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

by Graham Johnson

  Dylan said, ‘With the buy-price sorted, I then phoned my mate in Bradford, and he told me that he’d take 20 kilos at £18.5 K. So my cut on the whole thing, as the middleman, was 20 times £1,500 profit = £30,000, which was half-decent, to be fair, for a few phone calls and a couple of hours on the couch. I did the maths: I’d give Cagey the £11k that I owed him for the E’s that went down on the previous deal. After that, I’d be left with 19 grand, which would take care of that week’s wages.’ That year’s Christmas must-have toys were Pokémon and Furbies – Dylan could afford to buy a whole shopful for his kids on this deal alone.

  But within hours, the best-laid plans had been scuppered. The next day, Dylan’s mum died unexpectedly. The heroin baron was left ‘cabbaged’ in the house, grieving and making arrangements for the funeral. He decided to put everything on hold while he got his head together and took care of family matters.

  Dylan said, ‘I told Cagey and my mate in Bradford that I wasn’t doing any graft and switched my phone off. Cagey had just lost his ma a month before, so he said he understood the situation. He made out that he wasn’t that worried about the deal.

  ‘I was devastated for five days.

  ‘On Christmas Day, Cagey phoned the house out of the blue. Not to do the deal, he said, but to console me type of thing. He said: “Don’t be afraid to cry, lad.”

  ‘I told him that me ma was getting buried on 29 December. I invited him to the wake and all that. But he said that he couldn’t come because he was on bail for a murder at the time.’

  However, Cagey told him that he would come and see him in the new year to finalise the 20-kilo heroin deal. Dylan was surprised that he hadn’t got rid of the gear yet and that the deal was still on the table. He took it as a sign that Cagey was loyal to him. On the night of the funeral, Dylan went out and got rotten drunk.

  Dylan said, ‘The next day, I wasn’t going nowhere: just sat off on the couch while my wife was looking after the kids, who were all running around while my head was exploding with a hangover. I had no plan to do anything that day, never mind pick up the baton on a heroin deal from a few weeks earlier. I was just going to watch the telly, I was still mourning type of thing.’

  At 4 p.m. that day, 32 police officers were scrambled to watch Dylan. Surveillance was redoubled and the team was put on red alert, having received a tip-off that something potentially big was in the offing. How did the police know? It was the day before the millennium. At Liverpool’s riverside Pier Head, the Cream nightclub was putting the final touches to its New Year’s Eve extravaganza. In London, the Millennium Dome was gearing up for the Queen’s visit. Meanwhile, an observation post was videoing the front of Dylan’s house. In one scene, once again they captured a local heroin addict selling shoplifted sundries door to door.

  CHAPTER 39

  SEIZED

  1999

  AT 3.55 P.M., Cagey and another well-known dealer called Mealy, two of the most prominent members of the Cartel, unexpectedly knocked at Dylan’s door. The police video did not record the visit.

  Dylan said, ‘Cagey was all business all of a sudden. “What’s happening, lad, and all that?”’

  Dylan, his face white and with a sheen from whisky and grief was surprised to see the dealers on his doorstep. His mother had been in the ground for less than 24 hours and already he was being dragged into graft.

  Dylan said, ‘Sound, mate. What’s going on?’ Dylan didn’t knock them back or tell them to come back later. He was always polite but this time doubly so – he was conscious that he still owed Cagey 11 K. To boot, he was slightly weak and paranoid from the booze. Cagey could be exceedingly violent, if push came to shove. On one occasion, he had escaped an assassination attempt by one of the country’s most-feared hit-men. An internecine dispute had erupted between two wings of the Cartel. One group had contracted the services of an extremely violent gangster from Scotland who specialised in contract murder.

  The Scotsman had planned to ambush Cagey outside his house near Runcorn Bridge. He’d brought with him a small arsenal of weapons, including several handguns, a shotgun and a fast-firing sub-machine gun. What followed was a bizarre scene in which the Scotsman ambushed Cagey as he came out of his house, letting loose with everything he had: first the pistols, then the rest. But coolly, Cagey got out of his car and began to return fire in the suburban street, in the middle of the day. No matter how much firepower the Scotsman rained down on his target, Cagey would not go down. Eventually the Scotsman gave up and went back to see the principal, the Cartel boss who’d put the contract out on his enemy.

