I wasn’t the only one. Haase and Bennett had been tracked from the Norfolk House Hotel, then Haase was nicked in a car with Bennett somewhere in Croydon, south London. They rammed him from behind and boxed him off with vans. When I got to Birkenhead, Bennett was in one of the cells, but on the board by the desk it said: ‘Ergun. Bennett. Keep them apart.’ That was so we didn’t communicate. He was there. I heard him.
There was more bad news to come. Kaya was nicked in King’s Cross station with a false passport in the name of Garo Sarkizian. He came to England a couple of days after I was nicked. He was in Italy. I couldn’t tell you why he came here. I don’t know if he got the messages but he come over here. I’m with his sister, aren’t I? He probably wanted to get money – see how the thing’s going. He’s phoning my mobile.
Luckily, the Customs didn’t find any evidence in the house. When my old man saw the Customs in my house, they asked him, ‘Where does your son keep the money?’ They think there is millions in the house.
My old man grabs him by the collar and throws him out and says, ‘Do you think I’m going to grass on my son, you dirty bastard!’
Some of the others got nicked at different locations with a matter of minutes between us. The Colonel, Ansen, got nicked at the Ebury Court Hotel. He was a retired colonel. He was the one who was taking cash over to Turkey for us. I was charged straight away after the arrest.
Manuk Ocecki got away at first. But a few months later, on 2 September ’93, he was arrested at Felixstowe coming off a P&O ferry by Customs Officer Shaun Edwards. He was strip-searched and his Fiat was searched. All they found was a black briefcase, in which were two passports, both in the name of Manuk Ocecki.
Then I was on remand for twenty-four months, just gone two years. Three months of it was JR’d [judge’s remand] and then we got sentenced. There was still one outstanding matter: we had given Haase a hundred kilos. Fifty kilos had been seized. We wrote that off and didn’t ask Haase for the money. That’s the unwritten code in drug dealing. But there was another 50 kis still outstanding. Part of that was the 25 or 30 kilos Eddie Croker had put in the blue Previa which Neil Garrett and another kid called Dave were last seen with outside Eddie’s mum’s house. We assumed that Haase had sold the 50 kilos either before he got nicked or while he was on remand with us, with someone on the outside doing it for him. That meant there was another million pound outstanding – owed to us. We needed that money now. When you get nicked, you can’t do anything out on the street, so wages stop coming in.
JOHN HAASE: In July 1993, I was arrested in London. I had fled there from Liverpool because I knew the police were after me. When we were arrested in London, the first man who was arrested was Eddie Croker. There was one big parcel of 100 kilos. Eddie Croker had picked up 50 kilos from this parcel. That was how it started. He’d gone to pick up our parcel just in from Turkey. He was the first man.
Croker should have phoned Bennett on that morning but never did. So we went to the street where Croker lived. It was blocked off by police cars and everything. He lived by the Crown pub. Bennett and me knew the shit had hit the fan, sort of thing, and two hours later Bennett and me were in Wales, where Bennett had a caravan on a site.
We made a lot of phone calls telling everyone we were in Wales and then left Wales and headed to London to meet the Turks to let them know it was ontop for everyone. The main deal was to meet the Turk and warn him. He didn’t know it was ontop and that [the police] had everyone’s cards marked. That was the worst thing . . . the police were all over them as well.
That night, Bennett and me stayed in a hotel in London. The next morning, we left the hotel about eleven o’clock and on the high street two white vans rammed us. A gang of armed police swamped us. They bashed in the windows and suddenly in a London street I was sat there with my arms held high and a load of machine guns at my head. There were machine guns smashed through the side windows of the car and we were arrested. It was the most frightening moment of my life and I thought, ‘This is it, I’m dead.’
Eight of us were arrested in London and Liverpool. After we were arrested, we were taken to Liverpool and charged and put in Walton.
