Druglord

by Graham Johnson

  BORROWS: In April 1985, I got out of prison after serving nine months for burgling a detective-inspector’s house. Liverpool was a grim place to come out to. There was no graft whatsoever. It was bang in the middle of all that Militant crisis with Derek Hatton. No cunt had a job – there was fuck all going. I had two kids to support. But all’s I knew was robbing. In the end, I went back to being a doorman on a nightclub in Liverpool.

  I never set out to be a drug dealer. It happened purely by accident. It all happened because there was a patch of waste ground near Lodge Lane where drug dealers would often stash their stuff while selling on the frontline in Granby Street, which was nearby. There was a campaign in the neighbourhood to keep heroin out of the ghetto. There was graffiti saying ‘This is Toxteth not Croxteth’ on the wall, referring to a district that heroin had turned into Smack City. Vigilantes were going around having dealers off. And grassing them up. So no one wanted to get collared with Class As on them. They all had their little stashes on the sly.

  I knew this and I would always walk carefully over this patch of ground to see if I could find anything. I was skint. I never found nothing, of course. Except for one day. I was just looking out of the window. This fella walks straight over and I watch him try and drop something on the ground. I waited for him to go and then I went down to where he’d been standing – and I found a bag of white powder. It was just there, under an old Coke tin. Nothing dramatic. Just like that – in a resealable plazzy bag.

  That was it. That was my point of entry into the drugs business. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew it was good so I was buzzing. I took it to a friend’s house, who immediately said it was cocaine. Up to that point, I’d only ever come across cocaine twice before. Both times it was back in the ’70s, when I’d seen a few of the lads, armed robbers and what have you, snorting in a couple of pubs. It was rare and expensive then and it was a bit of a thing to have it, showing off. It turned out to be a quarter-ounce of powdered cocaine that was worth about £350. But my friend said if I bagged it up, it was worth twice as much.

  We split it up into eight bags, each with a gram inside, and sold them for £80 each. They took over a week to sell. I soon found a reliable source of cocaine and doubled up. I bought a half-ounce and bagged that. Business picked up.

  After a few weeks, my friend said that he’d heard about a new form of cocaine in America. He said the dealers there could sell it quicker because they made it into crack. People smoked it in seconds rather than snorting it over hours. Instant bonus if you’re a dealer. The rocks were also small and easy to conceal. I began to find out more.

  My friend said he would introduce me to a yardie who could wash up a few days later. I was buzzing. My friend took me to the yardie’s house. It was a nice flat and it turned out that we knew each other from around the place. The yardie was not a dealer, just a user. I took out an ounce of Charlie and put it on the side in the back kitchen. The yardie put on a pan of water to boil. I started to build a joint while the yardie got out the scales and weighed the cocaine into four quarters. He said, ‘I will wash the first quarter and then you do the next,’ and so on.

  The yardie showed me how to wash the impurities out by heating it with baking soda, to make crack cocaine. After about 30 seconds, I could see the white froth begin to crystallise on the surface of the boiling water. I was buzzing. Even then I was thinking about how much money I could make. We dried it on the cooker; I paid him for his services and left.

  Again it took me a week to sell, mainly because no cunt had tried the rocks before. But I made £1,000 profit. Then I doubled up and bought two ounces, washed it up and sold it from my car on the frontline in Toxteth. I then set about learning by myself how to manufacture crack on a big scale, how to do it properly. The first time I did it by myself, the mixture blew up all over the walls because of the baking soda. I lost £1,000 worth of cocaine. But it didn’t matter. The punters who I had sold it to a day earlier were now craving for it, begging me for more. By trial and error, I got it right. I used bicarb, ether or ammonia, depending on what quantity I was washing up. It was done in a test tube or a Lucozade bottle, in a jam jar or a microwave.

