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

by Graham Johnson

  Through his solicitors and family, Mark Lilley began to confirm a lot of what David Parsons was saying. He said that the rumours going around were true. David Parsons then began to reveal more details about his involvement with the police. He said that the police allowed the gang to take possession and recycle 15 to 20 kilos of police-tested amphetamine and Ecstasy tablets and use them to ‘set up’ Frank Smith with lab materials that they had. He claimed that as part of his contract with the police, the gang was allowed to carry lab-restricted glassware. He also said that the police unknowingly tested BMK for another big drug dealer. He made an allegation that also said that an NCS officer tried to procure BMK. He said that the policeman wanted him to make amphetamine paste to cover their expenses – but this was never done. The police denied the allegations and said that they were not corrupt. The officer closest to David Parsons denied any form of corruption and the NCS believed they were being made into scapegoats.

  Twenty people were charged in relation to the conspiracy. Frank Smith died in custody. Eventually 19 men went on trial charged with a variety of drug offences. Seven were allowed to have charges lie on file. The remaining men either admitted their part or were convicted by a jury. But the experience of using informants as the key resource in intelligence-led policing left a bad taste in some people’s mouths. Intelligence-led policing was given a thumbs up for the amount of suspects that it could churn up, but badly behaved supergrasses were given the thumbs down.

  Meanwhile, in a different case, the authorities were trying to attack the Cartel from a different angle: by confiscating their assets. In 2000, while drugs baron Eddie Gray was serving his sentence as a Category A prisoner at Full Sutton prison in York, the authorities set in motion a cash-grab case against him. But Gray refused to cooperate, telling the police that his Ferrari and luxury home with heated indoor swimming pool were the fruits of a modest taxi business he’d once owned. Investigators hoped to seize a fine collection of designer jewels for the Crown, but the case was to drag on for years.

  Meanwhile, heroin dealer Dylan Porter still hadn’t been nicked, despite his suspicions that the police were on him, after ten kilos of his heroin had been seized over Christmas, not to mention the £11,000 worth of E’s before that. Dylan tried to rationalise the busts, concluding that they were isolated incidents. By the law of averages, this happened now and again, he told himself. But something else kept niggling him. Occasionally, a courier’s drugs supply was seized, but the men at the top had no idea that they, too, were under the police spotlight. Was this the case with him? He was confused, but he had to crack on and take care of business. Everyone was relying on him. After New Year, he resumed his day-to-day job of organising imports and distribution for his boss Paul Lowe.

  But it was only a matter of time. The net was closing fast. In fact, by the end of February 2000, the police had nearly everything they wanted to build a case against the gang – and they were poised for the final take-down. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Dylan. A big consignment had just been picked up by the gang’s disabled bagman Carl Frederick in France. He returned to the UK on 27 February. Mr Big Paul Lowe and his lieutenant Martin Neary were in the middle of making last-minute preparations for the arrival of this latest batch of Frederick’s heroin. Neary made separate visits to the gang’s heroin safehouse in Upper Parliament Street, Toxteth, to make sure that the right equipment was there to cut up the raw opium, bulk it out and then re-bag it before nationwide distribution. Before leaving the premises, he checked to see if anyone was watching the property. There was no one that he could see anyway. The adrenalin was flowing in expectation of the next payday just around the corner. Everything was going just as usual. They were buzzing in anticipation of the latest parcel ‘getting home’. Neary contacted Lowe to let him know ‘that he’d got all his ducks in a row’.

  At the same time, Frederick sailed through Customs and headed north. He finally arrived in Liverpool with the smuggled heroin cargo in his specially adapted mobility car. Lowe and Neary were relieved. Frederick went straight back to his own home, where he planned to hand over the gear to his bosses. Neary arrived shortly afterwards to collect. He picked up the bags of heroin and took them to the safehouse. A few minutes later, the MCU team swooped on the property. Bingo! They found the newly arrived 26 kilos of heroin untouched without much of a fuss. It was worth £1.89 million, stashed in black bin bags.

