Gangs

by Tony Thompson

  Three weeks later Tippett read a story in the paper that made him realise he’d had a lucky escape. Lawlor and his friend Brian Stead had been out on a pub crawl when they ended up at a place called the Gin Palace club in the Old Kent Road. There they happened across Ray Brooker, a devoted family man but even more devoted social drinker. Brooker had been due to go to his daughter’s nativity play but chose to spend his time drinking with Lawlor and Stead instead.

  They travelled back to Stead’s flat and carried on drinking and taking vast quantities of cocaine. When Lawlor left the room to go to the toilet, Brooker remarked drunkenly, ‘I’m going to do him one of these days.’ As soon as Lawlor returned, Stead told him what had been said. Lawlor then grabbed a .38 pistol and shot Brooker in the mouth. Both men then stabbed him repeatedly.

  Once Brooker was dead Lawlor called his brother, Jason, who came to the flat and helped the pair to cut up the body in the bath.

  ‘But then as they were driving the body to the dump James reaches into one of the bags, pulls out Brooker’s arm and starts using it to make hand signals. Then some girls go past and he uses the arm to wave at them. He was an absolute psychopath. It turned out he’d been working as a hitman for a couple of the south London gangs and had killed at least three people. At the same time he’d been involved in loads of different armed robberies. The police had been waiting for him to do another – I think they were hoping he’d try to shoot his way out and they’d get the chance to kill him on the job. Now he’s doing life instead.’

  It used to be the case that only a few well-known criminals, mostly in London, had direct contacts with the Colombians. Now it’s spread across the whole country.

  Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, a Merseyside drug baron, who is now serving time in the Netherlands, was one of the first, and dozens have followed in his footsteps.

  In Manchester throughout 2002 Donovan Hardy ran a massive cocaine empire from behind the facade of a mobile-phone shop. Hardy would send his cash to Colombia – either directly, via Panama, or by paying money into his bank account on the Cayman Islands – and pick up the drugs in the Netherlands. He employed several couriers, who would bring back small batches of cocaine, usually around two kilos at a time, from a stash of up to a hundred kilos that he kept in the false ceiling of a flat in Rotterdam.

  In Scotland in the early part of 2003 a four-man gang led by James Mair paid £1 million direct to a Colombian cartel for a half-tonne consignment of cocaine and a further £50,000 for dozens of bales of raw rubber, which would be used to conceal the drugs on their journey from Panama.

  But even for those who fail to link up directly with the South Americans, there are still vast sums to be made from the cocaine business. This has prompted police in London to change tactics and go after the mid-level dealers, who had been virtually left alone for many years while detectives focused on large-scale importers and street sellers.

  According to intelligence sources, these entrepreneurs are vital to the supply chain. Some are hardened criminals, involved in gang and drug activity, but others are seemingly respectable business people running food outlets, property and import/export companies that act as fronts for illegal activities.

  It took only three weeks for me to track one down.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I hear Rick long before I see him. His gravelly Yorkshire tones cut through the hubbub of the pub in Norton, just outside Doncaster, where I’ve spent the last forty-five minutes waiting for him to arrive.

  He bustles through the swing doors, laughing like a drain as the teenage girls on each of his burly arms giggle and make wide-eyed kissy faces at him. Rick is a stocky six-footer and, notwithstanding the beginnings of a neat round beer-gut protruding over the top of his black jeans, looks supremely fit and formidable. His dark hair has been cropped to disguise the early stages of male-pattern baldness and he wears a perfectly tailored smart-but-casual dark grey jacket over a black T-shirt. Confidence oozes out of every pore: the first impression is that of a high-class spiv, the sort of man you’d find selling brand new Jaguars and Bentleys rather than second-hand Fiestas.

  Rick heads straight for the bar so Billy, who has set up the meeting on my behalf, nips over to let him know I am there. Eventually, having installed the two girls at a corner table and picked up a bottle of premium beer, Rick wanders over. He eyes me cautiously and makes no attempt to apologise for being so late. I know better than to mention it: he is, after all, one of the biggest coke dealers in the North-east and he’s taking time out to speak to me purely as a favour to his friend Billy.

  The air of confidence crumbles alarmingly when I pull out my MiniDisc recorder and place it on Rick’s side of the table. By the time Billy and I have reassured him that there’s nothing to worry about he has drained his first bottle and returned to the bar for another, stopping off to talk to the girls once more on his way back.

  Finally Rick returns to the table and sits himself down, seemingly eager to get the whole thing out of the way as quickly as possible. ‘Okay,’ he says, with a half-sigh. ‘Tell me what you want to know.’

  My first question is the most obvious one: of all the town and cities in the North-east, why does Rick base himself in Doncaster? Rick smiles, settles back in his chair and sips his beer while nodding slowly. I know what you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s not so long ago that, as far as drugs were concerned, all roads led to London, end of story. Everything was controlled from there and passed through there, regardless of where the stuff finally ended up.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, London’s still important, it’s kind of like the main hub, always will be, but Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol – they’re all moving up the ladder. These days a lot of the big shipments miss out London all together and go straight to the regions ’cos that’s where the demand is.