The Liverpool mob had been caught red-handed, with damning evidence including 50 kilos of heroin in the range of 51.5 per cent and 59.4 per cent purity and loads of cash. Though not an offence, when Croker was nicked he also had on him 2 kilos of paracetamol dilutant – known in the trade as ‘bash’. At one of the gang’s HQs in Rocky Lane, Liverpool, £164,715 in cash was found concealed under the bath surround, along with a diamond-studded necklace worth approximately £46,700. On their arrest, Haase had £2,208 and Bennett had £2,465.
All in all, Operation Floor had been a massive success – with just one reservation. All the major players had been caught, except for the biggest man of all: The Vulcan. Before the July importation, The Vulcan had slipped into the UK to make sure that everything was running smoothly and to give the go-ahead for more heroin to be smuggled in. However, he left the country before the shipment arrived, preventing Customs from picking him up during the coordinated raids. But, as experienced officers knew, the game wasn’t over until it was over. More surprises were in store.
PART TWO
THE GUN/POWDER PLOT
11
THE CON
Haase, Bennett, the Turks and the rest of the gang were facing massive sentences. They had been caught bang at it, as a result of the greatest victory British Customs had ever had over an international drugs ring, at a time when the Tory hard right had vowed to destroy trafficking in the War on Drugs. They were going to make an example out of this one for everyone to see, to show everyone how great they were and how well they were doing. The government was going to throw the book at them, no two ways about it, and then throw the key away. No one was getting any breaks; no one was getting anything that wasn’t coming to them. Haase and Co. were going to jail for a very long time. That was a fact.
Only a comic-book miracle was going to save them now. Pessimistic Haase did not believe in miracles. He was devastated. Deep down he knew he couldn’t face another big stretch in the shovel. He also understood, however, as a modern drug dealer schooled in the dark arts of counter-surveillance, plea bargaining and generally playing the system, that there were always options. After all, the law was now a business. That was also a fact.
The best answer to the grave set of circumstances that faced him was the simplest one: turning grass. By ratting on the rest of the gang, including the Turks, and confessing first-hand in detail how their heroin operation worked, there was a good chance that he could buy himself some credit with the authorities and get a portion of his sentence knocked off as a reward. But there were limitations to this strategy. As the second-most-wanted prize behind The Vulcan – and considering Customs might not even need him onside because of the vast amount of evidence they had already accumulated – Haase would be bargaining from a weak position. He would be telling them things they already knew. For this, he would be risking a lot, including certain retribution from the Turks, for an outcome of which there was no guarantee. In addition, Haase knew that Customs almost certainly wouldn’t let him go just like that. He’d have to serve at least some time in jail. As the uncompromising John Haase, though, he was demanding an unconditional instant ‘walk out’, and as far as Customs were concerned that was an outcome which they could not deliver.
The second option was to turn supergrass. The difference between a grass and a supergrass is that grasses only inform on the specific crimes with which they have been charged. Supergrasses blow the lid on everything that they know of, relevant and irrelevant to the case in hand. Haase would have to inform on everything he knew about the wider underworld over and beyond the Turkish Connection, any crimes or criminals he could think of, any organisation, friend or foe who was bang at it and of interest to the law. As a Liverpool Mafia godfather, that was potentially a lot of sensitive, valuable information. He could bring a lot of people down. But
there was a problem: this option didn’t sit well with his underworld code of silence. In addition, it would mean instant death or, at best, life on the witness-protection programme away from his beloved villainy when he ever got out of jail.
The third option was a win–win solution, but one that was almost impossible to achieve: to pretend to be a supergrass. That would involve stunting up a series of phoney crimes, fabricating evidence to make them look real and reporting the incidents to his handlers in a bid to simply convince them that he was an informant. If that could be done while he was in jail on remand, and they fell for it, he might be in a position at the trial to watch the sentence-meter go into reverse. The bigger the bogus crime, the more years would be scrubbed from his time. A good word goes into the trial judge’s ear and bingo, you’re back on the street, a hero to all concerned. This scam had been successfully used by villains to wriggle out of smaller cases in Scotland and London for a long time, but never on such a high-profile case. If it was done right and no one realised what was going on, everyone would be a winner. Haase would get out of jail early. To boot, he would be revered by the underworld for conning the government, his reputation intact for not really grassing anyone up. Customs and Excise and the police would not only get a result on the Turkish Connection, but on a whole raft of other ‘big crimes’, which would make them look good, leading to greater commendations, etc. and hopefully promotions and pay-rises for all concerned. It’s a no-brainer.