  As a more detailed police search got underway, Lowe turned up unawares. He didn’t realise that the police were there and was arrested immediately. At his house around the corner, police found £24,270 in cash.

  Now it was time for the detectives to move on to the next target in the gang: Dylan Porter. They began planning the swoop. The police laid off a fourth member called Jason Smith for the time being, because they didn’t have enough evidence on him yet. They watched him for a further two months and eventually recovered 46 kilos of heroin, worth £3.25 million, and £36,000 in cash from his house. During their surveillance, police had also observed Ian McAteer buying heroin from the gang. They’d also watched Warren Selkirk ferry money around (obviously, this was before McAteer had killed Selkirk). At first, McAteer and Selkirk were also named on the drug-smuggling indictment but after the murder it was decided to try the Scot on the murder charge alone.

  Dylan said, ‘Everyone around me was getting done, and it didn’t take them long to get round to me. I got nicked in February 2000, shortly after the others. I couldn’t believe it, how quickly things had gone from bad to worse. Six weeks before I got nicked, I’d been doing great: no problems. I’d had £237,000 in cash in my kitty, and I was owed £120,000 in back payments from previous deals. In other words, I had a healthy cash flow. But in the space of those six weeks, in the run-up to me getting nicked, I’d lost £180,000. That included the money I had to give Cagey for E’s and the heroin that’d gone down. And the money that the busies found when they came through the door. In my business, you’re not insured, are you?

  ‘I was interrogated, of course, but as usual I said fuck all. But I knew they’d got me with surveillance and whatever. Even so, the busies wanted me to do a deal. They wanted me to give evidence against Ian McAteer, who’d been accused of murdering Warren Selkirk.

  ‘The officers said to me: “We will get you off the heroin charges. You will never see the inside of a prison cell. We will relocate your family to a safehouse and arrange for a financial package to be put in place.

  ‘“In the meantime, we’ll keep you in a police cell in one of our stations rather than sending you to a prison on remand, so that it will be easier for your wife to come and visit.”

  ‘In other words, I was being offered an easy time right away and some rewards in the future, in return for becoming a grass.’

  Dylan sat back on his plastic chair.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  2000

  ON THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT side, the police were learning from the initial mistakes that had arisen from intelligence-led policing. Controversy over the use of participating informants, such as David Parsons in the amphetamine-busting Operation Pirate, and fabrication of evidence, in the case of John Haase, had led to a Home Office review. A new philosophy was born. The National Intelligence Model was introduced in 2000. It was to be a business plan for the management of hierarchical crime (i.e. the Cartel). Crimes were classified into three categories. For each category, a police structure was put in place to deal with exactly those activities. That part of the police would be geared up specifically to deal with crimes of that nature, with complementary resources and backed up by a flow of intelligence that was relevant. Gone was the one-size-fits-all approach. The Cartel had a hierarchy, so a rationalised police hierarchy was needed to fight it.

  The crimes were classified into broad levels:

  Level 1: Tackled by a Basic Command Unit that investigated crime that affected the police and community at local level, such as burglary.

  L
evel 2: Serious and organised crime that affected the whole force on a regional level, encompassing cross-boundary issues into neighbouring forces. The crime group that attracted Level 2 heat had to have greater organisation. Therefore the police needed to bring together resources from across the board and organise them to fight crime head on.

  Level 3: Described international and national criminality, such as the Cartel. Merseyside Police were only the force outside of London that had Level 3 capability.

  The Analyst said, ‘What we did, as a force, made us unique outside of London. We were prepared to look at Level 3 at a time when other forces weren’t prepared to take on the responsibility. It’s a big commitment. But we knew we had to, because the Liverpool criminals were far ahead in the drugs business. We believed that we could take out our crime families and our crime groups by not setting ourselves boundaries, both geographical and otherwise. For the first time, we said: “We will go after the criminals no matter where they go in the world.”

