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

by Graham Johnson

  One day, a few of the Cartel bosses paid a visit to the Cumbrian factory to see how the operation was coming along. The group was led by Mr Big, who seemed to be in charge. Frank Smith felt as though he and his team weren’t getting a fair share of the profits. In a bid to bargain up their fee, the workers plotted to give Mr Big ‘a taste of what they had been through’.

  Frank Smith recalled, ‘You have to realise we were working with respirators, with caustic soda all over the floor and ammonia in the air. It got so bad that at one stage we filled the bath with water to allow us to stand in the bath to stop our feet burning, because the chemicals were eating through our trainers. The ammonia was burning our lungs.’

  Frank and the workers played a trick on the visiting dignitaries by deliberately blasting them with the ammonia. It was a dangerous ploy that risked agitating Mr Big and the other Cartel bosses – some of them were high up and strictly hands-off – but there was a hidden agenda. Frank was scared that the factory was inefficient. They had used a whole three gallons of BMK, the raw material given to them by the Cartel, for the first cook: much more than had been budgeted for. Frank was worried that he’d get punished for wasting too much; he wanted to show Mr Big that the error was down to the dangerous conditions as opposed to waste or theft.

  Frank and his team had been promised a flat fee of £90,000 for making the speed and a bonus of £5,000 for the bad conditions. Therefore Frank and the team were expecting a total of £95,000. But instead of being given £95,000 for the first cook’s revenues, they only received a total of £25,000 in cash. That worked out at £3,500 wages each for the seven-man team that Frank was responsible for (which included himself) and £500 left over for sundries such as food and drink. In order to get avoid paying the balance, the Cartel argued that a total of £65,000 had already gone through Frank’s account at his laboratory. This was true, Frank agreed, but he argued that that money was not wages but expenses and had been spent on equipment and chemicals and various other things such as cleaning gear and office supplies. Frank argued that he hadn’t been reimbursed for this; hence he wanted the full £90,000 plus his bonus. The Scousers refused and said that he’d have to bear the cost of expenses. To add insult to injury, he later got a message from Mr Big refusing to pay the £5,000 bonus for bad conditions. Their ploy at demonstrating how hard it was to work in the ammonia-filled atmosphere had fallen flat. Frank was learning how the Cartel short-changed its suppliers and tricked them out of money. The horse-trading left Frank confused. When he and the workers complained, Mr Big threatened to have them killed.

  On the second cook, Frank and his team were promised £140,000 each, plus £90,000 expenses. But the Scousers were contemptuous of the ‘woolybacks’ (the term that peole from Liverpool used to describe out-of-towners) and constantly played them in complicated Indian giving deals, where they pretended to give with one hand but took away with the other. The Scousers enjoyed horse-trading like the professionals they were, because as expert drug dealers they had the advantage of knowing the cost and sale price of all the materials, and they often left the amateurs bewildered and frightened during the complex trade-offs.

  On one occasion, Frank Smith was conciliatory. He agreed to reduce his £90,000 fee claim by £20,000 in order to pay for a chemical called formamide (which the gang wrongly named ‘formahide’) that was urgently required. The Scousers laughed: they were never going to pay the £90,000 anyway, and Frank was getting deeper and deeper in debt with his legitimate suppliers, a liability that he was personally responsible for.

  The rip-offs and the petty backstabbing continued. On another occasion, Frank discovered that he had some formamide hidden in the laboratory’s stores. He tried to get the Scousers to pay for it in a ploy to recover some of his expenses. They promised £18,000, but he only received £1,500. The front laboratory was sliding into insolvency. Behind his back, the Cartel plan was to secretly ‘long firm’ the business: bleed it dry of all the registered chemicals it could buy, then bust it out and saddle Frank with the debt.

  To pretend to help Frank, one of the Scousers proposed a side deal of supplying five gallons of BMK that would get them an extra £140,000 worth of speed to clear the debts. The Scouser said that they would make the extra speed on the side and not tell the Liverpool bosses.

