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

by Graham Johnson

  The second big mistake Smith had made was to find a new partner. The third was that he chose a police informant called David Parsons, who’d been tasked by the National Crime Squad to infiltrate the Cartel. Though Smith had fallen out with the Cartel, the NCS’s plan was to concentrate on the peripheral associates in the hope that they would serve up the big bosses at a later date, possibly by giving evidence against them in court.

  So desperate were the NCS to get into the Cartel that it was claimed that they had allowed their nark far too much scope. There was too much incitement to trap Smith rather than let the crime run its natural course. Parsons claimed his police handler allowed him to source the equipment to help Smith build a factory and the E tablets to set Smith up, and that the handler had even helped check out properties. However, later the police officers denied any form of malpractice or corruption and were never charged or convicted with any allegation of abuse of office.

  The policing tactics may have been questionable, but Smith and Parsons’s new factory quickly became a roaring success, so much so that they carried out five separate productions of amphetamine at the Durham site, one after the other: a major feat in underworld terms. In total they manufactured an estimated 30 kilos of very high-grade synthetic drugs. The active ingredient was then bulked out to eight times its original weight, giving a distribution mass of 240 kilos. Each wholesaled for £1,000, yielding a total of £240,000. Finally, Frank thought, he was getting the rewards he deserved.

  Much of the profit was Frank’s and he was very pleased with himself. Now he wanted to set up a second factory with Parsons. All of his suspicions that Parsons was a grass were gone. He was getting more and more confident, so much so that Smith said that the gang could even use his old house in Thatto Heath as a cook venue. The location was a big risk for Frank. Not only was it in a built-up area where the fumes might hassle the neighbours, but also the comings and goings at all times of the day and night might attract heat from the police. In addition, the area was close to Liverpool, where the Cartel had put a price on his head. He’d be working in their backyard.

  ‘Fuck them,’ he told the gang. ‘We can do it without the Scousers, and the last place they’ll look is right under their noses.’

  Smith also convinced his top cook Tony Johnson that he could manage the fumes using better technology. Frank was getting high off his own abilities.

  Frank got busy making plans. He asked David Parsons to source some of the chemicals. Parsons said he could get the BMK. As good as his word, he soon afterwards came back with the drums full of illegal chemicals. Later, this cache of BMK would cause great controversy. Parsons claimed that the police had given it to him to give to Frank, effectively inciting a crime and propping up a speed factory that would not have existed otherwise. To make matters worse, Parsons also claimed that the police had got the BMK after raiding another speed factory in St Helens owned by the Cartel. Parsons was claiming that the police were recycling illegal drugs and evidence from one case into another. If true, it was a highly dubious practice.

  However, Parsons was less successful in sourcing other chemicals needed for the process. He got confused and made elementary mistakes. He ordered a solution called formaldehyde instead of what Frank had requested: the usual formamide. The error set them back several days, forcing Smith to hang around longer at the factory than was necessary, waiting for Parsons to come up with the right stuff to add to the BMK. During this phase, Smith was particularly vulnerable: a sitting duck. Had Parsons made this mistake on purpose and planned the hiatus deliberately?

  ‘I was sat on their settee waiting for the phone call from David Parsons at around 11 a.m.,’ recalled Frank, ‘when the front door was forced open and I was arrested by uniformed police officers.’ The police had caught Frank red-handed with his cooking gear and BMK, bang to rights.

  To his horror, after being charged, Frank was put on remand at HMP Liverpool in Walton: a jail full of Liverpool drug dealers and notorious for violence. The Cartel was still after him, not having forgiven him for running off with their chemicals and equipment, and he knew he was vulnerable. The Scousers also hated Frank more after finding out that he had chosen Parsons as his partner, the snout they now suspected of grassing them up. Smith cowered in his cell, hoping that no one would recognise him. But things got worse. News reached him that the Scousers from the second Cumbrian cook were in Walton. And he wasn’t the only person who had been nicked during the latest round of arrests. All of the rest of the original gang – including several Liverpool bosses going back to the first round of cooks in Cumbria and Coal Pit Lane – had been swooped upon as well. It seemed as though the police had been watching them for months, and Smith’s arrest was just one part of a big operation. In all, nineteen men were rounded up from all over the country, including three from the Wirral. Astonishingly, it turned out that the police had been watching them for ten months, between 1 February 1998 and 11 November 1998, at all the locations that had produced amphetamine, as part of a massive joint operation, codenamed Pirate, between police forces on Merseyside, Cheshire and Cumbria and the National Crime Squad.

