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

by Graham Johnson

  The Analyst soon had two of the worst districts on lockdown. Street dealers knew to beware, that if they set up in his locale there was no point. Trouble would come their way. The Analyst would come and get you within a matter of days. But the Analyst always had to keep an eye on internal politics. Patiently, he’d gather intelligence until he knew that a safehouse was full of drugs. But it wasn’t enough: he wanted the safehouse above that, and the one above that, so he held off and continued the watch. But the older officers, unfamiliar with the way it worked, wanted a quick hit, instant glory, drugs on the table.

  The Analyst said, ‘The safehouse is gonna be the key to tumbling the whole crime group. Politically, the senior officer wants a big hit. They want to publish a story; they want the drugs and guns out. They just want the glamour. But the team says no – you’ve just got to bear this through.

  ‘The senior officers say, “No.” They end up seizing the drugs and guns. No prisoners and they burn that line of inquiry for good. So the bosses get what they are after: the limelight for 24 hours. But it scuppers the operation.

  ‘However, we soon learned from those experiences and said sometimes you’ve got to play the longer game for the greater benefit.’

  There was also a greater emphasis on visibility: showing the community practical examples of how dealers were being taken down. The Analyst’s squad went after the mid-ranking dealers who had the stone-lion statues on the corner of their gates. He busted them to prove a point. Within months, the house was up for sale. The Mercedes was gone from the driveway.

  The Analyst: ‘That’s when it started to have the wider impact, when people saw that the police were actually doing something about this problem, taking them down, at all those different levels of criminality. You can do more at the lower level than you can do at the more sophisticated level – so you’ve got to express that physically so that everyone can see it.’

  But as the intelligence got more heavyweight, the Analyst was faced with a new dilemma: the supergrass. Supergrasses were great because they were prepared to blow up a whole criminal infrastructure. But the problem was that much of their intelligence was historical. By the time they were sitting down in front of the Analyst, they’d half extracted themselves from the crime group. Therefore, they were less useful.

  CHAPTER 32

  SET UP

  1998

  COMPARED TO INNER-CITY Liverpool, Crosby was a relatively prosperous area and much quieter in terms of guns, gangs and drugs. Compared to other gyms, Darren Becouarn’s new haunt was civilised and there were fewer gangsters. Becouarn settled in. He looked like a young professional with a salary to spend. He didn’t speak with a Scouse accent, wore smart clothes and lived ‘over the water’ on the other side of the River Mersey, on the Wirral. Of course, he gave no indication that he had four previous convictions. His record for robbery was never mentioned. When other customers gossiped about the crime splash in the Liverpool Echo, Becouarn shied away. An awkward conversation about the fact that he just got out of prison on early release was to be avoided at all costs. He didn’t want to go there.

  During the sessions, like most gym users, he broke off for regular breaks and a drink of water. He took the opportunity to speak to those nearby. He was paying particular attention to two muscular men doing sets together: 36-year-old Kevin Maguire from Thornton, a feared nightclub doorman known as Mad Dog and sometime associate of the late George Bromley, and his sidekick, a younger man called Nathan Jones, who was only 24 and from a nearby estate in Crosby. Becouarn engaged them in conversation and shared the odd joke.

  Maguire and Jones were ferocious bodybuilders. They worked out at the gym for between one and two hours most days, following a punishingly rigorous routine to boot. But they were happy to join in the locker-room banter with the newcomer. After all, Becouarn seemed genuine – and he was no threat to them.

  Meanwhile, Merseyside Police were determined not to make the same mistakes that other forces and Customs and Excise were making. Intelligence-led policing was a powerful weapon, but it had a big weakness. First, much of the intelligence was from criminals. So could it be trusted? And could you use those criminals, who’d grassed up their mates, to go a little bit further, a little bit deeper, to set them up as well? This area was a legal and ethical minefield. Customs and Excise were learning that informants would and could fabricate evidence for their own ends: sometimes, like John Haase, on an industrial scale. In addition, there was a risk that so-called ‘participating informants’ would entice targets to commit crimes that they wouldn’t normally have got involved in. Soon the underworld had dubbed intelligence-led policing ‘the Judas system’.

  The Analyst said, ‘We never really got drawn into the supergrass system. We never used informants for evidence, only intelligence.’

  Technically, informants were known by the acronym CHIS: covert handled intelligence source. Two years later, the good practice and methods pioneered and developed by the likes of the Analyst were codified-in-law. The management of informants was governed by the RIPA Act (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000).

  The Analyst said, ‘Informants give you the edge when you start the case, but it’s about the art of exploiting what they give you. You may never have known who that person was. If you take the example of Marks & Spencers in Amsterdam, the supergrass may say: “A dealer goes to Marks every morning for his croissants.” That’s the trigger for the operation and then you’re up and running. The trigger leads to a safehouse. The safehouse leads to surveillance opportunities. Surveillance leads to associations: finding out who the target knows and meets with. Associations then go on to mobile phones. Finally, if you can attribute identities and information to mobile phones, then you’ve got a distribution network. This in turn leads to more safehouses to watch, which will reveal how and when the importation of the drugs take place.’