  A new team of amateur chemists was drafted in, including an old mate of Frank called Tony Johnson. Tony Johnson had been involved earlier but only on the periphery as a kind of advisor. Now he was brought in full-time as a hands-on ‘cook’. In the next, more efficient cook, the gang produced forty kilos from ten gallons of BMK and a further twenty kilos from Charlie’s own side stash that he’d been given by one of the Scousers to clear the debts.

  The Liverpool bosses arranged for their 40 kilos to be taken to the bashman. The helpful Scouser agreed to take away the unauthorised 20 kilos as well. Frank was reluctant to part with them, but he had few options; he had no alternative method of distribution. The drugs were transported away from the cottage in false-bottomed propane gas cylinders. But the containers leaked and the drivers got so high off the fumes that they went too fast and missed the turning on the motorway. Eventually they arrived in Liverpool. The Cartel converted the whole of the 60 kilos of pure amphetamine into 480 kilos of diluted drugs by adding seven kilos of adulterant to one kilo of pure chemical. Therefore one kilo of pure gave eight kilos of diluted speed. They sold the 480 kilos almost straight away. The profits were great: 60 times 8 times £1,000 = £480,000. But, as usual, Frank’s share was low, even though he’d been promised an under-the table bung to clear his debts. He and a couple of other workers got £7,000 each. Frank was furious.

  CHAPTER 34

  OPERATION PIRATE

  1998

  SOME GYM USERS described father of four Kevin Maguire as friendly and approachable. In the outside world, it was a different story. Maguire had risen to become a feared underworld enforcer for the Cartel. Even so, the top drug bosses didn’t like him. But, for now, it was better to have him inside the tent rather than having him turn on them. Maguire was a stalwart on the cut-throat door scene and a frequent participant in gang wars over security contracts. But he was disliked, many believing that he threw his weight around and bullied weaker people to get what he wanted. He didn’t even follow the general underworld rule that most Cartel villains lived by: Maguire seemed to target both criminals and law-abiding civilians alike, not caring whom he stabbed and shot. Maguire was of a new breed of arrogant, ruthless villains who considered everyone fair game in his battle for wealth and power.

  Maguire had a previous conviction for a disorder offence and had been jailed in 1995 for the kidnap and assault of a 21-year-old student whom he stabbed in the leg with a pitchfork. His sidekick Nathan Jones, though younger, was a rising star in the door world and had previous convictions for a public order offence and assault.

  As Maguire and Jones laddishly swapped quips with Becouarn, their killer waited calmly and smiled; he had them relaxed and totally unaware, and all he had to do now was wait for the right moment in order to make each shot count and therefore ensure the success of his hit. The lady who worked in the gym had to be out of the way so nobody else was to be endangered – that was an order from Becouarn’s controllers, according to Paul Burly. Becouarn had been contracted by a middleman on behalf of someone who had been severely wronged by Jones and Maguire. But who that someone was Paul Burly had no idea – for he had sent a lot of information out to their victims via his network of reliable ‘squeaks’. That was Burly’s term for the gossips and underworld propaganda merchants who worked on his behalf. Burly was too careful to become directly involved. Burly could well have done the job himself he claimed, but he had no wish to risk a slip-up that could send him away to prison once more. Even though he felt it was a moral right that Maguire should it killed, of course it would be classed as a wrong in the eyes of the law. Time was now running out for Maguire and Jones, who had killed and maimed so many during their underwor
ld careers. Many of their victims would see their murder as natural justice. Now Becouarn was awaiting his final orders to execute the important stages of the plan. In the meantime, he continued to nonchalantly familiarise himself with the scene of the action.

  When he felt the time was right, his hand reached into the bag and unwrapped the towel . . .

  Meanwhile, in Cumbria, things at the speed factory were going from bad to worse. The Liverpool drug barons were manipulating the men they had hired to make the amphetamine. One of the Scousers, Charlie Corke, offered another ‘side deal’ to help Frank get out of debt. The unauthorised cooks yielded thirty-five kilos from ten gallons of non-Cartel-sourced BMK.

