Terrified that Shaun’s gang might finally find him, Sidious went into hiding, then fled Liverpool altogether. Later, he allegedly gave the names of six of the attackers to the police. Shaun’s gang seized on the rumour and used it to decimate Sidious’s reputation in the underworld. Word that he was a grass soon spread around Liverpool. Six-foot-high graffiti declaring ‘Sidious – grass’ appeared on the walls of a gym frequented by club doormen. Leaflets and posters were printed with stories on them, declaring that Sidious was a police informant. The News of the World even ran an article claiming that Sidious had switched sides. With Sidious on the run, there was room for another young gangster to take his place.
CHAPTER 43
GUERRILLA WAR
2001
IF A CASE got to court and, against the odds, there was a conviction, then the judges wasted no time in giving drug dealers a hard time. New Home Office guidelines, designed to tie in with more sophisticated policing, demanded longer sentences for drug dealers. The new era of tough justice did not bode well for Dylan Porter. If he was found guilty, not only could he expect a big sentence but also he’d be left with nothing: the police had vowed to strip his assets. Dylan had refused to turn informer. He was told to expect no quarter from the Crown Prosecution Service and the judge. The trial did not go well.
Dylan said, ‘In court, as evidence, the police attributed a phone to me, which linked me to all kinds of deals. The phone records made me look like a number-one organiser. Then they had an eyewitness, saying that I’d been at the handover of the ten kilos of Cagey’s heroin to the Bradford people at Chelwood Avenue. My argument was that even though I was bang at it, these two bits of evidence were wrong. I denied that the phone was mine, and I said that I wasn’t anywhere near the handover. But at the end of the day, that’s what convinced the jury – the phone and eyewitness – no matter how much I denied it. That evidence was a stitch.’
On 5 February 2001, the jury found Dylan guilty by a majority of ten to two. Dylan Porter got a weighty 21 years – the full force of the law – handed down by Judge Maddison.
Dylan said, ‘“Dis-honour Maddison” I called him. The Lockerbie bomber, whether he did it or not, only got 20 years. But what could I do? I took it on the chin; I didn’t blame anyone but myself. I gave the thumbs up to the judge and said thanks very much. I put on a front, as much for my family as for me, but also a bit for the lads, to show that I hadn’t crumbled.
‘But inside I was devastated. I was gutted, but I didn’t moan about it. I’d done the crime, now I’d do the time. I bit my lip and just cracked on.
‘All my neighbours in the court were devastated also. But when I went to jail, my wife and kids got left on their own. I expected the lads to look after her, but no one came.
‘Then I landed in Whitemoor Prison. I saw John Haase, but I wouldn’t speak to him because he was a grass. I was Cat. A for six years after that.’
During the interviews for this book Dylan refused to name the members of his gang or those criminals he sold drugs to. However, their names were revealed on court documents. Ten people from the gang were jailed, including Paul Lowe, who got twenty-four years. Martin Neary got sixteen. Even disabled Carl Frederick, the supposedly disabled courier, got fourteen years. Jason Smith and safehouse keeper Anthony Ellis got sixteen years each. Bradford boss Mark Davey also got sixteen years. Five other runners got sentences ranging from six to twelve years. The message from the authorities was clear: drugs were now a big, bad offence, and if they reeled you in, you were staying until you were an old man. Sentencing was catching up with the police’s capabilities. The political will in Whitehall was stiffening.