  The Scotsman told him that Cagey was like the man they couldn’t hang. He refused to die and, for that reason, he must be protected by a higher force. The conclusion was that the Scotsman could not fulfil his obligations under the contract. The Scotsman wouldn’t be making a second attempt, as is standard practice. He handed back the weapons and got off back to Glasgow.

  Now the bulletproof gangster was standing before Dylan on his doorstep. Dylan wasn’t intimidated, but he did want him out of his life as quickly as possible. Once inside the house, Cagey told Dylan that he still had the heroin. Cagey claimed that he hadn’t sold it yet because he was staying loyal to Dylan. Plus, he wanted ‘to help [Dylan] out’ with the £11 grand he owed him.

  Dylan said, ‘I was still half drunk, but I couldn’t turn them away. I told him that I could do it, but he’d have to help with the logistics. I told him that I’d make all the calls and set up the handover. I told him to sort some transport and send the heroin over to Bradford, hand it over to my people there. I told him to do the handover at a landmark they both knew. And five minutes after the Bradford people had taken possession, they’d come back with the paper.’ ‘Paper’ was the term that Dylan used for money.

  But Cagey didn’t like it. The Cartel drug lord refused to take responsibility for shipping the gear to Yorkshire. He made it clear that he wouldn’t be laying on a car and a driver. Cagey got the number of the Bradford dealer from Dylan. Bullishly, he phoned the Bradford dealer himself and told him that he’d have to come to Liverpool to collect if he wanted the 20 kilos. They could pick up ten kilos on tick, and once they’d paid for that they could have the balance of a further ten kilos the day after.

  The MO was well out of the ordinary for both Dylan and the Bradford crew. But, his head wrecked by a hangover and under stress, Dylan reluctantly went along with the plan. It wasn’t his usual method, certainly; it involved far too many strangers and variables. But what could he do? His mind was elsewhere. Foolishly, in his haste, Dylan persuaded the Bradford couriers to reveal the make and model of their handover cars over the phone – a Honda Legend and a Suzuki Bandit – so that he could tell Cagey what to look out for. It was a strict breach of protocol, but he just wanted to get on with it. For anyone listening in to the phone calls, it was a godsend. The police now knew what cars to look out for.

  The plan was actioned quickly and the Bradford end agreed to come to Liverpool. A few hours later, the Bradford crew were in Liverpool. They picked up the first ten kilos from a suburban street called Chelwood Avenue in a quiet neighbourhood called Childwall, which dated back to the Domesday Book. The handover went well. But within minutes, things weren’t looking so rosy. On the way back from the rendezvous, on the M62 going towards Bradford, the heroin-carrying cars were pulled over at the first service station. The whole Bradford team was nicked. Dylan claims he wasn’t at the handover and was still sitting at home while the drama played out without his knowledge.

  However, within minutes he got the call. Bang! Action stations. On hearing the news, Dylan was immediately convinced that he’d been set up. But there was only one suspect – and that was Cagey. It sounded too hard to believe: Cagey was a hardened, respected Cartel veteran who’d been there right at the beginning. He’d funded his first deal by ram raiding over a decade before. Now he was a hard hitter with Curtis Warren’s backing. Had Cagey turned informer? Was one of the most trusted members o
f the Cartel now working for the other side? Dylan couldn’t believe what he was thinking.

  Dylan was further confused by Cagey’s response. The following day, Cagey expressed grave concern. He told Dylan to get rid of his phone. He referred to the bust briefly, though he seemed to be going through the motions. He said it was ‘hard lines’ for Dylan, but that’s where his empathy seemed to end. Suddenly, he turned. Cagey now demanded more money and compensation for his lost 20 kilos of heroin. He presented Dylan with a bill, saying that Dylan now owed him an extra £127,000, including the £11,000 from the previously lost E’s. When Dylan objected, Cagey told him that he would have to stand the cost of the heroin because the Bradford people were his contacts.

  ‘They’d fucked on the transport,’ Cagey told Dylan. ‘I got the gear to them, it was in their possession, it was their fault that they got nicked.’