  Within weeks of selling my first rock, I got my first crack house, a flat in Faulkner Square in Toxteth. It was an ordinary flat, but high up and in the middle of the red-light area. I installed a huge gas fire and had it burning 24 hours a day so that the gear could be vaporised in the event of a police raid. The customers would be sweating like pigs but it kept me out of prison for three years.

  The secret to my success was I learned how to wash up cocaine in large amounts and get a production line going. That was the turning point. Up to then, people used to do it themselves like a cottage industry. My first premises generated between £2,000 and £5,000 a day.

  Within three months, I opened three more crack houses in the Lodge Lane area of Liverpool and I got ten street dealers also selling for me. They were open 24 hours a day. As more people got into crack, each house made between £5,000 and £10,000 a week. Then I began to make an astronomical amount of money. Forty thousand a week became a pittance. A pittance. I expected to make that per day sometimes, never mind a week.

  I literally became famous for being able to wash up cocaine better than anyone else. Other dealers paid me £3,000 per kilo to wash up their cocaine to make crack. When I first started, I didn’t spend any on drugs for myself and it was strictly business. I was a millionaire in a matter of weeks. Not months. Not years. Not like Branson, who’s taken so many fucking years to make so many millions. You could do that in a matter of months back then.

  I lived an extravagant lifestyle. I bought a BMW, a Jag, American imports, Mercs, a Bentley – all new and for cash. I still wore tracksuits, whether I had millions or not, for doing business on the street. But for going out I wore Armani, Moschino. I’d spend £2,000 a night on Chinese meals and champagne.

  I bought a nightclub and two massage parlours, one with a swimming pool. I found out quite early on that sex makes money as well as drugs. It goes without saying that I got the girls on the rocks, so it cost me nothing. I bought two shops that sold TVs and videos, like electrical shops. I’d sell them from the front. But I’d still have someone selling crack out the back. I bought a clothes shop. Then I started investing in antiques, mainly because I had two houses to fill with them.

  Soon I had Liverpool saturated with crack. I then moved into other big cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, in which crack had started to appear. But as far as I was concerned, they were untouched. No one had gone in there and really caned it yet. Crack was around those places but no one was doing it big, no one was doing it like me. Also, there were little towns in the suburbs and in the country with no drugs. Places like Ellesmere Port on the Wirral and Chester and rural places. I moved into places like that, too.

  Wherever I went, I had a sales pitch, like a system to get new customers into crack. I’d go to private parties where people with plenty of money would be snorting cocaine. I’d take one or two people with me into the cellar and I’d start taking crack cocaine. Curiosity would draw them in. I’d say to them, ‘The shit in the powder does you more damage than anything. This is pure.’

  They got the first rock for nothing. The high only lasts 15 seconds. When the rock’s gone, they craved another one. Then they’d have to pay. No one sat there and smoked for nothing. Then they’d tell their friends and it just escalated. All of a sudden, I had a lot of people taking crack cocaine, which was all the better for me because I’d make a lot more money.

  I’ve lost count of the number of girls I’ve put on the game through crack. One was a lovely-looking girl who used to do a bit of modelling. I met her when she was 15, still at school. I gave her the first rock for nothing, of course. Within two days, she was a prostitute on the street. Then I moved her into my parlour. She made a lot of money for me. Now she is back on the streets and will do anything for the crack cocaine. I don’t feel anything. I had
to make a living.

  I’ve had people offering me their girlfriends and wives for sexual favours just because they were £10 short for a rock. Normal, respectable people – teachers, civil servants, taxi drivers. All’s I was interested in was money. I didn’t care how they got their money – if they were prostitutes, shoplifters or muggers. I treated everybody with the same respect.

  I’ve had armed robbers turn up at my crack house with £10,000, £20,000 in cash in a Kwik Save bag, still sweating from running away from a post office. I sat there smoking it with them until the pile of cash slowly moved across to my side of the table. Then they would give me their watches, their clothes, their trainees. Eventually they would leave, three days after they’d arrived, wearing just a pair of stinking jeans and a pair of old slippers I’d lend them to walk home. I used to keep a pair handy exactly for this.

