On another occasion, Haase’s gang diluted three kilos of heroin to make six, so that it would make a better find for police and Customs. Darcy said, ‘When the police found it, along with loads of E tablets, plus loads of guns, it gave them better credit.’ Other phoney caches included 150 illegal firearms, 80 brand-new shotguns, Kalashnikov assault weapons, Armalite rifles, Thompson machine guns, Uzi sub-machine guns and 1,500 rounds of ammunition.
Former gangster Paul Ferris also admitted helping to supply between £20,000 and £50,000 worth of weapons to Haase. He said, ‘They were planted in a car in Holyhead ferry terminal in North Wales and a lock-up in Liverpool, and Haase said they were IRA. Customs never found out the truth.’
Suleyman Ergun said, ‘I was told three times about the gun-planting: before, during and after it happened. The first time, Bennett told me while we were in prison that they were going to buy up guns from all over Britain and plant them in Liverpool to make Customs think that they were informants. He told me he’d help get me free using phoney plants.’
Between October 1993 and June 1995, Haase and Bennett led police to 26 gun and drug caches containing 150 firearms and explosives. Phase two was the clincher for the Royal Pardon: the crown jewel of the phoney gun plants. It consisted of no more than a single pistol – but it was the location and the timing of this particular set-up that were so crucial. Haase dreamt up this stroke of genius two-thirds of the way through the gun-planting period, in December 1994. By that time, even after offering up a series of spectacular arms finds, getting out of prison immediately was not on the table. Customs and Excise were playing hardball with their remand prisoners. They were saying that they could get a bit of time off, but a walk out was out of the question. After all, no arrests had been made as a result of Haase’s intelligence. Some wise old officers were also getting a touch suspicious. And at the end of the day, Haase was asking a lot – he was asking them to wipe the slate clean on 50 kilos of gear, and on one of the greatest arrest coups they had ever achieved.
Haase was getting frustrated, racking his brains to discover a way to raise his game. Then he stumbled on it – the Royal Prerogative of Mercy. Haase found out that only this Prerogative, otherwise known as a Royal Pardon, would guarantee instant freedom. He had also found out that this ancient decree dating back to the Norman era was exclusively used in modern times to reward model prisoners who had helped save prison officers’ lives in one way or another. It was a quirk of history, rather than official policy, but that was the lie of the land. Haase thought that if he managed to have one of his moody guns smuggled into a prison with one hand and then conveniently grassed it up with the other, meanwhile gently blaming it on a fellow prisoner, that could be construed by the authorities as having prevented the potential killing of a prison officer, an IRA-style breakout or a hostage situation. In December, Haase arranged for a gun to be smuggled into Strangeways prison, Manchester, the weapon hidden in a sandwich toaster. Haase told his handlers about it. The authorities pounced and Haase got the credit. Bingo! Royal Pardon in the bag. The fact that the gun was wrongly blamed on another prisoner, Thomas Bourke, was of no consideration to Haase.
A report to trial judge David Lynch later praised Haase and Bennett for ‘The prevention of a possible hostage situation. A prisoner convicted of two double murders was planning to escape by use of a gun. A loaded gun was recovered and the prison officer responsible for smuggling the weapon into the prison was identified.’
Haase was over the moon. Everything was going sweetly and if no one rocked the boat, he’d be out in no time. He just had to make sure that between that point and his official sentencing (in August ’95) and the Royal Pardon hearings no one in authority cottoned on to his massive scam. He carried on as normal so as not to ring alarm bells, feeding his handlers info but gently winding down gun-planting. Unbeknown to him, some officials had begun to get suspicious that the finds were too good to be true. Haase then launched into his final phase. Claims by underworld sources suggest that officials and other mysterious figures were bribed to cover his tracks. Haase also wanted to grease the wheels of justice so that they would turn faster, in the hope of getting his Royal Pardon more quickly, before the whole house of cards came crashing down.
