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

by Graham Johnson

  Whatever the truth, it was a matter of underworld semantics. The facts were simple: Green’s sudden death seemed to be the alarm that triggered the gang bosses controlling Becouarn to send him into action. One of the other gangs behind the order was rumoured to be the cocaine cartel run by Curtis Warren – the richest criminal in British history, worth £200 million. Though Warren himself was serving 12 years in a Dutch jail for massive coke smuggling, underworld sources claim that members of his gang back in Britain, on the outside, had put a £100,000 contract on Maguire’s head.

  Underworld contract killings are rarely that straightforward. Had Paul ‘piggy backed’ onto Warren’s execution order by passing on badly needed information and a phone number via a trusted friend? Did he now want the other two dead, and if so, was that the reason he was already in touch, in the same way, with a few of the victims that Maguire and Sinnott had left littered around the city?

  Meanwhile, back at the speed factory in Atherton, the cook was producing a huge amount of dangerous toxic waste. The dirty barrels – two forty-five-gallon drums and twenty five-gallon drums – were also full of incriminating evidence. Instead of getting rid of them carefully, the gang disposed of the waste like they did in Mafia films. Some of the criminals who worked for Frank were so desperate for cash that they wanted to steal the waste to recover extra amphetamine residue.

  Frank said, ‘I was later horrified to be told by Tony Johnson that he had seen the barrels at the side of the road and was thinking about recovering them to extract the oil. I was worried in case the barrels leaked into the water system.’

  The cutter, or bashman, lived above a pet shop on the High Street in Skelmersdale, a town on the border between Merseyside and Lancashire. He mixed the drugs with the bulking agent in large blending machines that he had in the rear of the shop. Under the instructions from the Cartel, he sealed the drugs with a vacuum-packing machine in bags used to wrap bacon for supermarkets.

  One day, Frank and Charlie Corke went to drop off three kilos at a Cartel Mr Big’s house in the plush Sandfield Park district of Liverpool. Frank wanted to use the opportunity to go over Charlie’s head and appeal directly to the big boss for a better deal. But he was naive to think that he would be granted an audience. Charlie stashed the drugs in a skip near the boss’s house and then said to Frank that Mr Big lived in one of the big houses on the estate. Frank was amazed at the size and splendour of the mansions.

  The Cartel demanded that Frank expand and franchise out his operation. A second factory was set up in Cumbria. A third was planned at a farm in Knowsley. The farmer said he would take the kids away for the summer in exchange for a huge fee. But Frank was getting increasingly desperate and confused.

  Frank said, ‘In short, I was fearful that I could have been killed: dead men don’t talk.’

  One day he overheard the Mr Bigs having a meeting.

  ‘The figures they were talking about were astronomical: in their millions,’ said Frank shaking. Frank Smith was becoming scared for his life, so he hatched a plan. He went on holiday to Majorca, but he was planning to use the opportunity to disappear. Before he fled, he hid all of the lab equipment and chemicals in a container on an isolated farm, effectively bringing the Cartel’s speed operations to a standstill. He’d got it in his head that he’d hold the Cartel to ransom: ‘Pay me what I’m owed and I’ll tell you where the equipment is.’ The threat was foolhardy to the point of suicide. He was planning to blackmail the gang bosses into paying him what he was owed, as well as the debts at the front laboratory. If they did, and gave him assurances that he wouldn’t be punished, he’d come back to work and give them the equipment for the new factories. If they didn’t, he’d disappear.

  But the Cartel wouldn’t play ball. The gang threatened to track him down and shoot him. In addition, they made it clear that they’d kill his son, who was back in the UK, if he didn’t stop messing about. Panicking, Frank flew back from Spain to try to sort things out. But he was too scared to meet them. He lost his bottle and ran off to a safehouse in Cornwall.