  But, again, Charlie Corke didn’t pay them. He claimed that the final product made by Frank was substandard, blagging him that the crystal was turning black and brown. However, it was just an excuse. Frank’s speed had been good. The brown sample that he showed Frank as proof of poor quality was someone else’s that Corke had switched. Charlie was passing off somebody else’s bad speed as Frank’s in a ploy not to pay him.

  To soften the blow, Charlie Corke offered Frank one final superdeal: he said that he had personally bought forty-five gallons of BMK from Holland, off his own bat, without Mr Big knowing. He said that it cost £80,000 but if Frank made the speed ‘on the side’ again he could sell it back to the Dutch, with a sell-back price of £1,200 a kilo. By keeping it in a Dutch loop, the Cartel needn’t ever know, Charlie bluffed. It was a testament to Frank’s expertise that the Dutch criminals were now wanting to buy speed that he made rather than buy stuff made in Amsterdam.

  Frank realised that ‘things were getting bigger and bigger, and there was less and less chance of getting out alive after paying off all of the bills’.

  A new worker called Taff Shipman was brought in, a computer student at Liverpool University. Taff was a specialist at making methamphetamine, a souped-up form of speed that commanded higher prices. They also discussed how to make a hallucinogenic designer drug made out of skunk oil and LSD. Seeing a way out of his predicament in methamphetamine that sold for a premium, in desperation Frank offered Taff research facilities at the laboratory. But Taff Shipman preferred messing about than getting down to business: he simply filled the office computer up with Internet downloads, emailed people about making drugs and eventually broke the hard drive.

  The locals in Cumbria were becoming suspicious of the speed factory in their village, so the Cartel bosses demanded that a new factory be opened at a secret location, preferably nearer to Liverpool. Through Charlie Corke, the gang eventually found an old car mechanic’s garage on a quiet road called Coal Pit Lane in Atherton. The venue was ideal because it had a car-spraying room attached equipped with a powerful extractor fan that could be used to disperse the fumes.

  Frank’s men pulled together, organising themselves like a ‘gang’ on a building site or in a coal mine. They were more amateurish than professional tradesmen, but they had a can-do, casual pragmatism which seemed to pull them through. They wanted to present a united front to the Cartel in a bid to negotiate harder. They threw themselves at the new work, hoping to get themselves out of debt.

  The Liverpool bosses paid £10,000 for six weeks’ rent on the old garage. The owner, who was called Carl, seemed to know that his garage was going to be used illegally, and he tried to cover his back by getting a legal contract drawn up so that he could blame anything on the renters. It was a long shot if things went wrong, but the Cartel bosses persuaded him that it was a get-out-of-jail-free card if the premises were raided.

  Computer boffin Taff Shipman was rehired. He worked in a tidy area separated from the main factory by a black curtain. His job was to make higher-quality methamphetamine. Some people within the Cartel had become obsessed with ‘crystal meth’. The drug had swept through several cities in the US like a typhoon, and it was hideously addictive but dirt-cheap to make.

  When he was not watching porn on the office computer, Shipman had done lots of research into so-called ‘super speed’. The Cartel bosses became fascinated with a story of how Nazis had used methamphetamine during the Second World War to fight combat fatigue. The Cartel wanted Shipman to make powder that they could press into pills for sale in the clubs. But they found out that the Nazis had laced chocolate with methamphetamine, which was popularly known during the war as fliegerschokolade (flyer’s chocolate) or panzerschokolade (tanker’s chocolate) to keep soldiers awake while operating heavy machinery. The Cartel had already done their market research. The reason why they wanted meth was because it fitted neatly into a niche, between downmarket normal speed and designer Ecstasy. By 1998, the bottom of the E market had fallen out because of the low quality of MDMA. Consumers were wary of cheap imitations, but they were no longer prepared to pay between £10 and £25 per tablet. If the Cartel could peddle a meth tablet at between £5 and £10 a pill, they were convinced they’d strike gold. What’s more, if they could add it to chocolate or sweets, then it’d be a gimmick that’d fit into their demographic. To protect the brand they would have to keep one story about meth a secret: Adolf Hitler had become addicted after receiving daily injections to overcome depression and tiredness.