The bribes were allegedly paid from both the war chest and other funds on five occasions, split roughly into two groups: those that involved Michael Howard’s relative Simon Bakerman and those that did not.
– Payment one: the insider pay-off. Haase claims that £100,000 was given to an insider connected to the case.
– Payments two and three: the London pay-offs. An alleged £1 million was taken by a drug-money courier called John ‘Paddy’ Scanlon from Haase’s main lieutenant, Chris No-Neck, in Liverpool to a Turkish café in Paddington, west London. Another London bribe of just under £1 million was handed over to representatives of an influential VIP at a hotel in the capital.
– Payments four and five: the alleged Bakerman links. Haase claims he ordered No-Neck to pay the home secretary’s cousin Simon Bakerman £400,000. Another payment of £920,000, with an alleged Bakerman link, was handed over in room 133 of the former Forte Crest Regent’s Park Hotel in north London.
Scanlon claimed he received a call from a man codenamed The Bank Manager (Chris No-Neck), while the drug barons were on remand awaiting trial. He used a kid called The Bank Clerk to move the money between Haase’s gang and himself: ‘I was told it was a million. I got a phone call the morning of the drop telling me I had to be at the café in London by teatime. The drop-off was a café in west London. The man I handed it to was a fella I’d met there before. I just passed it to him and said here you are. I was paid £2,000 for it.’
The £920,000 Forte Crest drop was planned with military precision by a female associate of Haase’s known as The Supervisor and The Enforcer, who acted as consigliore. The Enforcer has revealed that the cash was split into four loads of £250,000. He took one bag, and three couriers took the rest. All four were to pay themselves £20,000 from the cash. In the winter of 1995–96, each courier was told to go to the Forte Crest Regent’s Park Hotel (now a Holiday Inn) at different times and take the bag to room 33 or 133. (The source claims the room contained the number 33, possibly changing from 33 to 133 after a refurbishment.) The Enforcer said, ‘The detailed instructions were given to me by a female who was visiting Haase frequently in prison. The hotel room opposite was being watched by Haase’s men and they were also outside the main entrance. There was a tray of food left outside the room. I was told the people we would be paying the bribe to would come and collect it when all the drops had been done. I was told that Bakerman was the link.’
The second London payment of a similar amount of money was arranged in much the same way. Further corroboration of the bribe allegations has come from Suleyman Ergun. In prison, Ergun later demanded the £1 million he claimed was still owed to him by Haase and Bennett for 50 kilos of heroin. He was told the money was going to be used to get them all out. Ergun explained, ‘Bennett said the money was getting switched to big people that would help us all get out. Bennett was so happy he was clapping about it. So I put the debt on hold.’
12
INFORMERS
From January 1994, while on remand, Haase and Bennett were registered by Customs and Excise as official informers and all information received was recorded on contact sheets. The story of how they ‘turned’ gives a fascinating glimpse into the astonishing behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that underlies many court cases today. For several politicians, lawyers and journalists, the case signified the end of an era, the nail in the coffin for common-sense justice. Gone were the days when Dixon of Dock Green nicked a suspect who was banged to rights, and the investigation, court and jail sentence were just a formality, based on the fact that the criminal was clearly and irrefutably guilty. If there is a point in recent British history when the Daily Mail can look back and say, ‘That was the point at which criminals began to have more power and
more rights than their victims,’ then this is it.
By the 1990s, even prior to the Haase and Bennett Royal Pardon negotiations, in drug-swamped Britain it seemed as though the legal system had lost the plot. Good guys and bad guys were a relic of the past. Now there were only players, refereed by highly paid lawyers. The big dealers were so powerful that they were able to negotiate with the authorities on an almost equal footing. In big cases, the police, Customs and judiciary had lost ground to the villains they were supposed to be punishing. Narco-superstars now led the charge, dictating unconditional terms like terrorists and using double-tricky mob lawyers to wriggle out of charges and to push their will through the corridors of power. Awestruck coppers and Customs investigators, who had watched far too much TV for their own good, kowtowed to their arrogant big-shot captives, talking to them in near reverential terms. What’s more, it all seemed so legal. Streetwise solicitors held court in the plea-bargaining sessions with Customs officers, which were little more than drug-deal-style negotiations. But this time it wasn’t the kilo price of heroin that was bartered, it was how many years the suspect was going to get off his sentence. Dealer goes high; Customs go low. Eventually they meet in the middle and everyone goes away happy. Even if you couldn’t cut a deal before going to court, the system still worked in your favour.
