The victim Tony Murray was rushed to hospital and a surgeon battled to save his leg. The local papers said he was hanging on to his life by a thread. They described him as a garage boss. The busies said it was a gangland attack and they were determined to bring the culprits to justice.
Three days later, Haase and Bernie got nicked and charged with attempted murder on Murray and GBH on Foxy. They were sent to Risley Remand Centre. Then my uncle Billy Grimwood got it sorted. He was the biggest gangster in Liverpool at the time, old-school, and he had a secret meeting with Murray and persuaded him to drop the charges. That was normal.
On the day of the court hearing in July, Murray was persuaded to go missing, of course, and not turn up. The papers ran a story begging him to come forward and give evidence. They even had the prosecution barrister pleading with him in court to come back, saying that his leg would fall off within seven days of peritonitis, which would kill him if he didn’t get to a doctor fast.
As we predicted, the court said that if Murray didn’t turn up within seven days then they’d discharge John and Bernie. The police knew that we had nobbled the case so they launched a manhunt to find Murray and save the case. For a brief period, Murray came out of hiding and gave himself up to calm them down. He told his solicitor that there was nothing to worry about and he would go into the witness box before the seven-day court extension expired.
But on the day of the court, at dawn, Murray goes and has a freak car accident. Instead of going to court, he was rushed to hospital with his shot-up legs even more mangled and pumped full of drugs by the docs, meaning that he’s in no fit state physically or mentally to give evidence in a court of law.
The police were so desperate to get him into court that they went to the hospital and tried to drag him from his bed to court. But the docs refused to allow it. In a last-ditch attempt to keep Haase behind bars, the most senior busies in the city plead with the court not to drop the case, but the judge discharges the case and Haase and Bernie walk.
That was the first time Haase started to get a reputation as someone who could beat cases and manipulate the system.
3
THE TRANSIT MOB
During this period in the late 1970s/early ’80s, Haase put together a notorious gang of armed raiders called the Transit Mob, a name derived from their trademark use of Ford Transit vans. The gang terrorised Britain, targeting post offices, security companies and high street shops, stealing tens of thousands of pounds.
The Transit Mob was the dark secret Haase was trying to hide from the outside world by pretending to be a part-owner of Paul Grimes’s waste-disposal company. Grimes noted that Haase would often disappear from the job for weeks on end without telling anyone what he was doing. Haase used these secret breaks to carry out armed raids. Most of the time was spent meticulously gathering intelligence on the target using surveillance, covertly logging the movement of security vans before attacking them with overwhelming firepower.
The seeds of the Transit Mob had been sown in the early ’70s while Haase was serving his seven-year sentence for armed robbery. In prison, Haase met other, more experienced raiders and decided to recruit them for a superstar team once he got out. Career villain Danny Vaughan was the first to enlist. Haase was impressed with Vaughan’s credentials. Vaughan picked up his first conviction at the age of 14 after stealing a million cigarettes from a kiosk in the Formby area of Merseyside. Later he was jailed for possession of a .45 Smith and Wesson and 50 rounds of ammunition. He was handy with a gun and noted in the underworld for his unflinching bottle, qualities which Haase admired and was determined to instil in the Transit Mob. A villain called Roy Grantham also caught Haase’s attention. Jailbird Grantham was a powerfully built man, 5 ft 10 in., with a nerveless temperament in the path of a storm. Haase got him on the firm.
The Transit Mob’s MO was simple but deadly. First, the gang’s Ford Transit van rammed the target vehicle off the road and then its passengers pounced mob-handed from the back. Clad in overalls and balaclavas and armed to the teeth, the raiders relied on terrifying their unsuspecting victims into submission.
The Mob struck many times in the late ’70s and evaded capture because of their careful preparation. Convicted heroin dealer Ken Darcy, a gangster who later went to work for Haase as a drug mule, estimated that Haase carried out 42 armed robberies. But by 1979, just as the gang were growing in confidence enough to increase the frequency of raids, the police were catching up. The key offences for which they were later convicted took place between 8 September 1979 – when the Transit Mob robbed a security van after ramming it off a dual carriageway in Netherton Way, Liverpool – and the day of their arrest on 9 April 1981. During this 18-month period, they were the most feared highwaymen in the north-west of England. The gang also raided high street shops including Marks and Spencer’s, W.H. Smith’s and Woolworths.
