CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 THE BIG BANG
CHAPTER 2 CANNABIS
CHAPTER 3 THE RAT
CHAPTER 4 RECESSION
CHAPTER 5 DISASTER CAPITALISM
CHAPTER 6 IMPORT
CHAPTER 7 CONSPIRACY
CHAPTER 8 HEROIN
CHAPTER 9 PAVED WITH GOLD
CHAPTER 10 TRANSPORT
CHAPTER 11 SURVEILLANCE
CHAPTER 12 CRACK
CHAPTER 13 VOYAGE
CHAPTER 14 RELOADED
CHAPTER 15 THE PARCEL
CHAPTER 16 LUCIO
CHAPTER 17 REPRISE
CHAPTER 18 DANCE
CHAPTER 19 CURTIS
CHAPTER 20 RETURN
CHAPTER 21 THE SEQUEL
CHAPTER 22 KILLERS
CHAPTER 23 REPEAT
CHAPTER 24 CANNABIS KING
CHAPTER 25 SHADY GRAY
CHAPTER 26 ROUND TWO
CHAPTER 27 COLE
CHAPTER 28 BROWN
CHAPTER 29 SETTLING SCORES
CHAPTER 30 DYLAN MARK 2
CHAPTER 31 MAJOR CRIME UNIT
CHAPTER 32 SET UP
CHAPTER 33 MAD DOG DOWN
CHAPTER 34 OPERATION PIRATE
CHAPTER 35 SPEED KING
CHAPTER 36 THE BUST
CHAPTER 37 DOOMSDAY
CHAPTER 38 OPERATION KINGSWAY
CHAPTER 39 SEIZED
CHAPTER 40 WARREN SELKIRK
CHAPTER 41 A NEW AGE
CHAPTER 42 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
CHAPTER 43 GUERRILLA WAR
CHAPTER 44 POTTED OFF
CHAPTER 45 URBAN TERRORISM
EPILOGUE
Powder Wars
Druglord
Football and Gangsters
The Devil
Gang War (originally published as Soljas)
Darkness Descending
Hack
To Lenny and Norma, Emma, Sonny, Raya, Connie and Clara
A big thanks to Jon Elek at AP Watt, and to Bill Campbell and all at Mainstream Publishing.
I would also like to thank all of the interviewees for the information they have provided, particularly the policeman known as the Analyst. I would also like to thank the sources known as Poncho and Hector.
I sourced information mainly from interviews and research. However, to get what I felt to be the truth of a lot of things, I reviewed four of Peter Stockley’s books: The Little Man Who Always Had a Busy Day, The Reluctant Vigilante, Extenuating Circumstances and The Rat They Called a Dog. I would like to thank Peter Stockley for helping me co-write several chapters of this book. I feel that Mr Stockley has, in his own words, ‘helped draw back the blinds on an otherwise obscure period and its happenings’. Sections of The Rat They Called a Dog have been copied with Mr Stockley’s permission. Mr Stockley refused to name anyone in connection with these events and their identifications have been made by the author from his own research.
I also read The Belly of the Beast by Dylan Porter. Dylan Porter refused to identify or name anyone connected with his crimes and this information was pieced together by the author from newspaper cuttings and additional research. Shaun Smith also refused to identify anyone connected to him, particularly those who were involved in attacks on premises he was connected to, and their identities were made by the author and not Shaun Smith.
I have used information published in the Liverpool Echo.
ON A COLD winter’s morning in 1974, the richest crime group Britain has ever known was founded in a rain-lashed lorry depot by a man named Fred. The story began with a heavily loaded BMC flatbed truck turning sharply into a disused cargo bay. The freight, stacked unusually high, swayed gently as the wheels creaked over the potholes, but luckily the crates didn’t topple. Just like the men who were waiting for it, the rigid-base 7.5-tonner had wide sideboards.
The smell of hot rubber and diesel fumes hung thick in the air. Droplets of damp sizzled off the hot engine, adding to the sense of urgency that animated a small group of tough-looking men huddled in the gloom. One donkey-jacketed warehouseman got busy closing the main gates, to screen off unwanted onlookers. Two others went off to keep ‘dixie’ on the reed-lined approach roads, making sure that the ‘transport’ hadn’t been followed. A fourth man warmed his hands near the spitting radiator grill before telling the terrified driver to ‘fuck off to the pub for an hour’.
‘No problem, boss,’ the haulier replied, mindful not to ask questions and glad to be out of the dark storm rolling in off the Atlantic.
The cab hadn’t even had time to cool down before the owner was busy scrambling onto the trailer behind, impatient to recover his riches. Fred lifted back the green tarpaulin, sending rivulets of rainwater carelessly splashing back onto sacks of foodstuff. But he placed little value on the lorry’s legitimate load. Fred pulled away more sacks to reveal a ‘parcel’ that had been hidden among the wagon’s cargo of coffee and tinned fruit.
