By night, Shaun patrolled his doors, settling scores and dealing with troublemakers. In the early hours he returned to his oasis, the pub over which his wife and young baby slept.
Shaun Smith said, ‘One night I was in bed. At 4.30 a.m., a window downstairs was smashed. Someone had thrown a tyre iron and spare wheel through the glass and got off in a car. What the fuck was that about?’
Shaun wasn’t too bothered at first. Scores of petty disputes simmered under the surface of a life on the doors. Little did he know that this wanton act of vandalism would drag him into a decade-long gang war: a savage struggle that would involve the biggest explosions of bombs on mainland Britain since the fall of the IRA; the first gangland dispute in which the police would become a legitimate target; a fight for power that would threaten the old order on which the foundations of the Cartel were built.
Shaun Smith began to investigate. He replayed the overnight CCTV images on the giant music video/karaoke TV on the stage at the side of the bar. Shaun couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Through the grainy image, he could see two young men getting out of a car, opening the boot, removing the tyre iron and lever, and lashing it at the plate-glass windows. Momentarily, Shaun was taken aback: for he knew the exact make and model of the car and, astonishingly, he recognised the figures in the images. The car was driven by a local teenager called Kaim, who lived in the next street and had been coming into the pub since he was a kid. Kaim’s dad was a close family friend.
Shaun went to see him. ‘Your Kaim has smashed the pub window for some reason,’ he told him. ‘I don’t give a fuck why he’s done it. Get £1,500 off him and I’ll call it quits.’
Fines and compensation were a quick and easy way of solving local disputes before they spiralled out of control. But after talking to his son, Kaim’s dad came back to see Shaun and said that the compo wouldn’t be forthcoming. Hostilities were likely to continue, he added.
‘I’m sorry, mate, but it runs a little bit deep,’ Kaim’s dad told Shaun. ‘My lad was with his mate called Terry that night. They’d been thrown out of one of your clubs for wearing trainers. The doorman was called Big Nose. Terry had fumed: “Who the fuck is this Big Nose, the cheeky twat – I’ll plug him.”’
Big Nose was part of a family that Shaun knew very well. Shaun ran the family’s large portfolio of pubs, clubs and security contracts. But the new generation of tearaways didn’t respect status, money or power. They had realised two things. First, that the multimillionaire gangsters who ran the underworld had cushy lifestyles and loads of assets, such as businesses and big houses. That made them vulnerable because they couldn’t hide: they were tied to their treasures, reliant on their highly visible assets.
Second, it didn’t matter how big and tough you were, there was a new equaliser in town: the gun. The new generation of teenagers realised that they could take on an 18-stone, steroid-fuelled doorman on equal terms if they were armed with a 9-mm pistol or a side-by-side shotgun, bought for £200 from the local estate.
The third characteristic of the young bucks was their sensitivity. They were hotheaded and quick to anger, highly irascible when it came to ‘respect’ issues. Being knocked back from a pub was a matter of huge humiliation, which had to be avenged by death if necessary. Many of their mums and dads had been smackheads and crack addicts. From an early age, the kids had been plonked in front of the telly, watching Scarface, while their parents chased the dragon on the couch. Their kids weren’t socialised. No one had ever taught them how to control their anger in public.
That night, after they failed to find Big Nose to shoot him, in desperation they smashed Shaun’s pub window, simply because he had a connection to Big Nose.
Shaun said, ‘They only did it because I was closely connected to the family. Terry and Kaim, they were kids, they were fuming, snorting their brains out, driving around, looking for someone to take it out on – so getting at me was just a way of letting off steam.’
To stop the dispute escalating further, it was decided that both Terry and his doorman enemy Big Nose would have a straightener.
Shaun said, ‘The kid was game, to be fair. Terry had a bit of arse on him, so it wouldn’t have been a pushover for Big Nose, who was around the same age. But Big Nose had more to lose, so it made the whole thing a bigger risk for him. If Terry won, the arse would have fallen out of his business. He would have lost the seven doors that he controlled, because being on the door is all about reputation. And if you lose a straightener, then someone will realise that you’re weak and take your doors off you.’
But suddenly the fist fight, which was due to take place in a boxing ring attached to the club, was called off.