The police put the Transit Mob under surveillance, suspecting that Haase and Vaughan were the authors of a string of as yet unsolved robberies. However, officers failed to catch them red-handed and much of the evidence against them was intelligence-based. Vaughan recalled, ‘There was no personal admissions, there was no forensic evidence, no IDs, no eyewitnesses, nothing from the day of the robberies.’
When Haase and Vaughan were arrested, the police believed they had enough evidence to link the pair to two robberies in Ormskirk, Lancashire, and another in Maghull, a suburb of Liverpool. They were transferred from Liverpool to Manchester County Court for committal.
During the investigation, Roy Grantham turned supergrass, to the delight of the police. Using his evidence, officers had the confidence to widen their investigation to cover more than just the two sample offences they had charged Haase and Vaughan with. Police were able to link Haase and Vaughan to a backlog of unsolved offences, known as ‘out of date’ crimes, some stretching as far back as 15 years. Haase never forgave Grantham for informing on the Transit Mob. Several years later, Grantham allegedly committed suicide after mysteriously disappearing at sea on a boating trip. Underworld sources maintain he was killed in revenge for betraying the Transit Mob. Other sources claim that he took his own life out of fear, after a series of threats. However, the inquest into his death found no foul play, and Haase and his associates deny any involvement.
To seal the case, the police turned to a second supergrass called Dennis ‘the Menace’ Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a career con who specialised in luring his cellmates into making confessions during off-the-record conversations inside prison while they waited on remand. He was a vicious kidnapper and sex offender who had served time in jails all over Britain. His credibility within the close-knit prison system made him an ideal double agent. Wilkinson had few problems gaining the confidence of his victims, convincing them he was a hardened gangster, staunch and trustworthy.
At the time, Wilkinson was facing a possible 20-year sentence for kidnapping, torturing and sexually assaulting a man, so he agreed to help police in exchange for a reduced tariff. Wilkinson befriended Vaughan in jail and claimed to his police handlers that he had wheedled sensitive information out of the talkative Scouser. He started to report this back to them. Later, in his legal statement to police and under oath, Wilkinson swore that Vaughan had admitted the robbery of a post-office van ‘during conversations in the last few weeks’. Wilkinson claimed the explosive confession took place in an exercise yard, despite the fact that he was being held in a different part of the jail from Haase and Vaughan. His evidence helped police win a conviction for the Transit Mob robberies. In July 1982, Haase got fourteen years for armed robbery on two post-office vans. Haase was then 33. His co-conspirator, 31-year-old Danny Vaughan, was jailed for 13 years. They had both pleaded not guilty. Haase remained at Liverpool’s Walton jail but Vaughan was transferred to Gartree prison in Leicester.
Furious Haase waged a war of violence against the prison system, beating up guards and sparking a string of mini-riots in an attempt to get back at the authorities he blamed for st
itching him up. He spent four years in solitary confinement as punishment, becoming increasingly embittered and cut off. He caused fights with other prisoners and took on the daddies and godfathers of the system without care. For comfort, he befriended other Scousers and took it upon himself to defend them against bullies, increasing his reputation in his home town on the outside. Haase was convinced that he would die in prison and at every turn looked for any excuse to appeal.
An opportunity arose. Supergrass Wilkinson’s evidence was later discredited after he was exposed as a fraud. Haase and Vaughan tried desperately to appeal on the back of the revelations, getting solicitor Paul Baker on the case. Baker learned that Wilkinson had appeared as a key prosecution witness in at least eight major criminal trials, where he alleged that fellow prisoners confided in him about serious crimes. He had been used by police to give evidence against more than 20 men, who had been jailed for a total of 90 years. He was first exposed in 1984, two years into Haase’s fourteen-year sentence, for irregularities in his evidence after he made his own confession in taped conversations with David Capstick, a private detective and former police officer. Mr Capstick said, ‘He was nothing less than a professional witness.’ When Wilkinson himself appeared in court later that year accused of kidnapping, torturing and sexually assaulting a man, police attended to praise his evidence in the robbery trial. The judge took the credit on board and sentenced Wilkinson to just six years.