The heavy wooden cases were pushed off the side clumsily – there was no forklift and no time – then dragged across the loose coal that littered the yard’s weed-cracked concrete. The adjacent warehouse, constructed of great flaps of asbestos tiles, had a leaking roof and a pigeon problem. Rays of winter sunlight streamed through the holes and cracks in the tiles; they were the only source of illumination. Decrepit though it was, the structure at least offered some shelter from the elements, and from prying eyes, too, if only for a few minutes, while the graft was carried out. Since the decline of Liverpool’s Empire-linked sea trade, this outpost of the distribution yard had been little used. But the area was still well known to the corrupt dockers and their relatives who smuggled stolen goods out of the port regularly. Isolated by surrounding waste ground, the facility was ideal for transferring the contraband that would later revolutionise the fortunes of their dying city.
Fred was incongruously well dressed for the task, sporting high-waisted dark-red flares and brown, spoon-shaped shoes. But he ignored the splashes of mud and oil on his threads, manhandling the cargo roughly until he’d reached the shadowy innards of the covered area. Brainwashed by and high on avarice, Fred was experiencing the adrenalin rush of seeing a parcel ‘land’, or ‘get home’ as the process later became known. It was a feeling that would become familiar to the many who followed in his trail, a buzz so addictive, it was claimed, that men would risk long sentences just to be in on it: even more addictive, some boasted, than the stock-in-trade itself.
Feverishly, Fred jemmied open the lids of the crates with a crowbar, revealing a sickly sweet-smelling dark mush wrapped in stained muslin bags and layered crudely in crinkly coloured plastic. Heroin – three kilos’ worth.
A celebration was in order – this was the first consignment of Class A drugs that Fred had successfully smuggled through Liverpool docks. Fred headed for one of the nightclubs he owned in the city centre, took off his dripping sheepskin coat and drank to the future of his new venture. Thirty years later, the Cartel that he had inadvertently founded in a grimy post-industrial goods yard had a turnover of billions, employed thousands of people across the world and boasted of a hierarchical structure similar to that of a global corporation.
But the success was no accident on Fred’s part. His character was ideally suited to his new job. By day, he was a commercial burglar turned wholesale fence, buying and selling stolen lorryloads of consumer items. By night, he was a pioneering drugs trafficker. On the one side, he was a meat-and-two-veg gangster known on the street for ‘fucking’ his underworld rivals – betraying them on transactions and bumping them for money. His double-dealing had even earned him the moniker ‘Fred the Rat’.
‘Because at the end of the day,’ a contemporary called Paul Burly revealed, ‘he was a rat.
‘Around that time, I was sent to jail, and when I was inside, Fred kind of took over a nightclub of mine and he stripped all the equipment from it – the kitchen, the big steel ovens and work surfaces, the fridge etc. When I got out, I went to see him and “took” £27,000 back off him, as compensation. I just walked into his place and took however much was there, in cash.
‘Fred couldn’t see what he had done wrong. He couldn’t fight me either, so there was nothing he could do. But at the same time, he wasn’t that bothered. £27,000 was a lot of money back then, but it wasn’t a lot of money to him.’
On the other hand, Fred was a shrewd and forward-looking villain. In his new profession, Fred wasn’t interested in being a Mr Nice. Pleasantries were for your Oxbridge international playboys. Fred poured scorn on the privateers, flakes and hippies that had hitherto dominated Britain’s fledgling drug economy. Fred’s ambition was to rationalise the piecemeal drugs trade. On the supply side, he hoped to smuggle in loads of tens, and, if possible, hundreds, of kilos in regular, controllable patterns as opposed to the small amounts of variable quality muled in by opportunists. On the demand side, Fred wanted to take drugs out of the cult scene and into the mainstream market – the housing estates and new towns that made up Merseyside’s bomb-cratered post-war topography.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, and most drug lords that would follow him, Fred was not afraid of getting his hands dirty. His underlings and rivals were always surprised. Fred insisted on being present when a consignment of drugs was being unloaded: unusual behaviour, in hindsight. By the 1990s, the Cartel bosses had learned to remain in the background, strictly hands-off. Trails were covered, connections severed. Deals would often be done months in advance in third-party countries that had few obvious links to the point of departure and the final destination, or at least in places like Amsterdam, Istanbul and the Caribbean. In international hubs there was less chance of being caught.
At the coalface, the criminality was conducted by a small army of couriers, middlemen and distributors, many on wages and retainers. The system ensured that the Mr Bigs rarely came into contact with the product. But for the founding fathers like Fred, things were simple and straightforward. As greedy former petty criminals, they were overly possessive. Like many self-made men, they obsessively refused outside interference in their empires and treated the drugs business like any other organised crime: they had to be kings of their patch, constantly on the plot, having to be seen and heard at all times. They wanted to protect their own assets. They discussed deals in person. They made the decisions, more often than not, in face-to-face meetings. For Fred, the risks were low. The authorities had not yet started handing down big sentences for drugs. Heroin had not yet been demonised for driving up prostitution, burglary, mental illness and family breakdown. For now, at least, there was no reason why he shouldn’t handle his own tackle.