Inside their mansions and foreign boltholes, the Cartel bigwigs sat up and took notice. No one wanted to suffer the same fate as Dylan. But on the street, the younger generation wasn’t listening. Caught up in the heat of battle, the up-and-coming gangs weren’t concerned with consequences. None of them had been inside for long sentences, so they didn’t understand the full, life-sucking horror of being a Category A prisoner for ten, fifteen years. They were high on life. By 2001, the conflict between Shaun Smith and the next generation of dealers had settled into a kind of asymmetric warfare. Shaun put a conventional force of doormen on the streets, to flush out the young scallies. Like a standing army, Shaun’s troops were a constant presence, harassing and interdicting all known associates of his enemies. The other side, meanwhile, exploited their own strengths. They were more like a militia, an irregular force relying less on brute force and more on their flexibility and the element of surprise. They threw pipe bombs and hand grenades into pubs and nightclubs linked to Shaun. They paid ‘creatures’ to shoot at doormen in random drive-by attacks. ‘Creatures’ was the street name for heroin and crack users who would perform acts of violence for very little money. Crazed by addiction and desperate for gear, they would shoot someone for £500, stab someone for £200 or throw a grenade through someone’s window for a bit more. In retaliation, Shaun’s gang put money on the heads of the foot soldiers. The addicts were often kidnapped off the street and thrown into the back of a specially adapted van. It was no more than a mobile torture chamber, in which they were gassed, beaten and penetrated with broomsticks, their arms and legs smashed and slashed. Flames from cigarette lighters were held under their noses, burning deeply into the septum until they gave in. Their legs were broken until they confessed whom they were working for and gave their addresses.
Shaun said, ‘We were driving around of a night in cars. The opposition were as well, so we were trying to find them. We used to go to the auctions and buy old Volvos and Granadas for £500. Of course, the cars weren’t insured or nothing like that. It wasn’t that bad then, for things like that. As long as it was taxed, it was OK. They were just our battleships, full of four or five doormen that we paid to put on the streets. If we saw them, then we’d just ram them off the road. We didn’t have to pay all of the lads: the average doormen didn’t want to get involved because it was personal family business. So there was a hard core of just our close associates who were prepared to fight against them.’
By 2001, Colin Smith (no relation to Shaun) was the undisputed king of the Cartel. He had taken up Curtis Warren’s mantle. By now, he had brought in a well-known gangster called Stephen Lawlor to beef up his security. It was a risk. Though Lawlor had risen through the ranks, he still had one foot back on the street. He was involved in a long-running gang war over nightclub doors. His sworn enemy was a doorman called Stephen Clarke.
In time, Colin Smith delegated some responsibility for dealing directly with the Colombians to Lawlor. It was a decision that would come back to haunt him. The Cartel was already under strain from increased police scrutiny and internal strife. The Colombians were losing faith. A bad deal set up by Lawlor only added to the growing friction between the Colombian cartels and the Merseyside mafia. During the spring of 2001, Lawlor arranged for a cocaine shipment to be smuggled from South America to Amsterdam and then to Britain, according to senior underworld sources. Lawlor never saw a penny of the £72 million deal. In May 2001, he was shot as he left a party in Liverpool. Initially, the murder was blamed on a long-running feud between door boss Stephen Clarke and the Lawlor family. At first, Stephen Clarke’s younger brother Peter was accused. But Peter Clarke was later acquitted of the murder. Even so, Stephen and Peter Clarke’s older brother, Ian, was shot dead in what police believed was a revenge attack four months later. Ian Clarke’s funeral cortège included 32 black stretch Mercedes and Daimler limousines. Weeks after that, Lawlor’s brother, Tony, was murdered. During the dispute, a Scottish hit-man had been drafted in by the Cartel to kill the leader of the other side. During one attempt, he dressed up as an old woman and waited at a bus stop to catch his prey. But the target was carrying a child, so he let him go. Amid the ensuing chaos, the coke that Stephen Lawlor had allegedly ordered from the Colombians had vanished. Following Lawlor’s untimely death, his boss Colin Smith was left to pick up the pie
ces. He told the Colombians that the Liverpool mafia had never received the missing drugs, even though underworld sources said it had arrived in Amsterdam safely and had been stored in containers that were lined up on the docks ‘like a row of new cars’. The events led to a misunderstanding and the Colombians lost a bit of trust in Smith, some claiming that over time it grew into a grudge: one that would later play a crucial part in Smith’s career as king of the Cartel.
The big-time deals were just telephone numbers to the rank and file ‘soljas’. The street dealers never got close to the deals that made their bosses very rich. But it was from the lower rungs, the street kids, that the next generation of Cartel bosses was already coming up. A young scally known on the street as Kallas was busy making his bones. He was a friend of Terry, Kaim and Sidious: members of the young gang that had declared war on Shaun Smith.