Haase and Vaughan were confident that Wilkinson’s sensational new evidence would help overturn their convictions. They instructed their solicitor, Paul Baker, to interview him in Wakefield prison. Wilkinson told Mr Baker that he would help his clients because his relationship with his police handlers had by then turned sour. He was bitter at his treatment by the police, who he claimed had promised him a new identity in Canada but later reneged on the deal. Mr Baker took a statement from him and contacted solicitors from other trials in which he had been involved. However, none of the convictions were overturned.
In a further bid to get back at the police, Wilkinson later retracted his original statement against Haase and Vaughan, claiming in a Sunday People story that he fitted up the pair on the instructions of a bent copper who had passed him Vaughan’s confidential file and told him to memorise the evidence. Wilkinson claimed that he had perjured himself.
In 1984, friends and relatives of Haase and Vaughan climbed the 120-foot Wellington Monument in Liverpool to protest at the miscarriage of justice that had brought about their imprisonment. Vaughan’s wife, 32-year-old Kathy, and Haase’s brother-in-law Eddie Thompson barricaded themselves inside the stone plinth, which is similar in design to Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square, and climbed to the very top. A police inspector using a fire ladder eventually persuaded them to come down. The protest, which later inspired the ‘Free George Jackson’ campaign in the soap opera Brookside, was in vain. Haase’s and Vaughan’s convictions were not overturned. They stayed in jail and served out their remaining sentences.
Haase was devastated, but the incident had taught him a lot. He noticed the increasing influence that supergrasses – the police’s latest secret weapon – were having in the legal system as the law battled desperately to stay on top of organised crime. To him, it seemed as though the authorities would do business with anyone, no matter how crooked, as long as it got results. Haase also noticed how supergrasses were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage, bargaining tariffs for intelligence whether it was credible or not. It was a lesson he never forgot.
Personally, the long stretch in prison – without the prospect of early release – had a dramatic effect on Haase, as he later revealed to the Liverpool Echo.
JOHN HAASE: I got a long stretch and served 11 years out of a 14-year sentence. I spent the first four years in solitary confinement. I just could not handle such a long sentence and I rebelled. It seemed like the end of the world. I was violent and gave the screws a lot of trouble. I lost remission and the years were just piled on. I was a Category A prisoner with a history of trouble and violence and I was shunted between prisons . . . Parkhurst, Albany, Armley.
There did come a turning point and I realised that if I was to get out, it would be down to me. I had done four years in solitary, completely on my own in prison. No contact with my family. After 11 years, I was out. I had won back two years’ remission, otherwise it would have been thirteen.
There were other spells in prison and since I left school I have spent most of my time either in Borstal or behind bars. You have to harden to it all and you eventually become conditioned to life in prison. It was tough but I took it on myself to look after the underdog and, of course, fellow Scousers behind bars.
But friends say Haase was underplaying the effects, that the sentence left hideous mental scars that never healed. He became vengeful against society, savagely, psychotically violent and hell-bent on taking huge risks to claw back the lost years by living hard and trying to earn money at an impossible rate. According to his friends, he had always been a ‘hard-knock’, a man who took no shit from anyone and was always up for a fight, but now he lost his temper more rapidly and did not know when to stop, even when his victims were unconscious on the ground. He had apparently lost control of his bloodlust.
Vaughan recalled that by now prison had changed Haase irrevocably. He said it affected Haase mentally, making him cold, hard and bitter. Another pal said, ‘The 11-year sentence changed Haase into what he is today. He went in a criminal. But he came out evil. That was the difference.’
However, he also emerged a more accomplished villain. He had gone into prison an amateur and come out a mastermind. Now back on the outside, he began to win the respect of his underworld underlings with his professional attitude and by not being afraid to go out on jobs himself.