On the following Saturday night, Terry and Kaim’s gang were celebrating, as if the fact that the fight had been called off was a victory. They drove past the nightclub, determined to rub it in. They threw bottles and cans at cars belonging to Shaun and the family, threatening to torch the pub and nightclubs of Shaun that were run by Big Nose.
By now, the row was getting out of control. A foot soldier loyal to Shaun Smith decided to take matters into his own hands. Without Shaun’s go-ahead, he got two squirty bottles and filled them full of petrol. He went to the back of Terry’s mother’s house while the family were asleep at 10.30 p.m. on a Sunday night. Four squirts of accelerant were fired through the letterbox and into the bin. The fumes were lit and the fire took hold silently. As a small sign of underworld empathy, the gangster booted in the door to deliberately wake Terry’s family, giving them time to escape. The message was clear: ‘This is a warning. We let your mum escape. Next time we’ll nail the doors and windows shut and burn her alive.’
Shortly afterwards, Terry phoned Shaun. But he wasn’t calling to surrender. ‘You’ve torched me ma’s house,’ Terry screamed. ‘My family was in there. You’re fucking dead.’ He made more threats against Shaun’s family.
Shaun: ‘The firebombing was done totally without my knowledge – it wasn’t my style. I settled my disputes man to man. But I’d been dragged into the situation because Big Nose would not have a straightener. And that was the start of the nightclub war, which went on for years and destroyed the lives of many.’
The nightclub was the jewel in the family’s leisure empire. Terry’s gang made their next move: they attacked the club when it was filled with dancing teenagers. They sprayed bullets at the Halfway House pub, which was also owned by Shaun.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated case, a mid-ranking Cartel dealer had just been released from prison after serving four years in jail for supplying drugs. Warren Selkirk vowed to make a fresh start. He told friends that he’d never touch drugs again. Some of his pals weren’t so sure that he’d stick to his word. Selkirk was surrounded by Cartel peddlers. Temptation was a mobile-phone call away. Dylan Porter was an old mate who’d served him up heroin before now. Scottish drug dealer and Glasgow enforcer Ian McAteer was also a friend. John Haase and Paul Bennett were also contemporaries – all heavyweight Cartel VIPs.
Selkirk needed money fast. To keep his promise, he said that he would no longer get involved in hands-on distribution. But he was prepared to make himself available for support activities, such as running money and general dogsbodying. He soon picked up a job as a Cartel courier, ferrying cash, up to £30,000 at a time, from Scotland to Liverpool to fund drugs deals.
Colin Smith’s brother John Smith Junior was also climbing up the ranks of the Cartel. Around 1999/2000, he began making trips to Amsterdam to set up deals. By the late 1990s, John and Colin had got themselves well established. Life was good in the world of international drug dealers.
CHAPTER 38
OPERATION KINGSWAY
1999
FOR DYLAN PORTER, business was also booming. As a middle- to senior-ranking Cartel distributor, he was pulling in between £5,000 and £20,000 per week. But little did he know that the police were already on his case. The secret operation against him had now turned into a huge deal: the biggest operation of i
ts kind ever mounted by Merseyside Police. If it failed, the consequences would be catastrophic, potentially bringing the whole philosophy of intelligence-led police into question. The future of the new generation of officers was riding on it.
In a bid to move Operation Kingsway along at a faster pace, the police mounted a crude undercover operation against Dylan. To date, they’d had his movements pinned down with covert surveillance, but they were desperate to ‘get a body next to him’ that would enable them to pick up better, real-time information. The icing on the cake, if feasible, would be to sting him with a hand-to-hand – to catch him red-handed with a controlled purchase of drugs by an undercover cop, captured on covert video that couldn’t be dismissed in court. But Dylan was careful. So far, his outward appearance had given little away to the long-lens snappers and listening probes that the police had directed against him.
One officer disguised himself as a low-level smackhead, pretending to sell shoplifted clothes to cash-rich dealers: a kind of door-to-door salesman of the underworld. To make the cover story stack up, he was introduced to Dylan by another local grafter whom Dylan knew well. As they chatted away in Dylan’s front room, suddenly the undercover copper asked Dylan whether he could get any coke. The question was probably a touch premature, and the copper might well have done better to hang back until he’d got his feet under the table. But the pressure was on, and it was always a tough judgement call, to balance the pressure from superiors to get the job done and the subtler operational requirements of the job.
