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

by Graham Johnson

  In the last three weeks of October 1999, McAteer spent much of his time trying to lean on Selkirk to come up with the money. Like most drug dealers then, McAteer was never off the phone. He made 1,155 calls in 20 days, many of them to Selkirk and the people around him, checking on his movements and asking questions. At midday on 29 October, McAteer decided to travel down from Glasgow himself to smoke Selkirk out of semi-hiding, to pin him down. On the motorway journey down, he chatted to associates and girlfriends. He made 95 calls, some to Selkirk, on the 250-mile journey south.

  McAteer told Selkirk to meet him in the car park of the Merton pub in Bootle at 11.30 p.m. Selkirk was cute. He knew McAteer wouldn’t attack him in front of a witness, so he turned up with his girlfriend Lynne. It was a good move. McAteer was surprised by the unexpected guest, placatory, even going as far as proffering the possibility of giving Selkirk more time to pay the debt. Effectively, Selkirk had given himself a 24-hour stay of execution.

  The next day, McAteer got hold of Selkirk once again, keeping up the pressure. Mobile-phone records show that Selkirk picked up the call at 7.42 p.m. He was driving along the M57 motorway, heading home to Bootle from Huyton after a Chinese meal with his two sons. McAteer told him to divert to Crosby marina, where they’d have a chat: no big deal, no dramas, just a chat about the next bit of graft. Again, McAteer wasn’t threatening. In fact, he sounded as though he needed Selkirk to do some more work, sooner rather than later. Maybe he’d let the £40,000 go? thought Selkirk, according to pals later. Maybe McAteer would allow him to work the debt off? Selkirk was scared and cautious, of course, but he agreed to meet McAteer all the same. Once again he’d take along an insurance policy. He had the chance to drop his kids off at home on the way, but instead he decided to take the kids along. Surely McAteer wouldn’t kill him in the presence of his own children? They would be his human shield.

  Selkirk parked by the marina. He told his sons to be good in the car and got out. ‘I’ll only be five minutes, Joseph,’ he told one of them. Their dad walked along a path and into the grass, heading to an isolated spot where he usually met McAteer for secret briefings.

  ‘He got out of the car and it was dark,’ one of the lads later recalled to the police. ‘I watched him walk down the path until I couldn’t see him any more.’

  When he arrived at the spot, Selkirk was unnerved. McAteer had an accomplice with him. This time it was Selkirk’s time to be surprised at the mystery guest – fearful even. According to sources close to the gang, McAteer told Selkirk that he wanted him to take another parcel to Glasgow. Inside, Selkirk was buzzing. He’d read it right: McAteer was going to give him a walkover on the debt. McAteer then handed him a plastic bag. But instead of the usual £40,000 cash inside, it was full of dog faeces. The message was: ‘You’re full of shit, Selkirk, and we’ve had enough of you talking shit to us.’ Unfortunately, he didn’t even have time for the insult to register.

  Shortly after 8 p.m., five bullets were pumped into him from a small, palm-sized gun fired from less than a few feet away: one in the chest, four in the head as he lay on the ground. By 8.05 p.m., he was dead.

  Meanwhile, his sons were still waiting in the car for their dad to come back.

  ‘After about 25 minutes, I was getting worried. I said to my brother, “There’s something wrong here, James,”’ his son Joseph recalled. ‘I shouted out of the window “Dad” and I was honking the car horn.’

  Eventually, Joseph got so scared that he jumped into the driver’s seat. Luckily, his dad had left the keys in the ignition. He drove the car 200 yards, out of the grass and scrubland and onto a road. Passers-by saw and helped, before calling the police.

  A police patrol was quickly on the scene. The officers searched the area, but it was dark and there were no street lamps on the wasteground, so they couldn’t find anything. Warren Selkirk’s body was found the next morning by a dog walker. Selkirk was lying on his back near undergrowth. His fingers were still clutching a plastic bag containing dog dirt, handed to him as a sick joke a second before his death.