But like any entrepreneur, Fred had been careful not to gamble too much, too quickly on his start-up. Three years earlier he had begun small. In an effort to learn his trade, he had first experimented by importing cannabis. He’d soon struck gold, peddling his wares to the city’s melting pot of post-Beatles bohemia. The grant-fuelled student population was ballooning and the post-liberal Abigail’s Party crowd were dabbling in soft drugs. Fred also made contacts in Liverpool’s thriving West Indian community, links that would later become crucial to the future of the Cartel.
However, Paul Burly proffered another theory that explained Fred’s early successes. ‘Fred the Rat was also lucky,’ he said. ‘It was 1971 when he’d started with the pot: the year of decimalisation and devaluing, and the authorities were distracted by all these things going on in the wider country. While they were looking the other way, Fred started bringing in weed – in truth, I don’t think Customs and the police cared that much. It was a very confusing time and people were stressed out – cannabis took people’s mind off things.’
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, a generation of young criminals were making their bones in different ways. In Glasgow’s tough Easterhouse district, 11-year-old Ian McAteer was dipping purses and robbing handbags. Dirt poor and effectively orphaned, McAteer was only doing it to buy food for his two brothers and two sisters. His mother and father had split up three years earlier. The family had been taken into care and were now back living with their dad. McAteer would grow up to be one of a huge number of contract criminals that would be drafted into the Cartel from all corners of Europe. By the time he was an adult, all traces of human empathy had gone: he had become a dead-eyed contract killer ideally suited to working for the Cartel as an enforcer, solving internal disputes and being paid in heroin. His services became so notorious that one day McAteer would even be suspected by the police of shooting TV star Jill Dando.
SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, AROUND 1972/73, Fred approached two notorious armed robbers known as the Twins. He persuaded them to invest some of the money they had stolen from bouncing the counters at main post offices into a string of nightclubs. The Twins agreed, but Fred secretly siphoned off some of their capital to underwrite his planned upgrade into heroin trafficking. He rented, or possibly bought, some lorries and paid off contacts. When the armed robbers found out, they protested on quasi-moral grounds. But Fred didn’t share their old-school view that heroin was a dirty business. He carried on moving towards his goal regardless.
By 1974, a wave of economic shock therapy had paralysed the nation. Inflation soared to a 34-year high, power cuts led to a three-day week and conflict in the Middle East had sparked an oil crisis. Two general elections and a miners’ strike added to a general malaise and a sense, at the worst of times, that collapse was imminent. If the worsening economy wasn’t enough, a fresh campaign of IRA terrorism spread fear across the mainland, leading to a backlash of emergency laws that were rushed through parliament.
Fred saw his opportunity and acted. He sensed that he could make money amid the turbulence. The bonus was that the risk was low: the authorities were distracted. He put his heroin plan into action. Fortuitously, the Cartel had unintentionally discovered its growth model. Success went hand in hand with the phenomenon we now know as disaster capitalism, to use the phrase coined by Naomi Klein in 2007, whereby companies profit from others’ misfortune.
His one-time associate Paul Burly explained: ‘Fred had looked into the future. He realised that being a gangster wasn’t about guns and robbing banks. Fred had realised that power came from money. It wasn’t a coincidence that he did well when the economy was going down. They [Fred, his gang and a few other pioneer drug dealers who were operating on the fringes] were just like speculators.’
The other crucial factor in the drugs business was contacts. In the city’s Toxteth area, Fred had got to know an officious Afro-Caribbean engineer who wore a collar and tie under his navy-blue overalls. By day, the young family man was a contract fitter, working at the port and in the surrounding industrial units. By night, he secretly unloaded cannabis from docking ships and smuggled the loads out in his van. He then distributed the cannabis to West Indian communities in Manchester, Birmingham and London. His young son Poncho sometimes went with him.
‘Most of the West Indians in the different cities knew each other because they had come over on Windrush or on the later ships,’ Poncho remembered. ‘And a lot of them were up for it. Like my dad, they’d come over as tradesmen. But, unlike him, many of them could only get shit jobs, so they needed to make a bit of money on the side. So it was a ready-made distribution network and it was a natural thing.
‘It just meant that my dad made a few extra quid. We were comfortable anyway – my dad had come over with a business, and made a good living. But selling weed gave us a middle-class lifestyle in a place where most people had nothing.’
Despite his bourgeois pretensions, Poncho would go on to build on his father’s black-market success. Poncho became part of the second-generation Cartel. His gang would later claim the dubious title of being the first to smuggle a 1,000-kilo consignment of cocaine into the UK.
Less than a mile away from where Fred’s and Poncho’s nascent Cartel was starting up, another organisation was taking root. In 1974, three local constabularies were amalgamated to form Merseyside Police. To the outside world, the force had a tough but modern image. The TV cop series Z-Cars had been based around Liverpool Police’s new panda patrols. With shiny cop cars linked by high-tech radio sets and set in a crime-ridden new estate, the BBC drama became a huge hit, combining kitchen-sink realism with police propaganda. The message from the top brass was that the old guard was using progressive technology to continue to maintain order. But behind the scenes, Merseyside’s new constabulary was slow to change. For many officers, the criminal world was still a simple landscape divided into cops and robbers.