‘Fuck off, I don’t get involved with that,’ Dylan rebuked him, meaning that he couldn’t be bothered selling bits of gear to smackheads. The direct question had been inappropriate, ill timed and too direct, according to Dylan. It left him feeling spooked.
‘I was selling kilos, hundreds of kilos, to other big dealers,’ Dylan explained. ‘I was a well-known operator. I wasn’t a street dealer. Why would I suddenly turn around and serve up a few ounces of charlie to a complete stranger, who was roasting anyway? The feller was bang on, and I knew he was a busie. I was quite wise to all that, to be fair. By that time, I’d already been targeted by Operation Garrison, an investigation into the sale of stolen goods. I’d been caught in a kind of sting. But I’d got out of that in the end, because I’m not a bad feller, I’ve always been a nice feller, and five women gave evidence on my behalf. But I wasn’t about to be turned over by a plainclothes busie again, so I fucked him off.’
The run-up to Christmas was traditionally a boom period for dealers. Punters were queuing up to stock up on drugs over the festive period, when customarily deliveries slowed down for a few days: a period known in the trade as the ‘Christmas drought’. But this year, there was the added bonus of the end-of-the-millennium party. Every type of drug was flying out.
A senior Cartel dealer called Cagey wanted to cash in. Cagey was part of Curtis Warren’s crew. He’d once been partners with Johnny Phillips. Cagey had been living in Amsterdam and was linked to several shootings there. Dylan Porter refused to name Cagey, Warren or any of his criminal associates; however, the author was able to piece together the network from other sources, including court reports and other documents.
Dylan said, ‘Despite all the ups and downs of normal business, and despite the fact that I suspected the busies were on me, I was still grafting away and I was doing really well. The run-up to Christmas was steady but was building up. One day in December I’d sent ten kilos of brown to Bradford. The money came back sweet, no problem. It was business as usual.
‘Then this kid I knew, called Cagey, turned up at my door, and said: “Can you do anything with tablets?” He had 10,000 Doves – E pills – which he wanted to sell quickly.
‘But I said, “I don’t do nothing no more like that.” I’d stopped doing little deals on the side. E’s, weed, speed: in general, I swerved it, because it was hassle and I didn’t want to compromise my day-to-day business. I just stuck to my Bradford stuff, or stuff that came through the big, normal channels kind of thing. Don’t forget that I had an inkling the busies were on me after the undercover copper tried to get me to sell charlie, so I didn’t want to take any risks.
‘But Cagey kept asking me, hassling me, so as a favour, I phoned my mate in Bradford and asked him whether he wanted the E’s. In the conversation I also told him that I had a few kilos of heroin left over, if he wanted them.
‘To my surprise, my Bradford mate said: “Listen, send me your last three kilos of heroin and I will take the ten thousand tablets.”
‘So I thought, “Why not? It’s a nice little Christmas bonus, and I was going to have to send the heroin to him anyway and it’d get Cagey off my case.” So it was killing two birds with one stone.’
By this time, Dylan had rationalised his heroin dealing in such a way that it no longer affected his conscience. He justified selling heroin in the same way that most dealers do: by convincing himself that he wasn’t actually serving up to heroin addicts directly. That was the domain of the ‘creatures’ lower down the food chain, whom he looked down upon. He considered himself to be a businessman, and drug dealing just seemed like an extreme form of capitalism no different from corruption or price fixing or overselling substandard goods. Businessmen, corporations, out-of-control bankers and boardrooms seemed to do what they liked. It was boom time. Blairism and globalisation were the dominant ideologies. A concept that would later be identified as disaster capitalism had come in from the cold, and was now widely accepted as a force for good. Selling heroin was no different from sweatshop slavery in the Third World, Dylan concluded, or wars for oil, or loaded free markets imposed on loan-saturated countries by economic hit-men. He may have been right in some respects, but like so much criminal psychology, the reasoning was flawed and self-serving. However, it enabled him to carry on.