  At this point, the situation got very messy and mysterious. One of Frank’s old mates called Tony Johnson, who had been one of the cooks in Cumbria, had decided to branch out on his own. He knew where Frank had hidden ‘the glassware’ and the other vital ingredients needed to make speed. Tony saw no reason why he couldn’t set up his own factory in Frank’s absence. After all, the makings were just sitting there doing nothing and he was skint. All he needed was some backing. Crucially, he needed a partner with access to distribution. Without any guidance from Frank or the Cartel bosses, it wasn’t long before he was out of his depth and walking into a big mistake. Tony Johnson joined up with a local villain called David Parsons, who promised him cash, free supplies of BMK and access to dealers to sell the finished product. But Tony was heading into a trap. Parsons was working for the National Crime Squad, as an undercover participating informant. The National Crime Squad were desperate to get an ‘in’ within the Cartel. As the first speed operation imploded in Frank’s absence, they saw a chance, amid the confusion, to pick off the weak links: hence Tony Johnson. They hoped that by the time the next cook got underway, they’d have one of their snouts close to Johnson and at the heart of the production.

  Through Tony Johnson, Parsons was quick to bleed him dry of all the Cartel secrets he had learned over the past few months. David Parsons also found out from him that the Cartel had just set up a new factory in Cumbria that was bigger and more productive than the first one, which had been set up by Frank. Frank’s ploy had not stopped them from making speed. They’d simply gone out and bought more glassware and employed new technicians to operate it. Parsons passed the information up the chain. Within days, Charlie Corke and the Scouse operation were arrested in Cumbria. Tony Johnson’s independent factory wasn’t busted, and Frank was still on the run.

  In his safehouse in Cornwall, Frank had got wind that his mate Tony Johnson was hanging around with a suspicious new contact called David Parsons. He’d also heard that the second cook in Cumbria had been busted. It didn’t take him long to put two and two together. He concluded that the Scousers had been blown up by David Parsons, who had suddenly and conveniently appeared on the scene.

  He was right. Parsons’s motivation for informing was simple: he wanted credit from the police. First, he claimed that he benefited by police turning a blind eye to his own drug dealing. But there was also a more perfidious type of self-interest at play. By taking out the Cartel’s newest speed factory, he hoped to capitalise by exploiting his monopoly on the market. He had got a share of Tony Johnson’s speed production. Now he had manipulated a gap in the market that the Scousers had once filled. Effectively, he was using the police to do his dirty work for him and take out the competition.

  In a statement to police, Parsons said, ‘[A big drug dealer called] Michael gave me 15 to 20 kilos of bad Ecstasy tablets that had gone wet and formed into a mash. I told [my police handler] that I had obtained tablets off Michael and gave the handler a sample of the tablets for him to test to see what they were. The NCS said they had a high percentage of amphetamine.’

  By this time, Parsons had also come into possession of some lab equipment, some of which was probably technical glassware that had been hidden from the Cartel by Frank Smith. Frank’s original glassware had been hidden in the steel container by Tony Johnson, who probably tipped off Parsons as to where the valuable equipment was. Instead of handing it over to the police as evidence, Parsons claimed that he told his National Crime Squad handler, who agreed that they could use it in a sting on Frank Smith, in what was rapidly becoming a very convoluted exercise.

  David Parsons said, ‘My handler at the NCS then told me to use the glassware I had obtained (this was obtained to set a factory up in order that we could set up Frank Smith, who was another person my handler was after at the time) and turn these bad E’s back into amphetamine so that I could buy BMK to set Frank up.’ However, the police officers involv
ed later denied any wrongdoing and were never found guilty of breaking any rules or the legal codes governing investigations.

  Parsons was crossing the line. As an informant, he was doing everything that the Analyst had warned against. Effectively, Parsons was saying that the NCS were allowing him to set up a drug dealer at their behest, using E tablets and equipment that he had obtained from the underworld. Then he was going to sell the reconstituted E tablets to fund the purchase of speed-making chemicals, to then set up a drug dealer whom the NCS had expressed an interest in catching: exactly the type of bad behaviour from participating informants that The Analyst had warned about.

