In the winters of 1991 and 1992, Customs and Excise, aided by Grimes, sank Warren’s cocaine-smuggling operation. Two consignments supplied by the Cali cartel were recovered, weighing 500 and 1,000 kilos. Curtis Warren was later put on trial for the crime, but, learning from the mistakes made by his Liverpool Mafia mentors, he got the best lawyers money could buy and fought every technicality in a complicated case that was littered with them. The strategy worked and he was dramatically cleared of all charges. However, the ordeal led to a second surveillance operation which later resulted in his conviction for similarly huge consignments in Holland, where he is now serving a 12-year sentence.
Warren’s conviction had bigger knock-on effects, leading to the capture of several key members of the Liverpool Mafia. But the biggest coup for the Dutch authorities was the subsequent arrest of one of the world’s most successful drug dealers. On 8 October 1998, Cali cartel godfather Arnaldo Luis Quiceno Botero, the figure who had allegedly supplied Warren with cocaine, was jailed for six years.
6
MICHAEL HOWARD BACKGROUNDER
Michael Howard’s and John Haase’s lives could not have been more different. Michael Howard was born into a Jewish middle-class family on 7 July 1941 in Gorseinon General Hospital, near Llanelli (a small mining town in South Wales). He followed a model academic and career path that made him one of the most powerful and successful men of his generation: from grammar school to Cambridge to barrister to politician to cabinet minister to Tory leader.
Haase’s angry view of the world, meanwhile, was formed during a childhood of crime and violence. He has spent much of his adult years in jail, mainly as a high-risk prisoner or in solitary confinement, which compounded his disturbed outlook and made him callous and hard, at times psychotic. When not in jail, Haase lived on the streets of Liverpool in the company of some of the most disgraceful and dangerous members of society. Worlds apart, but Haase’s and Howard’s fates were set on a collision course that would explode into scandal, the fallout from which had long-lasting ramifications for both of them.
Even before Michael Howard was born, events were occurring in his family that would come back to haunt the political leader in later life. The first controversy, which would embarrass the leader of the opposition nearly 70 years later, involved the immigration status of his Jewish immigrant father, Bernard. As Tory leader, Howard fought the 2005 election campaign on a ticket of get-tough measures against asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, attacking Labour MPs for being a soft touch. However, to Howard’s chagrin, it was revealed that his own father had been turned away from Britain as an illegal immigrant before the Second World War, four years before Michael was born – and that only the intervention of a humanitarian Labour MP had saved his father from being sent back to Romania to certain persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Not for the first time, Howard was accused of double standards and hypocrisy.
The theme is recurrent throughout Howard’s life. The two great scandals that have dogged his career – the Haase and Bennett scandal and the Al-Fayed–Lonrho DTI affair – have both involved associations with dodgy cousins dragging his name through the mud.
Michael Howard’s real name was Michael Hecht, but his father changed the family name to Howard in March 1948, seven years after Michael’s birth, as they settled down and became more anglicised. His father, Bernard, then 23, and mother, Hilda, then 28, were from orthodox Jewish families and had recently opened up a drapery shop. They had married a year earlier in June 1940 at the synagogue in Llanelli. Hilda had been introduced to Bernard by her wealthy cousin Harold Landy. Michael Howard’s associations with his second cousin Landy, a powerful man in the Jewish community, would later come back to haunt him.
Bernat Hecht (his original name) first tried to land in the UK on 21 March 1937, aged 20. He arrived at Dover from Ostend in Belgium aboard the mail ship SS Prince Leopold with a Romanian passport and described himself as a synagogue ‘cantor’ or singer. When quizzed by immigration officers, Mr Hecht produced a letter from the president of a synagogue in Whitechapel, east London, which stated that it wanted to consider employing him for just one month as a cantor. However, Mr Hecht – born in Romania on 13 November 1916 in the town of Ruscov – was ‘refused leave to land’ because an immigration official found that he had not been granted a vital Ministry of Labour work permit. Howard’s father was sent back to Ostend that day on the same ship. However, just two days later, Labour MP James Hall hand-delivered a letter to the then home secretary Sir John Simon pleading for help. The MP for Whitechapel wrote, ‘I beg to submit the application for your favourable consideration and would regard it as a personal favour if an early reply could be given me because of the urgent character of the situation.’ Four months later, Mr Hecht was granted a visa allowing him to stay in the UK for a month by the Home Office at the British embassy in Brussels. He finally set foot on British soil on 20 July, after sailing from Ostend on the SS Baudoin. He then took up a month-long ‘trial’ at the Kehelath Moishe Anshei Belz synagogue in Fairclough Street, Whitechapel. For the next year, Mr Hecht obtained a string of visa extensions on the back of offers of work from the Whitechapel synagogue, allowing him to stay.
