Powder Wars (28 page)

Then Haase and Kenny turned their eye on the hotel and car park. Heath smashed up the hotel. Then he done all the cars in so that we ended up with the screw on the car park. Every single car in the car park – about 50 including rows of BMs, Mercs, everything – owned by the guests who were staying at the hotel were smashed up. Sledgehammers, baseball bats, the works. The next morning it looked like a riot scene. Eventually after a campaign of hassle we got the full contract for the Devonshire.

After that, Heath had to carry on doing little bits of damage to the hotel and cars so that it didn't look too suss. So that it looked as though we had nothing to do with it in the first place and that we were gradually reducing the damage now. It was textbook protection racketeering and it worked like a dream. The money rolled in, but Haase wanted more. He was a 24-hour-a-day gangster. He couldn't sleep. He used to phone me up at three and four o'clock in the morning to ask me about jobs.

Then Kenny wanted another club. The Buzz club where all the footy players and the Spice Boys used to go and that. So Heath did the business there. Then Kenny started going after the big clubs in town. Haase ordered a drive-by shooting at one of the superclubs in town. A security guard got shot in the hand. Kenny got Chris No-Neck to do that. He jumped out of the car all ballied up, ran up and just shot them point blank. All the taxi drivers chased him up the hill. But he made it to the get-away car. Heath supplied the car for him. I don't know whether Heath was driving, but No-Neck did the shooting.

In the end Haase didn't get the door, but the doorman who got shot in the hand ended up working for Kenny anyway. He never knew that Kenny had been involved. Kenny made a lot of money for Haase. He was getting a nice bunce out of it as well. Kenny only paid his men £50 a night and he taxed them £5. Kenny used to pay Haase a nice few grand every month on the dot. If he didn't pay he would've been stoved as well.

But Haase wasn't satisfied. He couldn't bear the fact that once the clubs shut and his doormen went home he wasn't making money. He wanted money coming in round the clock. So he hit on the idea of actually robbing the pubs and clubs he was meant to be protecting. Who would ever suspect the team who run the door of an armed robbery of the takings?

He actually done the heists himself with a shooter and a balaclava. I couldn't believe it. One of the country's top villains, worth millions, doing blags, but he got a buzz out of it. I think it took him back to his youth, like a proper villain again instead of some fucking drug dealing fucking organised crime king sat behind a desk.

One night when I was off I got a call from the police saying that one of the clubs we had the door on had been robbed and my doormen had been held up. I shot down there in the car. When I got there the police were jumpy. As I got out of my car the armed-response busies pounced on me, pointing their Hecklers in my grid. ‘Woh!' I said. ‘I'm the security manager.'

One of the doormen had been twatted in the head bad style. He was badly injured; two weeks off've work and all that. This was an act of war. Whoever was responsible was going to pay. No one fucks with my men. The next day I went into the office. I was fuming.

Haase simply smiled and said: ‘Who the fuck do you think did it, you stupid bastard.' Couldn't believe it was him who had done the robbery. He had held up his own men and battered them. Couldn't believe he'd treat his own men like that.

On another occasion he robbed a club owned by a feller who was well connected to the Bhoys – the IRA. But Haase didn't give a fuck. Big Brother had been asked to give an estimate to install video cameras in it. CCTV was a very successful side of the business. During his guided tour of the premises the manager shows the Big Brother technician called Mark the safe, stuffed full of goulash after the Bank Holiday, and the other security bits and bobs. He even gives him the fucking four-digit alarm code. ‘Got to ring that one in to Haase. Just got to, haven't you?' he thinks.

Haase told the video man to give him the layout, paid him off, and then he burst in there in the middle of the day, ballied-up with bats and that. The next day Haase handed me a bag and asked me to get rid of it. Then he counted out the money on his desk. There was tens of thousands and thousands. Haase gave me drink out of it – a couple of hundred quid. He fucking loved that balaclava. I think that was the only thing he thought was real crime.

People were always getting leant on all over the place. It didn't matter who they were. Even normal businessmen who had contracted us to do security. Or even people who had asked for a quote and then decided to go with someone else. Oh no you don't! After a beating they came round to Haase's way of thinking. Then if they tried to press charges they were beaten some more.