  But once the drugs were over in the UK, that’s when the hard work started. The police mounted surveillance on distribution in the UK and began to link everybody through to someone else in the chain. As the operation as a whole came together, it was important that the police took their time and built the case stage by stage.

  Customs and Excise were criticised in an official report called the Butterfield Review, which was sparked by the collapse of the famous London City Bond warehouse prosecutions in Liverpool. The cases fell apart after the court heard Customs officers had encouraged the offences in a sting operation. One informant had become a witness in the case, confusing the various roles.

  The Analyst said, ‘If you have a person who gives you information, he’s called a confidential contact, and you can only meet them a couple of times. You can task them, but you can’t involve them in the suspected crime, or the investigation side of things; that’s asking them to do something wrong. If the relationship goes further, the confidential contact has to be registered as an informant. This protects them, and their rights are secured under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

  ‘Butterfield was the review of a case involving evasion of duty. You can’t let someone become an informant when they are calling themselves something else in the case, just to make life easy for the investigation. Everything we do is robustly underpinned by legislation.’

  As the big police operations had an impact, some Cartel members tried to switch sides to save themselves. But the Analyst was careful. He perceived the supergrass as a particular type of informant, like in the Northern Ireland situation, who went into the witness box and into the evidential chain. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s, the police and army had been successful in ‘turning’ former IRA members and converting them from intelligence sources into witnesses who gave evidence in court against their former comrades. The witnesses became known as ‘supergrasses’. The Analyst refused to go down that route, no matter how tempting it was to burrow deep inside the Cartel. It was a frustrating decision, considering that he’d been building up to thi
s point with the lower-level operations. But the law was the law, and he had to abide by it no matter how tempting the short cut was.

  The law later allowed some informants to give evidence. But even that legislation, which allowed supergrass evidence under strictly controlled conditions, didn’t come along for another seven years. In 2005, sections 71 to 73 of the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act allowed police to use people as informants and as witnesses, to give evidence.

  The Analyst said, ‘But even back then in 1998, everything we did was underpinned by legislation. There was an authorising officer whose job it was to be independent and impartially decide whether it was legal, necessary and proportionate. There’s a difference between informants and CHIS, who are prepared to give evidence.

  ‘We use informants, and on occasion you can use participating informants, who can become involved in the low level of the criminality. But there are really strict rules about that, so that participating informers can only be peripheral. They can’t incite the criminality. That meant that we couldn’t use informants in isolation, just rely on them for a case. You’ve got to use them collectively, along with surveillance and your case building.

  ‘You can build a conspiracy case. For instance, in Amsterdam, wiretapping or telephone interception is legal. So you can use it as evidence over here. If the dealers are involved in drugs trafficking in Europe then that’s how they get caught: that’s where Curtis Warren fell foul – because the prosecution used the telephone evidence from Europe in this country. If it’s lawfully obtained in another country, it can be used here in British operations.

  ‘There’s a debate in this country about using wiretap evidence in court, but I don’t think there’s a will to do it. I think the problem lies around disclosure. If you wanted to use a conversation as evidence in court, you might end up with 1,000 hours of phone calls to be disclosed in evidence. You might only want to use two hours, but sure as eggs is eggs, the defence will come on one and want to know what’s on the other nine hundred and ninety-eight hours. “Can we have a transcript?” Logistically, you just couldn’t do it, could you? And if you just hand over the tapes, there might be something on there that is sensitive. So wiretap evidence is not as good as it seems.’

  In April 1998, six regional squads were brought together to form the National Crime Squad. It was going to deal mainly with organised and major crimes. For this reason, the NCS reporting lines were streamlined. No longer would officers be hindered by having to report to their aging constabulary bosses who knew little about drugs. They would report directly to the Home Office, which was theoretically singing from the same hymn sheet: it was in their interests to make intelligence-led policing work. The NCS had nationwide and international jurisdiction but didn’t have to get bogged down in security or terrorism matters.

  The Cartel bosses were worried. The NCS’s brief looked like a Cartel to-do list: drug trafficking, contract killing, gun running, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping and murder relating to any of the above. Crucially, the NCS could support regional forces like Merseyside Police. The NCS consisted of 1,656 full-time personnel, spread over three regional command units, including five Directors, 1,169 seconded police officers and 280 civilian police staff. Their resources were unprecedented, including a property portfolio of offices that would rival the Cartel’s.

  The new mood of optimism was accompanied by several successes. In late 1998, a top Cartel money-launderer called Ussama El-Kurd went down in history as the first person to be convicted solely for money laundering. El-Kurd had run a West London bureau de change estimated to have washed £70 million in dirty money, much of it linked to Curtis Warren. One of Warren’s runners, Peter McGuinness, was jailed for ten years. Two of Warren’s E dealers who had helped export drugs to Australia were arrested at Warren’s old house and later jailed for ten years. During the previous year they had made £800,000 from the Oz connection, wired back to the UK in over 200 money transfers.

  Joseph Noon and Michael Melia, who had set up a drugs run importing drugs in plantains from Antwerp Fruit Market, were nicked and jailed. Many believed that they had been set up by John Haase, who was seen close to where they had been arrested and was still feeding information to Customs and Excise.