  Shipman got busy and was granted unlimited resources and special privileges to work on the secret project. He worked like a scientist, and the people next door were impressed that he made a ‘catalyst’ to hurry the reactions along.

  Frank said, ‘His methods were extremely clean and quiet. His method involved dropping a chemical at two drops per minute.’

  Eventually Shipman produced 520 grams of methamphetamine, which he said would cover his wages. He was promised £10,000 but only got £6,000. Charlie Corke came to collect the meth and took it away to the cutter. But, once again, he came back later complaining that it wasn’t as good as the standard amphetamine that Frank was making. The Scousers were playing different parts of the gang off each other.

  Frank said, ‘I took this to be Charlie Corke lying to us again, so he could cream some money off the organisation.’

  Frank got on with his part of the bargain. This time he honed the chemical process down to a fine art, with imported equipment and a new recipe. But still his workers made mistakes.

  He said, ‘The refluxing was carried out in giant 25-litre flasks. While we were doing the separations of the amphetamine oil and water, Terry Cheshire was being intoxicated by the fumes and was getting confused and pouring the wrong chemicals into the wrong containers and generally messing up.’

  The third cook made 60 kilos of pure amphetamine, which generated £480,000 at wholesale. Frank hoped the Cartel would show mercy and pay him the several hundred thousand pounds he thought he was due.

  Frank said: ‘I can recall at Atherton that Charlie Corke paid £5,000 to everyone. Before I had even had a chance to count the money, he said he owed someone £13,000 and was £5,000 short, so he needed to borrow the money back from me.’

  Instead, all of the money was handed over to the Cartel Mr Bigs. They included a gangster with close links to John Haase, another villain called John Byrne (who had no links to Haase but was known to police), and a Cartel speed expert called Terry Yates. He was a cook who specialised in producing speed using an efficient, high-pressure method.

  CHAPTER 35

  SPEED KING

  1998

  ON 28 SEPTEMBER 1998, a few days after one of Becouarn’s visits to the Crosby gym, a 36-year-old mature student called Neil Green said goodbye to his girlfriend. He left their flat in nearby Aintree and went out. It was the last time he would be seen alive.

  Just over 36 hours later, on 30 September, his body was found face-down in sand dunes on the beach at Ainsdale, near Southport, Merseyside, by a man walking his dog. A bag of cocaine with a street value of up to £50,000 was discovered in Green’s Vauxhall Vectra car, which was found less than 50 yards from his body. There were no signs of a struggle, Green did not appear to have been robbed and there were no signs of foul play. Green was a s
ocial studies student who had no visible links to the underworld; even though a small amount of drugs was discovered in his car, it was probably not enough for police to suspect the usual motive: that it was a drug deal gone wrong that had resulted in a murder. The mystery deepened when detectives admitted they were baffled by the death on the popular stretch of beach.

  The underworld rumour mill ground into full gear. Some gangsters believed that Green had been unwittingly recruited as a low-level drugs courier by the gang currently at war with Maguire, or that he at least had some loose connection to them. Because Maguire and Nathan Jones knew Green well from around the neighbourhood, they had then decided to ‘tax’ Green by stealing all of the drugs and money he had, an unspeakable double-insult to his enemies. They lured him to a meeting on Ainsdale beach to force him to hand over the drugs. Even though he had £50,000 worth in his boot, a terrified Green refused to tell Maguire and Jones where the drugs were for fear of upsetting his own bosses. If he handed them over, they would be sure to kill him. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. Maguire and Jones began to torture him, possibly by forcing his head into the sand or seawater so he couldn’t breathe. Suddenly they went too far and Green died. Maguire and Jones quickly left the scene, not even caring to search his car in case a passer-by stumbled upon the murder.

  Other underworld speculators said there was a similar but simpler explanation. Green had unwittingly got caught up in the drugs business and was paying protection money to Maguire. When he failed to pay, he was killed: whether it was on purpose or by accident was irrelevant. In disgust, Green’s furious pals then ordered revenge by asking for help from the gang that Maguire was at war with.