  The pieces of the jigsaw began to fit together. The alleged Mr Big was an appropriately named 41-year-old Liverpool boss called Frederick Cook. He was so high up that Frank Smith had never even met him. All the other suspects were there in prison, including Charlie Corke and John Byrne. After Frank Smith had left the Cartel operation, Cook had ordered the remaining members of the gang to set up a new factory in Cumbria. They’d chosen West Mead cottage in Bowness-on-Solway. This time, Cook declared, he wasn’t interested in ten- or twenty-kilo batches. He wanted them to take the expertise that Frank Smith had given them and produce amphetamine on a hitherto-unknown industrial scale. Now that dance drugs were in decline, the Cartel were plotting to flood the UK with cheap speed and turn the towns and cities into US-style crystal meth wastelands. The police had smashed down the door of the cottage on 17 September 1998 in a bid to stop this new frightening phase in its tracks. They found chemicals and components that made 750 kilos of drugs, just like Cook had wanted.

  Rumours were flying around the jail that the Cartel bosses were ‘straightening out’ all of the lower-rung members of the gang. One target included Brian Jefferson, whose decision to dabble with the Liverpool underworld had nearly cost him his life. BJ, as he was known, had been the caretaker of the speed factory. Now he was being threatened by the drug lords to shut up. Later he was put on an isolation wing for his own safety.

  Frank Smith prepared for the worst. If the Scousers were in the same jail, surely they would want to kill him as well. After all, he’d done much worse than BJ. They’d want revenge for pulling out of the deal. They might even blame him for getting them nicked. The Cartel was becoming trigger-happy.

  Astonishingly, when they finally got to Smith in his cell, the Scousers came to him with smiling faces. They were friendly. They even tried to help him. They offered him money, intelligence and legal advice from one of their top lawyers. ‘What the hell is going on?’ Smith asked himself.

  A Liverpool fixer called John Byrne, who had been a manager in charge of the Cumbrian cook, explained that if Smith remained loyal and did what he was told, then everything would be OK. But if he continued to misbehave and stay on his own, then there might be trouble. Byrne said that himself, Smith and the others had been nicked as part of a great conspiracy. Byrne revealed that they had worked out that they had all been set up by an informant called David Parsons. Parsons had been sent by the police to bring them down, he said. But the upside was that if they could prove that Parsons had behaved badly, gone above and beyond the call of duty, had broken the rules of being an informant, then the case against all of them would collapse.

  ‘So what’s this got to do with me?’ asked Smith, terrified that he was getting out of his depth again.

  ‘Because you know Parsons best,’ said Byrne. ‘He got right into you. He actually grafted with you in Thatto Heath and Durham
, so you know how he works. All the time he was setting you up – so you’ve got to expose this.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’ asked Smith.

  ‘Because Parsons never got near to us. He got to us once removed by going through Tony Johnson and tapping him up and then you. You were another weak link, and he went after you direct to get at us.’

  The Scousers wanted Smith to do their dirty work for them. Smith may have been the weak link, but now the Cartel needed him badly. Suddenly, Smith had gone from being on their hit list to being a prized asset. Smith felt scared.

  Frank said, ‘John Byrne told me that there were some tapes in existence which showed that I had been set up by David Parsons and that the BMK that David had brought me had been given to him by the police, and that the police had got it from the Scousers’ lab in Widnes for which they had been arrested.’