On 11 April 1940, the Home Office granted Michael Howard’s father ‘leave until further notice’ provided he did not change his employment. But within a fortnight, he had moved to Llanelli in South Wales to live with the family of Hilda Kershion, whom he married two months later.
It was another six years before Bernat Hecht applied for British citizenship. By then, he was known as the Revd Bernard Howard, a title commonly used in Britain by Jewish ministers lower than the office of chief rabbi. At that stage, he falsified details on his paperwork, claiming that both his parents had died in Romania. In fact, his father Maurice – Michael Howard’s grandfather – was still alive and had been living in London since the 1930s. He was a synagogue warden. Maurice’s wife Leah perished in 1943 at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland.
Many members of Howard’s family were tortured by the Nazis, including his Aunt Rose, who survived Auschwitz. Howard has suggested a possible motive for his father’s false statement: ‘I have speculated on the reason and I suppose one possibility is that my grandfather might have entered Britain unlawfully.’ Mr Howard acknowledged that, while Nazism was on the rise in Europe, at the time he settled in Britain his father was primarily an ‘economic migrant’. He died aged just 49 in 1966 in Llanelli. His widow, Hilda, is now aged 94 and lives in Stanmore, Middlesex.
Further intrigue surrounds the circumstances of how Michael Howard’s mother entered the UK. The former Tory leader once hinted that Hilda’s Jewish parents, Max and Chaika Kershion, fled Tsarist Russia to escape persecution. They arrived and settled in Llanelli, South Wales, in about 1912, when Hilda was six months old and her brother Jack was two. As is known, Hilda later wed Howard’s father, Bernat Hecht, after being introduced by her wealthy cousin Harold Landy. However, so far no trace of a family with the name Kershion or similar has been unearthed in the Ukrainian town of Ostrog, where Howard’s office has said his maternal grandparents came from. Immigration records also fail to shed any light on how the Kershion family came to enter the UK. Howard’s grandfather Max died of an epileptic fit aged just 30 on 26 January 1913. The name Kirson – rather than Kershion – is recorded on his death certificate. Hilda is thought to have been born in Ostrog on 30 December 1911.
Michael Howard was raised in Llanelli, in orthodox fashion amid the small Jewish population of 120 people. Howard attended Llanelli Grammar School from about 1951 to 1959. Rebelliously, he used to leave school at lunchtime for the ‘nefarious purpose’ of honing his skills in Jack’s Snooker Hall in the town. To the annoyance of the school authorities, he was notoriously anti-rugby and pro-football and played the guitar in a skiffle band. ‘Lonnie Donegan, that sort of thing,’ he said later. He joined the Young Conservatives at the age of 15. From there, he obtained a place at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he
was president of the Union in 1962 – some two years behind former vice-president of the EC and home secretary Leon Brittan QC. Howard was known at university as a bit of a dandy. While the others went for zip-up jackets, his soft lambswool pullovers and high-sided elastic boots earned him many female admirers. He was a bright star of the Union in the 1960s, a formidable debater with a killer political instinct coupled with fierce ambition. With contemporaries such as Kenneth Clarke, Norman Lamont, John Gummer, Leon Brittan and Norman Fowler, Howard and this group of friends became known as the ‘Cambridge mafia’. Two decades later, they provided much of the upper reaches of the Thatcher and Major cabinets. The gang was close-knit. When Howard made a rare attack on his old friend Lamont, saying that he would ‘cut a ridiculous figure’ if he stood against John Major, Sandra Howard told Lamont’s wife, Rosemary, that ‘it’s just politics; it’s not worth destroying a friendship for’.