Customs Officer Harry Ferguson, who was part of the team that had shadowed Haase for 18 months, revealed in his excellent book Lima 3:
You went away, did some time on remand and then had your say in court. At the end of the trial, you still had a better than evens chance of getting away with it: your lawyer would get as much of the evidence excluded as possible and there was always the possibility of bribing or intimidating a member of the jury. Even if you were convicted, after doing half your sentence you went straight back to work. In fact, many were able to continue to run their smuggling activities from inside prison.
Today, many people might be tempted to ask why it was ever allowed to happen. Wasn’t it enough that the dealers were clearly winning the war on drugs, flooding the streets with cut-price crack and smack? However, the criminals weren’t the only ones to blame. Both sides shared responsibility for the ruination of the justice system in the early ’90s. On the law-enforcement side, Customs, police and prosecution lawyers simply couldn’t cope with the drugs boom. The new phenomenon had taken them by surprise. Large-scale, American-style undercover operations against traffickers were a relatively new approach to policing organised crime – and Haase’s case was one of the first. They were difficult and costly to run. The evidence-gathering was often accompanied by new plea-bargaining tactics as the power shifted towards the villains. Plea-bargaining is an official system in the US, whereby defendants can negotiate with judges and prosecuting lawyers to reduce sentences using bargaining chips such as guilty pleas, confessions and supergrass information. Plea-bargaining has never played an official part in British courts, but in the ’80s and ’90s much more began to emerge from behind the scenes, especially in big, complicated drugs cases. In the US, such tactics brought successes in the war on drugs. However, emulating the system in the UK by introducing deal-making, often in a piecemeal and unregulated way, led to grave mistakes. The problems may have played a part in many of the big Customs cases which have collapsed in the past ten years. The bad publicity associated with these failures may also have influenced the government’s decision to break up the Customs service into separate investigative and revenue-collecting divisions.
The villains played their part in this new phenomenon, the vast amounts of legal knowledge they had accumulated enabling them to play the system effectively. As soon as Haase was arrested in July ’93, he had a strategy. In his eyes, the senior Customs officer in charge of his case was his equal – and Haase claims he simply summoned him in order to start negotiating the sentence he wanted.
JOHN HAASE: I was arrested in July 1993 in London, taken back to Liverpool and charged, after a day or two of investigations and interrogations, with conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. The solicitor I got at the time was Tony Nelson from Haworth and Gallagher Solicitors in Birkenhead. I was placed on remand, Category A, in Walton prison, Liverpool. Also with me was my co-accused, Paul Bennett, who is my nephew. All my other co-accuseds were in Walton prison. On my first visit from my solicitor, I asked him to get in touch with the head man of the Customs and Excise who was involved in my case. Mr Nelson said he would see what he could do and get back to me.
After about a week or so, Mr Nelson got back to me and said that a visit had been arranged at Walton prison to see this Customs and Excise officer – his name was Paul Cook. I had the impression he was in charge of everything. The visit took place in Walton prison with Mr Nelson and Paul Cook. When Mr Cook arrived, I asked him straight away, ‘What’s the chance of doing a deal?’ He asked me what I meant. I said, ‘Information in return for a reduced sentence.’ He asked me what type of information. I said I could supply all types of information on drugs, guns, anything. He said he would have to go away and talk to people and get back to me. That was the end of the meeting.
