Culturally, the Toxteth Riots and Liverpool’s seemingly endless economic recession during the ’80s and ’90s also helped promote organised crime, providing an army of desperate anti-establishment foot-soldiers infected with the city’s trademark scallywag subculture, the swaggering, pro-crime ‘Spirit of Whacker’. Scallies were to drugs what yuppies were to stocks and shares. Technologically, mobile phones, computers, electronic counter-surveillance, cheap air travel and financial deregulation also played their part. People in the West were now richer than ever, with the spending power to consume drugs in mainstream amounts. On the supply side, modern industrial farming methods had now reached places like Colombia and Afghanistan and were quickly adapted by drug-crop growers, enabling them to churn out harvests on a massive scale. The cocaine produced from just 500 coca leaves in South America could fetch half a million pounds in a city in Europe or the USA. All this meant one thing: the ’80s and ’90s were the golden age of drug dealing, and Liverpool was knee deep in it.
Police and Customs officers were quick to realise that there was a sea change under way and that Liverpool was the epicentre of a drugs tsunami. Phil Connelly, former assistant chief investigator of HM Customs and Excise, said, ‘In the early ’80s, Customs formed two special units to tackle the increase in drugs. One targeted heroin and one targeted cocaine. I was in charge of the one that was after the heroin dealers. There was 100 to 150 men in the team.
‘At first, we concentrated our efforts in London, for obvious reasons. That was where a lot of the big players were. Then we started following the drugs and money. And we ended up in Liverpool. We were surprised how big the operations were in Liverpool.
‘As drug dealers, they were the best. The drug dealers in Liverpool were streets ahead of everyone else. That was mainly because they were smart. They were very good at covering their tracks. Some of them were very intelligent. For instance, Paul Bennett was very clever.’
A detective-sergeant from the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Crime Unit revealed how drug dealers in Liverpool were quick to use the legal system to protect themselves in a way that had never been tried. He said, ‘The drug dealers in Liverpool at around this time were quick to take advantage of the legal system. A colleague in the Merseyside Police told me that just about every drug dealer in the city was rushing to the police or Customs to become a registered informant. That was for two reasons. Number one: they could learn how the system works from the inside. Number two: if they got caught, they could use it as an insurance policy. They could say, “I was only dealing to cover my tracks as an informant,” or, “I was gathering info for the police.” They used it as a get out of jail free. That was very different from how villains behaved before drugs came along. Because it was the early days of big drug dealing, a lot of mistakes were made by us, the police and Customs, in falling for criminals who abused the supergrass system by using it for their own ends.’
Another leading Customs investigator described Liverpool as ‘the number one UK centre of excellence for drug smuggling’. The situation was becoming a law-enforcement embarrassment and it was not long before politicians were demanding action. Gradually, the authorities began to respond. First up were Customs and Excise, who agreed to train their biggest undercover informant on the city like a guided missile. Former Greek-Cypriot freedom fighter and gangster Andreas Antoniades, who has worked for HM Customs and the American CIA for over 30 years infiltrating the world’s biggest narco networks in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, was instructed to bring down the Scousers with immediate effect. The colourful Antoniades, who shot one of the Krays’ gang before turning supergrass, had dozens of successful big convictions under his belt, leading to three attempts on his life, and went on to take part in a US intelligence-service plot to buy back Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from the Taliban in Afghanistan. Posing as a buyer, he befriended members of the Liverpool Mafia but quickly realised he was dealing with some of the most violent and calculating men he had ever encountered. To boot, they had learned about the supergrass system well, which made it difficult for him to turn them over. He said, ‘I did a job in Liverpool involving over 1,000 kilos of cocaine where [my fellow undercover man] was almost killed.’
In March 1982, Merseyside Police Chief Ken Oxford recognised the trouble in his own backyard. He declared war on the drug dealers. He said, ‘We are talking about millions of pounds. It is essential that money does not go back into the international syndicates because as one gang is busted there is always someone to take its place. There is no diminution of supply and the key to the supply is the exchange of large sums of money. It is important that these people do not gain from their criminal activities.’ But even by then it was too late. The seeds had been sown a decade or more earlier and now there was nothing stopping it.