  ‘So why Doncaster? Well, it’s a big city and it’s central, especially to Yorkshire. A lot of people come together here. There are always a lot of faces in Doncaster and a lot of activity. There has to be. The reality of the drugs trade is that the big players are a lot more spread out than a lot of people would think. Otherwise it just wouldn’t work.’

  Born in Leeds, Rick moved to Grimsby at an early age and, after working as a doorman and gaining a reputation for being useful with his fists, found himself drifting into a world of crime. ‘It were never a deliberate choice, like, it just sort of happened. You start out doing little favours for people, and before you know it, you’re at it yourself.’

  After dipping into protection and debt collection, Rick turned to large-scale bootlegging, one of the first in his area to do so. He made a small fortune almost overnight but ended up in prison for eighteen months after being caught during a random Customs sweep. It was soon after his release that he was invited to join the criminal equivalent of the Premier League. And, surprisingly, it was all courtesy of the Kray twins.

  In March 1969 Ronald and Reginald Kray were convicted of the murders of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie and George Cornell, and the detectives responsible for putting them away felt confident that their gang – the Firm – had also been brought down.

  Not so. Despite remaining firmly behind bars for the next thirty-odd years, the Kray twins were able to use the extraordinary power of their name not only to keep the Firm going but to amass around £5 million as their share of the proceeds of their new criminal enterprise. Some of their income came from books and film deals as well as payments from newspapers and magazines for exclusive interviews. Other money came as the result of legitimate ‘sponsorship’ arrangements through which dozens of businesses – at least ten of them debt-collection agencies – set up deals in which the twins received a cut of the profits in return for allowing them to use the Kray name.

  But the bulk of their income came from the criminals who wanted to advance up the career ladder and knew that being a part of the Firm was the way to do it. A typical deal would involve an up-and-coming gangster writing to the twins and asking whether, in return for a re
tainer of, say, £800 per month, they would endorse him. If they agreed, the twins needed do nothing more. The up-and-coming gangster would be able to say he was part of the Firm and join the list of those allowed to meet the twins in person.

  During such occasions the newcomers would find themselves rubbing shoulders with regular visitors who were noted members of the old guard, men like Joey Pyle, Freddie Foreman and Tony Lambrianou, who had long since retired from a life of crime. While the old-timers swapped war stories, the newcomers would be introduced to one another. The system worked like a dream: without ever leaving their cells, the Krays helped put together dozens of drug deals, robberies and other scams. Throughout their prison career the twins never masterminded any direct criminal activity but their knowledge, criminal contacts, and the sheer power of their name made them pivotal figures in the underworld.

  According to Ronnie’s widow, Kate Kray: ‘If somebody needed something or wanted something it would cost them money from the moment they walked into Broadmoor or prison to see one of the twins. They never organised crimes but they were there to make introductions and advise for money.

  ‘Ron was the kingpin. Villains from Scotland, Wales and all over . . . they didn’t know each other but they all knew Ron. So if you had some villains from Liverpool coming down to London to do a bit of business they would pay Ron to make the introductions. He never wanted to know the details of the villainy – the only thing he was interested in was how much his cut was going to be.’

  In time-honoured tradition, Ronnie and Reggie referred to this money as their ‘pension’ and it soon amounted to far more than the twins could ever spend themselves. Some of it was diverted to charity, some sent to keep their wives, friends and ‘colleagues’ who had fallen on hard times out of the gutter. There was more than enough to go round: almost all the payments were made in cash and Kate Kray alone was picking up at least six £800 ‘pensions’ each month. She once collected a single package that turned out to contain £85,000.

  Membership of the Firm (which continues to flourish, despite the death of its founders) means instant access to a trusted network of top criminals with international connections. And in an underworld where ‘grassing’ is fast reaching epidemic proportions, the Firm stands out as an organisation that lives by the rules of organised crime as they stood in London in the mid-1960s. Parents, particularly mothers, are to be treated with the utmost respect, women and children are to be kept out of the line of fire, and the police are to be treated with utter contempt.

  These are values that Rick holds dear. ‘When I’m grafting, I only ever work with people who I’ve known for a long time or people who have been put on to me through the Firm. Dealing with proper people who I know I can trust, it might mean I end up waiting a little bit longer for the deal to come through but at least when it does, I know it’s a hundred per cent safe.

  ‘You need to be part of a trusted network. The downside of being somewhere small is that everyone knows who the main players are and you soon get to know one another. You have different levels. If you take the drug scene you’ve got your street dealers, the guys who deal to them and then the ones who import. Up to a certain level, everyone sticks together but when you get above that, when you get to where I am, no one will deal with anyone else because no one trusts anyone else. At some time or another everyone in this town has worked with everyone else and at some point they’ve all fallen out with one another.

  ‘If you deal with sensible people you are not going to get fucked over. At least, that’s the theory.’ I ask Rick to elaborate. ‘I have always been part of the old school and gone with the old-school rules. You don’t fuck with people and that means you can come back again and again and again. You get a good name for yourself and you get some respect. Your name starts to be given out to other people. But if you decide to rip someone off for twenty grand, you’re only ever going to do it once.’

