Powder Wars (21 page)

Then they took me to Newcastle. We went to some police-training place. As soon as we got to court all the solicitors came to the back of the court to have a look at me. As though I was some kind of fucking freak. They wanted to see with their own eyes 'cos (one) they didn't think I was still alive and (two) they didn't think I'd be so crazed as to turn up. Was that ontop, in all fairness.

Going in the stand was a bit of an anti-climax. I wasn't arsed. Threw in a few funnies and all that, had the court laughing and that. They brought up all the stuff from the past about being a gangster and that. I was like that, I'm a businessman. It was like that Italian Tony off've
The Simpsons
, knowmean? ‘I'm not a mobster. It's a slur on my reputation and that. I'm just a legitimate businessman.'

Then they said I used to be a bouncer. I hate that word. I told them that a bouncer is what you buy from Mothercare for babies. The court was in bulk. Then they started fishing, trying to get me to admit that I was an informant. Bad one, la, but I just blanked it and they couldn't say fuck all.

Then they made a big deal of me having a mobile phone. It was the dark ages in those days and lads like me with porties and that did look half shady, to be fair. It was all bollocks though, but I had to get them off've that subject in case they asked for the bills; it had the Customs and Excise numbers all over it. If they would have asked for records of my phone it would have shown me calling my handler. Bang ontop, knowmean? And they said that I was supplying all the boys with these phones as well. I didn't know nothing about it.

Curtis Warren was sitting in the dock with all the others: Snowball, Jimmy Mac, the other feller etc. All's I did was look at the jury so I didn't have to look at them. Bored of them I was. When I did look at them I smiled. I did what I had to do.

It was never revealed in court that Paul was the informant. The cover story that he was simply a scrap dealer who had agreed (innocently) to broker the sale of lead held tight, but other aspects of the prosecution's case rapidly fell apart. A row between Customs and Excise and the Regional Crime Squad over the best way to use Brian Charrington in the case blew up into a Government scandal.

At first Charrington was promised £100,000 in a secret deal by police as a reward for being an informant. Astonished Customs officers blocked the payment, pointing out that Paul Grimes had been a more valuable and honest source. Furious, Customs officers then charged Charrington with drugs offences relating to the first 500 kilo consignment, accusing him of double-crossing them and deliberately allowing the drugs to slip their net so he could make money from their sale. What happened next was unprecedented in British judicial history.

The police asked their local MP Tim Devlin, parliamentary private secretary to the Attorney General, to lobby for Brian Charrington. It resulted in the Attorney General agreeing to act as a referee between the Customs and Charrington's lawyers in a secret meeting. One month later the charges were dropped.

Devlin attempted to cover up the scandal, but the
News of the World
splashed the story over the front page. From then on it seemed the prosecution was fighting a losing battle. A string of other problems plagued the case. Half way through the trial, before even a single defence witness had taken the stand, the judge dropped a bombshell. He let Warren walk.

Mr Justice May ruled there was insufficient evidence against him. All that anyone could prove was that he had made a number of journeys, met a number of people and made a number of phone calls. It was not enough. At the end of the day Warren had not come into contact with the cocaine.

As he left the courthouse Warren turned to the Customs officers who had brought in the case and said: ‘I'm off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can't fucking touch me.'

All of the other defendants except Joseph Kassar walked – two at a later retrial. In his summing-up, the judge pointed out that there was no evidence that there was actually any cocaine in the first load of ingots. Paul bit his lip. If he could have given his evidence revealing his conversations with Snowball, and his admission to cutting the cocaine from the lead, the course of the trial may have been changed dramatically. Ironically that would have blown his cover.

PAUL: They all walked on a technicality. My first thought was, ‘What the fuck's going on?' I was fucking furious. Oh ay I was. I phoned my Customs feller up and said: ‘What's happened? How did you fuck up?'

He was gobsmacked. He couldn't answer me. One thing I did know is that all of my enemies were now out on the street. Pure dead man walking wasn't in it.

17

The Intervening Years

On the face of it Paul's efforts to bring down the cartel had been a disaster. Warren and his main boys had walked and were back on the street. It seemed Paul had failed in his mission. But Paul was playing a long game. As a former racketeer he understood that, if anything, his intelligence had allowed the authorities to get a handle on Warren, get their teeth into him. He knew that they would not let go. Especially after their humiliating defeat in court. Warren was now the dead man walking.

In truth, the court case was the beginning of the end for Warren. Even as he staged an impromptu victory parade in Toxteth, regally lapping up the adulation from well-wishers from a convertible limo, the chain of events that would lead to his downfall was already in motion.

Almost immediately a specialist police surveillance unit was set up to track his movements. Then a joint Customs–Police operation was launched to specifically target Warren and his backer, The Banker. The collapsed court case had hardened their resolve and this time Operation Crayfish would not be plagued by the in-house fighting which had weakened their last mission.

Unlike Grimes, Warren had failed to grasp the bigger picture. In a bid to sidestep the heat, he moved to Holland but carried on smuggling. The British police tipped off their Dutch counterparts and on 24 October 1996 Dutch SWAT teams raided six houses. Coordinated raids in Britain at a further 20 addresses linked to Warren's cartel were hit at the same time. The pièce de résistance was a raid on a shipping container in Rotterdam. Inside they found a cargo of lead ingots, similar to those Paul Grimes had rumbled five years earlier, containing 400 kilos of super-grade cocaine.

A further 1,500 kilos of cannabis, 60 kilos of heroin, 50 kilos of Ecstasy and £370,000 in cash were recovered. A small armoury including 960 CS gas canisters, hand grenades, three guns and a cache of ammunition was also seized. Warren was later jailed for 12 years. He is currently serving his sentence in one of the toughest jails in Europe in Rotterdam, Holland.