Almost all of the members of the Liverpool Mafia had served their criminal apprenticeships as professional warehouse raiders stealing from the city’s docks in the 1950s and ’60s. For organised crime back then, the Port of Liverpool was the answer to their prayers – a ready-made wealth-creation scheme on their doorstep which they could tap into any time they wanted. Eight miles long and poorly protected, the warehouses were jam-packed full of millions of pounds of every conceivable consumer good ripe for the picking. In a post-war era which had created a ration-starved public used to meddling in the black market, it was a match made in heaven.
For the Liverpool Mafia, the bonus was that warehouse robberies were largely risk-free. The docks were totally under their control and had been for generations. Dockers, lorry drivers and security guards were mostly friends and family, whose cooperation was bought with bribes if not loyalty.
During the Second World War, the US Army had tried in vain to stamp out the gangs that were a threat to war materials. Special platoons were created to prevent Army cigarettes from being stolen en masse. But unlike New York, where the US Navy had got the dockers onside by doing a deal with their union-boss mobster Lucky Luciano, the attempts in Liverpool to stop warehouses from being looted failed miserably. In fact, the plunder rocketed to new heights. By the 1950s, the problem was putting the economic viability of Liverpool’s port at risk. Marine insurers began to balk at losses no longer covered by special wartime indemnities. In desperation, cargo handlers began introducing bizarre security measures. The shoe exporter Tampon’s began splitting up its cargoes – left feet on one ship, right on another – so that the hijackers were left with lorry loads of stolen but untellable single shoes. The electrical goods company Remington removed the magnetic motors from its top-of-the range razors and stored them in separate warehouses, miles apart from their plastic cases. But the raiders simply slipped the cargo handlers bigger bribes to pinpoint the exact locations of the various components so they could be robbed and reassembled later. Finally, in the mid-’60s, faced with huge losses from theft, the Port Authority of Liverpool invested millions of pounds into containerization – the transport of cargo in relatively secure steel containers.
Containerization spelled the end for this type of crime. But by this time, the Liverpool Mafia had moved into contraband smuggling, armed robbery and protection racketeering. This set them on the route to drug dealing, which would turn out to be their field of excellence. The advantages afforded by living in a port soon paid serious dividends, including good money-laundering contacts and strong historical and family links with the Dublin-based IRA, the most ruthless and efficient contraband smugglers in the world.
Another key to success was the UK-wide underworld distribution network which the Liverpool Mafia had been running since the war – a ring of fences, middlemen, money-men, drivers and couriers across the country that was the envy of their land-locked rivals in other cities, who traditionally feared to tread outside their ‘manors’. Using the network, they were able to sell stolen goods far and wide quickly. And in the ’70s, the same contacts experimented with sales of cannabis. In the ’80s, they moved into heroin and by the time the cocaine b
oom of the ’90s came around, the network was flooded with cheap Colombian powder, trafficking drugs to all corners of the UK. The Liverpool Mafia, as controllers of this system, grew rich as drug addiction in the inner cities soared.
A power shift away from the traditional gangsters towards the new drug dealers began in the early ’80s, corresponding with the ascent of Mrs. Thatcher and the Toxteth riots of 1981. By 1985, the drug dealers reigned supreme, their power base built on vast wealth. The new drug dealers were quick to ditch the traditional underworld codes. Forging profitable and strategic partnerships was now the source of their power, sometimes by passing information to the police and Customs and Excise, becoming double agents who protected their own empires by ratting on others, and at other times by linking up with new criminal gangs. For instance, the predominantly white, middle-aged gangster elite began forming unprecedented links with the young, black drug dealers of Toxteth’s Granby ghetto – a partnership that led to mutual success.
The founding fathers of the Liverpool Mafia included leading luminaries such as Tommy ‘Tacker’ Comerford, Tony Murray, brothers Michael and Delroy Showers, a super-rich godfather known as The Banker and crack baron Colin Borrows. These were the pioneers who got a foot in the door, allowing Haase to boot it in and open the floodgates. These were the gangsters to whom John Haase would owe his good fortune.
