Powder Wars (3 page)

The rule – the rule, if you will – was that you got battered on the first morning by him. Pure not going to happen that, by the way, I thought. Big lad, to be fair, the daddy was. From Stoke and all that. But not going to happen, all the same, thank you very much.

Comes morning, I was waiting for his good self, the daddy. But they did nothing. Instead they picked on two coloured fellas who I'd arrived with. Was a bit of a go around with them, the usual caper. Bullying and all. Can't abide that, by the way, bullies. I stood there watching, to sort of protect the black lads. Not being very arsed about the whole skenario, to be honest. Waited for it to finish. Patiently, if the truth be known. Said fuck all. Then I gets hold of this daddy and sticks his head down the toilet. Is right, Daddy, I thought. You have been made to look a pure cunt now. In front of your little team and all. So I trust that will be the end of these games and so on. For good measure, I battered one of his mates. Not totally goodo but just sound enough to let them know that there was a real gangster in town now, if you know where I'm going. Ended up all right there then.

Couple of screws didn't like what I'd done to their cock. He was their hero and all. Kept order. Maintained the status quo and so on. But, in all fairness, you can't please everybody, can you? Just can't, can you? Ended up being left alone after that. Got on the weights and all that.

2

The Oslo

At 17, Paul stepped up a rung on the crime ladder: he moved into the nightclub scene. He was hungry for independence, desperate to forge his own criminal destiny away from the shadows of the family. Paul was also keen to shed his teenage tearaway image. Organised graft may have been pulling in hundreds of pounds a week, but the scallywag in him could not resist the lure of small-time yobbery.

He had become addicted to joyriding, a newly fashionable crime amongst teenagers that mirrored the rise in mass car ownership. Paul justified its pettiness by targeting expensive cars and selling off the accessories he found inside – a boot full of golf clubs here, a van load of tools there. But nightclubs were a different ballgame altogether. They could be a passport into organised crime proper, a rite of passage into the big time – if he played his cards right.

By a twist of fate, an opportunity soon presented itself. Two up-and-coming gangster families that had joined forces in a bid to challenge the old order were putting the squeeze on a profitable seafarers' club on Liverpool's Dock Road. The Oslo was far from premier league in nightclub terms – it was situated ‘off the strip' just outside the city centre in the largely rundown but industrialised waterfront area. The clientele were rough and rowdy, mainly vodka-swilling sailors from northern and eastern Europe, fresh in from the Baltic and the Black Sea. The female punters were no better, mainly prostitutes and
Letter to Brezhnev
-style good-time girls looking for a cheap night out in exchange for liaisons back aboard ship.

But for all its downsides, the Oslo nightclub was a cash cow – a money-spinning goldmine packed to the rafters seven nights a week with currency-rich sailors desperate to blow their wages on a good time. The punters may not have been A-list, but they were prepared to pay in excess of £20 for a bottle of vodka, which at the time normally cost only £6. In the Wild West atmosphere, the owners were guaranteed to shift spirits by the crate load all night long, all day long.

Furthermore, from a criminal's perspective, the Oslo was wide open. It was a clean enterprise owned by legitimate businessmen. No gangsters were involved. Tucked away among the waterside warehouses and seamen's missions, the venue had largely escaped the attention of the city's villains, who didn't even go in there for a drink. Why bother? There was little posing potential to be had in front of a crew of drunken Russian deckhands. And if gangsters did visit the Oslo, it was definitely off limits as a ‘den for meets', where business could be discussed openly. Unusually, the licensee wasn't even paying protection money. And the door, the club's security, was largely hood-free, run by ‘ordinary, working fellers' moonlighting on the side to make a bit of extra cash. One was a mechanic for Mercedes Benz, the other was a taxi driver. In short, the Oslo was a gangster's dream.

Paul Grimes began drinking in the Oslo in 1966 – he even listened to England win the World Cup against Germany on the specially drafted-in wireless behind the bar. He was captivated by the Oslo's edginess: the beer-and-short soaked carpets, the scantily clad women reeking of cheap perfume and exotic duty-free cigarettes and the explosive mixture of battle-hardened bar-room brawlers ready to go off at any moment. For a young hood it was paradise. He felt older and respected.

