Druglord

by Graham Johnson

  They told me who planted them for No-Neck. It was a lad who was on remand with us but he got out. He was all right. He did a few plants for them.

  No-Neck did everything. Years later, he told me that he did the planting – that’s when I fell out with him. Then Eddie Croker told me about five kilos of Semtex they had planted. Eddie also told me that they were planting heroin. Haase had promised Eddie that he would get out as well. Eddie knew it was bull but he kept quiet because he was shit scared of Haase.

  In Full Sutton, Ben was bouncing around the wings like a kid. I was getting packets and packets of trips. He was taking them and bouncing around the wings like a kid.

  We knew John would fuck us over, so me and Kaya decided to do our own plants. But instead of guns, we were going to plant massive stashes of heroin in holes in a forest and then grass them up. Ten or twenty kilos at a time. But we called it off because we knew that because they had done the guns, it just wouldn’t work. We didn’t have a relationship with Customs.

  Over a three-month period between February and May 1994, seven huge arms caches were ‘discovered’ by police. On 4 February, a stash included a Kalashnikov, an Uzi and seven Czech machine guns. One haul unearthed on Monday, 14 February 1994 – the biggest ever on Merseyside – included 80 brand-new Italian Armi Technique 12-bore shotguns worth £30,000 retail still in their boxes. The shotguns were the parcel bought by No-Neck with the help of James Turner and were stashed in a red Daihatsu in Bootle. They had been part of a consignment of 89 that had been stolen from a lorry while the driver was asleep near Oxford six days earlier. Another stash gave up ten sub-machine guns, five silencers, three magazines and two hundred and twenty-nine rounds of ammunition. The first find, in February, yielded thirteen automatic weapons. On 31 March, buried wartime rifles were dug up in Formby. Four discoveries in April turned up pistols and a machine gun in Fazakerley, AK-47s in West Derby, a Czech pistol in Stanley Park and, among other weapons, an elephant gun in Ellesmere Port. In June, six Uzis were recovered.

  The finds were sold to the public as a major coup in the fight against organised crime. Confidently, investigating officers immediately ruled out a terrorist link and said the guns were definitely heading for the criminal underworld. It was just the success that Merseyside Police had desperately been looking for. The city was reeling from a recent spate of gangland shootings. The success of Curtis Warren’s drug operation was causing friction between those favoured distributors who were growing rich on his business and those gangsters who were being kept out of the loop. The rivalry would eventually lead to the shooting of David Ungi on 1 May 1995, though there was no evidence to suggest that he was involved in drug dealing.

  Big photo-calls were staged by the police in which serious-looking officers posed with the staggering array of weapons they had taken off the streets. The press conferences were reminiscent of the RUC displaying captured IRA weapons in Northern Ireland. It was unprecedented on the mainland. Experts, like celebrity cop John Stalker, were wheeled in to ominously explain how Merseyside had become a ‘staging post for gun-runners’, but that the good news was the police were getting on top of it. A police spokesman said, ‘The information is proving spot on. We are trying to improve intelligence – this shows it is working.’

  14

  THE STRANGEWAYS GUN PLANT

  Even though the gun-planting was going spectacularly well, instant freedom wasn’t guaranteed, because of bureaucracy. Customs couldn’t free a prisoner like John Haase just like that – no matter how valuable and cooperative he was apparently being with them. They were also playing hardball. Suspicious investigators were now asking for bodies to tag on to Haase’s hoax crimes. They wanted faces and names, arrests and convictions, and were pushing their informant to the limit.

  But Haase wasn’t playing. He was desperate to find a way of getting out immediately. He then, quite incredibly, stumbled on the idea of getting a Royal Pardon. Only the home secretary has the right to exercise this little-used legal instrument in modern times, and it has been granted only five times since 1996. The Royal Prerogative is the only opportunity outside the appeal system, government guidelines and judges’ rules by which criminals can be freed from prison. No official procedure exists to win a pardon – each applicant is assessed on a largely ad hoc case-by-case basis. In fact, Royal Pardons are so rare that most lawyers don’t even know how to get one. Haase did, though, so he allegedly set about dreaming up a hoax crime that he could stunt up in prison while on remand that would give the impression that he was saving prison officers’ lives – the key factor in getting a pardon. A tall order, but time was running out. The outlandish scheme begged the question – just how did a drug dealer know exactly which boxes to tick to get a Royal Pardon? The answer is that he was probably told by a corrupt mob lawyer he knew nicknamed The Devil. The Devil got his nickname because of his thoroughly disgraceful and underhand dealings with gangsters, combined with an unimaginable disregard for justice. The Devil had nothing to do with Haase’s official representative, Tony Nelson, but he was acting as unofficial consigliore on the gun-planting scheme, offering tips on how to get maximum benefit and how to present it to Customs. His crookedness was so thoroughly ingrained that The Devil often scared his gangster clients.