KEN DARCY: Haase is very polite. His expression never changes. Cold and callous but he is very civilised. I’ve done graft with him. I’ve had 100 kilo of weed [cannabis] thrown in the back of the car and he’s followed me home. I’ve bought all kinds of guns and he’s followed me home. He’s not afraid to be there when it’s going off and get his hands dirty – and stay with it until the job gets done. A lot of the major criminals distance themselves from the graft, getting joeys to do their running around because they fear getting caught. But he wanted to do things himself. Everything I’d done with him was spot on and I’d had good wages out of him. You could see he’d done 11 years, see he’s been en route – he was staunch.
But a new associate called Chris No-Neck, who was dealing drugs with Paul Bennett while Haase was in prison for the Transit Mob robberies, noticed a sinister, venal side to Haase.
CHRIS NO-NECK: My bird got on to him, the real him, before I did. He said something which summed him up one night, which gave us an insight into his true character, when we were all out on Valentine’s night. Haase said, ‘I would do absolutely anything for money.’ Women get on things. Their instincts are better. She understood what that meant. That defined him.
4
JAIL AND THE BIG–TIME
In 1982, Haase may have been depressed by the 14-year sentence that lay ahead of him, but he was determined to make the most of it. Just as he had done during his previous stretches, Haase used jail to his own advantage. ‘Make the time work for you’ was an old lags’ saying, and Haase did exactly that. He networked with Britain’s top villains, plotting and scheming on the criminal activities that would make him rich when he got out.
Haase was constantly on the lookout for the crimes of the future, new opportunities that would pay better and pose less risk than the more traditional armed robberies that had landed him in jail. It didn’t take long for his market research to throw up the Next Big Thing: drugs.
In Long Lartin prison in the late 1980s, Haase was introduced to an inmate who would change his life: a Turkish-Cypriot heroin dealer called Mustafa Sezazi. The former policeman turned vineyard owner was serving 18 years for mass importation of heroin into Br
itain. Sezazi was an early pioneer of the Turkish Connection, a ruthless gang of Turkish babas or godfathers who controlled the Southern Route, a heroin-smuggling network from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to Britain via Turkey, the Balkans and much of Europe.
The Turkish Connection had refined their smuggling into a military operation. Successfully, they had used immigrant Turks in Britain and other European hubs to get their gear in from the east. The organisation grew in efficiency because of the deep-rooted, Sicilian-style values that held it together. Toughness, honour and a strong code of omerta (silence) were paramount. Soon they began to push the traditional competition – including the Chinese Triads, Pakistanis, Indians and Iranians – out of the heroin market to become Britain’s number one suppliers. Ninety per cent of heroin in Britain originates from Afghanistan, the bulk of it coming through Turkish hands. Customs and Excise assistant chief investigator Phil Connelly, whose 100-man team was dedicated to stopping heroin at the time, said, ‘It was big business. They were handling a hell of a lot of heroin even then. When this all started, it was all Pakistanis. In the ’80s, it was virtually all Pakistanis. In the late ’80s, the Turks then became very big in it.’
But, as Sezazi had discovered to his own misfortune, there was a weak link in the chain. The Turkish Connection could get heroin into the country but they didn’t have control of the end-user distribution networks in British cities outside London, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. To put it bluntly, the Turkish Connection did not have good contacts with established, mainly white British villains who had the muscle, the firepower and the know-how to distribute large amounts of heroin into local markets once it was in-country. The Turks – or Diesel Mercs, as they were known in cockney rhyming slang – couldn’t get a handle on the local crime families and gang-bosses in these regions who controlled the council estates and the tower blocks where heroin addicts lived, who had the confidence to dish out kilos of heroin on tick to middle-ranking dealers, assured that the debts would be repaid out of respect. At street level, these local hard-men had fearsome reputations, ensuring that the heroin would not be stolen by rival dealers and that drug money could be transported safely without being hijacked by specialist tie-up gangs.
Druglord Page 3