Powder Wars (18 page)

Toxteth's criminal fraternity were quick to take advantage of the chaos. From the smoking ruins, they were able to forge a community in their own image, a base from which to wreak havoc on the rest of the world. Liverpool 8 became a de facto police no-go area. The seething population effectively cut itself off from the rest of the city, which in turn had cut itself off from the rest of the country in a wave of militant-inspired revolt. Suspicious and angry, Toxteth turned in on itself, fiercely protecting its own at all costs, even if they were criminals. A haven for lawlessness soon established itself. A perfect breeding ground enabling the exponential growth of street criminals into gangsters in double-quick time.

Drug dealing, ram raiding and muggings were seen as legitimate earners. A self-sufficient black economy boomed, employing whole families and streets from grandmothers to children. Even the chief community leader and council appointee Michael Showers was an international heroin dealer and racketeer.

At 19 Warren was sentenced to his first spell in a ‘proper jug' after he was convicted of blackmailing a prostitute and a punter in a crude backstreet extortion racket. His accomplice was Johnny Phillips. Phillips would go on to be Warren's right-hand man in the cocaine business, notoriously declaring a fatal war on the Ungi clan on the way. It was a turning point in Warren's criminal career. On the wings, he was exposed for the first time to members of the Liverpool Mafia, the white, middle-aged crime godfathers who controlled the big-time action in the city.

At that point in time, many of them were plotting the strategic switch from old-fashioned racketeering to drugs. It was a match made in heaven. Here was an extremely bright and hard 19-year-old black villain who was closer to the heart of the deep-rooted but essentially piecemeal drug trade in Toxteth than they were. It was a case of ‘I've got the brains; you've got the cash. Let's make lots of money'. Numbers were exchanged and the seminal foundations of the future cartel laid down.

When he got out, Warren stepped up a gear, holding up a Securicor van with a pistol and a sawn-off shotgun. After smashing in the skull of a have-a-go hero, the gang fled with £8,000. Warren was caught and handed down five years. He continued his criminal education, consolidating his connections with the Liverpool Mafia and also networking with villains from Manchester and London.

On the outside the Liverpool gangs were making quantum leaps in their drug-trafficking enterprises. Heroin and cannabis abuse was spiralling out of control. In 1985 Tommy Comerford was convicted of a huge cannabis conspiracy and the Godfather of Toxteth, Michael Showers, was busy organising the heroin consignments for which he was later jailed.

On his release Warren was prevented from getting a piece of the action by a lack of funds. Instead he jumped on the scallywag bandwagon headed for Europe. For several years the city's top urchins had been plundering the sports shops of Switzerland and Germany, blazing a trail of havoc in the wake of their beloved football teams and shipping the exotically rare designer clobber ‘zapped' from the shelves back to Liverpool. From mass sportswear theft, the phenomenon escalated to robbing jewellery shops and snatch raids. Some of the ‘teams' had colourful names, such as the ‘Cuckoo Clock' gang, distraction thieves from Croxteth's Smack City who specialised in stealing high-value jewellery from specialist cuckoo-clock shops in Switzerland.

Warren joined the
Trans Alpina
exodus, but in Christmas 1987 was caught stealing £1,250 from a super-sleek shoe shop in the chocolate box Swiss resort of Chur. Warren was jailed for 30 days after the judge heard how he violently attacked the female shop assistant before making off with the till.

Following his stint in jail, Warren returned to Liverpool and set up shop as a street dealer in Toxteth. His unique selling point that made him stand out from the army of dealers on Granby Street was that he served up heroin. Pre-Warren, a gang of vigilantes had kept Toxteth gear-free, using extreme violence and the catchphrase ‘This is Toxteth not Croxteth. No smack'. Warren moved up the ranks quickly by warning off the vigilantes, exploiting the competitive advantage in heroin and opening the floodgates.