There was only one problem: pulling it off. The phoney crimes would have to be big and spectacular – drugs, guns, murders, terrorist attacks, underworld hits, etc. – and have to look real. The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed, to paraphrase Hitler. It would take another devious and practised liar, a criminal mastermind, no less, to organise such an audacious and preposterous scheme. Haase was certainly up to the job – even though his hands were tied to some extent, being behind bars in Manchester’s Strangeways prison. That meant he would need a team on the outside to follow his orders to the letter, good communications with them and a war chest full of money to ensure that his Hollywood-style special effects were successfully put into action. The con would have to be good enough to conjure up an illusion of reality to a high degree, so much so that it would deceive the trained observers of the law.
Haase would also have to rely on the gullibility of his handlers, to an extent. How much would they want to believe it? How hungry were they for success? How desperate were they to repeat their recent achievements in smashing his gang? How much did they want to believe that they were dealing with a top villain? How much did they want to believe that he was capable of handing them top cases on a plate? Haase figured they would go for it. He knew the psychology. In general, he believed that certain middle-ranking investigators in Customs and the police had the same motivations as the villains they chased for a living. They were ambitious. They had big egos. They were impressed by reputations. At the end of the day, they were still boys at heart – in it for the adventure, fearful of the mundane and mediocre. They were like desperate reporters chasing a story – success at all costs. They sacrificed a lot in pursuit of the villains they hunted – family time, seeing their kids, weekends, wives, marriages, their well-being. It was an unhealthy, unbalanced lifestyle, and one that could be exploited by someone as cunning as Haase, who was seemingly offering short cuts to success. Haase knew that they would be pleased with themselves for netting as big a fish as him. He also knew that they would try to become his mate. Law-enforcement officers could be as guilty as villains in respecting the gangland hierarchies, in revering the big players. If he started talking, it was the icing on the cake – it would blow their minds for sure. They would put the double coup down to themselves, down to their own skill. That’s just the way they were. Ego would prohibit them from suspecting that Haase was pulling a fast one.
A possible theory is that Haase chose option three and that the con was put into action with immediate effect. It makes sense that he hatched the plan within a few days of being arrested. His main worry would have been how he was going to fund the campaign, but that could be instantly sorted. His gang on the outside was still in possession of 50 kilos of heroin from the 100-kilo parcel that the Turks had given to him. Some of this was the 25–30-kilo load that Eddie Croker had been observed bashing by Customs officers the week before he was arrested. Astonishingly, this 50 kilos had slipped the Customs net during the arrest. As Haase’s stand-in boss in his forced absence, Chris No-Neck had got it and was awaiting instructions from Haase on what to do with it. Haase knew he could sell it to fund his war chest.
The next problem would be choosing the right solicitor. Haase and Bennett’s initial tactic seemed to be finding a brief who would actively participate in the scam – a respectable professional to front the con. The downside would mean they would have to confide their plot to the lawyer – a risky business – but the upside, if it paid off, would be that they would benefit from the injection of expert and specialised legal knowledge. It seems that they looked around for a bent lawyer to bring on board for the big win, and it didn’t take long to pinpoint a possible conspirator. Colourful Kevin Dooley was Liverpool’s number one mob lawyer. He was a local lad made good, able to talk to his shadowy clientele in a language they understood. The larger-than-life character was rumoured to have ‘washed’ millions of pounds of Curtis Warren’s drug money – a suspicion which hung over him until he was struck off many years later and until his subsequent death. Dooley was so close to the city’s top gangsters he was dubbed ‘Alfonso’ – a reference to his flashy suits, blingy jewellery and bullish manner. Like so many people who love hanging around the underworld, Dooley started to behave like the gangsters he represented, throwing his weight around, issuing ultimatums and giving the impression that he was untouchable. Some of his big clients loved it, including Premiership football players, big businesses and international terrorists. Other clients did not know about his shadowy links, including many of Liverpool Football Club’s top players such as Robbie Fowler, and even Colonel Qaddafi’s son. Business boomed, but Dooley refused to move his 50-strong staff from his dingy offices in Kirkby. The down-to-earth HQ gave him even more street credibility.