Tommy Comerford was an armed robber turned safe-cracker who blazed an early trail in heroin trafficking. Comerford had been behind an infamous robbery dubbed the Water Street Job in 1969, a commando-style raid on a Liverpool bank carried out by international jewel thieves. After spending two days tunnelling into the strong room of the bank, the gang made off with £140,000. They were the first in the UK to use state-of-the-art thermal lances during a robbery, and Comerford was later jailed for seven years. Following his release, Comerford invested in cannabis but soon clocked up another seven years for recruiting dockers in a smuggling conspiracy. In 1983, Comerford was arrested with a half a kilo of heroin at Heathrow airport and later jailed for 14 years for masterminding what Customs officers described as ‘Britain’s first Class A drugs cartel’. In the prison system, Comerford was noted for his Jimmy Tarbuck-style ’70s Scouse humour, a trait which made him many friends and enabled him to put his often ruthlessly violent and unstable peers at ease.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Comerford set up his HQ in the city’s Holiday Inn hotel, which later became a Moat House, to market heroin: the new drug of choice amongst unemployed youth. His objective was simple: the ruthless exploitation of the relatively new phenomenon of cheap, mass-market drugs. Comerford used the Holiday Inn to cut up his freshly smuggled heroin with Minotol baby-food powder in a kitchen blender. Minotol, he discovered, was a perfect blending agent for heroin. It was the same colour and consistency and it melted at the same temperature as heroin crystals. That meant that on the foil of the addicts who smoked it, Minotol ‘ran’ across the surface indistinguishably from the active ingredient heroin. Such was the demand for Minotol that when supplies ran out in the Liverpool chemists, gophers were dispatched on planes to Amsterdam to clean out the shelves there, where it was openly sold as a drug-traffickers’ product. Comerford was also an early kilo-cocaine speculator who experimented with buying powder in bulk at a time when most of his criminal contemporaries were still dabbling flakily in cannabis.
In between trips to Germany, Amsterdam and on the QE2, Comerford and his team of Lacoste-sporting scallywag urchins ostentatiously held court at the Holiday Inn. Touring pop groups and visiting football teams playing at Anfield and Goodison were lured up to his comped (complimentary) suites – the hotel management had been bribed – for all-night snorting sessions.
For Customs and Excise, he was the missing link in the evolutionary chain of drug-dealing gangsters. As they watched him, investigators observed that they were seeing something new – Comerford was essentially an opportunist drug dealer, a lay criminal who got into drugs because it was easier and more profitable than stealing. Like many of his narco-pioneer contemporaries, he came from a family of Liverpool dockers, steeped in the tradition of pilfering merchandise and smuggling contraband. Comerford saw drugs as an extension of this custom and was able to use his old knowledge and contacts in his new illegal enterprise. Comerford’s unique selling point was his professionalism, and this enabled him to make a quantum leap from being a small-time dealer to a big-time smuggler. In this sense, Comerford was the stepping stone from an era of ’60s hippy dealers and ’70s opportunists to today’s ruthlessly dedicated international drug dealers.
A major criminal player called Tony Murray was also quick to realise the potential of drug dealing, along with the importance of covering his tracks in this extremely fickle business. He became an expert at leading a double life, to shield his activities not only from the police but from his underworld peers as well. Playing your cards close to your chest was an essential tool of survival in the new culture of drug dealing. There were too many informants, too many anti-drugs vigilantes and too many villains looking to rob or ‘tax’ drug dealers of their super-profits.
In a bizarre bid to distance himself from the new phenomenon, Murray publicly declared war on the city’s drug dealers in 1985. The stunt, solely designed for public consumption, was triggered after Murray’s 14-year-old nephew Jason Fitzsimmons died of a heroin overdose. The tragedy was one of the first teenage deaths from drugs in the UK, sparking a media frenzy. Murray attacked the drug dealers responsible on local TV and vowed to ‘wipe them off the face of the earth’. Jason’s death then triggered a national outcry. Even PM Margaret Thatcher commented, ‘Jason’s death reminds us of the threat drug misuse poses to the well-being of all our young people, their families and society.’