  I have a young daughter these days. Lo and behold if I find anybody who sells my kids crack cocaine. I would be their worst nightmare. I’m their father. Other parents may allow their kids to get into crack. But if my children decide to sell drugs, then that’s fine. All’s I would do to them is give them advice on how to do it properly. I wouldn’t stop them. If they listen to me, they’ll make a hell of a lot of money. If they don’t, then they will go to jail.

  People thought crack was a fad that would die out. But I made it big so that it will run and run and be there long after I die. No one can take that away from me. I created an industry. I made something from nothing. I feel a sense of fucking pride in that. It’s an achievement.

  It’s impossible to put a number on the amount of people I’ve got into crack – thousands, tens of thousands. Every one of them will have been fucked up in one way or another. Many will have died. But if it’s killed 100,000 people, I couldn’t give a fuck. I’m not interested whatsoever. I feel no remorse or sorrow. I don’t regret anything. Fuck all. A lot of people will call me a cunt. For ruining their sons’ lives or whatever. But again, I could not give one fuck. It’s of no consequence to me. I don’t think anything about being a crack dealer.

  Because I was the first crack dealer in Britain, people expect me to have something to say about what has happened. They expect me to feel sorry. But I don’t feel fuck all. In fact, I’m fucking pleased about it, to be truthful. At the end of the day, it was a product that people wanted and I manufactured and sold it to them. I had a family to support at the time with no qualifications whatsoever. It was in the middle of a recession. All’s I did was what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do – get on your bike and make money on your own. Fuck everyone else. Being a criminal was all I knew.

  As far as I was concerned, selling crack cocaine, to me, I didn’t see it as illegal. Obviously, the government thought it was illegal. But I just thought that was their problem. I just thought they were fucking stupid for not trying to sell it themselves. To me it was a business opportunity. I never stole anything. All’s I done was made a product, realised there was good money to be had and bladdered it – to death. I realised it was a commodity that people wanted and made sure they got it. I manufactured crack cocaine from powder. And sold it, masses of it. I don’t think that’s illegal.

  It’s just like someone selling cigarettes from a shop or alcohol from a pub. It’s given a lot of people jobs. There are whole communities who now rely on drugs to make a living. It generates billions. I’m proud of that. I’ve contributed to society. Without me, they’d have fuck all – no cars, no tellies, no trainees, fuck all.

  The difference between me and other drug dealers who went before me was two things – the scale of my operation and the fact that I got onto a new thing first, fast. I steamed right in there, no messing around. When I got involved, crack wasn’t around in Britain. It was just something we read about in the papers from the States. But I realised it could be big. Just like any other businessman with an idea, I did my homework. I went out and found how crack cocaine was made. I found out that a few yardies were the only ones making it in this country. But they were small, flaky operations making it for personal use only. Once I found out, I just started making it, fucking loads of it, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

  In the early ’80s, supergrass Paul Grimes was a prominent enforcer in the Liverpool underworld. He was anti-drugs, but in the book Powder Wars he recalled how dozens of his criminal associates were dropping everything to become drug dealers.

  PAUL GRIMES: All of a sudden they’d all started to get into it. Even my partners. Even my relative Johnny One Eye started flying it in direct from the Dam without a care in the world. He kept this a secret from me because he knew how I felt about drugs. Eventually he was jailed for ten years for organising a parcel worth £135,000, which came into Liverpool and Harwich. It was like a kick in the teeth, knowing that someone so close to you had become a drug dealer without you knowing.

  Then there was another mate called Glyn. He asked me to take over his scrapyard in Wavertree so he could concentrate on running a car-ringing scam in a hidden shed at the back. But later Glyn got nicked for dealing in the heavy stuff. Again, I was gobsmacked.