  The biggest fish was yet to be landed. In October 1998, Luis Botero, aka Lucio, was jailed for six years and fined one hundred thousand guilders: not much, considering his position, but the Dutch prosecution could only muster one highly incentivised paid-for witness, such was the fear of going against him. Lucio was sent to the same Dutch jail as Curtis Warren, which was ironic, as he was believed to be the mysterious man called Mr L who Warren had been heard referring to on Dutch wiretaps, although Warren and his lawyer denied there was any link.

  Scarface and Kaiser were devastated for their old pal Lucio. Without him, there wouldn’t be any Cartel. But at the same time, they had to count their lucky stars that they had not been drawn into the investigation. The whole Curtis Warren thing was turning out to be a mess and they felt guilty that they had introduced Lucio to him in the first place. Scarface and Lucio believed that Lucio had been caught because he’d wandered onto the Dutch wiretaps as the mysterious Mr L.

  Despite the obvious successes, some police officers were still not happy. They became frustrated at the amount of red tape that some believed was holding them back. Crime groups weren’t bothered by legislation, laws or rules, and if a plan didn’t work they simply found a way around it. However, the rules surrounding informants were only a fraction of the legislation that the Analyst had to consider before getting down to the real laws: those concerning the offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the various related conspiracies. In addition, most of the Warren-related cases – which included a total of 80 arrests and the seizure of a staggering 4,000 kilos of drugs – were done under a joint police–Customs and Excise banner known as Operation Crayfish. The investigation was a model of cooperation, but Merseyside Police wanted its own capability.

  CHAPTER 33

  MAD DOG DOWN

  1998

  UNUSUALLY, KEVIN ‘MAD Dog’ Maguire had allowed Darren Becouarn the privilege of some small talk during his small number of visits to the gym. They were getting comfortable. Maguire was usually nasty and uncommunicative, according to those who knew him well. To some extent, Mad Dog was letting his guard down. The gym was his comfort zone. Maguire felt totally at home there. Like it was for most doormen, it was, in fact, a second home.

  As a senior security boss, his whole livelihood depended on his being muscular and fit. Maguire had been training nearly all of his life. In the gym, he felt on top of his game, supremely confident and safe. He knew everyone in there, and a casual visitor like Becouarn seemingly had nothing to hide. He had come openly with a smiling face, revealing his full and true identity.

  A lot of business between doormen was conducted in gyms. Being ‘on the weights’ had turned into a self-contained underworld subculture. For the Cartel’s growing power base, gyms were the new churches. But as far as Maguire was concerned, with Becouarn it was just pleasure. He was a distant associate at most. An irrelevance.

  Meanwhile, in April 1998, the Cartel nursed the country’s biggest-ever speed factory into production. Using Cartel-supplied base material, amateur chemist Frank Smith had completed the first phase of the amphetamine-making process. This had been completed at his front laboratory. Now it was time to move out and upscale the operation for the final phase. This phase involved cooking up the intermediary chemical in a makeshift distillery, siphoning off amphetamine oil and then converting it to speed paste. For this, the Cartel had rented out a cottage in a chocolate-box village in the Cumbrian countryside.

  However, within days the operation had descended into farce, more Carry on Cartel than Britain’s most sophisticated narcotic facility. The team had given themselves daft code names. Charlie Corke was known as ‘Bollocks’. Tony Johnson was ‘Casey’. Chris Willows was ‘Katie’. (Tony and
Chris were middle-ranking members of the speed-making gang.) During the telephone calls, the front laboratory was dubbed ‘the supermarket’. BJ was ‘the neighbour’. Like most drug dealers, they talked in a form of crude code, as though that was going to fool anyone listening in. In reality, it did little more than bond the group – and they needed all the help they could get, for things were going wrong.

  A helper called Terry Cheshire had brought his dog along to the cottage, but instead of guarding the entrance, the pit bull terrier kept eating the valuable amphetamine oil as it dripped out of the condenser, spilling on the floor. The dog got high and suddenly went berserk. Terry Cheshire had to take the dog for a long walk until it calmed down. Terry was worried in case his dog overdosed and died. The episode was a source of great amusement to the gang, who were working 24 hours a day, in sweatshop conditions. The rooms were filled with deadly fumes. But the stress was even harder to cope with: the gang were under constant threat of violence from the Cartel godfathers.

  Each production cycle was known as a cook. The first cook produced 12 kilos of pure speed paste. A Cartel fixer called Charlie Corke bagged up each kilo. The most powerful, potent part of the paste was known as the ‘brain’ and sold for £2,600 a kilo. The non-rump standard paste sold for £2,000 a kilo.

  The different-strength pastes were taken to Liverpool. They were given to a specialist ‘bashman’: a subcontractor who was able to dilute the pure speed with bulking agents, a specialist job that took a reasonable degree of skill. Each kilo of pure paste was cut in the ratio of seven-to-one with lactose sugar, meaning that in total one original kilo produced eight kilos. Each ‘bashed-up’ kilo was wholesaled for £1,000. The first cook generated £96,000 in kilo sales.