At first, Kallas had been reluctant to get dragged into their troubles. He was too interested in making money. But one day Shaun’s gang came close to making a full-time enemy of the rising star. One of Shaun’s younger relatives had beaten him up for selling drugs, not realising it was a bad move.
Shaun Smith said, ‘Kallas was around 19, 20 years of age at the time. It was around a year before things kicked off really intensely. One of my relatives knocked Kallas out. Kallas had been selling weed outside the shop on his bike in Kirkdale, and trouble broke out.
‘This kid who was part of our family done him in, then ran over his bike. He kept reversing over the bike four or five times while Kallas was watching. Kallas was saying: “You’ve fucked my graft up. That bike earns me my money.”
‘My person, known as the Young One, was just trying to teach him a lesson, that’s all. This happened about a year before it all kicked off. But during that year, Kallas didn’t go away. It didn’t teach him a lesson and neither did losing his bike stop him from selling gear. Instead, he started getting a bit stronger by getting more into selling drugs.’
In the course of that year, Kallas had gone from selling weed to coke to heroin. In addition, he had a load of ‘creatures’ around him. They sold heroin and cocaine for Kallas on a shift system. Kallas paid his lads £200 a day to sell gear. The top salesmen got a free car thrown in. Shaun’s forces were set on a collision course with the new kid on the block. Shaun wouldn’t name them, but his two top enforcers were still Michael Brown and Gary Hampton.
Shaun: ‘I had a couple of lads with me, who are now in jail doing 17 years each. They were best, best mates. There was also a member of the family called the Young One, who’d done in Kallas and run over his bike. Kallas wasn’t really involved at that stage, but he was still holding a grudge from getting a pasting. We were ramming their cars off the road every night, but they always got away, the rats.
‘Then one night we saw them in this little white Peugeot. I jumped out. I always carried bricks in the car: they were pebbles from Crosby beach. I painted them and put colours on them, so if I got stopped by the busies, I could just say they were the kids’. The lads used to call me “the Caveman” because I always had these big fuck-off rocks around me in the car. The reason I carried them was that they were fucking lethal. If you got hit in the head with one, you were going down. If I threw one at the car, the window would shatter, and then if it hit the driver, he was going to hospital.
‘So I saw this white car and I smashed the window of the white car with one of these stones. One of my lads who was with me tried to get through the other window and get the person who was sitting on that side with a blade. But somehow they got free of us. The car drove off and we chased it. The lad I was with threw a hatchet and it hit this kid.
‘It turns out to be this Kallas kid, who was already angry at being done in by one of us. So now he’s got reason to be doubly upset. After that incident, he decided to go against us full-time and put his hand in with Kaim, Sidious and Terry. That’s how his firm got involved.
‘Soon after, they let off two shots down at the nightclub. Kallas rang me up and said: “You have got me involved now: now you are getting it.”’
Kallas was on his feet with drug money and now took it upon himself to make repeated gun attacks on Shaun Smith. Using his resources, he was able to recruit more mercenaries. Smith found it difficult to retaliate. The new generation didn’t own assets. They moved from one safehouse to another in speeding, blacked-out 4 × 4s, lying down in the back seat, or hidden in the boot, armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art sub-machine guns.
Shaun tracked the gang down to a grubby house on a run-down estate. Kallas and Sidious wouldn’t use the front door in case they were seen. They entered the house through the back garden, climbing over a door that held down the wire fence, so that they were never seen going into the house.
Shaun Smith said, ‘I couldn’t find Kallas personally. We had men on the street just waiting for him to surface, but he refused to come out and fight. Even though I knew where their safehouses were, I could never get them. They were rats. So finally, in a last-ditch attempt, I went down to see his ma.
‘I said to her: “Tell your son to give us a ring: he’s getting involved in something and he might get himself hurt.”
‘But she didn’t seem to care. She just said he got blamed for everything and she’d heard it all before. She just seemed to have given up on him.’