  The ‘Scousers’ lab’ that John Byrne had been referring to was a speed factory that the Cartel bosses had set up after Frank Smith had deserted them. They had set it up inside a catering shop in Widnes that was owned by a corrupt businessman called Stan James. The shop was raided. James was later convicted for allowing the amphetamine factory to operate on his premises.

  A lot of long-serving Cartel bosses and foot soldiers were facing jail as a result of Operation Pirate. But instead of taking the pain and letting justice take its course, the Cartel did what it always did when caught red-handed: they tried to wriggle out of it, blame the crimes on someone else and manipulate their non-Cartel co-defendants into taking the rap. The methods had been perfected by Cartel godfather John Haase. Despite having been arrested for 50 kilos of heroin, he’d spent his time on remand plotting and scheming his way out of the charges. He was sentenced to 18 years in jail but had miraculously got out after 11 months. It was the same with Curtis Warren in 1992, the same with Ian McAteer on his violence charges and the same with countless other drug-dealing Liverpool mafia bosses who thought they were above the law. Their lying and cheating had worked. Many of the defendants involved in Operation Pirate knew John Haase and Curtis Warren and had learned from them. Now they were trying to cause a big manipulation in their own cases. As usual, it involved covert tape recordings of sinister conspiracies, set-ups and allegations of corrupt police informants.

  The Cartel bosses claimed that they had a tape of Frank Smith talking to David Parsons about setting up the Thatto Heath factory before it was busted. If authentic, the tape might prove that Parsons, a de facto police agent, had behaved illegally and the case against the Cartel might fall apart.

  In order to control Frank Smith, the Scousers wanted him to change solicitors to their own. Kevin Dooley was a notorious Cartel solicitor who worked for Curtis Warren and numerous other drug barons. He was later bugged by Merseyside Police and struck off for links to money laundering.

  The Cartel wanted Frank to blame everything on David Parsons. Inside prison, Charlie Corke got busy trying to keep everyone in line. He tried to persuade some of the non-Cartel workers that it was in their interest not to go against them. He even offered some of them work. He admitted to Stan James, the owner of the catering firm that had been busted, that he was still working for the Liverpool gang. If James stayed onside, they would give him work, Corke promised. The Cartel always took care of their own, he crowed. The Cartel were interested in manufacturing perfume and he could have a piece of the action and get rich quick once they were released – if he stayed onside, that is.

  CHAPTER 37

  DOOMSDAY

  1999

  HIS FACE WAS covered by a mask. His weapon was covered by a balaclava. But when the assassin got close to his target, he revealed his weapon of choice – and it was one that was difficult to mistake. The MAC-10 sub-machine gun is one of the most instantly recognisable weapons in the world. Lauded in popular culture. Starring in more Hollywood blockbusters than any other gun in history. Counterfeited by more underworld gunrunners in the UK than the AK-47. More hits on Google than Jesus Christ.

  But the assassin had chosen his instrument of death appropriately. The target was a difficult man to pin down. He was alert and jumpy because of his cocaine habit. Just a few weeks before, he’d outrun a machete-wielding attacker, living to fight another day. His state-of-the-art body armour had saved him from more than one enemy. A spray-and-pray machine gun was ideal for the job. If precision wouldn’t kill him, then overwhelming force would.

  Several years had passed since Paul had sworn a vendetta against the three men whom he believed had threatened his son. Two of those suspects were now dead: George Bromely and Kevin Maguire. A third man, Nathan Jones, had been killed by association. But few in the underworld felt any remorse – Jones had revelled in some of the violence and suffering that had been handed out by his mentor Maguire. It was also strongly rumoured that Jones had taken part in the killing of the young man Neil Green who’d been found dead on Ainsdale beach near Crosby just a few days before Jones had himself been shot. Underworld sources said Green had been force-fed sand before being killed, and Jones had been named as his torturer. The upshot was simple – in the eyes of the underworld, Jones had been found guilty by association with Maguire. According to Burly, it was a case of ‘run with the dog, die with the dog!’