  Two-thirds of the way through Haase’s gun-planting operation, in the winter of 1994, Haase began plotting the phoney plant that would get that elusive Royal Pardon in the bag. A gun needed to be smuggled into the recently privatised Strangeways prison and planted inside to make it look like a crazed inmate was planning a shoot-’em-up, IRA-style breakout. Or, failing that, other types of weapons could be used to make it look like a riot was in the offing in which officers would be attacked and taken hostage. Or, more conspiratorially, some kind of poison could be planted to make it look like rogue prisoners were planning to lace the guards’ tea urn with cyanide. Haase tried all three. Such a ruse would not only fulfil the conditions of a Royal Pardon, but if the hoax crime could be pinned on a defenceless, disreputable prisoner, no matter how loosely, it would also provide his Customs handlers with a body. Successfully duping Customs into arresting and trying a suspect would make Haase’s gun plants look at least half-real.

  As usual, the methodical mastermind that was Haase did a dummy run to see how the practicalities would work. He decided to persuade a fellow prisoner to get caught with a bag of heroin in jail in much the same way as Billy the Hamster had agreed to get caught with a toolbox full of guns in his house. Possession of a bag of heroin was a lesser offence but one which would at least show how the prison authorities dealt with plants – whether they were as foolable as the police and Customs, and whether Haase would get the credit under this type of regime. Never one to miss an opportunity, Haase could also use this relatively harmless plant to ‘throw in’ (give Customs) a body to help his cause to boot. But the plan went disastrously wrong when the inmate ‘double-bubbled’ Haase with a heavy dose of prison cunning – he doubled-crossed him by keeping the heroin himself so there was nothing for the prison warders to find.

  SULEYMAN ERGUN: I didn’t hear about the Strangeways gun plant until after it happened. But it wasn’t the first time Haase had tried to moody up plants in there – the gun was just the first one that worked. Firstly, he tried to get some heroin smuggled in so he could inform on a pre-arranged plant in a radio, which was owned by a con I knew who had agreed to take the rap. This Welsh fella agreed to get caught with Haase’s heroin for £1,000 so Haase would get the credit. But in the end the geezer backed down and had John over as well. He took delivery of the radio with the gear in it, but just before Haase ‘informed’ on him, he took the heroin out of the radio. He removed the heroin just before the screws raided his cell. So the screws found fuck all. The Welsh fella got all the gear, fucked Haase off and Haase was made to feel foolish.

  Even though the dummy run had failed, Haase was undeterred. He begged his pal The Enforcer, a loyal ally on the outside, to get a gun and some cyanide smu
ggled into Strangeways. He was also trying to persuade The Enforcer to pretend to be an informant, to butter up Customs Officer Paul Cook with false promises of intelligence. By this time, the gang had nicknamed Cook Eliot Ness, after the real-life Prohibitionera gang-buster made famous in the film The Untouchables. The movie remake was popular at the time. The name was partly to make fun of Cook’s image as a big-time lawman, partly because he was seen as untouchable in the close-knit team he worked in – the gangsters were impressed by his power to do deals – and partly because he was untouchable under the witness-protection programme after Haase’s bogus assassination threat.

  THE ENFORCER: Haase was arrested in July 1993. I still saw him and visited him at Manchester and Hull prison and elsewhere, having been passed [background-checked] by the police. On one occasion, he said that he needed to bring a gun up to Manchester. I asked why. He replied, ‘Never mind. You want me to get out, don’t you?’ I asked for time to think. His girlfriend was with me but was getting refreshments when he asked this.

  Some time later, I went for dinner with a lawyer Haase knew [The Devil] and he asked if I was doing that favour for John. I said, ‘What favour?’

  He said, ‘He wants you to take a gun up to Manchester.’

  I told him to fuck off.

  Prior to this, I had been at court in Liverpool and this lawyer had said, ‘Guess who is here? Eliot.’

  It turned out that this was Paul Cook from Customs and Excise. The lawyer said he would take me to see him, but when I did I was to say to him, ‘Don’t be worrying, Mr Cook. Anything you want off me, John or any of his friends, you’ll get much more than you’ve already got.’ I do not remember whether guns were being found by then.