  Dylan became suspicious. Not only was it a coincidence that the two deals that had gone down recently were both Cagey’s, but there were other irregularities too. Later Dylan found out that the heroin that had been seized at the M62 services was not the same quality as the heroin that Cagey had given him a sample of a day or so earlier. The seized heroin had a lower purity of 32 per cent. Had Cagey switched the gear to a cheaper alternative, knowing that it was going to get caught by the police, leaving him free to sell the higher-quality stuff to a third party later on? It was a common ploy by grasses. In addition, Dylan found out that the police had definitely received intelligence before the ambush. He couldn’t say it was Cagey for sure, but the odds were stacking up. Dylan didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Looking at it objectively, Dylan’s bad luck could have just been related to police surveillance and had nothing to do with Cagey. But if that was the case, why hadn’t the police taken out any of his other consignments, not just those linked to Cagey? The plot thickened when he found out from other Cartel sources that Cagey was already under suspicion of being a police nark. A Cartel insider said that Cagey was a common denominator in several other unrelated cases, where tip-offs had been given to the police and fellow Cartel bosses had been nicked. For instance, Cagey had been involved in the deal with fellow Cartel Boss Spencer Benjamin.

  Benjamin, along with his partner in crime, had resisted going to Amsterdam to buy drugs after deciding that it was too hot for the Liverpool mafia to be seen in the ‘Flat Place’. Instead, they had persuaded a senior Cali Cartel member to come to the UK and they had started to buy drugs from him in London.

  Cagey had soon learned of Benjamin’s link. Had Cagey got jealous? Was Benjamin a threat to his own status within the Cartel? Did the London connection threaten to undermine his own theatre of operations in Holland? Was he being secretly tasked by the police? Cagey had been a pioneer of Cartel operations in Amsterdam. Once Scarface and Kaiser had got established over there, he had gone over with Curtis Warren and both of them had done very well. When Warren had got nicked in Sassenheim in 1996, Cagey had come back to Liverpool, but he still had a ‘team’ over there in Holland that made him lots of money and secured his position within the hierarchy.

  By now, the Cali Cartel were thinking along the same lines as Scarface and Kaiser. The Amsterdam politie were cracking down, and maybe it was better to simply relocate to London, where they could do much better business with the Cartel. In 1999, the Cali dealers and the Liverpool mafia began an experiment. Venezuelan Ivan Mendoza di Giorgio, a 39-year-old who was later described in court as a ‘very major player’ in the British cocaine network, was given instructions by his bosses to link up with Spencer Benjamin, the rep from the Liverpool Cartel.

  Benjamin was a rising star. He had recently moved out from the Toxteth ghetto to a new £120,000 home in Halewood. However, he had retained a shop on his manor with a flat above so that this could become the hub of his drugs operation.

  In the spring of 1999, after receiving a tip-off, the Major Crime Unit placed a two-month watch on Benjamin and his 26-year-old associate Edward Serrano, following a lead that they were doing deals with di Giorgio. This was known as Operation Warren. The National Crime Squad put a coordinated watch on the Venezuelan, which was known as Operation Waterloo. The police quickly found out that the drugs were being smuggled from Colombia to Holland and from the Dam to the UK, proving that the Cartel were trying to run things out of Holland remotely from the UK.

  In May 1999, police watched as Benjamin and Serrano handed over a plastic bag to Mendoza in a pizza restaurant in London. Benjamin returned to Liverpool, but Serrano stayed in London and met Mendoza again the next day. The plastic bag was passed back to him. Serrano then caught a train back to Liverpool, where police detained him. The bag contained four kilos of cocaine worth around £310,000.

  The rumour was that Cagey had been lined up to buy the gear from Benjamin when it arrived in Liverpool with Serrano. But was it just a ruse to rat them out? Was Cagey the latest Cartel boss to be turned by intelligence-led policing? Or, if he wasn’t an informant, had he just wandered onto the MCU’s radar, which then led them to Dylan and his boss Paul Lowe? Cagey bought and sold gear to both gangs. Things were getting complicated and dangerous.