  ‘As a force, we then built up relationships with national and international law enforcement, to take out the crime groups that were specifically affecting communities by distributing drugs in Liverpool. Previous to that, if you hadn’t seen the drug dealers in Liverpool for three months at a time, because they were in Amsterdam, then there was nothing we could do; we had to wait for them to come back on our radar. The old-style operations simply hadn’t worked in this respect, because we never had the resources to follow the criminals into other countries, the permissions and the protocols from those foreign forces and contacts over there. However, after we moved into Level 3, it was no longer a case of waiting until they returned. You had to actively chase them.

  ‘So that’s the style of the way we started to work: we would chase the criminal. And we soon got the protocols set up and the contacts in place.’

  Until now, the Cartel had thought they were safe in Amsterdam, Spain and Portugal, at least from UK police, if not the local force. They thought that being out of the country put them out of harm’s way. But suddenly the policing barriers were gone. New laws were enacted to boost the police’s surveillance capability – but to control it as well, in a bid not to make the same mistakes that had occurred with participating informants, or with the use of foreign evidence, such as had occurred with the Curtis Warren case in 1992. If the police could be empowered to use new technology to gather evidence objectively, they wouldn’t be so dependent on human intelligence. RIPA controlled the powers of all public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation. The interception of communications was particularly important. The law was introduced to take account of the Internet. Strong encryption of emails and phone calls was cheaply available and the Cartel was using satellite phones.

  ‘RIPA allowed direct and intrusive surveillance of drug dealers,’ said the Analyst, who is probably the UK police’s number-one expert on the legal text of RIPA and its practical implications. The Analyst had a geeky side that had hoovered up this stuff long after other coppers had switched off. He was coming into his own. ‘It still had to be legal and necessarily proportionate,’ he added. ‘For instance, section 27 deals with organising surveillance and section 27(3) deals with surveillance anywhere.’ In an instant, the Analyst could quote the sections and subsections verbatim, and cross reference them to related precedents under earlier case law. Alongside the true-crime books and police-training manuals stacked upon his office shelves, there were rows of law textbooks. They were well-thumbed and not just for show.

  RIPA went hand in hand with the new National Intelligence Model. Unlike the old guard, who seemed to categorise police resources haphazardly, the new buzzwords were ‘strategic’, ‘tactical’ and ‘operational’. What was surprising was that the new system seemed to work well. It was what the new generation of officers, such as the Analyst, had been waiting for, and they welcomed it with open arms. Existing resources and procedures within the force could now be run at their optimum level to achieve the best possible results. The piecemeal approach was gone. Standardisation enabled the smooth flow of information throughout the system.

  Almost immediately, the Cartel began feeling the heat once more. By the turn of the millennium, the good times were over for Poncho. External pressure from the police led to a dramatic rise in arrests. Internally, guns, politics and paranoia were tearing the Cartel apart. Scarface and Kaiser were still trading in huge amounts of cocaine, but they were staying low-key and flitting from country to country in a bid to cover their tracks. Their operating expenses quadrupled, dramatically pushing up the price of their cocaine. Poncho’s brother Hector saw the bad moon rising and started making plans to get out of drug dealing. He embarked on a degree course at Manchester University.

  Hector said, ‘These were the bad times. You could tell that the police were catching up; you could feel it. You could sense the change in the air. They were getting the breaks now, not us. All that hazy, crazy Wild West era was over. Suddenly, it was cold out there.

  ‘Things like that cause stress. Drugs themselves make you paranoid enough, and a lot of the lads, including me, were breaking the first rule: don’t get high on your own supply.

  ‘One of our close associates, Stephen Cole, had been macheted to death. And that was a kind of turning point as well, a warning signal: this game is turning nasty.

  ‘It was no longer just about bringing in hundreds of kilos and then selling them with a phone call. It wasn’t just business: it was more of a guerrilla war. It was getting cut-throat and people were getting murdered all over the place. I went to Manchester Uni and started doing a bit of graft there.