Women were impressed by his sharp suits and seemingly endless thick roll of fivers and tenners. Paul revelled in the fact that he looked like a million dollars stood next to sailors from places where the ‘heigth' [
sic
] of fashion was a Red Army demob suit or a pair of navy blue overalls. The teenager was pulling a different woman every night. Paul felt at home in the Oslo. It suited his rough-and-ready tastes. He had never quite fitted in to the candle-lit cabaret club scene that was all the rage at the time. The icing on the cake was that there weren't any rival gangsters to challenge his hard-man autonomy in the Oslo. But that was soon to change.

The Ungi and Fitzgibbons families hailed from a nearby dockside district called Dingle. The Ungis were descended from Filipino sailors and the Fitzgibbons from Irish immigrants. But in the melting pot of Liverpool's slums they had formed a strategic alliance based on close familial and marital ties and driven by a desire to be the number one mob in South Liverpool.

Over the next 30 years they would outgrow their own parochial ambitions and develop into a national syndicate with international links, attracting the interests of Britain's top serious-crime policemen and intelligence agencies. On the face of it, to the outside world some of the members remained no more than petty, unpredictable criminals with a penchant for street-gutter violence.

In 1969, 18-year-old Tony Martin Ungi was sentenced to borstal for killing 16-year-old drinker John Bradley at the All Fours Club in Liverpool. Ungi slashed the main artery in his victim's neck with two broken pint glasses. Twenty years later 23-year-old Colin Ungi was jailed for five years after blowing the head off his best friend Nathan Jones with a sawn-off shotgun as they played around whilst smoking cannabis.

The family history was littered with scores of such incidents, most of which went unreported, but such bouts of inexplicable violence formed their power base. On the streets, they were feared. This fear was systematically exploited to racketeer. By the mid-'90s their hunger for power had landed the Ungis at the centre of one of the bloodiest gangland feuds in British criminal history.

On 1 May 1995, the then family leader David Ungi, a 36-year-old father-of-three, was mown down in a hail of automatic gunfire as he drove his ‘super low-key' VW Passat through the streets of Toxteth. The bullet-proof jacket he routinely wore – even to pop down to the local 24-hour garage to buy a pint of milk – offered him little protection. Ungi's death was the result of a long-running feud with a cocaine-smuggling gang run by a crack-addicted multi-millionaire drugs baron called Johnny Phillips.

Phillips was the Number Two in an international smuggling cartel run by Curtis Warren, a Toxteth scally who had risen to become Britain's biggest ever drugs dealer. After switching headquarters from Liverpool to Holland in the early '90s, Warren had charged the 35-year-old bodybuilder to oversee the British arm of his drugs operation.

Warren, known on the street as Cocky Watchman, immediately threw his weight behind Phillips' war with the Ungis. From his Sassenheim mansion Dutch police phone taps caught Warren plotting attacks on the Ungi family HQ near Park Road in Liverpool.

‘It is very easy for me to throw 20 kilos of Semtex into Park Road,' said Warren ominously. ‘If they touch my brother then I would throw 50 kilos of Semtex into their mother's house.'

The enormity of the threat coupled with the notoriety of its source proved to law-enforcement agencies and to the underworld how seriously the Ungi mob was being taken.

The street war between the Phillips and the Ungis raged on. Sixteen months after David Ungi was killed, Phillips mysteriously died of a heart attack in a ransacked, blood-stained safe house on Merseyside. Rumours abounded that a secretive underworld hit squad known as ‘the Cleaners' – who specialise in assassinations made to look like accidents – had been contracted to do the job.