Crime-fighting technology, such as DNA tracing, didn’t exist. Fingerprints couldn’t be searched electronically. Burglar alarms were rare. Cocky watchmen were the first line of defence against a post-war tidal wave of property crime, a trend that led to 1964 being the worst year for crime in over a century, with more than a quarter of a million indictable offences in the UK. Police interviews weren’t taped. Courts took officers at their word, with few challenges to the prosecution. Conviction rates were comfortingly high. Organised crime was low-priority, in the view of chief constables, and could be dealt with by the newly formed Regional Crime Squads: elite units that had been specifically set up to bring down the soaring crime stats.
A new, trendy profession echoed the views of the old coppers. In the lingo of the sociologists, crime in the 1970s was still largely ‘relational’: based on family ties and close-knit communities. The average villain was still spurred on by traditional ‘motivators’, such as fiddling the system and earning a bit on the side. Dockers robbed the ships and commercial burglars plundered the warehouses. It had been going on for centuries, and the fact that it had been growing rapidly since the war was just a blip.
But one new recruit into the new Merseyside force had already seen the writing on the wall. Crime was changing rapidly. The inner-city slum dwellers had been shipped out of their prefabs and Corrie-style terraces and starburst into a constellation of new towns that circled the Second Port of Empire like a fortress. High-rises dominated the skyline around the newly erected estates in places like Speke, Kirkby and Cantril Farm. In Croxteth and Norris Green, acres of factory-built units formed a new no-man’s-land between the suburbs and the countryside. A minority of newcomers had migrated their crime with them but applied it to new opportunities, the most obvious one being the fresh network of motorways that connected them to a whole new market of victims and criminals in other cities. Rather than looking inward at crowded central areas, they were looking outward to counties such as Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria, which offered easier pickings. The IRA had blown up the M62, killing 12, in the same year Merseyside Police had formed. The thinking was, ‘If the terrorists can exploit the new system, so can we.’
The new generation of gangsters no longer looked at the port as something that would sustain a subsistence living; the eight miles of quayside were now seen as a gateway to the world and all its vices. The young police recruit intuitively understood how ‘opportunities of transport’, as the police would later describe the process, were revolutionising crime. He noticed that the young Scousers were effective at migrating crime to wherever they went in the country: for example, to Torquay, Bournemouth and Eastbourne, where they took up summer jobs, or to Glasgow, where heroin flowed through links established by religion and football. But the police force, still run along military lines, was static and slow to catch up. The senior and middling ranks were filled with ex-army types, veterans from the Second World War, Korea and Malaysia. Every morning the young recruit had to line up on a parade ground. The shine on his boots was checked for reflections. His whistle was tested to make sure that it still worked.
But the constable wasn’t put off. Quietly, behind the scenes, he was determined to make changes. Later, he would become known as the Analyst: partly because of his systematic way of approaching crime and partly because he loved to read law books.
Thirty years later, he would go on to be Merseyside Police’s number-one asset in the fight against the Cartel and Britain’s top spy in the War on Drugs.
MUCH OF THE old-school gangland missed out on the emerging drugs scene because they looked down on it. Most of them were armed robbers who valued their status in the old underworld hierarchy. According to Paul Burly, the self-styled elite were known as the ‘dream-doers’, because ‘other men could only dream about how they lived and never had the bottle to take the risks themselves’.
He continued, ‘They were the men of business who had never held a gun to anyone or worn a ski mask for anything other than its true purpose. They were men who knew what was going on because they were alert and kept their fingers on the pulse of things, especially things which buzzed around the city, like bees do in a hive of honey.
‘This is not about the plastic gangsters who frequently got caught but the more subtle ones who managed to stay one step ahead of those elite cops who find detective work so hard that they have to rely on words from the right places.’
He added, ‘In those days, drugs were mainly frowned upon by those who flouted the law by hijacking wagons or robbing banks and post office stations – the dream-doers. Those dream-doers frowned on the creeping introduction of drugs, which were being sold by the more affluent yobs, even though they were down the hierarchy. The street yobs who sold drugs regularly rubbed shoulders with the dream-doers as they flashed their hard-earned but highly illegal bundles of money. Those thieves, who so often boasted that they did what lots only dreamed of, were entrenched villains. They would do almost anything to make money but somewhat frowned on the emerging drugs scene.’
Fred did not share the dream-doers’ qualms. As far as he was concerned, if other villains didn’t want to sell drugs, it just left more for him to make money off. Fewer than five years after starting in the drugs business, Fred the Rat was a millionaire several times over. He’d come a long way. A decade earlier, in the late ’60s, he had been little more than an overweight hustler who lived day to day on the stolen goods that he could buy and sell. Before that, he’d been a penniless petty thief who, according to those who knew him, went to church in order to take money off the donation plate.
But in the late ’60s he’d struck lucky. A Jewish businessman he knew gave him a loan to start up a used-car lot. From the off, Fred had no intention of flogging low-margin bangers to the working families who lived on the local estate. He had a knack for identifying gaps in the market. He would target the only people he knew who had cash to burn: the gangsters, the serial armed robbers – the dream-doers.