After leaving university, Howard pursued a career as a lawyer with an American firm, becoming a barrister in 1964 at the age of 22. He shared a bachelor flat in Harley Street during the ’60s with Norman Lamont. Following a period working on criminal cases, he went on to specialise in industrial-tribunal work then planning and administrative law. He took on tricky planning appeals such as the Sizewell B power station and Okehampton bypass.
At about this time, Michael began to travel to Liverpool more frequently. In 1966 and again in 1970, he stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate in the Edge Hill constituency, a Labour stronghold in the city. During 1970, he was chairman of the Bow Group, again following in the footsteps of Leon Brittan. Between 1970 and 1973, he was a member of several leading Conservative groups promoting links with Europe, and was chairman of the Coningsby Club during 1972 and 1973. He resigned from the Conservative Association committee over its decision to invite Oswald Mosley to speak and later joined the Campaign for Social Democracy, a minor political party in the 1970s formed by an ex-Labour MP.
On 1 August 1975, at the age of 34, he married former model Sandra Paul, also 34, at Winchester Registry Office. She called him ‘an extraordinarily romantic man’ after he gave her a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night after they first met. This was her fourth marriage and she already had one child. Her previous husbands included Robin Douglas-Hume, a nephew of the former Tory prime minister. They went on to have two children together. Howard’s best man at his wedding was Norman Lamont, the former defence minister, and he in turn was best man for Lamont.
By the time he was 40, Howard was rich enough to become an underwriting member at Lloyds, and he was appointed a QC in 1982. In June 1983, he was elected Conservative MP for the safe Tory seat of Folkestone and Hythe. With a foot in the door, he rose through the ranks quickly. In 1984, he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to the solicitor general, and in September 1985 became parliamentary under-secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, with responsibilities for corporate affairs. He stopped being a member of Lloyds and ceased practising as a barrister. In March 1986, he was appointed a recorder, although he couldn’t carry out this function while a minister.
Howard was a member of the Carlton Club and, in 1985, he and his wife were members of the St John’s Wood Liberal Synagogue. During his time as a junior Trade and Industry minister under Margaret Thatcher, Howard became embroiled in his first scandal. He was involved in an official takeover report on a business – but did not declare that one of his relatives was involved. Ten years later, while home secretary, he became embroiled in a related scandal – the refusal to grant millionaire Harrods boss Mohamed Al-Fayed a British passport. Again, the same relative was lurking in the background of the case.
Both of the scandals were related because Howard’s shadowy second cousin, millionaire tycoon Harold Landy, was at the centre of the storm. On both accounts, Howard was accused by his rivals of allowing his ministerial position to be unduly influenced by his cousin. Landy was born and bred in Llanelli and was a powerful figure in the local Jewish community before Howard’s dad arrived from Romania. Landy had signed Howard’s father’s naturalisation papers as sponsor. In return, Howard’s religious father blessed Landy’s wedding. Landy’s brother Maurice married Howard’s parents at the local synagogue.
Landy subsequently moved to London, where he set about building a family business empire. He became a pillar of Jewish society on a national level and sat as a JP in Hertfordshire and Middlesex. In 1974, the Israel-Britain Bank (London), which he controlled, crashed with initial debts of £2.8 million and threatened the survival of his other company, London City and Westcliff Properties (LCW). Later it emerged that the bank, with a parent company in Tel Aviv, had combined deficits of £60 million relating to loans – mainly irrecoverable – made to companies under the control of Landy in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
The senior official receiver’s report blamed his conduct for the collapse of the bank. Landy and four other bank executives were charged with conspiracy to defraud the bank’s customers. In July 1979, Mr Landy was jailed for five years and fined £350,000 for his part in the bank’s collapse. The conviction was quashed three months later on a legal technicality and Landy escaped prison, but his fellow director in Israel was jailed for 24 years.
The key to the scandal which later engulfed Michael Howard was Landy’s friendship with controversial tycoon Tiny Rowland. Before the court case, Rowland’s company Lonrho bought a 29.9 per cent stake in Landy’s property company LCW for £5.73 million. Rowland helped with the appeal and after his conviction was overturned Rowland installed Landy as his deputy in Lonrho.