Over the next three yearsWarren moved up the Class A ladder from street dealer to wholesaler to importer. He befriended Liverpool Mafia boss Stan Carnall and flew to Amsterdam regularly. Carnall was typical of the older generation of white armed robbers who'd moved into big-time dealing. Paul Grimes knew of him and hated him. It was around this time that British Customs first became aware of Warren's smuggling activities. Intelligence reports and phone calls linked him to a one-off heroin run from the Dam to Liverpool.

As with the Toxteth riots and then his frontline heroin revolution, Warren was quick to take advantage of market changes to build his business. Modern commercial tools such as cheap international flights, computers, mobile phones, integration with Europe, deregulated banking and English as the international business language helped push his growth rates into mind-boggling figures. The free availability of firearms was also a factor, but the biggest factors of all were as old as trade itself: supply and demand.

Two distribution networks set up by the £10 billion Medellin cartel to flood Britain with cocaine were simultaneously smashed in 1987, instantly cutting off bulk supplies. Meanwhile, demand was rocketing. Street seizures were at record levels and in June 1988 Britain's first crack manufacturer Colin Burrows, Warren's business partner, was caught in Liverpool. From then on, crack would drive demand for cocaine, leading to a year-on-year exponential growth in demand. The Liverpool Mafia responded by setting up a home-grown network in alliance with south London gang boss Eddie Richardson. But the organisation, which had not yet got Warren fully onboard, was unfocussed and flaky.

In 1991 the police first became aware of Warren's independent smuggling operation after an informant in Operation Bruise, a Midlands-based task force targeting organised crime, named him as a maverick middle-ranking operator who specialised in 50-kilo-at-a-time shipments. It wouldn't be long before the Liverpool Mafia would realise Warren's full potential and headhunt him into an executive position and it wouldn't be long before his path would once again cross that of Paul Grimes. A collision course was in motion.

13

The First Consignment

In the winters of 1991 and 1992 Paul Grimes helped Customs and Excise sink the biggest ever cocaine smuggling operation in Britain's history up to that point. He led them to two consignments of cocaine smuggled directly from Colombia by the Liverpool Mafia. The first weighed 500 kilos. The second weighed 905 kilos.

Curtis Warren was later put on trial for the crime, but was dramatically cleared of all charges on a technicality. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't really matter. Grimes had led them to their man and they now had their teeth into him. They weren't letting go. Sooner or later Warren would be taken out.

The story of how Paul Grimes infiltrated the UK's first drugs cartel begins in the late '80s in Amsterdam. Following the spectacular failure of the Medellin cartel to penetrate the British market, the rival Cali cartel decided to mount a rival bid. The Cali cartel, based in the Colombian city of the same name, had always played second fiddle to the wealthier Medellin mob who had grown powerful on their dominance of the US market, but with their crack-friendly cocaine and good European connections the Cali cartel planned to even out the market share.

The Cali's senior salesman in Europe was 22-year-old Mario Halley, a Colombian-born Dutch citizen whose job it was to drum up business. In the late '80s, he met a senior member of the Liverpool Mafia who was in Amsterdam trying to make connections to facilitate entry into the top end narco market. It was a match made in heaven.

Within months the Liverpool Mafia bosses introduced Halley to their rising star, Warren. In turn, Warren introduced Halley to a wealthy drug dealer from the North East of England called Brian Charrington. Little did Warren know that Charrington was a police informant.

Charrington, a former second-hand car dealer who owned two aeroplanes, had grown rich on cannabis importation by sacrificing his partners-in-crime up to the police in order to protect his own operations. Even though Warren considered his own cell-structured network super-secure, unknown to him it had already been compromised.

In July 1990 detectives Ian Weedon and his boss Harry Knaggs of the North East Regional Crime Squad based in Teeside were green-lighted by top brass to handle Charrington as an informant codenamed Enigma One. The flow of intelligence would specifically concern up-and-coming drug deals.

They soon learned that Charrington was an expert at playing the double-agent game. At times, the information was long on generalisations and ‘colour' but short on key details. Crucially, the crafty Charrington seemed to pick the timings at which to download his mental notepad to police to when it suited him, not the operation. Some senior officers were frustrated that the drip feed meant they were missing the boat on important stages. These flaws would leave Charrington open to accusations that he was holding back in order to protect his own interests.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas the distribution arm of Halley's Cali cartel was putting the finishing touches to its plan to flood Britain with cocaine. A front company called the Conar Corporation, ostensibly an import–export firm, was set up by businessmen Marco Tulio Contreras and Jesus Camillo Ortiz Chacon to mask the South American end of the smuggling operation.

In March 1991 Curtis Warren and Mario Halley held a summit in Amsterdam. They were joined by Charrington, who later reported back to his police handlers that an imminent drugs deal was high up on the meeting's agenda.

Charrington claimed that a massive load of cocaine – a record 2,000 kilos – would be routed to Europe between July and November 1991 on a ship that had already been lined up for the run. Though Warren was later cleared of all charges, the intelligence was enough to spark a police operation that gathered momentum throughout the summer.

As autumn set in the Liverpool team began to get their ‘ducks in a row' in preparation for the deal. A long-standing friend of Billy Grimwood, who had secretly moved from warehouse robberies into drugs and become one of the richest criminals in Britain in the process, volunteered to underwrite the deal with his massive cash pile.

A second notorious Liverpool thief, Brian ‘Snowy' Jennings, who was also a millionaire haulage contractor, was put in charge of organising the movement of the consignment after its arrival from the port of entry to a holding depot in Liverpool. A Manchester business acquaintance of Jennings called Joseph Kassar was drafted in to front the British end of the ‘legitimate' import deal.

The plan was to conceal the cocaine hidden inside X-ray-proof lead ingots. Kassar's responsibility was to arrange the paperwork to import 85 tonnes of lead ingots and 40 tonnes of aluminium and to make it look like a kosher scrap-metal deal. Kassar then handed the deal over to his London-based cousin, Joey Nana-Asare. But he did not tell Asare the true nature of the transaction and pretended that it was a straightforward metal import with a 20 per cent forecast profit.

From then on there was a flurry of big-player movement on both sides of the Atlantic. In September 1991, Curtis Warren and Brian Charrington flew to Caracas via France and Spain, disguising their trail as much as possible. Coincidentally, Mario Halley was also in Caracas at the time. Nine days later, while they were still there, the lead ingots left Venezuela, bound for Britain. During a pit stop in the Dominican Republic the load was transferred to an ocean-going freighter called the
Caraibe
. Warren and Charrington returned to the UK. The smugglers' plan was to drop the first 500 kg load of cocaine in Britain and the remaining 500 kg load in Europe. Based on Charrington's intelligence, it was assumed these loads were destined for the Italian Mafia and the Turkish
babas
.

Several weeks later in late September/early October 1991 Charrington decided to tell his handlers of his trip for the first time. He reinforced his earlier intelligence that 2,000 kg was winging its way to Britain, but astonishingly feigned ignorance on the subject of mode of transport and date of arrival.

A few days later on 8 October 1991 the North East RCS disclosed their information to the Customs and Excise for the first time. All hell broke loose with Customs accusing the police of deliberately holding back on them until it was too late. To add insult to injury, Customs retorted by revealing that they had been independently looking into Charrington for months in Operation Python, as well as liaising with residual elements of the Midlands RCS's Operation Bruise. A wall of distrust formed between the two agencies. The upshot was that Customs began looking for their own way into the smuggling operation.

Almost immediately pieces of intelligence began to flow their way independently of Charrington and the Regional Crime Squad. The police in Caracas had got wind of the plot and in mid October tipped off Customs in Britain that a heavy-duty load of coke was in transit. Crucially, they filled in the blanks left by Charrington and said it would come by sea and possibly be stashed in blocks of metal.

As Customs and Excise analysed the intelligence to find out if there were any matching metal cargoes due into British ports, Mario Halley had quietly slipped into Manchester airport to meet Warren. It was 16 October.

Two days later the
Caraibe
docked at Felixstowe. At once Kassar ordered Asare to make ready the necessary arrangements to deliver the lead ingots to a storage depot called P&J Warehousing, owned by a Mr Singleton, near the Grand National racecourse in Aintree, Liverpool.