That's what happened to a nightclub owner called Roy Carson. After Haase knocked him round, he filed charges. But he soon withdrew them. It was same with everyone who brought charges. The statement issued by the CPS was always ended with the same line: ‘I can confirm the case has been discontinued after the complainant withdrew his evidence.' Too right he fucking did.

Haase was treating Liverpool like his own fucking fiefdom, knowmean? He had his little spies all over the show, ringing it in when someone badmouthed him. Hitler youth or what, la? One time someone spotted a bit of graffiti on the back of a toilet door in a pub off Park Road, near Admiral Street. It said that some gobshite robber had shagged his daughter. Haase hated kids but he would do anything for his daughter. This really sent him wild. Two carloads of fellers were ordered down that moment to do this one feller in. The robber done one, got on his toes.

If you crossed him you got hit hard. Revenge was how everybody stayed in line. Haase bragged about a feller who'd let him down over the 18-stretch for the heroin. The feller had betrayed him in some way. When he got out Haase cut him up to fucking bits. If he held a grudge, he never forgot. Telling you, la. Would literally take it to the grave.

There was another feller called Flannagan – a tax man, an extortionist who had tried to steal money from Chris No-Neck while Haase had been in jail. Haase went down to see him. By this time the Customs and the busies were following him 24 hours a day with secret video cameras. Haase just walks up to Flannagan and cut his throat in the middle of the fucking street.

The busies who are watching him nearly fucking choke. This was on video. Panic breaks out.

‘What the fuck do we do?' they are shouting down the radios.

But the control room is saying: ‘Leave off. Get out of there. We can't nick the cunt.'

They couldn't nick him 'cos that would have brought the whole operation ontop, there and then. No back answers. They just have to carry on filming it.

Flannagan falls to the floor, blood gushing from his neck. Haase leaves the poor cunt where he found him. Left for dead.

Next minute Haase finds out that Flannagan is alive, on a fucking life-support machine, in the ozzie.

‘What? Cannot believe this,' he says, in genuine total fucking disbelief. ‘Is this fucking Flannagan taking the piss or what?'

Next, he jumps in his fucking Beamster and is heading up to the ozzie to switch off the life-support machine. Bombing round the corridors looking for him. Mad, isn't it? Luckily, he didn't find him. That's what happened if you didn't pay.

Another time Haase told me to go out and buy some acid. Gallons of it. ‘I want the strongest acid there is,' he said, with a weird look on his grid.

He knew that I could get hold of hydrofluoric acid 'cos I had been in the stone-cleaning business. It's the strongest acid known to the human body. Just eats you it does. You need goggles and big rubber gloves to just open the top. The antidote is fucking torture. The most painful injection ever – a big spiked ball on the end of a hypodermic needle full of alkaline.

Next he moves in an auld bath and puts it in the basement where we had a massive cannabis factory on the go. He tried to blag me off that the acid bath was in case the busies raided the premises. He said he would just throw the bags of heroin and cocaine he had in the bath so the evidence would dissolve.

But later I found out that it was for an acid bath to dissolve someone alive. Haase had to torture someone. Don't know what it was for, but the acid bath was prepared for this feller, whoever he was, at the Dock. It was powerful enough to liquidise a body in an instant.

Haase had never forgiven the Ungi crew for insulting his bird all those years ago. When David Ungi, the one who got shot, was getting buried, Haase planned to throw a hand grenade at the funeral. Haase didn't like him at all. He vowed that this feud would go on and on whether he was dead or not. I think Haase may have been inside at the time, on remand for the scag, but he got his team to get the grenades together nonetheless.

But none of his boys would do it. Not because they were scared, but because they thought attacking a fucking funeral was out of order. How much of a sick bastard is he to think that? A funeral is a funeral, no matter what. You don't do things like that. His boys talked him out of it. They told him that if he launched a grenade attack it would fuck his chances of doing the deal with Michael Howard.