Ungi's hit sparked a tidal wave of revenge killings, gun incidents and mini-riots, followed by a string of over-the-top East End-style underworld funerals. David Ungi's was attended by 600 mourners. The cortege was a long procession of 31 black limousines followed by 30 private cars, including a flatbed truck laden with floral tributes spelling out the word ‘Davey' in yellow carnations. The arrangement was crowned with a dove, and a photograph of the late businessman formed the centrepiece. Up to 1,000 people lined the streets to watch three hearses, two packed with flowers and the third carrying the coffin, and another floral tribute in the shape of a boxing ring, enter Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, ironically close to where Ungi had met his death. The route was secured with a fleet of police armed-response vehicles, snipers and officers equipped with Heckler and Kosh guns. A private security team, run by a notoriously shadowy ‘security consultant' called Kenny Rainford, kept order with a small army of doormen.

The increased security was not an overreaction. Jailed gang boss John Haase, a long-running rival of the Ungi family and ex-business partner of Paul Grimes, had reportedly been planning a hand-grenade attack on the funeral. Despite being behind bars on remand for an £18 million heroin ring, Haase had allegedly instructed his lieutenants to purchase the bombs. To his anger they refused to carry out the attack because they felt it was disrespectful to blow up a dead man and his mourning family. Haase later denied the plot, claiming that the rumour had started after a car boot full of grenades and Semtex had been found near the Ungis' Black George's pub HQ and were wrongly linked to him.

In the run up to the big day, tension was heightened after several senior members of the family were arrested. David Ungi's two younger brothers, Brian and Colin, were arrested in connection with a revenge shooting on a rival gang boss and on the eve of the funeral, in an operation to smash a national drugs ring, police arrested Ungi's uncle Brian Fitzgibbons, 47, and charged him with conspiracy to produce and supply Ecstasy. It was not disputed by any side that David Ungi was clearly one fatality in a long-running gang war.

However, the immediate sequence of events which led to his death were far less dramatic. They revolved around a low-level dispute between the gangs over the rights to use a local pub which the Ungis had unofficially taken over one year earlier. It was a classic Ungi tactic. Move in on a nightclub or a pub, take the premises over and turn it in to a powerbase from which to direct crime. Ironically, it was the same
modus operandi
which had brought them into conflict with Paul Grimes 30 years earlier.

PAUL: The Oslo was a rough house, full of hell-raising seafarer types, and brasses and all of that to do. There was a lot violence all the time. But it didn't matter. I fucking loved it in there.

You could stench the atmosphere. A pure cocktail of sex and roughness. I was made up because I was knees deep with a different pay-per-view girl every night. I was 17.

But as well as the good times there was always business to be taken care of. One Sunday night I was in there having a drink. Suddenly, I hears the wife of the owner scream, blood curdling and all, too. So I jumps up and has a peep into the porchway. Norman the doorman was getting purely filled in by a team of local gangsters.

I noticed that they were well dressed, this little firm. But only young lads, they were – 18, 19, 20. Bit older than me, to be fair, but was still kiddies all the same.

I didn't like the fact that there was six onto one so I jumps into the mix and dishes out a few small, controlled digs. There was no room for serious contact, to be fair. So I gives them a few slaps. Then threw them out one-by-one.

Then the owner pops over for a word, looking a bit chocca about all this. He informs myself that the team I've just seen off are this Ungi crew, which, he says, are a bad firm. The owner said that what they liked to do was go into a club and make it look like they controlled the place so they could do what they wanted. Then they just take it over. No back answers.

The owner said that this little firm of no marks had already wrecked the place twice and was always purely trying to get in and do more business. His head was a bit wrecked over it all.

In fairness, this place was pure wide open for the likes of this squadron to home in on. I knew where he was going with all this, by the way. Billy Grimwood had been investing into nightclubs for a while and I was au fait with doors and all of that.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, I understands quickly that this feller needs a sponsor. Someone to take over the door. And more than just a team of meatheads and all. A proper out-sourcer who can take all this shite off his mind so he can get on with the real business of shifting cellar loads of overpriced vodka to the international seafaring community. What was required was a staunch community leader, if you will, capable of keeping the likes of these dogs on a short leash.

Then comes the $64,000 question, spelt out. Will I takes over the door? Get paid. Don't mind if I do, thank you very much. I was only 17. Already I was being cut into half a decent skenario about the town and that.