Cook came to Walton prison again. Present was Mr Nelson. Someone else was with Paul Cook, who didn’t introduce himself – I didn’t know his name. Paul Cook started discussing the case again, saying, ‘Depends what you can give us information-wise.’
I said, ‘It depends on what’s in it for me, what the deal’s going to be.’
I then mentioned that I would like my nephew, Paul Bennett, brought into this. Cook said no at first. I said I would like him to be brought in because Bennett knew an awful lot more than me information-wise. At the time, I was brand new to the drugs game and Bennett had been in it for a long time. Though I had met them [the Turks] myself, he had been in it longer than me but a lot lower down. The meeting ended with them saying they would have to speak to people to see if Bennett could come along.
Later, at Walton prison, there was another meeting. Tony Nelson, Paul Cook were there and I think Bennett was brought in on that meeting as well. He was told that he could come as long as the information was good. While this had been going on, there were things going on on the outside. Meanwhile, in Liverpool [prison], Cook met with me and Bennett and Nelson and said the deal was depending on what we could give and how much we could give. He said the more the better. I got moved to Manchester prison then. I was only there about a week and then got moved to another prison, an Army prison, on high risk in isolation. After six weeks, I was taken off the high risk and taken to Hull prison, and Bennett was in Hull prison waiting for me.
Cook knew a lot of people. When I was in Hull, he was in the background. Imagine the scenario. Smash! Bang! I’m in London with the [police] guns [on me during the arrest] and I’m saying, ‘Fucking hell! I’m gone here.’ Imagine, I’ve just done 11 years for a robbery. And what am I looking at here, 20-odd years? Imagine how my brain’s working. From day one, I was scheming.
Haase had more chips to bargain with – other things on the table as well as the phoney gun plants he could offer Customs Officer Cook in return for a reduced sentence. First, he could force or persuade the co-defendants in his case to go guilty – saving Customs the cost and hassle of a trial. He offered to get Kaya and Ergun to go guilty. Slyly, he had no intention of telling the Turks that he’d be benefiting from this plea. If the omerta-obsessed Turkish Connection found out Haase was turning them over, they would have killed him in prison. Lower-level people like Eddie Croker would be no problem – Haase could manipulate or simply bully them into submission.
As the terms of the deal got more complicated, so did Haase and Bennett’s deceit. They decided that they would not give statements. They did not want to give any clues to their co-defendants, especially the Turks, that they were grassing. So they talked off the record to Cook, but cleverly invented a way of getting crucial information relating to the case on the record so that it could be used in the up-and-coming trial without being traced back to them. For instance, Haa
se claims that Cook and the prosecution were keen that at least one member of the Liverpool gang confessed in detail to receiving heroin from the Turks. The detail would fill in the gaps on the surveillance logs, making a watertight case. Haase and Bennett simply got Croker to ‘front’ the deal. They instructed Croker to make a statement on their behalf saying that he had been in possession of the heroin and that he meant to sell it.
Throughout the whole of the negotiations with Paul Cook and other Customs officers, Haase covered his back in case they reneged on the terms later and refused to slash his sentence – he secretly tape-recorded the meetings. He arranged for a mini-tape recorder to be smuggled into prison and strapped it to his body before entering the prison visitors’ area.
One of the tapes (which I have obtained from an underworld source) contains a meeting between Haase and Bennett, their solicitor Tony Nelson and Customs Officer Paul Cook. Haase appears to begin by saying that he is trying to get to see Eddie Croker – presumably to influence what he will say in his statement – but is finding it difficult to bypass prison rules to fix a meet or even see him in the gym because it only admits one inmate at a time. Haase seems to be saying that they will have to use another witness if he can’t get Croker to cooperate. But Cook seems to be asking Haase about Croker’s first statement.
HAASE: It depends on another witness. It’s gonna take a lot of hard work to put in to see him [presumably to see Croker]. Put in an application. Got to get over to see him in the morning. Thursday morning, that’s the only time I can see him, but you can only go to the gym one at a time here . . . there’s always some stupid rule.
Druglord Page 16