The collapse of the bank prompted Landy’s niece Francesca Pollard, then 46, to start a campaign against her uncle, claiming he had deprived her of her rightful inheritance from her grandfather, who had founded the bank. She wanted £90 million, which she claimed Landy had siphoned off for himself and his business mates, including Roland. Pollard, who was Michael Howard’s cousin, went on the rampage against Howard too, blackening his name at every turn and publishing libellous pamphlets such as ‘20 things you didn’t know about Michael Howard’.
Ten years later, the scandal would resurface during Howard’s reign at the DTI when Tiny Rowland complained that Harrods had been unfairly taken over by Mohamed Al-Fayed. As a minister, Howard was instrumental in the department’s decision to set up an inquiry into the Fayeds’ takeover in 1987. Howard had been the Trade and Industry minister in 1985 when Lonrho was desperately campaigning for an inquiry to be set up. But to his peril, Howard failed to declare his interest through a link with Landy, a director of a Rowland company, to Lonrho. Fayed did not believe there should be an inquiry and claimed that Howard was being pressed by his cousin Landy to help Lonrho.
Howard, who had helped set up the inquiry, did not disclose to the House of Commons his or his parents’ close family links with the Landys and their close links with Tiny Rowland and Lonrho. He was challenged in the House by Dale Campbell-Savours and five other opposition MPs to explain why he had failed to reveal this link, which ‘provides legitimate cause for public concern’. Howard did not respond. He also refused to comment on whether it was right to answer a series of questions, as Minister for Trade and Industry, about Lonrho and House of Fraser in the House of Commons between September 1985 and 1987.
When Fayed first made allegations about the link, Landy denied the claims, saying of Howard, ‘We may be second cousins but we are not exactly close. We don’t even send each other Christmas cards. I haven’t seen him for two years.’ He stated, ‘I never spoke to him [Mr Howard] once, either by telephone or face to face during the Harrods takeover inquiry. Why should I? Mr Al-Fayed is a very bitter man. If ministers had to declare every distant relative, government would grind to a halt. Michael Howard’s mother is my cousin and I keep in touch with her but that is it.’
In 1994, Howard’s irate cousin Francesca Pollard alleged that Fayed had paid her £2,000 a month to finance her smear campaign. In return, she had sent out hundreds
of malicious letters about Rowland. She later ‘defected’ to the Lonrho camp. At the time, Al-Fayed’s camp denied Pollard’s claims. A House of Fraser spokesman stated that everything she said should be ‘taken with a fairly large sack of Saxa [salt]’. The allegations have been raised in court cases and Pollard repeated them in a sworn statement. But the alleged payments have never been fully investigated.
A further ten years later, while Howard was home secretary, the spectre of Harold Landy appeared again. The scandal was still rumbling on. The Home Office had refused to give Al-Fayed a British passport. Al-Fayed claimed that the home secretary was pursuing a vendetta against him because of a ‘blood debt’ he owed to Landy. Fayed claimed he was being victimised because Landy was the pal of his bitter rival Tiny Rowland, whom he beat to buy Harrods. By that time, Landy had suffered a stroke. But his wife Gertrude, then 82, denied family links could have had any influence on the home secretary’s decision to deny citizenship to Mr Al-Fayed. She said, ‘My husband and Mr Howard have nothing in common. If they met, they would have nothing to say to each other. They have had no contact for years.’
Mohamed Al-Fayed fought on and claimed that Howard had taken a bribe from the Lonrho team during the DTI inquiry. But another inquiry cleared Howard. In a report, Sir Gordon Downey, parliamentary commissioner for standards, dismissed Al-Fayed’s bribe story. He said, ‘Mr Al-Fayed has discovered fragments of evidence which, when pieced together, seem to support the explanation of a bribe,’ and stated, ‘I have no reason to think that Mr Al-Fayed is not telling the truth as he sees it.’ Al-Fayed kept pursuing the story, repeatedly demanding an appeal for a judicial review, which was refused. Eventually, the scandal blew over, but to some degree the damage had already been done.
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