  David Parsons said, ‘I was telling my handler that it was costing me a fortune in expenses running about and buying the BMK. He also told me to take some of the BMK to make a paste to cover the expenses that I had paid out. The handler also used me to set up Frank Smith. Both myself and the handler were looking for places to rent in order to set up a factory to get Frank Smith cooking. On one of my meetings with the handler, he brought with him some papers of properties to rent in Wales and enquired about them from his own mobile. Eventually, a place was booked and I sent the deposit down for the rental of the property. The intention of this was to set up a factory so that we could get Frank Smith cooking so that [my handler] could bust the factory and catch him.

  ‘I have already mentioned about some bad Ecstasy tablets that my handler told me to turn back into amphetamine after he tested them. In order to do this, the handler told me to set up a factory as we already had the glassware and the chemicals.’

  At the last minute, the venue was changed from Wales to the north-east.

  David Parsons added, ‘He was also aware of the fact that he would make a profit on this factory, but this stage was never reached, as we were unable to reverse the tablets, so they ended up getting buried.’ Once again, the police officers denied certain allegations made by Parsons and were never found guilty of doing anything wrong.

  Frank Smith was lured out of hiding by David Parsons’s offer. Parsons promised him that he wouldn’t tell the Liverpool gang and that if they set up a speed factory together, it would be run as an independent and the profits would be shared equally.

  Frank helped him set up the factory in the north-east on some land that had been sublet to them.

  Frank said, ‘When we went to Durham, there was myself, Tony Johnson, David Parsons, a man I know as Neil Carter and a huge man called Mark who used to be a bouncer.’

  Neil Carter, according to informant David Parsons, was a big drug dealer who liked guns. Carter was also being protected by the NCS. Mark was probably a drug dealer called Mark Lilley, whom the NCS were also targeting and had previously asked David Parsons to bring down. Detectives bugged Mark Lilley’s home in a bid to obtain more evidence. It seemed as though David Parsons was bringing together all of the targets that the NCS wanted so that they could be arrested in one swoop.

  There is a slight difference between David Parsons’s story and the account given by Frank Smith. Previously, David Parsons had said that the mushy Ecstasy mixture had been buried. But Frank claims that Neil Carter dug the sample up again. He brought the 25 kilos of damaged E’s, which he described as a ‘large amount of brown sloppy material similar in texture and appearance to clay’. Frank said that they set up a cook and were successful.

  ‘In fact, we did recover the MDMA and obtained a thick brown oil,’ he said. ‘We then cleaned the oil using steam and ended up with 700 ml of MDMA. This was mixed with the cleaned bulking agent, which had been removed and turned back into powder.’

  Technically, the police were now able to link Mark Lilley to drug dealing, no matter how spurious and set up it seemed. Even though the MDMA base had been supplied by the informant David Parsons, it could still be used against Mark Lilley as evidence. His house was raided shortly afterwards and he was charged with drugs offences. Cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy, amphetamines and cannabis resin totalling £1.2 million were seized from him. Firearms were also recovered. From the outside, it looked like a dream bust and Lilley was facing a long time in jail. But later he skipped bail during a trial at Bolton Crown Court and fled to Spain. In his absence, Mark Lilley was sentenced to a 23-year jail term for conspiracy to supply drugs, but he has never been brought to justice. Lilley still remains on the Crimestoppers’ list of the Most Wanted Spanish-based fugitives, known as Operation Captura. Despite several appeals, he has refused to come back from Spain, claiming that his case was corrupted by the police’s bad handling of its wayward informant David Parsons.

  Elsewhere there were other criticisms of the police for allegedly inciting crimes during investigations, one involving Curtis Warren’s friend Phillip Glennon. In a court case involving a corrupt police officer being paid by Warren, Glennon was described as ‘a very wealthy man as a result of drug-dealing activities from which he amassed a fortune’. Glennon hit back in a statement he made public through his solicitor after the court case, accusing the police of ‘consistent and cynical breaches of the law’, blaming ‘senior officers at an international level’. Even so, the case was a success: the corrupt copper and two of Warren’s cronies were jailed.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE BUST

  1998

  ANOTHER CASE WAS also coming to a conclusion. It was 11 a.m. on Thursday, 1 October. Two days after Neil Green’s body was found on a beach near Crosby, Darren Becouarn paid a final visit to his new gym. He handed over the visitor’s entrance fee as usual and entered the weights room. Both Kevin Maguire and Nathan Jones were working out. Maguire’s common-law wife, Linda, was also in the gym, as were the premises’ two owners, Carl Tierney and Mark Scott. A couple of other customers were hanging around. There was a total of eight persons in the area, including Becouarn, making it a quiet time of day.