  At the London end of the operation, police followed Mendoza as he met another contact. The man was intercepted carrying two kilos of cocaine, and police then swooped on Mendoza’s home in south-east London.

  Bingo! Inside they found 46 kilos of cocaine worth £3 million, £140,000 in cash and documentation pointing to more than £10 million paid through bank accounts into companies in Europe.

  Benjamin was then arrested and charged. All of them were given very long sentences in jail. Police, of course, never revealed if Cagey was an informant, but intriguingly they did admit that intelligence gathered during the Merseyside’s MCU Operation Warren investigation was to lead later on to the larger-scale operation against Paul Lowe and Dylan. The missing pieces were falling into place. Either Cagey was an informant or at the very least he had led police to Dylan by accident.

  CHAPTER 40

  WARREN SELKIRK

  1999

  IN GLASGOW, CARTEL linkman and contract killer Ian McAteer was on top of the world. Over the past 20 years he had forged strong links with the city’s main drugs lords. To wash his money, he traded in second-hand cars, which he had built up into a profitable business in its own right.

  But his business with the Liverpool mafia was even more profitable. McAteer was buying heroin and coke from several Cartel distributors simultaneously, proving that he had preferred status as a distributor in Scotland. John Haase sold him heroin and also contracted other jobs out to him, such as underworld debt collection and protection. Paul Bennett got him cannabis and tablets. McAteer was a gun runner for Haase and Bennett. A steady stream of illegal guns travelled between Liverpool and Glasgow, and many of them were sold on to gangs in Northern Ireland. However, Dylan Porter’s gang was McAteer’s main supplier. They also sold McAteer heroin; they had a mutual acquaintance called Warren Selkirk who acted as a freelance money courier for both firms. In fact, the police who were watching Dylan and his gang had magically watched McAteer and Selkirk drift onto the radar as well. The whole of the police’s theatre of operations involving drugs was rapidly becoming very good at locking onto villains. A whole network of simultaneous rolling operations were underway. They were confident they could link them to Dylan’s heroin. The intelligence-led system was paying off. The system proved that its overarching, globalised way of looking at operations was dragging more and more suspects into the net.

  The Analyst said, ‘We were learning how to integrate our operations not only between different targets but also between different forces and national bodies. By standing back and not simply concentrating on one crime and one man, we were able to cast the net wide.’

  Selkirk was not long out of prison. He didn’t mind moving dirty money around, but he refused to touch drugs in case he got another long stretch inside. His only other vice was gambling.

  Warren Selkirk was on the dole
and had no visible means of income. However, he regularly spent thousands of pounds at the bookies. The police were convinced that he was a compulsive gambler. His weekly job was to ferry £30,000 in cash from Glasgow to Liverpool, which bought four kilos of heroin for McAteer. But instead of passing the cash straight on, Selkirk often skimmed fifties and twenties off the wads of tattered notes. He went to the bookies and gambled. Sometimes he won. Most of the time he did not.

  Couriering for a drugs firm was a time-consuming job, with lots of waiting around. Contacts were notoriously flakey, and Selkirk often found himself stranded for hours in car parks and pubs waiting for his opposite number to turn up. He got used to the last-minute calls, the latest excuses: they were still in bed, they had lost their mobile or had been nicked for drink driving the night before – the multifarious explanations that petty villains dreamt up to cover their chaotic lifestyles. To kill time, Selkirk kept dipping into McAteer’s cash and standing in front of the whiteboard and the SIS TV monitors in the nearest bookies, a better’s mini pen hanging gormlessly from his mouth, a dead man’s stare in his eyes.

  For a while, McAteer ignored the fiddle. After all, what was a few hundred quid compared to the few hundred grand that he was making every year from his Cartel connection? In addition, Selkirk was good at his job: he could keep a secret and had never been taxed by rival robbers or nicked by the police. McAteer held his tongue until the debts reached nearly £40,000. It wasn’t so much about the money: Selkirk was now becoming an embarrassment, a stain on McAteer’s ferocious image. If Selkirk could take liberties without punishment, then McAteer was leaving himself wide open. McAteer began pressing him for the money. At first, Selkirk asked for time, then he started ignoring his calls and messing him around: all the usual stuff. He’d have to be taught a lesson.