  Though Paul Burly had never dealt drugs, he’d had to befriend some of the Cartel’s men in order to create the conditions for the hits to be carried out successfully. Burly said, ‘I had to create an atmosphere for my goadings and innuendos, which were necessary to form the illusion of truth.’

  The first two ‘contracts’ had been the subject of much secret negotiation. Paul Burly was an old hand at underworld intrigue. To minimise the chances of being associated with the killings, it was alleged that allies of Paul had ‘swapped’ several hit-man contracts with members of the Cartel. They would kill Paul’s targets if the Cartel would kill theirs. Therefore there’d be no link between Paul’s allies and the two dead suspects. And if and when Paul’s associates returned the favour, there’d be no link between the Cartel and the people that he ironed out for them. The exact details of the plot remain a mystery, but to this day Paul Burly denies any direct involvement with the hits and says that if his associates made any agreement with the Cartel they did it without his knowledge.

  But just one problem remained: thirty-nine-year-old former boxer Tony Sinnott. Sinnott was the third suspect on Paul’s alleged hit list. He was also a Cartel drug dealer but one who was unpopular enough for his death to be sanctioned by others. Paul Burly’s associates had taken counsel from his enemies. Sinnott was out of control on drugs, they said. They also wanted him dead. If they did him for Paul’s friends, Paul’s friends could do one their enemies for them. Or so it was alleged. Once again, Paul Burly later denied direct involvement.

  Many people had suffered at the hands of Sinnott, according to Paul Burly. The full story of the plot to kill Sinnott is explored in detail in Peter Stockley’s book Extenuating Circumstances. They began to hear stories of more hurt coming their way because Sinnott, it was widely thought, could not be stopped. Some concluded that they could no longer rely on the law. The system had let them down badly, they claimed. One judge who’d sat in judgement on a case in which Sinnott had been accused of violence had dismissed Sinnott with these words: ‘You will leave this courtroom without a blemish on your character.’ To many of his victims, that meant Sinnott virtually had a licence to do whatever he wished. He was becoming increasingly arrogant.

  To create a conspiracy against Sinnott, Paul had to target those who had been Sinnott ’s victims. But he had to be careful to select those who had the bottle to exact revenge. Paul Burly said, ‘Or those who were so scared that they had become mice; but even mice can turn into vicious things when they feel overly and wrongly threatened. If telling somebody the truth, even though it led to another’s murder, was a crime, then half the world would be felons.’ Paul smiled as he made his first phone call . . .

  On 23 April 1999, a masked gunman confronted S
innott at a garage on his home turf in Speke, near John Lennon airport. The assailant levelled his 9-mm sub-machine gun and fired 22 shots at him. A hail of 18 bullets cut Sinnott’s steroid-pumped frame to pieces. Only four bullets missed their target. Three heavyweight enforcers with links to the Cartel were suspected of overseeing the murder, but they were too high-up and hands-off ever to get blamed. The execution only took two seconds. Only one getaway car was used: a Ford Fiesta XR2 that was car-jacked at gunpoint from a passer-by. Zero guilty persons have ever been convicted. The case is still unsolved.

  A pair of low-level associates were eventually tried for the hit, but even they walked free after a trial. One of the men charged was the owner of the garage who, it was alleged, had lured Sinnott to the industrial estate. A number of other gangland figures were roped in for a go-around in the interrogation room, but none folded under questioning. Paul went back to his life, looking after his family and running a charitable organisation.

  Paul smiled and resumed his life knowing he had done a lot to help put right situations that the law had seemed unable to prevent in the first place. His smallholding could now be enriched with tame wildness now that the wildness that had threatened it had been tamed.

  Across the city in Kirkdale, door supremo Shaun Smith was sleeping in his pub. The popular local wasn’t really a business. For Shaun, it was more of a home and hobby. He’d built up a massively successful security company that employed hundreds of men. He also provided close protection and back-up for VIPs, underworld figures, football stars and businessmen. Part of his empire crossed over into a nightclub operation run by his in-laws. The jewel in the crown was a rave club that had become hugely popular with the mainstream crowd that couldn’t get into Cream.