Murray went further in a statement to the Liverpool Echo:
When I find out who did it, then they are dead. I will do it with my bare hands if I have to. These people are nothing but rats. They are scum of the earth. They should be wiped off the face of the earth.
Ten years later, the stunt spectacularly backfired. Murray was jailed for 12 years for plotting to supply £1 million worth of heroin. He was caught red-handed offering to sell one kilogram of heroin to undercover police officers and conspiring to traffic a bulk load. In September 2002, a car carrying 10 kilos of heroin with a street value of more than £500,000 was discovered in Beech Street, Kensington. Realising the game was up, Murray fled to Spain after a car chase in Cannock, Staffordshire, in which he crashed into seven vehicles. British police launched an international hunt for the man who had shot to the top of their wanted list. He was arrested at his villa in Malaga and extradited to the UK. In March 2005, Murray was jailed again, this time for 13 years in a second plot to traffic heroin, in partnership with a Turkish gang. Judge Jonathan Foster QC told him, ‘The supply of drugs is a sophisticated business. It involves knowledge and dealing with a producer or wholesaler. I find you were the principal participant of the Liverpool end of this conspiracy.’ Murray had reaped rich rewards from his career as a drug dealer, including a luxury house in Cheshire. Of all the Liverpool villains who made the leap from traditional villainy into drug dealing, Murray was the most symbolic.
Toxteth brothers Michael and Delroy Showers led the charge amongst the black community and soon broke into the heavyweight league. Michael Showers rose from barman to doorman to racketeer. He was evil, violent and feared, and began drug dealing on a small scale by travelling abroad and sending parcels of marijuana back to his girlfriends in Liverpool.
Between 1977 and 1979, Michael’s brother Delroy increased their imports, flying to Kenya on a false passport and sending suitcases of cannabis back to Liverpool by sea. Delroy had close links with south London mobster Charlie Richardson. In 1980, Delroy was jailed for nine years for being ‘the ringleader’ of the smuggling operation.
Meanwhile, his brother Michael was covering his tracks by carving out a political career as a self-styled spokesman for the riot-torn Toxte
th ghetto. Astonishingly, he was given a £16,000-a-year job by Liverpool City Council and appeared on BBC’s Question Time and Panorama. It came as a great shock when Michael was jailed for 20 years for smuggling 12 kilos of heroin into Britain from Afghanistan.
The Banker is the undisputed godfather-king of the Liverpool Mafia, a drug baron worth hundreds of millions of pounds. He cannot be named for legal reasons because he has never been caught with drugs. The former docker was so secretive about his Class B and Class A drug-smuggling operations in the beginning that his closest friends did not know he had got involved. He became an expert money-washer through property deals and various businesses. But his strength lay in his ability to overcome the race prejudices held by other villains of his generation and do business with the black gangs who knew the drug scene back to front. His claim to fame was that he started off super-dealer Curtis Warren.
Colin Borrows slipped secretly into the history books on Wednesday, 8 June 1988 as the first person in the UK to be arrested for the manufacture and supply of crack cocaine. Officially, he had become Britain’s first crack dealer. The lorry driver’s son turned gangster had begun dealing crack cocaine three years earlier, in 1985. During that period, he had revolutionised the cocaine trade and changed the social and criminal landscape in Britain forever. Borrows’ rags-to-riches story was textbook business. He had started out with a little-known niche-market product and turned it into a household name almost overnight. He compares himself to Richard Branson, Bernie Ecclestone and Alan Sugar, apportioning his success to the application of a peculiarly British brand of ‘stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap’ entrepreneurism to an amateurish cottage industry. And it was a formula that struck gold.
Today that market is worth £1,817 million in the UK, boasts more than 200,000 loyal customers and employs thousands of people, many from deprived inner-city backgrounds. If it were any other business, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Borrows being lauded at 10 Downing Street as a particularly exciting example of British free-market capitalism. But his business was crack cocaine, the most addictive street narcotic known to man. Borrows is unrepentant and proud of his achievements.
Druglord Page 5