  Becouarn pumped iron for half an hour and chatted to Maguire, his wife and Jones. He was a cool customer. Becouarn did a few more sets before exchanging more small talk. Suddenly, he reached for a canvas bag and pulled out a long-barrelled handgun from inside. He aimed the revolver at Maguire. At close range, he blasted the doorman with one shot. Maguire was killed instantly. Naturally, Jones was terrified. He immediately began running towards the door. Coolly, Becouarn moved towards him, took aim at his heart and fired. The wound in Jones’s chest was massive but not instantly fatal. However, Becouarn was not interested in hanging around to find out whether Jones would live or die. A third shot was fired before the assassin made his escape.

  Nathan Jones managed to stay on his feet. He staggered into a changing room before collapsing. He lived for a few more minutes but later died on his way to Fazakerley Hospital. Before the alarm was raised, Becouarn ran out of the gym and got on the back of a black Honda Trials motorbike that was waiting outside. Quickly he was driven away by an accomplice. At nearby Victoria Park, the assassin and his getaway rider abandoned the bike. Police believe that at this point they were met by at least one of the Mr Bigs involved in the hit: the senior hit-man who had planned the whole operation and oversaw its implementation, a Mr Big who had insisted on split-second timing, and observed the unfolding events from a short distance away.

  Detectives believed that at this point Becouarn and his motorbike man jumped into a dark-coloured car and that either the Mr Big or another accomplice drove them to safety. The killing had all the hallmarks of a professional slaying. It was a three-part pattern of events: triggerman – motorbike-getaway – car. It is a tactic that has become standard within the underworld and in political assassinations.

  The use of the motorbike in targeted killings had first been used by the Mafia in Italy in the 1970s: simple, cheap, deadly. From a tactical standpoint, the technique ticked all the boxes of a textbook attack: speed, aggression, mobility. On the street, Mafia pistoleros had liked it because both the identity of the getaway rider and armed pillion passenger could be hidden using helmets during the escape. In this case, although Becouarn’s ID was known, the bike driver’s wa
sn’t, which made it difficult to link the shooter to anyone higher up the chain. The bonus was that after a racing exit from the scene, the assassins didn’t have to torch the bike. If they were using a car, the standard practice was to burn it out later. Motorbikes, however, are much less recognisable by witnesses and fewer forensics stick to them. Consequently, the bikes could either be disposed of, as they were in this case, or hidden and recycled on the next job. Not having to petrolise the getaway vehicle and set it alight saved hassle and money. The principals who contracted out targeted killings may have been wealthy, but like many ‘businessmen’ they were greedy and liked to keep costs down.

  During the 1980s, the model had been exported and adapted by IRA terrorists, Colombian drug cartels and crime outfits worldwide, such as the North London Adams family who had made it their trademark method of slaying. The tactic had been modified with back-up cars, triangulation of fire and weeks of preparation: just like with the Becouarn hit. The Cartel had become experts in rubbing out their irritants.

  A murder investigation swung into action. Officers were convinced that the Maguire/Jones double-hit was a contract killing from start to finish. Among other theories, they suspected that the Mr Big had been awarded the contract by Curtis Warren’s gang, which wanted the pair dead. The Mr Big had then subcontracted the job of triggerman to Becouarn and wheelman to his mysterious motorbike-riding associate, also providing them with the firearm, the know-how and an idiot’s guide to how to carry out the plan.

  Meanwhile, hapless amphetamine king Frank Smith was getting busy setting up a new drugs factory in County Durham. Foolishly, he had decided to set up independently of the Cartel, even going behind their backs. Smith had double-crossed his Liverpool mafia bosses and they had people searching for him in various parts of the country.