Many of Warren's immediate associates were jailed for between three and ten years, but even more astonishing were the knock-on effects thereafter. Without the expert guidance of their leader, the Liverpool Mafia began to fall apart. Several key members were convicted of big-time drug and money-laundering offences simply because they messed up in Warren's absence. But the biggest prize of all was yet to come.

Warren's conviction directly led the Dutch team to one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. On 8 October 1998, Cali cartel godfather, Arnaldo Luis Quiceno Botero, the ‘Mr Big' who had allegedly supplied Warren with cocaine, was jailed for six years.

An article in
The Observer
newspaper definitively explained the significance of Warren's capture and, by default, the key role played by Grimes in his downfall. Journalist David Rose wrote:

Paul was buzzing.

PAUL: After the trial finished in April 1993 I just disappeared into obscurity. For the first time in my life I lived in the suburbs. On the Wirral, pure bank manager territory, knowmean? I was content to be just another Mr Average. I got up in the morning and went to work. I drove a Peugeot 205. Of a night I sat in and watched the telly.
Eastenders
and all that bollocks. Watching that shite was far more painful than all of the injuries I had sustained during a life full of violence. It was, believe you me.

Gone were the days of £1,000-a-night Chinese meals and champagne nights out with the lads. Gone were midnight raids. The lock-ups full of swag. The beatings. The dough on tap. Banging birds two at a time because they wanted to suck your cock 'cos you were a top gangster. The respect. The power.

Now I was ten-grand-a-year Joe Schmo. None of the neighbours knew who I was. I was just another loser, keeping his head down and trying to get through the day without any hassle. And do you know what? In a weird way, I enjoyed it. I felt free. For the first time in my life I wasn't a criminal. No one was after me. The moby wasn't going off 30 times an hour, at all hours, with villains on the phone saying this and that. Life was simple. There was a certain logic to knowing that if you didn't go to work you didn't have enough 50 pences to put in the gas meter.

There was no
get paid
. That goes without saying. It was all simple textbook economics. No beating the system. Do this. Get that. End of. The system had been here for 2,000 years and for the first time I'd found my place in it. I was conforming.

I got rid of all the businesses and got a job as a painter and decorator. Then as a security guard. It was a shit job, but I got a buzz out of it. I was guarding warehouses. Poacher turned gamekeeper, all that. I was good at it. A lot of people suspected me of having made a lot of goulash from my swashbuckling days and from the sale of the yards and that, but that was my business. I certainly didn't go shouting about it, knowmean, the taxman and that. At the end of the day money meant fuck all. I've always enjoyed living frugally and being super low-key. My new life as an arse-wipe security guard suited me perfectly.

After the trial the Customs didn't offer me a witness-protection programme. To be honest, there was no need. My role as the grass never came out in court. Their cover story had held tight. Obviously, Warren and Snowball had their suspicions and that. And to boot, they were certainly pissed off that I'd given evidence as a legit scrap dealer.

But in the furore of them walking, everyone forgot about it. Of course I still carried a gun. That was my only vice. That was for my own self-protection.

Once when I was driving along in my little works van I suddenly saw Snowball out of the corner of my eye. He was driving a big wagon with ladders on. He reversed the lorry into me. Full on. Clearly trying to kill me, but I just got out and started laughing at him. In the past, I would have banged his head in the car door repeatedly and left him for dead, but I just walked across the road and called the busies. That was the new me.

A couple of months afterwards, one Sunday, I slipped back into Liverpool and went down to Heritage Market. I wanted to prove that I could go anywhere. I walked in and the first person I saw was one of Warren's men, the skip-firm owner who had sold me the lead. One of Snowball's team.

I just smiled at him. To me he was a piece of shit. He started giving it mouth. Language and that. He called me a grass and all that carry on.

‘Fuck off, you drug dealer,' I said to him.

With that, he walked away from me. Knowing full well that, even though I had turned over a new leaf, if he carried on his foolishness, he would suffer a thrashing – Sunday shoppers or no Sunday shoppers. I could have done him in there and then, but I really couldn't be arsed, to tell you the truth.

The girl who was serving me said: ‘What was that all about?'

I raised my arm and pointed him out to the crowd: ‘He is a drug dealer.'

She said: ‘I didn't know that. He comes in here all the time. I won't be serving him again.'

It was only a small thing but it was good. I had threats and all that. Even my brother Stephen was passing threats round. They were ashamed of me.

I started going into pubs and people would mark my card. A lot of people asked why I did it because no one knew that I was an informant. I just made out I was a businessman who had got mixed up in it all.

‘Do you think I'm going to jail for those pieces of shit?'

That was my excuse and I just kept that going.

A few of the lads were on my side. There were still a lot of gangsters who were against drugs. They wouldn't dabble in that shit. They looked at it as that the people who did dabble in it were shit who killed people. One of them was an old mate called Little Mick. He'd made a lot of money selling bent ciggies and all that. In massive amounts. Huge lorry loads. He'd got into the building and was doing all right, but he was anti-drugs. He kept me supplied with guns.

There was lot of big names who were made up. They'd shake my hand and all that, but they never had the bottle to do what I did. They knew that I'd stopped a lot of gear coming into the country. They were amazed that I had the bottle to still walk around and all the carry on.

One thing that didn't change was my hatred for the drug dealers. As a security guard in the shops I began noticing that most of the thieves I was catching were bag-heads. Stinking, alien-headed heroin addicts who stole batteries, razor blades and coffee to get through the day. They were pathetic, for sure, but I still felt sorry for them. In their dead, dark eyes I saw the ghost of my own son, Jason. I could see the estates and schools being swamped with Es, coke and brown. Cheap, strong drugs like there had never been before. The rave thing had opened up whole new markets and new outlets. Even door crews were well in on the act now.