  Dylan Porter said, ‘I knew Warren. I’d done some graft with him. When he was shot, I got blamed, but it wasn’t me.’

  McAteer was arrested and put on remand. McAteer was furious and blamed the police for stitching him up. He was convinced that he hadn’t left any clues. Too clever, he thought. He’d beaten a string of cases already and had never been caught for 99 per cent of his crimes, so he thought it was an injustice from the start, just to be pulled in for it. McAteer was convinced that he’d carried out a near-perfect crime, right down to the gun: he’d used a miniature weapon, so that the discharges wouldn’t be heard. Not even Selkirk’s sons had heard their father being executed, from a few metres away. No one would testify against McAteer. Phone calls and links to the victim were all circumstantial – all easily explained away by a born criminal like himself. McAteer felt that the Scottish police were trying to frame him. He was confident and cocky, even boasting to Scottish detectives about wanting to kill a police officer. According to Detective Superintendent Julieanne Wallace-Jones, ‘He openly bragged about his hatred of police, including wanting to shoot an officer. He was believed capable of using guns to resist arrest.’

  1999 was shaping up to be a good year for the police. Earlier in the year they had managed to pin a conviction on yet another Curtis Warren associate and Cartel senior, Stan Carnall, known as ‘the Big Fella’. Carnall was jailed for six years for passing over five kilos of heroin at a service station.

  Warren wasn’t faring much better. In a Dutch prison, he killed a Turkish inmate in an exercise-yard fight.

  CHAPTER 41

  A NEW AGE

  2000

  MEANWHILE, THE GANG war between Shaun Smith and the new generation of superscallies was hotting up. Shaun was not a member of the Cartel, but the new bucks identified him as a prestige target anyway. He didn’t deal drugs, but the Cartel often used his small army of doormen to solve problems. If the upstarts could take down such a powerful figure, it would make their bones in the underworld. A clear message would be heard by the drug lords: that there was a new generation of gangsters in town – and they must be taken seriously.

  One night, Terry cruised past Shaun’s Halfway House pub in the Kirkdale area of Walton. Tuesday night was pool night. The pub was busy. Terry was driving a Lexus LS 400. Shaun was sitting outside, taking a breather with one of his crew, known as Big Pim.

  Suddenly, one of the hoodies sitting in Terry’s car’s back seat shouted over to Shaun, ‘Youse are getting it.’

  Action stations.

  Shaun said, ‘I threw me top off and walked over to the car. But before I got there, a mixed-race kid popped out of the window, just as I was about to front them. He pulled out a gun. Without warning, he let off seven shots at us. I was exposed. I ran behind the back of a parked van to take cover. Big Pim, who was with me, ran back into the pub to get away. He locked the doors behind him, to stop the shooter running in, but this locked me out as well.

  ‘I wasn’t running anywhere. I stood my ground and decided instead to run after the car: attack was the best form of defence, in my opinion. When there was a gap in the firing, I took my chances and ran towards the car again, where the shooter was. As I ran, I threw a bottle at him, aiming at his head. But it missed him and he started firing again, so I had to take cover again.

  ‘This time I ran towards the pub, but, as I said, the door had been locked by Big Pim to stop the shooters running inside. Big Pim was inside, but no one would open the door, even though I was stood there. Even so, the shooter started firing at the pub. The bullets missed me, but one bullet went through the bar.’

  The shooter wriggled back inside the window and the car sped off. Shaun didn’t want to ring the police: it was against the code of silence. Instead, members of Shaun’s gang decided to hit back immediately. Terry, the kid who had originally started the feud and was in the shooter’s car, had gone to ground. But Shaun’s gang decided to m
ount a second attack on Terry’s family’s house instead, in the hope of flushing him out once and for all. The gang traced the family to a new address. Terry had recently moved his family to a leafy part of Liverpool popular with students.

  Shaun said, ‘The attack on Terry’s home was nothing to do with me and I wasn’t part of the attack. But I was told what exactly happened. The assailants who carried it out didn’t have guns, just hatchets, knives and wood choppers. They went through the door and found the family screaming. Someone was crying with fear.