‘I sent the heroin and tablets to Bradford. But the courier who was taking them for me to Bradford in the car got nicked. “What the fuck’s going on?” I asked myself.
‘I immediately went down to see Cagey and said to him: “Those tablets have gone down.”
‘But he was strangely calm. He said: “I already know, I’ve seen it on the Teletext.”
‘That made me a bit suss, because the kid who’d been captured wasn’t named on the Teletext report that was flashing up on his TV. It just said a man had been arrested on the motorway with some drugs. So how could Cagey have put two and two together so fast and assumed it was our man? It could have been anyone: quite a few people got nicked on that stretch every few months. Call me paranoid, but that got me suss that Cagey either had inside info off the busies or knew it was going to happen because he’d tipped them off. In other words, I started to suspect that Cagey had set me up.’
To make matters worse, Cagey then told Dylan that he’d have to pay for the E tablets, even though they’d been seized on the way to Bradford. He owed him £11,000, Cagey warned.
Dylan said, ‘That’s how he snared me, there and then, that’s how he reeled me in for what he had in store for me in the future. Of course I protested. I said, “Fucking hell, Cagey,” arguing that it was unfair and too much dough. Sometimes, if a load went down, you just wrote it off, or split the cost in half, because it’s no one’s fault, really, just part of the job. But Cagey wasn’t arsed.
‘He did give a little bit of slack in the end, saying: “Don’t worry, you can work it off, you don’t have to weigh me in now.” Meaning that on the next deal that we did, he would deduct the £11,000 from my share of the profits. So that’s how he snared me, that’s how a one-off deal suddenly became two or three deals, cos I was in debt to him – from now on I was beholden to him.
‘I should have given him the 11 quid [£11,000] there and then, as it wasn’t a lot of dough, but it was kinda nothing, just one of those things, and I let it ride.’
But on 19 December 1999, the plot thickened. Dylan got a phone call from a Cartel insider, tipping him off that Cagey had just ‘taxed’ an independent dealer for 20 k
ilos of heroin: that is, stolen the drugs from him. The insider told Dylan that Cagey was on his way to see Dylan, with a view to getting him to sell them on his behalf. By now, the Cartel had developed a wide-ranging and efficient intelligence system that passed important info on to favoured members. Dylan was tipped off that Cagey wanted to sell him the stolen 20 kilos of gear – and this was the deal where Dylan could ‘work off’ his £11,000.
Dylan said, ‘As if on cue, Cagey turned up with a sample and made out that he had 100 kilos instead of just 20. “There’s as much as you want,” he said.
‘But I knew he was lying – because I knew he only had 20. He was trying to blag me, in the hope of striking a better price. Or maybe there was another agenda, I don’t know. But he’d also come to me, I said to myself, because this was the deal on which I could pay back the 11 grand that I owed him, and make some on top for myself. It was all a bit mad, but that’s life as a dealer. You take what comes; you buy and sell. I was a one-stop shop, a walking stock exchange for heroin, so it’s just another day, and you’re thinking not only can I make a few quid but I can get him off my case as well. So I said to him: “Go ahead – sound. I’ll sort it.”’
Dylan got the scratch: the scraping of heroin sliced off the consignment as a sample. He sent the small bag up to his mate in Bradford for testing, in order to get the percentage purity, which would determine the eventual selling price.
It came back ‘sweet’, meaning high quality. That night, the Bradford dealer phoned Dylan back. He was buzzing: ‘That gear is the bollocks, I’ll take whatever you can get.’ It was an ideal, unexpected stop-gap to plug the Christmas drought.
With an order in the bag, Dylan immediately phoned Cagey to close that side of the deal and take care of the logistics. Cagey was well known for being a ‘tough negotiator’ who ‘charged through the nose’ for his ‘tackle’, according to Porter, who described him but refused to identify him by name. But, unusually, on this occasion he settled for a relatively cheap wholesale price: an enticing £17,000 per kilo, which Dylan jumped at straight away. Dylan was surprised that he hadn’t been hit for £20,000 or more, but he assumed Cagey wanted to get rid of it quick and was happy to cream his 11 grand bonus.
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 24