Haase loved footy. He played five-a-side and he even sponsored his own Sunday league team out of a pub called the Pineapple on Park Road. They had Big Brother on the front of their shirts and Haase even paid to have an all-weather pitch done up for them. He was always down there giving the groundsmen loads. Then he got in to doing security for the big Premier League (or whatever it was then) footy clubs in the North West and North East. He had stewards on the team coaches and round the grounds.

Haase was one of those villains who would be torturing someone one minute and then helping old ladies across the road the next. He hated it when kids were being disrespectful to the old folks. A gang of teenage scallies were harrassing an old biddy who lived in the same block as him. He'd told them to fuck off, but you know what the kids are like. Hard-faced schoolie birds chewy-swinging and giving it loads and that back.

One night they were sat off in a bus shelter causing the old folks grief, terrorising the bingoites and that. Haase stops in his Beamer across the road and phones one of the lads on his portie. The next minute two cars full of lads pull up with cans of yellow paint. They throw it all over the hooligans, just fucking head to toe drenching the little cunts in yellow paint. Never came back, la. It was same yellow paint that Heath used to use to damage people's cars and that. Used to buy it bulk. It was a tool of the trade – the gangster trade.

25

Drugs

Of all his criminal activities, Haase kept the drugs side of his business closest to his chest. It was the riskiest. It was the crime the authorities were determined to nail him on. Haase put measures in place to decrease the risks. A loose cell structure meant that certain crew members didn't know what the others were up to – even if they were closely involved with the same drug deals. No one knew the bigger picture except Haase.

Drugs also brought with them the added risk of ‘have offs' and ‘tie-ups' – being robbed by other gangs. Liverpool's second generation of drug dealers had spawned a ruthless new phenomenon – specialist gangs of kidnappers and torturers who preyed on drug dealers, ‘taxing' them of their super profits. They often burst into rooms where deals were going down, masked and armed with assault rifles, to relieve dealers of their ‘tackle' and tens of thousands of pounds in cash.

Though Haase was still feared and revered himself, reputation was not necessarily a defence against attacks from the new breed of irreverent young bucks. Therefore Haase was forced to boost his security during ‘drop offs' with old hands like Paul Grimes as well as banks of CCTV cameras Haase used to monitor entrances, exits and stairwells.

In this role Paul Grimes was able to get snapshots of information about Haase's drugs network. He was able to pass on this piecemeal picture to his Customs handlers. For example, Paul manoeuvred himself into a position whereby he was able to be present when up to six kilos of heroin were delivered into the office at fortnightly intervals. Paul was convinced that there were many other deliveries but Haase only allowed him to see this specific arm of the operation. At times Paul believed that these single-figure consignments were the vanguard of much bigger loads – mere test samples to be distributed amongst the many gangs who bought from Haase. But he could never get total proof.

Paul was also able to penetrate Haase's Scottish connection – the large-scale trafficking of cocaine to gangs north of the border.

PAUL: I first realised there was drugs involved when I became Haase's right-hand man and I was in and out of the office.

One day I was guarding a site at Dunningsbridge when he called me and said: ‘I want you back at the Dock now.' When I got back there, it was about four o'clock in the afternoon. Haase said: ‘A black feller will arrive soon. He'll be in a cab. Let him in. If anyone tries to come in behind him do them in.'

Sure enough, a scruffy black lad turned up. He had a leather coat on with fur inside, a woolly hat and he had a students' bag on his shoulder. I showed him up to Haase's office, then I kept watch on the front door through the CCTV monitor.

At that stage I didn't know what was going on. I'd been working for Haase for about nine months. I knew about all the guns and the firebombings and what have you. But then Haase called me in and said: ‘Call him a cab,' pointing at the student.

There was just them two sat there at opposite sides of the desk. On the table was four bag-of-sugar-sized parcels of beigish, off-white powder: heroin. I was fucking gobsmacked to be honest. I never knew he'd got back into the brown. I thought he'd learned his lesson after being jugged for the 55 kilos, but it was there, as clear as powder. One of the bags had a split in it, obviously where Haase had tested some. Them two were just sitting there talking about football or whatever.