According to Dooley, Bennett made contact with him with a view to retaining his services. Though Dooley was wide, he wasn’t stupid. As soon as the con was explained to him, he refused to have anything to do with it. The gun-planting scheme was a preposterous perversion of the course of justice with a one-in-a-hundred chance of working. He knocked it back, without further ado. To curry favour with the Merseyside Police, Dooley later claimed that he tipped off his senior contacts about Haase and Bennett’s devious intentions. Meanwhile, the pair were furious that they had been forced to show their hand to Dooley without benefit. Later, Dooley claimed that they swore revenge, to get him back for not going along with their plan. No one said ‘no’ to John Haase. Dooley said that, as a result of his refusal to cooperate, Haase and Bennett set out to destroy him, constantly trying to ruin his reputation in a smear campaign.
The pair decided to be more careful about what they told the next lawyer. They decided to choose someone straight and keep him in the dark. Solicitor Tony Nelson was a rising star on the criminal-law circuit. He was introduced to Haase by shaven-headed Liverpool hard-man The Enforcer, a security consultant who ran most of the nightclub doors in the city. This time, Haase and Bennett were more discreet. They did not tell the lawyer about their intention to stunt up phoney crimes in which they had a guiding hand. They simply told him that they wanted him to defend them against the drugs charges and they would like to cut a deal with Customs. On top of his normal brief, would he act as a conduit for their supergrass information, passing it on from them to Customs? According to senior police sources, it is unusual for a solicitor to act as a middleman between a supergrass and the authorities. But Nelson agreed and, unbeknown to him, it was time for Haase to put his plan into action.
Ove
r the next 18 months on remand, Haase pulled off his massive con – mixed in with a heavy dose of alleged cash bribes – and got out of prison.
CHRONOLOGY
July 1993 – Haase and Bennett arrested in London and put on remand in prison.
October 1993 – mass gun-planting begins.
December 1994 – key gun planted at Strangeways – clincher for Royal Pardon.
February 1995 – Haase and Bennett plead guilty to heroin distribution to avoid an open court and jury.
June 1995 – mass gun-planting ends.
August 1995 – after the trial of other defendants, Haase and Bennett are sentenced to 18 years each.
Autumn 1995 – alleged bribery begins and continues into 1996 in order to cover up suspicions over gun-planting.
June 1996 – Royal Pardons granted to Haase and Bennett by Michael Howard.
July 1996 – both men are released.
The con comprised three phases. Firstly, Haase instructed his gang on the outside to buy hundreds of guns from the underworld. Stacks of deactivated weapons were sourced from official depots and rearmed. Plastic explosives were purchased from mercenaries. Haase’s men on the outside, led by Chris No-Neck, then planted the guns in safehouses and abandoned cars. The key element in this phase was that Haase was given the glory of telling his Customs handlers the location of the specially made caches – obviously implying that they were owned by other gangsters who were about to use them in killings or terrorist outrages. He pretended they were IRA arms dumps and weapons for use by contract killers.
Convicted heroin dealer Ken Darcy was one of the foot-soldiers paid by Haase’s gang to buy and plant Semtex plastic explosive. ‘I got paid five grand for just two kilos of Semtex,’ said Darcy. ‘It was planted in a flat in Liverpool and later found by Customs or police.’
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