  The Analyst said, ‘Our interrogation was straightforward. Our goal was simple: “Where did your stash come from? You’re going to jail for X number of years: if you help us, we can help you.” Legally, there’s an opportunity for text.’

  Text was the police term for a secret report that could be written by an officer in support of a criminal going to trial. The text would detail the cooperation given to the police by a drug dealer and would be given to a judge before sentencing, in the hope that the criminal would get time off.

  The Analyst said, ‘More often than not, the dealers would take the bait and bite – and give you the next dealer, one up the rung. You’d get your operation together – we’d have to be more sophisticated with each bigger catch because they were more sophisticated. But we’d literally be hitting safehouses with multi-kilo loads inside, with thousands of pounds of cash hidden, as opposed to the situation we were in a couple of years before, when we’d take the door off a house and there’d be 15 sticks of cannabis in someone’s bedroom that they’re selling on their doorstep. At last we were getting where we wanted to be.’