The strategy paid off. Fred’s bangers started to move off the forecourt. He charged his criminal clientele over the odds for souped-up Jaguars and top-of-the-range Triumphs, and they lined up to take them off him. Fred had more success selling cars to the underworld than he did to members of the public.
Fred was hungry, but he knew that timing was everything in sales. Instead of pounding the tarmac on the forecourt, Fred went out into the nightclubs and made his pitches over the bar. He made his patter sound casual, as though he wasn’t trying to sell anything at all. The main reason it worked was that the punters were drunk and off-guard. The gangsters liked the approach. Soon, Fred was offloading overpriced saloons and junky sports cars to armed robbers. The deals were shaken on over a bottle of whisky that they were paying for in an after-hours drinking den in the early hours of the morning. By doing the rounds in the nightclubs, Fred made contacts in both drug circles and with the armed robbers. The armed robbers were at the top of the criminal tree. Others looked up to them because they took risks. But by the early 1970s, Fred also began to make friends with the small number of cannabis importers and sellers that hung around the fringes of the underworld.
Paul Burly said, ‘Fred was a somewhat slovenly car salesman and he mixed a lot with the affluent yobs, and he saw the tsunami of drugs approaching. He could see that in the future society would have more leisure time, and this displayed the need for something else besides alcohol to be introduced.’
Fred was a shrewd salesman. He knew exactly which gangsters he could rip off and which ones he had to be straight with. It was this cunning that would serve him well when he became a drug dealer.
According to Paul Burly, ‘He wasn’t a particularly successful car salesman, but he made enough to wriggle his way through the expensive club nights, which he had become accustomed to, due to the need to sell his cars to people. The kinds of punters he sold them to exchanged the cars regularly and paid good money to do so – they were the dream-doers.
‘Being the conniver Fred was, he could see those who made cash regularly, then he judged them on how they splashed their money about. They all liked to spend big, but some only spent cautiously, just buying drinks for their friends – not the hangers on – drawing the line at over-tipping and checking their bills instead of just paying them. He knew these ones had to be dealt with fairly or he would lose their custom.
‘But most of all he loved those who bought drinks for everyone and over tipped – they were the ones who he could sell the rips [bangers] to, and blag them whenever a breakdown would occur. When his cars packed up, Fred lent them a run-around but charged them for it.’
In the early ’70s, as he moved between the armed robbers and the drug dealers, Fred had an idea. They were worlds apart, but what if he could combine the two? Use the criminal nous of the dream-doers, and their cash and their back-up to monopolise the drugs market that his other contacts knew about. A wholesale takeover, if you like. There was only one problem – most of the dream-doers wanted nothing to do with the drugs scene.
Fred had a solution – if he couldn’t find a willing dream-doer to do his dirty work for him, he would find one by other means. Fred bided his time until he could find the right partners – ones that he could deceive into thinking that they were investing in nightclubs and businesses when they were really ploughing money into cannabis and heroin deals.
The triplets became known as ‘the Twins’ after one of them was electrocuted on a railway line when they were kids. The Twins moved and thought as one. They were always noticed and stood well out from the crowds. They soon became the biggest dream-doers of all. Fred liked them because they were drivers of big cars.
It wasn’t long before Fred latched onto them. Fred was convinced that he could manipulate the Twins in the short term by selling them overpriced cars. But he was also convinced that he could reel them unwittingly into a drug conspiracy. Crime author Peter Stockley has revealed the full story in his book The Rat They Called a Dog, parts of which have been reproduced here.
Paul Burly said, ‘Fred didn’t think the Twins were easy touches, nor did he tag them as shrewd. He thought that he could manipulate them, after he had dealt them a few deals with cars and noticed their weaknesses.
‘Like most gangsters, the Twins liked to think of themselves as shrewd, and he certainly buttered that part of their toast, which satisfied their egos.
‘Fred played them – he even refrained from trumping them a few times in order to put them more at ease in his company and make them feel superior to him. And it worked: the Twins began to feel that they had become his mentor and – most important of all – they began to trust him.’
The Twins made their living by robbing post offices. The police noted that they were both prolific and choosey – they only targeted high-value post offices. Fred was too overweight to even be their getaway driver, but now and again he provided them with fast cars, and most importantly he offered to ‘mind’ their cash once the heist had been carried out. He told the Twins that he could ‘hide’ it among his car-sales bookwork. The Twins jumped at the offer because their booty was becoming too noticeable to manage. By the mid ’70s, the Twins had a million pounds in cash, a sum worth several times that amount in today’s values.
According to Paul Burly, ‘Now they felt more at ease, as they had a fat puppet to mind their money . . . Fred felt on top of the world. He had judged them correctly and wormed his way into their trust. At the same time, the road to the drugs world was getting wider. Now, there was the next stage – he had to find a way to take control of that money, not just be its minder.’
WITHIN A FEW years, the embryonic Cartel benefited from an unexpected boost. In 1980, the economy of Liverpool, then Britain’s second-biggest port, collapsed as though struck by an industrial tsunami. For most, the consequences were devastating. For some, it was a gold rush.