  The next time I saw John after the gun incident, he asked me to get some cyanide, suggesting that [handwriting unclear] I had no involvement in guns or anything else.

  When The Enforcer refused to get Haase a gun or cyanide, Haase ordered other members of his gang in Liverpool to put a gun on standby until a method was found to smuggle it into the prison. A serving officer in Merseyside Police has stated that the gun was taken in on 14 November 1994, but this is probably the date on which Haase launched his secret operation. The Scousers bought a sandwich toaster and hid the gun inside, resealing the box carefully and wrapping it in brown paper.

  Then Haase allegedly turned to another remand prisoner, Kenny Price (not his real name), to help him. Kenny was on remand accused of threatening to shoot a policeman and was part of a gang in Moss Side run by a notorious underworld family. The family’s godfather and a lower-ranking member were also in the prison at the same time. Through this family, Kenny had made contact with a bent auxiliary prison officer called Colin Baxter (not his real name), who worked in Strangeways. The naive officer, who had only worked at the prison for eight months and had very little training, agreed to smuggle in booze for Kenny. Then he started to smuggle in sealed parcels, not knowing that they contained drugs and mobile phones. For this, he was paid paltry sums, often between £50 and £80 a time, and promised the gift of a second-hand car as a Christmas bonus, which was coming up fast.

  This was the system that Haase allegedly used to smuggle in a gun to Strangeways prison. In mid-December, Haase asked Kenny if he would get a sandwich toaster that had been bought for him by a friend in Liverpool smuggled inside. Kenny told his contact on the outside, the Moss Side gang-boss, to expect a parcel to be delivered to them by a Scouser at the Brown Bull pub. The Moss Side gang-boss received the sandwich toaster wrapped up in brown paper but did not open it. The toaster was then given to a younger member of the crew called The Kid, who later met the bent warder. The Kid gave the bent warder the parcel and told him that it was for Kenny. In the same drop, the warder was also given a mobile phone to smuggle in for another prisoner. Little did the Moss Side gang-boss and The Kid know that Haase had secretly arranged for a gun and nine bullets to be hidden inside the sandwich toaster.

  MOSS SIDE GANG-BOSS: Basically how it started, Kenny wanted a bit of booze taking in. We dropped a few bottles off here, a few bottles there. The next thing is, a parcel has to be dropped off [to Kenny inside Strangeways]. It’s supposed to be a Scouse kid that dropped it off for us. We were told that there was a sandwich toaster in it but it was sealed. Then it was delivered to The Kid. But obviously we don’t want to be meeting anybody, seeing anything. There’s only a sandwich toaster in it, so we said to The Kid, ‘Don’t worry about it; no problem.’ So then it gets dropped off to the prison warder. When the prison warder picks it up, does all the routine drops, The Kid gives him his £50 or £80, whatever. We don’t hear nothing about it, don’t know nothing about what’s gone on. Then all of a sudden there is a gun scare. The top and bottom of it is we did not know anything about any guns.

  On Friday, 25 November 1994, Colin took the packages into Strangeways prison. He knocked off his shift at 3.45 p.m. but he told his supervisor that he was going to the gym. He was carrying a sports bag. He then diverted to A wing, using a cover story that he had to sort out some canteen queries. Fifteen minutes later, he was spotted by a colleague acting suspiciously near a toilet on A wing over the course of the next 45 minutes and reported to his superiors. When quizzed by his boss, Principal Officer David Halliwell, three days later on Monday, 28 November 1994, Baxter stuck to his story that he had gone to A wing to sort out canteen queries. Halliwell was sceptical but had to let him go for the time being. The heat was temporarily off.

  Meanwhile, Kenny told Haase that the parcel had safely been smuggled into A wing. Haase arranged for the gun then to be removed from the sandwich toaster and stashed in a secret hiding place in the small prisoners’ toilet recessed into the wall on the landing. Inside the WC, there was a stainless-steel cupboard which housed pipes under a washbasin. The gun was wrapped in a black bin bag and put in there. The gun was a Czech-made, .25-calibre self-loading pistol. The magazine inside it contained eight live rounds. In the bag, there was another bullet, but it did not fit the gun.

  Haase phoned his handler Paul Cook and told him that a gun had been smuggled into Strangeways and was being stored somewhere on A wing. He explained how a prison officer had brought the weapon into the prison and gave details of his outside contact and a mobile telephone number for this contact (who was not convicted). To give the episode greater credence, