Powder Wars (20 page)

The effect on the Customs was jaw dropping to say the least. Not only had I led them to the one just gone, but I was getting them into the next one. That would give them a good chance of copping for the gang red handed. Get paid.

15

The Bust

Shortly after Christmas on 12 January 1992, exactly as Paul Grimes had predicted, the second consignment of cocaine arrived in Britain. Bingo! The 32 cylindrical ingots contained a staggering 905 kilos of cocaine worth £150 million at street prices.

Acting on Paul Grimes' intelligence, Customs had been able to track the contraband continually throughout its journey through December from Venezuela to Felixstowe. Joey Kassar arranged for the ingots to be stored in a holding depot in Derbyshire. The Customs' plan was to hold off from swooping on the gang until later, by which time it was hoped that as many of the suspects as possible would have been drawn into the net. Until then it would be a waiting game.

But suddenly the British authorities were rocked. On 18 January, police in Holland raided a warehouse and discovered 35 similar lead ingots containing 845 kilos of cocaine. Conar Corporation executive, Jesus Camillo Ortiz Chacon, the technician who had bored out the cocaine from the Liverpool ingots two months earlier, was caught red-handed in the drilling position.

The Dutch bust caused the Cali and UK cartel to immediately batten down the hatches. The Liverpool Mafia ordered Kassar to leave the ingots well alone, but he ignored the instruction and transported them to a second warehouse in Stoke-on-Trent. It gave Customs officers a chance to covertly examine the ingots.

Over the next few days a special search team worked secretly and silently to extract the cocaine from the ingots without Kassar realising.

Each one yielded about 28 parcels of 90 per cent purity. The total, a whopping 905 kilos, was the largest amount ever recovered up to that point from a single shipment.

Over the next two months Kassar played cat and mouse with the Customs surveillance teams, moving the ingots erratically between warehouses around the North West. At one stage the gang took away a single ingot on a flatbed truck for testing. To foil surveillance the ingot was shunted around for nearly a month before they felt comfortable enough to examine it. The gangsters quickly found out it was empty.

Knowing that the gang had realised they had been rumbled D-day was quickly arranged. On 29 March, over a dozen men, including Curtis Warren and Joseph Kassar, were arrested and later charged with conspiring to import cocaine.

PAUL: It all went off. To keep me safe and to keep my role as an informant secret, the Customs hatched a cover story. Is right and that. The sketch was this. It would be arranged that I would be nicked along with the gang so it looked as though I was in the shit as well.

First they'd nick the Mr Bigs. Then they'd nick me. And then they'd nick Snowball and his firm of gobshites. To Snowball, the beaut, it would look like I was a pure stand-up guy, knowmean? Also, in the window between the Mr Bigs getting an early morning call and me getting collared I would be able to pump Snowball for more inside info. Devious, I know, but I was getting right into being a grass by then. Terrible, isn't it?

After the plan was sorted I was told by Customs to just go home and wait. Then one day I switched on the telly and lo and behold it was all over
Granada Reports
. A big drugs ring had been smashed. Pictures of the ingots came on. That Manc newsreader, Tony Wilson, was going on about it. It was clearly a big deal. He was getting a real hard-on over it, if the truth be told.

So was I. Was like that, ‘Nice one. Pure jug for youse scoundrels now.' Rubbing my hands together with glee, I was. Just like Michael Owen does after scoring a goal. Obviously the news report was the signal that I would be nicked soon. After I'd seen it on the telly, I phoned Snowball up and met him the next day. He was keeping his head down working on a demolition job by Hill Road Hospital in Everton. I pretended to be half head done in about it all, a bit worried, if you will, and I asked him about the ingots I'd seen on the telly.

I said: ‘What the fuck's going on? All this gear and all that.'

He's like that, going: ‘Ssshhh. Calm down will you. It's only telly talk and that.'

I'm secretly buzzing inside, but giving it loads on the panicky front: ‘What's all this fucking FBI and that? The Customs and Interpol involved in all this shit?'

Fairplay to the nugget, he just started laughing at me and said don't worry about it. ‘I'll give you a ring later on,' he said.

He thought none of it would go back to them. Of course, I knew it was coming right back to them, knowmean? It was going to be real horrorshow for them over the next few days, no two ways.

The next day the Customs raided their yard and ripped it to fucking pieces to find the gear, which hadn't been recovered from the first shipment. Of course, it was well gone by then. Then I phoned my Customs' hombre and had a meeting with him in a car on the Dock Road.

He said, ‘We are now going to start nicking them all.'

I told him that I wanted to get nicked outside my sister's house in Huyton. It was just something that came to me. We fixed the exact date and time; a couple of days later. They wanted to do it early doors and all that.

‘Forget about that,' I said. ‘I want to have some brekky and go the gym and that first.'

So it was fixed for three or four o'clock in the afternoon. It was the 6 April 1992. When they came for me I was sitting in the Jag on my new phone. It was one of those big fuck-off, prehistoric NEC porties they had in old days. There was about three or four officers. I was just sat there on my cream doe-hide leather seats waiting for them. One of them drove my car down to the Customs' HQ on the Dock Road.

They arrested me. I was making all kind of phone calls to solicitors and all that carry on to make it look like I was irate and that. I had to give a blag statement the next day to make it all look straight up. Of course, it didn't mention that I was the grass. It just covered my involvement with the ingots as an innocent and legit scrap dealer. End of.

To make it look legit to Snowball we also arranged that the only person I phoned in the family was me mam. Using my experience as a gangster I also designed a few nice details of my own into the cover story, to make it sing and that. Before I got nicked I had arranged to stash a load of bent booze in my sister's ken. It would appear to Snowball that I was still up to devilment, still one of the rooting-tooting lads and that. It was brandy and Scotch that had been robbed from a warehouse. In the phone call to me mam I told her to make sure they got rid of the whisky from my sister's before the rozzers got there. In code of course, ‘bagack slabang' and that.

Sure enough by the time the Customs turned my sister's over there was nothing there. In Snowball's eyes, it'd look like I was half a hero for thinking of the family first. I knew that was a nice detail which would impress him. The bottom line is this – when someone gets nicked on a big caper, the people involved are para to fuck. Constantly looking for signals, they are, that you're not talking and that. I had been a gangster all my pip. I knew exactly how they thought.

The Customs officers who were interviewing me knew that I was an informant so they were just going through the motions. They fixed bail so that I could go and get more info from Snowball. Snowball wanted to know why I hadn't used the solicitor the gang had sent down for me. He kicked off about it, but he was still none the wiser that I was turning him over. The prick. Then they all got nicked.

It was only at that point that I fully realised how big the big players really were. They were international super-heavyweights for sure. They had the money and the power to bribe busies and judges if need be. And if they found out I was the midnight mass, it was pure curtains for me – no two ways.

That's when I started carrying a shotgun round with me, just in case they fancied a pop. I even showed my shooter to the Customs fellers. They went mad, knowmean, but they understood that I was dead man walking. Even so, they said they couldn't sanction a shooter. But I kept it anyways.

I went down to Plymouth to get out of the way. My son Jason was still down there but he had deteriorated loads. He was using a lot of gear. It broke my heart, in all honesty, but at the same time it hardened my resolve to give it to these bastards. While I was down there the police in Plymouth turned over the car and found the shotgun.

After doing a couple of weeks in Exeter jug I got out and told my Customs guys in Liverpool. They called me all the pricks in the world for getting caught, but they closed the court and told the judge that I was a top grass and what have you. They straightened it out for me and I got let off. I got 18 months' conditional discharge, which was a pure result, in all fairness.

In the run up to the big drugs trial Snowball and the Mr Bigs tried to bribe me not to turn up in court. They used an intermediary called Paul. He was a painter and decorator for the council, but he was also a doorman. He came to my flat in Hoylake and then we went for a walk along the prom. He offered me 25 grand not to appear in court and not to give evidence. I said: ‘Yes, OK. I'll think about it.'

Then I got straight on the phone to the Customs. They said: ‘Yes, we know all about it. We knew that they were going to give you 25 grand and we know that they are going to bump you as well. They are gonna get you out of the way and after the court case they are going to fuck you off and not give you the money.'

I said: ‘Well that's not very good, is it?'

Later Paul showed me the 25 grand. I went to his house in Huyton and he showed me a shoebox with the notes all bundled up.

He said: ‘If you get off you can have this when the case finishes.'

I told him that I wasn't interested. After that, my wife started getting threats that the house was gonna get torched and that. I was getting told that I was a dead man. Was not arsed, by the way. I could well hangle these pricks. The funny thing was though, that they didn't even know I was the informant. They were just pissed off 'cos I'd made a shitty statement saying that I'd got rid of the ingots. It went without saying that if they found out I was the rat they'd execute me within 24 hours. No back answers.

16

The Trial

On 1 July 1992, as Paul was preparing to take the stand against Warren in the narcotics trial of the century, his beloved son Jason died of a drugs overdose. It was a bitter irony. It was Jason's 21st birthday.

Jason's frail, drug-ravaged corpse was found slumped in the street. When his father Paul identified the body two days later, he barely recognised the lifeless cadaver that lay on the mortuary slab before him. Jason's head looked unusually large and completely out of all proportion on top of his rake-thin, skeletal body. His face was taut, drawn and yellow. Paul broke down in tears. His son's body bore all the hallmarks of a smackhead. Where was the healthy, happy young naval recruit, he cried.

At the inquest it was revealed that Jason had overdosed on pills prescribed to help him cope with his addiction to Class A drugs. Paul Grimes' world came crashing down around him. He could not understand why it had to be his son. After all, hadn't he crusaded all of his life against drugs? He had given up everything to fight that war. Risking his own life to destroy the peddlers he believed were responsible for the huge upsurge in drug abuse.

For a brief moment Paul Grimes felt like exacting revenge with the barrel of a gun. Simply executing all of the peddlers of death he knew of there and then – those names on a secret hit-list he hoped to grass up in the future – would be some justice. But the Customs officers he knew talked him out of bloody revenge. They persuaded him to fight another way. The best thing for him to do would be to carry on informing and turn up in court. Paul vowed to carry on with his undercover crusade.

At the funeral, Snowball, who had miraculously blagged himself out of prison on bail, turned up unexpectedly to pay his respects. Flush with drugs money, he offered to pay for a flashy coffin and big spread at the wake. Paul had to hold himself back from putting one in his head there and then.

In the run up to the big trial Paul received several more death threats. Anticipating an attack, he got hold of two more guns: an .18mm sawn-off shotgun and a .38mm revolver. He carried them at all times and even took them to bed. He moved between different safe houses and during the day did business on the move. He even got a job as painter and decorator to cover his tracks and keep him mobile.

At a pre-trial hearing in Manchester an escorting prison officer refused to be handcuffed to Paul or walk beside him, fearing an assassination attempt. In April 1993, the trial proper began at Newcastle Crown Court. Paul was secretly billeted at a local police training college and guarded by armed officers round the clock. He was driven to court in a bullet-proof limo and his arrival was covered by snipers on the roof of the court precincts. A tactical firearms unit brimming with Heckler and Koch automatics was on standby outside. No one was taking any chances.

PAUL: I got escorted everywhere I went. One time I got escorted from Exeter Jail to Manchester on a pre-trial hearing kind of thing. The two screws was all shitting themselves because we'd parked the car miles from the court and we had to walk through the streets.

One of the Customs officers said: ‘This is fucking great, isn't it? We're sitting ducks.' He thought it was funny.

The other screw's arse went and he took the handcuffs off and I had to walk ten paces behind.

‘If they shoot you that means they shoot me as well, so you can fuck off,' he said.

In the days that followed I had to start watching myself. I was worried about who was following me. I knew that I was a marked man. That's why I started carrying. I had a shotgun and a handgun. I got them off a mate of mine. He just gave them to me. It was a sawn-off, .18 mm rounds. I stayed at different addresses and made sure that I was getting all over the place. If anyone would have come for me I would have used it. Oh ay. No back answers. The Customs knew I had them. I showed them to one officer. I showed them in the boot of the car. He just said: ‘I've seen them.'