  ‘By that time, Scarface and Kaiser were also on a bad run. The police were on them. One of their transports got hit by the busies. They lost a few million quid on a big consignment that never made it. It was coming on top all over the show.’

  The police were glad that they no longer had to rely so much on informants. The difficulty in getting villains to turn Queen’s Evidence was highlighted in Dylan Porter’s case. The officers offered him witness protection and a new ID abroad to shop Mr Big Paul Lowe and everyone else in the Cartel he had dirt on.

  Dylan said, ‘They sat me down and went through a big list of things they could do for me if I ratted on my other co-defendants: freedom, money, new ID, emigrate abroad, security, new house. You name it. And, of course, not going to jail for a very long time for the heroin.

  ‘“Have you finished?” I said to the copper.

  ‘“Yes,” he said, smiling. Thinking that I was gonna sign up.

  ‘“Well, suck my fucking dick,” I said to him and I laughed. “Fuck you – I’m not grassing anyone up.”

  ‘Later one of the busies tried to talk me around again. He tried to convince me that I wasn’t the only one: that there were loads of top gangsters on their side.

  ‘He said: “You’ll be amazed who’s on our books,” meaning that loads of big names were turning grasses.

  ‘But again, I said: “I’m not a snitch.” How could I be sitting on a beach, with my kids, out of jail and living in Florida or somewhere, knowing that I’ve sent another man away to prison – and he won’t see his kids for ten years. It just wasn’t me.’

  Meanwhile the war between Shaun Smith and the young Turks escalated. A female closely linked to Shaun was slapped by one of the gang. Shaun blamed the up-and-coming cocaine dealer Sidious. Without his knowledge, members of Shaun’s gang sought retaliation for the incident – and revenge for the shooting outside Shaun’s pub, which was still unresolved.

  Sidious had been arrested in connection with the shooting incident outside the pub. He was remanded for four months until the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. Now that he was back on the street, it was a perfect opportunity for him to be wiped out.

  In May 2000, 15 doormen were ‘called out’ and told to prepare for an attack on Sidious. He’d been sighted in a pub called the Sefton Arms. The doormen armed themselves with clubs, machetes and knives.
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  The men burst into the pub and doused drinkers with tear gas. They couldn’t find Sidious at first but instead cornered one of his known associates, Carlos Escoffery, in the bar. The order was given to cut up Escoffery. Anyone associated with the slapping incident was to be annihilated. Escoffery was left close to death, bashed and beaten. Sidious escaped the attack, but police were ordered to find the men who’d left Escoffery fighting for his life.

  Shaun and two men close to him, called Michael Brown and Gary Hampton, were arrested and charged with attempted murder. During interviews for this book, Shaun Smith refused to name Brown and Hampton as his associates, or Escoffery and the others as his enemies.

  ‘I’m not a grass,’ he said, ‘and I won’t even name names under any circumstances, not to the police, writers, friends or enemies – no one.’

  But the individuals concerned were named in court reports and newspaper articles from the period. Brown and Hampton were tough, but they were young and impressionable. They had come under the spell of older villains and were prepared to carry out their dirty work for them. They were facing a long time in jail if convicted for Escoffery’s attack. According to police reports, Hampton had previously been convicted twice for assault and also for carrying a flick knife in a public place. He wouldn’t be getting an easy time from the judge. Brown had a previous conviction for incitement to inflict grievous bodily harm. But, astonishingly, the case collapsed in August 2000, when Escoffery withdrew his statement at the last minute. Once again, from the outside, it looked as though someone had got to the victim. For the police, the case was totemic, revealing a wider weakness in the justice system. The force might have got their act together, in as much as they were now catching big players as a matter of routine, but criminals were simply going around them, by waiting until the files were passed over to the Crown Prosecution Service before ‘solving’ the problem. The new generation had none of the respect for the courts that the older ones had. They just saw opportunities to pay off witnesses or intimidate them quite openly.