  Another mate called Charlie swore blind to me that he wasn’t having anything to do with drugs, but later I found out that burglars had screwed his flat and took a telly with two kilos of cocaine hidden in the back. That’s where he used to hide his stash, in the back of his Trinitron. But he never banked on a couple of smackheads screwing his flat and having the telly off. They probably sold it for £50, not knowing there was 60 grand’s worth of tackle in the back of it. Charlie came to me because he wanted someone to find those responsible and get it back. No way.

  The list goes on: a gangster mate called Leslie, another called Brian – all what folk would normally call, at a push, ordinary decent criminals who got mixed up with the gear.

  The city’s underworld was soon split in two: the drug dealers and those that were against drugs and didn’t believe in it. They had kids, like me, who were growing up and all that and they didn’t want the likes of that shit on the streets. They were terrified in case their kids got involved with drugs. It was all over the papers – ‘Generation in Peril’ and all that.

  It was purely down to morals. The drug dealers said that it was down to jealousy, but we were making plenty of money so that didn’t come into it. My main motivation was that these scumbags were killing people. They were making lots of dough, but they were killing innocent people as well. End of. For the first time in my life, I was actually facing up to the fact that there were victims of crime. It wrecked my head at first.

  A lot of the big villains who I knew were anti-drugs also looked down on drug dealers as something that the blacks done. They were in pure denial, but they were very shocked when it turned out that it was whites what was doing it as well, and what’s more, it was their own – their families, mates, partners, brothers, sons. They all had blood on their hands.

  I wasn’t totally against all drugs. For me, there was a big difference between cannabis and Class As. I wasn’t arsed about the little dealers knocking out a bit of speed to their mates. The difference between them and this new crowd was the sheer scale. This new lot just wanted to get everyone bang into it on a fucking industrial scale. I watched them. One minute you had a nice auld neighbourhood somewhere where everyone knew each other and that. The next minute it was Escape from New York cos these cunts had flooded the place with brown. These new gangsters would have been made up if everywhere was reduced to smoking ruins, so they could run amok selling their drugs.

  A lot of the big gangsters who were anti-drugs just started keeping quiet about it, not wanting to ruffle any feathers. They never had the bottle to tell the dealers that they didn’t like what they were doing. Some of us even had a meeting. They were that fucking worried about the dealers finding out it was in total secret and they whispered their concerns like old women. I said that I was prepared to make a stand. To shoot some of these cunts if necessary. But they just ummed and arrhhed and said, ‘We admire
your stance and that but . . .’ And they didn’t know where to look.

  These were big names. Hard-hitters who had killed and maimed in pursuit of wealth with their own hands, but they were behaving like pathetic kids who purely did not know what to do. They gave up the fight before it even started. After that, drugs just became acceptable. It was because of drugs that I got out of being a criminal. Ironically, my son Jason got addicted to heroin. That was the reason I turned supergrass, to get back at the dealers. He eventually died of a drug overdose.

  I still had gangsters coming in to try to tempt me into getting back into crime but it was just drugs, drugs, drugs with them. One day in the early ’80s, before he went to prison for the Transit Mob, John Haase came in with Bernie Aldridge. They had 20 kilos of cannabis. They were desperately trying to break into the drugs market for the first time. Haase didn’t even know how to sell it so he thought with my connections I’d be able to get a buyer. They’d already squeezed all the oil out of it. They offered me a £1,000-a-kilo commission. I told them I wasn’t interested, but they even left behind a kilo sample to try to tempt me. I looked at it. Even though it was crap stuff, I knew I could have sold it with one phone call, but there was simply no question, 20k or not.

  Grimes struck back by informing on the biggest criminal to emerge from the second generation of drug dealers: Curtis Warren. Warren was a mixed-race mugger from Toxteth who rose from the ashes of the 1981 riots to traffic cocaine in 1,000-kilo loads. He was one of the new bucks like John Haase who capitalised on the Liverpool Mafia’s drug-dealing gains. He was Haase’s one-time partner and then bitter enemy, and their criminal careers were both brought to an end coincidentally by the same supergrass: Paul Grimes.