  I ask Rick to take me through the main commodities that he deals with and the relative merits of each. ‘A few years ago everybody was coming out of the drugs game and going into cigs and spirits. The money was good, and if you did get caught, the sentences were nothing. But now they’ve really clamped down on the bootlegging, pushing the sentences so that they’re on a par with cannabis, so people are drifting back into the drugs game again.

  ‘As far as cannabis is concerned, there’s no money in the resin any more unless you’re involved at a very, very high level, hundreds of kilos at a time. It’s that cheap over here now that it’s just not worth it. A few years ago you could bring it in for six or seven hundred a kilo and get two grand for it all day long. Now you’re lucky if you can get eight hundred for it. There’s still good money to be made in the quality herbal stuff, like skunk, but it’s a lot bulkier so it’s harder to smuggle.

  ‘Heroin? I can’t comment on that because I’ve never touched it and I never would. I don’t like the idea of going around creating junkies. Es are going for a pound apiece. You used to be able to make good money but not so much now. You have to put a shitload of cash up front and you’re taking a big risk for not that much gain.

  ‘The cigs business, it’s gone a bit silly now, it’s way too competitive. You have to pay up front and there’s no money to be made unless you’re bringing back containerloads. But once you start doing that the risk goes up tenfold. When I got into it, there were only a few people involved and you could make a good crack out of it. But not any more. Everybody’s selling cigs, you go to every corner shop or every car-boot sale and they’re all over the place.

  ‘Charlie is where the money’s at. The game has changed a lot since the old days but it’s still the main earner. I once heard someone say that drug-dealing was a thousand times more addictive than drug-taking and they were dead right.’

  Rick drains the last of his bottle and I offer to buy him another, fighting my way through to the crowded bar and waiting what seems like an eternity to get served. When I finally return Rick can’t remember the point he was about to make so I ask him what he considers to be the key attributes of a successful smuggler.

  ‘You have to be a bit of a gambler. The fact is there’s no way in the world that Customs can stop every single container that enters the country – if they did the whole world would grind to a halt. They’ve got their sources, they’ve got their intelligence, but most of all they’ve got their profiles. If they have a plane coming in from Bogota and another coming in from Milan, well, then, it’s obvious where the risks are. So my job is to play their game in reverse, to work out what they’re looking for and do everything I can to make sure my shipments don’t get flagged up.

  ‘When you get involved in the big shipments, I’m talking tonnes, then you’re in for a lot of sleepless nights. You put your money down and you’re waiting six months before you even know it’s got into the country. And even then you’re a long way from being home and dry. If Customs are on to you, they ain’t gonna pounce right away. They’ll wait until you’ve got it back to your warehouse or wherever. Touch wood, I’ve never been bubbled up – and, more than anything else, that’s the way you get caught these days.

  ‘I’ve spent time out in Spain, working with people there. There’s a lot of Brits in the area, especially around Puerto Banus on the Costa del Sol because there’s the huge marina there. A lot of the smugglers are using the big yachts to pick the stuff up because they know they’re less likely to get stopped than if they do it with some scruffy fishing-boat. You can bring the stuff right up into the heart of the town, and from there it’s easy. No Customs, no borders, nothing.

  ‘But there’s a lot of police activity in Spain now so more and more people are doing it through Portugal or flying it direct to the former eastern bloc where you can still bribe Customs and police and whatnot to get it through. Instead of hooking up with the expats, a lot of the gangs are doing their own trafficking now. Once the supply is sorted out, they don’t need to get anyone else involved. That means there’s even less chance
of getting grassed up, you can control it, put a real lid on things.

  ‘Once it’s in Europe it’s just a question of hiding in the HGVs and getting it through the tunnel or sea ports or sometimes just sticking it in the post. But even at my level, more and more people are looking to buy straight from South America. Some of those people who work on the cruise ships, cabin crew and such, are doing very nicely because of that.

  ‘A lot of the stuff I deal with comes in via Ireland. There’s a lot going on over there because the Irish navy consists of something like two rubber dinghies and one of those inflatable bananas. There’s so much coastline, they just can’t patrol it all. It’s absolutely wide open.’

  When I start to ask Rick about the usual quantities he deals with, one reason for his initial nervousness soon becomes clear. A few days earlier one of his former colleagues was arrested in connection with a £15 million consignment of cocaine, heroin, amphetamine and cannabis that was smuggled through the Channel Tunnel from Holland. The route and methods have both been utilised by Rick in the past.

  ‘His firm is based up in Bolton and basically doing in the North-west what I’m doing in the North-east. They’d done the run ten or eleven times before with no problems. They just got unlucky this time around. They were always careful. The drugs were hidden in containers of chemicals so there was no smell to leak out. The lorry drivers would be given pay-as-you-go phones just as they left and those same phones would be thrown into the sea while they were on the ferry coming back so there was no way they could ever be traced.