Merseyside had been hit by a double whammy. First, there was an underlying structural economic problem. For the previous 25 years, physical trade into the port of Liverpool had been drying up. Economists blamed the malaise on three changes – shipping containerisation, air travel and Britain’s integration into the European Community. The port of Liverpool had been slow to invest in equipment to handle containers, compared to competitors such as Tilbury, Felixstowe, Rotterdam and Hamburg. Air freight took business away from ships. Experts also said that Liverpool was on the wrong side of the country to benefit from the increased trade with Europe that had been a boon to the North Sea and south coast ports. But the truth was much starker. The port’s decline could not be explained by these three reasons alone. The main problem was historical. Liverpool had been built for Empire and was now dying with Empire. By the 1970s, half of Liverpool’s dwindling volume of exports was still bound for Africa and Asia. Desperate shipping agents had failed to draw in new markets such as Europe, China and the US. As a consequence, Liverpool slipped to being the UK’s fifth-ranked port. Unemployment rates in the city’s waterfront districts shot up to 30 per cent. According to historian Nicholas White of Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool had become ‘ossified as a marooned imperial seaport in a post-colonial age’. Academic John MacKenzie described a similar process in Glasgow being down to ‘specialisation in imperial markets’.
The second blow was the wider recession that had hit the UK. A fifth of the country’s manufacturing base had suddenly been wiped out. To boost growth, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a near-suicidal course of extreme monetarist policies. The theories had been developed by a school of academics in Chicago who believed in free markets and the power of myths derived from a Wild West TV show. Enforced ‘structural reforms’, such as privatisation, deregulation and trade union dissembling, had only ever been tried in Third World dictatorships with the help of CIA and shadowy World Bank functionaries, known as Economic Hit-men. The experiment in Britain was the first to take place in a democracy.
In Liverpool, the policies were a resounding failure. Over the next six years, unemployment rocketed until, at its peak, one quarter of the population was out of work. Like economic refugees, an average of 12,000 people each year began to leave the city in search of jobs. Families would be split up across the north–south sociopolitical divide for generations to come. Young people abandoned their Youth Training Schemes for low-paid seasonal work on the south coast. To support their struggling families, redundant construction workers headed for weekday digs in London and far beyond.
Large areas of Liverpool’s landscape, parts of which later became a UNESCO World Heritage site, were literally reduced to smoking rubble by demolition works – 15 per cent of the land became vacant or derelict. From a busy population high of 700,000 in the 1960s, when the city rocked the world with the Beatles, Liverpool shrank to around 400,000 and the population continued falling. In the media, a once-proud powerhouse was being viewed as an embarrassing disaster zone. Scouse humour was about Liverpudlians being mocked by outsiders. The ‘pool of life’, as Carl Jung once described the city, became known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism’.
Today, if history repeated itself, the misfortune would no doubt be swarmed upon by the new elite of globalised disaster capitalists: the corporations and consultants that circle the planet, preying on victims of man-made and natural calamities, the catastrophe specialists that load up people with debt and profit from poverty and misery, ‘restructuring’ economies into sweat shops and social no-go areas. However, back in the pre-yuppified days of the early ’80s, the informal cartel of hedge funds, global corporations, think tanks and casino banks was in no position to administer economic shock therapy to a failing city.
But one emerging sector was looking on, surveying the ruined landscape with desire. Fortunately for them – and thanks to the foundations laid down by Fred, Poncho’s dad and their associates – they were also poised to take full advantage of the situation. That sector was organised crime.
Amid the abandoned nineteenth-century warehouses and armies of shuffling, under-confident youths, the criminal underworld immediately saw opportunities where others only saw deprivation and fear. Fred and his supporters had a somewhat warped vision: to rebuild a new economy in their own image. One that they would control. One that would make them very, very rich.
Now, at last, it was their turn. For once, it would be them, the uneducated outsiders, who would take all of the winnings: not the businessmen, or the establishment, or the elite. In effect, the Merseyside Crime Groups, as they became known to the police, thought they could replace the legitimate economy that had just been taken away, filling the black hole with a brand-new system, albeit a black economy fuelled by graft and dirty cash. However, it was one that would generate jobs and wealth for anyone who wished to get involved. A loose alliance of gangsters, contraband smugglers, well-dressed football fans and armed robbers would attempt to remodel themselves as the first disaster capitalists: more right wing than Milton Friedman, more free market than Mrs Thatcher.
At the centre of their vision was an enduring and extremely profitable product: drugs. Still, it was a risky venture – no city in the UK had yet fully opened itself up to the international drugs markets. Never had a regional crime grouping gambled so much on a single venture. The rest of the country’s criminals were still largely interested in heists and protection rackets.
From the ashes of the recession-hit economy grew the Cartel: a global business that, ironically, would grow to rival any of the corporations that the new capitalism was throwing up, the extreme form of corporatocracy that was sweeping the world from Chile to London, from Buenos Aires to Java.