The attacks continued, each one more random and senseless than the last. Smith’s gang were becoming frustrated that they couldn’t pin Kallas down. He was becoming an embarrassment to them: a flea irritating an elephant. A few weeks later, hyped-up and angry, Shaun’s main lieutenants Gary Hampton and Michael Brown were driving around the Bootle area of Merseyside looking for Kallas. Shaun refused to talk about the incident; however, the story was later revealed in court reports. Hampton and Brown thought they saw Kallas and jumped out of their car, along with two associates. In the confusion, they attacked the man they thought was Kallas. The victim suffered fifteen separate stab wounds, including four which would have been fatal on their own. The man tried desperately to run for his life but was caught as he attempted to clamber over a school wall. It wasn’t Kallas: he was a completely innocent man, a 21-year-old joiner called Colin McGinty, from Crosby, who was doing nothing more than going out on the town with his mates. He had no connection with Kallas or the underworld or drugs and had never been in trouble with the police. It was a case of total mistaken identity.
Hampton and Brown fled the scene but were quickly identified by police and picked up. It was their young age and relative inexperience that had got them caught. There was evidence all over the crime scene. An underworld source described them as ‘hotheads’ who’d been brainwashed by unscrupulous bosses.
‘It was as though they were in a cult,’ the source said. ‘They were in their early 20s, just kids really, and they’d been wound up by these older fellers and just been told to go out and kill.’
Hampton and Brown were jailed for life a few months later. The pointless murder should have given both sides pause to reflect. Instead, both sides rearmed with bombs and guns, ready for the next round.
Shaun said, ‘I believe Gary and Michael were basically brainwashed by this family that I worked with. They sucked their youth away from them. They went to jail at 21 years of age and won’t get out until they’re 42. This is all down to one person not having a straightener at the beginning, and all this would have been forgotten about on the first night. If it had been settled on night one, none of this would have happened. I find it sad that these two are in jail over a fight that had nothing to do with any of us, that we were just dragged into unwittingly.’
CHAPTER 44
POTTED OFF
2002
BY 2002, INCREASED police integration, resulting from the National Intelligence Model, was paying off. Merseyside Police were getting good at tracking down the hidden assets of drug dealers because better intelligence was flowing into the hands of officers who could act on it. Cartel stalwart ‘Fast Eddie’ Gray was conv
inced that the police would never get their hands on his money. He’d been careful to put his property in other people’s names, or to claim that it was bought using wages from his small businesses, such as a taxi firm that he was involved in. But the police didn’t care: Gray was ordered by a judge to pay £417,343 to the Treasury. The Flash Harry gangster was warned that he faced an extra three years on top of his twenty-four-year sentence for drug dealing if he failed to pay up. The asset orders had much more of a demoralising effect on drug lords than anyone thought. Many Cartel bosses got comfort from the fact that if they went to jail they’d always come out to a nest egg. But assets recovery was rapidly eating into this insurance policy. Another drug trafficker, jailed for seven years, had his dreams of rich retirement banished by the judge. The police financial investigation unit confiscated £30,300 worth of assets, together with two cars and £50,000 in cash found at his home.
Dylan Porter’s gang had been well and truly smashed. Glasgow boss Ian McAteer got 16 years for the heroin he used to buy from Dylan’s gang, along with a life sentence for murdering Warren Selkirk, who’d gambled away his life. The court heard that McAteer’s final call to Selkirk had lasted just a few seconds and cost 35p – as well as his life.
McAteer was also dragged into an unrelated case, although at the time it was so sensitive that the police dared not make it public. In April 1999, BBC TV star Jill Dando had been mysteriously shot dead outside her Fulham home. A few months later, Cartel boss John Haase had been arrested for gun running. A secret police report claimed that some of the bullets that Haase had been trading in matched those that killed Dando. Haase had used McAteer as an enforcer and used to sell him heroin. McAteer was now being linked to the Dando killing as a possible suspect. The mystery deepened when a former associate of Haase’s, a jailed Turkish heroin smuggler called Suleyman Ergun, claimed to have heard Haase’s gang boasting about being involved in the Dando killing. Ergun claimed to have heard Haase’s partner in crime, Paul Bennett, confessing that they had been part of a contract team that had killed the Crimewatch presenter. Bennett, according to Ergun, had claimed that the principal had been a Scottish crime lord languishing in a Spanish jail. The triggerman had been none other than Ian McAteer.
The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang Page 28