  ‘One of the lads always carried a squirty bottle full of petrol in the car, because you can squirt it from up to ten to fifteen feet away and just light the victim up from a safe distance. He was shouting at the family: “I’ll burn you. I’ll burn this house with you in it.”

  ‘Of course, he didn’t burn the family, but he would have, if required – it was just a warning to Terry to back off.’

  Shaun went to stay in Manchester while things cooled down. A meeting was called with the heads of the family that Shaun worked with. The takeaway decision from the meeting was ominous: someone was going to have to be ‘taken care of here’, as one of the people there said. It was a euphemism meaning that someone would have to be murdered in order to bring the gang war to a close.

  ‘This is getting silly,’ Shaun told his associates and the family. ‘And the worst thing is, it’s not even my war.’

  Shaun told the family he blamed for dragging him unnecessarily into the dispute that ‘this is not my war, it’s yours’. He wasn’t happy that the family hadn’t had the straightener when all of this could have been put to bed. However, a decision was made by Shaun and the family to either put Terry in hospital, cripple one of his cronies or wipe out his back-up. Shaun hadn’t started the war, but he wanted to finish it.

  In spring 2000, the Operation Pirate court cases got underway. The trials related to the Cartel’s amphetamine factories set up by Frank Smith. On 3 March 2000, the mysterious Mr Big behind the £36 million plot, a Cartel veteran called Frederick Cook, was jailed for 12 and a half years. Frank Smith had never even met him. For the first time, he understood the enormity of the operation that he’d been involved in. The Cartel was like an iceberg, he told one of his mates on the wing. Most of it was hidden beneath the surface, and even when you’re working for it, you never know who exactly you are working for. He wished he’d known the truth about the Cartel from the off, for he would never have got involved, he told his confidantes.

  The judge in court knew the structure of the Cartel exactly. The details had been mapped out in evidence by the Crown Prosecution Service and the police. The judge described how Mr Big Frederick Cook had farmed out the manufacturing of the drug to ‘a ragtag band of petty criminals’, such as the hapless Frank Smith.

  Unfortunately, Frank Smith never made it into the dock with his co-defendants to defend himself or give evidence. He died of natural causes while in custody: a sad end to a sad life. His life was a cautionary tale of what happened when a relatively ordinary person got sucked into Britain’s most ruthless drugs operation.

  The court heard how the gang had been caught red-handed while ‘attempting to deluge the region’s streets with poison’ from their four illegal laboratories.

  As the case against the speed makers had evolved, the Cartel members knew they were doomed. The prosecution’s case was overwhelming. The Cartel members became more desperate to save their own skins and the case descended into a cut-throat defence, with everyone blaming everyone else. Deepening conspiracy theories heightened the tension, pitching the Scousers against the woolyback workers they had employed to carry out the donkey work at the factories.

  It was claimed in court that Frank Smith had made £7.5 million worth of drugs at his most recent and most successful cook in Durham, the facility he had set up at the behest of David Parsons, a known police informant. The money had disappeared. Frank didn’t seem to have it. If he didn’t have the money, who did? Now the Cartel was claiming that Frank Smith had turned secret informant as well. They claimed that he had fled abroad with his alleged millions, to start a new life under police protection. Others wrongly claimed that David Parsons had shared the profits with the corrupt coppers he had in his pocket, the same ones who had allegedly allowed him to sell drugs. The police rubbished the gossip, saying it was a case of dirty tricks to weaken the prosecution. But the conspiracy was given legs when Frank’s own son claimed that his dad was still alive. A photograph of Frank Smith’s corpse that had been taken in the hospital where he died was produced as evidence of his passing, along with a death certificate. However, the Cartel boss Frederick Cook dismissed both as fakes in a bid to cause as much trouble in the case as possible. On the outside, the Cartel got up to its old tricks, trying to stir up some controversy in the press.