At a car park near London’s Heathrow airport, an acquaintance of Fred the Rat was waiting by a phone box. Thomas ‘Tacker’ Comerford was a middle-aged ex-docker with a pockmarked face so rough you could strike matches on it. In between phone calls, Comerford walked slowly back to his silver Ford Granada and smoked.
Comerford had got to know Fred through the nightclub scene, where he’d worked as a bouncer. He’d watched Fred grow rich. Fred had recruited Comerford into the Cartel. Comerford wore £70-a-throw Fila tennis tops that stretched over his beer gut, £100-a-pop Pringle jumpers draped Jimmy Tarbuck-style over his hulking shoulders, and tinted Carrera sunglasses.
Comerford had taken up the baton from Fred but was now outrunning him. He was doing bigger heroin deals, pushing the boundaries of the Cartel a little bit further.
A daring former safe-blower, Comerford understood the need to take risks. While carrying out heists, he had pioneered the use of precision planning and new technology to steal a competitive advantage on his victims and rivals. He was the first bank-robber to use oxyacetylene burners to tunnel into an underground vault. The booty from robberies was then put up as capital to invest in drug smuggling.
Business models that he had developed as a professional bank-robber were imported into the drugs business. A ready supply of money was always on hand to fund the rapid expansion of the Cartel. A docker turned greengrocer known as ‘the Banker’ took on the role of informal financier. His job was to loan out vast amounts of cash, in different currencies, to underwrite drug transactions in the UK and on the continent. Ten years later, the Banker would be described by Interpol as Europe’s biggest narcotics profiteer and its most successful money launderer.
In addition, Comerford found new methods of smuggling that complemented the Cartel’s traditional expertise in running drugs overland and through ports. So far, it had enjoyed excellent contacts within the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and through family members and corrupt officials. But now heroin and cocaine were being muled in through Heathrow airport in multiples of half kilos. Unlike the good burghers of Liverpool, the drug runners understood that the port’s prominence was fading. Air travel and the Common Market were the future.
The route quickly became profitable: so much so that on many occasions, the gang had more heroin than mannitol, the cheap baby laxative that was used to cut the powder prior to distribution. Couriers were often flown to Amsterdam first class to clear chemist-shops’ shelves of mannitol, which was more freely available in Holland than it was in the UK. Comerford and his gang began to spend more time in the Dutch capital, which became known as ‘the Flat Place’. For the first time, the Dutch courts found that British criminals were appearing regularly before them.
Just like on a robbery, Comerford handpicked his team on the Heathrow connection – buyers, mules, runners and hard men to secure the merchandise once it had ‘got home’. Ostensibly, they lived in council houses on windswept estates and drove bangers to mundane jobs or to the dole office to sign on. But behind the scenes they cruised the world on the QE2, used posh hotel suites as their offices and partied with some of the biggest bands of the time. Ironically, Comerford refused Mrs Thatcher’s offer to buy the council house that he lived in. The portly smuggler and his wife still pretended to reside in a two-up, two-down terrace while really living in a six-bedroom mansion on a millionaire’s row in an upmarket district. His neighbours included Liverpool football stars and the founder of the Army and Navy Stores.
But for all his nous, Comerford was a bigmouth. Several members of the Cartel suspected that he was an informant. Drug dealing had brought with it a new phenomenon – large numbers of police snouts who were prepared to trade information with the authorities in return for privileges. This led to heightened levels of paranoia. The ancient codes of silence that had bonded old-school villains together were rapidly disappearing in this harsher world. But one source, a rich businessman who’d grown up with several Cartel bosses, wasn’t so sure. The businessman said, ‘Some people were saying: “Tacker’s a grass.”
‘I said: “Well, if he’s a grass, he must have grassed himself up, because he’s spent half of his life in prison.”’
Comerford may not have been an informant, but his loose lips and extravagant lifestyle had brought him to the attention of Customs and Excise investigators. A secret operation had been launched to put the flamboyant street criminal under surveillance. Now officers were plotted up yards from his parked Granada near Heathrow, observing him making calls from a phone box in a car park. Later, they photographed him meeting a man who had been followed by a second team of Customs officers from the airport’s arrival lounge. It was the rendezvous they had been waiting for. Comerford and his mule were then followed back to Liverpool.
In a rare moment of insight, the senior Customs and Excise officers were able to reflect on the bigger picture, to put what they were seeing into context. Instead of concentrating on the specific deals, Customs suspected Comerford was part of a much larger operation, one so far not seen on these shores. One shrewd investigator correctly identified Comerford as being part of Britain’s first and only drugs cartel, as defined by them.
In a series of reports, the officers described the gang as a small but tight-knit group of middle-aged men from a run-down regional city who specialised in importing heroin and cannabis resin. The members of the cartel, they said, were a mixture of ex-dockers, corrupt hauliers and career armed robbers, and if they weren’t stopped now, they had the potential to grow into something much more sinister and hard to control.
IN THE SUMMER of 1981, the Cartel benefited from yet another unforeseen boost: riots erupted in the Toxteth neighbourhood, close to the Liverpool docks. Many within the predominantly black area called the nine-day disturbance an ‘uprising’. For the first time in the UK, outside Northern Ireland, tear gas was used by police against civilians.