  Then came yet another astonishing twist. Some of the co-defendants claimed that there had been a murder of someone connected to the case. The victim, they said, was the father of another one of the lower-rung members of the gang. Tony Johnson had been a close confidant of Frank Smith and had been the assistant who had roped in David Parsons and retrieved the hidden apparatus to set up the Durham factory. It was claimed that Johnson’s dad had been murdered as a warning to his son. By exactly whom, they weren’t saying, but the thrust of the allegation was clear: the accusers were trying to pin it on Parsons. The allegation was taken seriously enough by the police. An investigation was launched. The father’s body was exhumed for a post-mortem. However, the police concluded quickly that all was not what it seemed. They said that it was a malicious allegation and that the victim had not been killed but had died of unrelated causes.

  More rumours dogged the case. The National Crime Squad was hailing the convictions as a victory in the war on drugs, but more experienced officers in Merseyside Police had doubts, particularly concerning the use of heroin dealer David Parsons as an informant. A rumour surfaced that Parsons was later arrested for crack cocaine- and speed-making chemicals by a local bobby who was by this time chasing David Parsons’s errant son. The bobby didn’t know that Parsons was on the books of the NCS and arrested him anyway. This was embarrassing.

  The back story seemed to drag the case further into disrepute. Parsons was allowed to deal drugs, the Cartel spin doctors claimed, as part of a tacit arrangement with his police handlers. While this absurd and unproven deal was in place, one of the heroin addicts that Parsons had sold to had committed a burglary on a pensioner’s house. The addict had bought his heroin on Parsons’s patch. The victim turned out to be the widow of the former Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, Sir Kenneth Oxford. She died three months after the burglary. The irony was not lost on some officers within Merseyside Police. Though they didn’t believe that Parsons had been allowed to deal drugs on such a scale, they privately disagreed with the NCS’s gung-ho methods of managing informants. Claims were made that Parsons had been allowed to peddle £250,000 worth of heroin in eight months while he was a police informant.

  Whatever the truth, and none of it was proved definitively, the smears did not seem to affect the case. Cartel linkman John Byrne got six years in jail for the speed-making factories and a £101,000 confiscation order. As part of disclosure in his trial, in police statements it was revealed that David Parsons had been working for the NCS under Operation Lotus. As an informant, Parsons had clocked up a whopping strike rate: 41 arrests, including 39 convictions. His codename had been Bob Latchford, after the legendary Everton goal scorer. Even so, the trial judge said that the police were wrong to allow the informer to peddle heroin. It was claimed but not proven that the police had given him £4,000, knowing the money was going to be used for heroin dealing. In another statement, Parsons said that he had given £30,000 back to his NCS handlers. The memo was based on a sworn statement that Parsons had made to his solicitors and was later used in court as part of his defence.

  In a bid to cover his own back, David Parsons began turning on his handlers and spilling
the beans. In a memo from his solicitors, Parsons claimed he and the police officers had made illegal purchases of chemicals and glassware to make the speed, thus inciting crimes. What’s more, his solicitors claimed that Parsons had been secretly taping his NCS handlers. The memo was based on a sworn statement that Parsons had made to his solicitors and was later used in court as part of his defence.

  The memo said: ‘The tape recordings clearly show that he had the ability to call off surveillance at will and was actively engaged in moving chemicals and glassware from storage to Frank Smith.’ Parsons said he had been paid £17,500 by police in the period that he had set up the case. However, all of the police officers involved denied any form of improper behaviour and collusion with Parsons in his criminal activities and were never charged or convicted of corruption.

  More grief attached itself to the case when it was revealed that one of the original targets of the operation had gone on the run. Mark Lilley had been on the NCS’s original hit list and David Parsons had promised to serve him up. He was sentenced to 23 years in his absence after going on the run during his trial. Unconfirmed sightings of him were reported in southern Spain and the Netherlands. Rumours abounded that he was being protected by the Cartel, that he was being held back until he could give evidence that would undermine the convictions of the others. Mark Lilley further attacked the National Crime Squad, saying that they asked him to set up Frank Smith. The National Crime Squad denied corruption and abuse of office and said their officers had behaved properly.