For the Cartel, there were several advantages. Since the mid ’70s, many black youths had become politicised, partly influenced by the Black Power movement in the States and partly as reaction to the rise of the far right in England. The riots galvanised an anti-establishment view of mainstream white society, an attitude that had been simmering covertly for years. But without a political outlet, the radicalism lost impetus. Much of the anger was channelled into different areas. Villains started to justify their crimes by saying that they were part of an attack on the economy that deliberately excluded them.
In the same year, the Tate & Lyle sugar works, previously a big player in the city’s manufacturing economy, shut down. Many black working-class people, with no links to the criminal world, began to think radically. If the system couldn’t provide them with a job, then the underworld economy would. Needs must.
Poncho said, ‘Up until the Toxteth riots, my family had options. My dad was both a tradesman and a cannabis dealer. The dealing was very much a sideline: a little bit on the side to give my dad a head start. We could have gone either way. But after the riots it was like, “There’s no choice – we can only go one way.” Even straight-going families started to think like that. The battle lines had been drawn.’
Meanwhile, the Analyst was a young beat copper patrolling south Liverpool. Allerton was a leafy suburb made up of pre-war semi-detached houses. The neighbouring district of Woolton was longer established. One evening the Analyst stopped to talk to a group of rowdy teenagers outside a shop. The area was middle class and there was little violence or thuggery: just high jinks and scallies sporting their latest pair of expensive trainers. Some of the kids were acting up and showing off as usual. It was the Analyst’s job to calm them down and get to know them, to build up a picture of the local area, to identify any future troublemakers and pick up some local intel. But one lad in particular stepped into the background and did nothing. He wouldn’t engage the Analyst in any conversation. His name was Colin Smith. Smith wasn’t a tough guy – he’d lost several fights in school. But he was very streetwise. He would later become known as ‘King Cocaine’.
On his beat, the Analyst tried making some contacts on the street. Later, as he moved up the ladder, he tried to turn some of these sources into informants. This grassroots experience would become invaluable. The registered informant would, in the future, become the police’s single most effective weapon against the Cartel, at least for a period. Those officers who were good at handling covert sources, as well as those who, crucially, were smart enough to know what intelligence was good, what was bad and when they were being manipulated, went on to become the successful ones. The Analyst made it his business to become an expert at handling intelligence.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, Paul Burly and his criminal associates were becoming aware that more informants were being groomed. In the late 1970s, Paul Burly was jailed for violence and firearm offences. For the first time, he became aware that many criminals were being groomed to become Cartel lieutenants.
Paul Burly said, ‘This could mean many things: for example, people who would hire yo-yos in order to give one to the police to allow more laden-down carriers to pass by with what they had.’ Otherwise known as ‘plants’, yo-yos were drug mules who were deliberately sacrificed to the police and Customs by their controllers to distract them from other mules who were usually carrying the bigger consignments on the same flight or ship or who were at the same port.
Paul added, ‘Or there were those who would willingly give a kid a gun and prompt them to use it in such a way that it would benefit the outfit they worked for, disregarding the danger they would be putting the youngster into by getting the kid lifed-up or even killed.’
The Cartel also made job offers to members of rival drug gangs, enticing criminals to switch sides in return for cash rewards. In some cases, the Cartel paid the gang members for information that would help the Cartel kill their rivals. Or sometimes they would pay for commercially sensitive information, such as the names of suppliers and buyers, so that they destroy their rivals in an economic way by undercutting prices or limiting supplies.
Paul Burly said, ‘A person would turn against his lifelong peers for the rewards offered by the now rich Cartel – greed to kill the seed, or at least its DNA!’
Burly said, ‘I met one such candidate for that rat’s lifestyle in jail. On the outside he had been a no-mark pimp, but now he was acting like he had been reborn, as if he knew he was heading for a better and more prosperous life with the heavy tag of “murderer” to back up any shout he was to make. His existence behind bars was so cushy and full of favours that we – his fellow inmates – felt he was being looked after by people on the outside, such as the fast-growing Cartel. To test this theory, we tried to discredit him with a plant of his own stuff . . . only to find out that we could not, because although the screws had been advised of the plant, they did nothing about it! Then we watched later as he glided his way with ease through the remainder of his ever-so-short life sentence and was released.
‘Upon his release, that man was allowed to work on, and run, nightclub doors with impunity even though the conditions of his licence forbade it. His trial defence of “stress-related syndromes” just did not add up. After all, what could be more stress-related than working on nightclub doors and dealing with troublemaking drunks? Whatever door he ran always had the same distributor coming and going, but they never spoke. Everyone thought it uncanny that these two, who were known associates through previous work, never spoke and yet they passed by one another every day.
‘Then, as if that were not most unusual and bad enough, he was allowed to open a security firm, which became engulfed in stories of protectionism. Panorama even did a documentary about it, but the police took no action to stop his heavy-handed practices.’ Once again, Burly was convinced that the Cartel was using their influence to get the police to turn a blind eye.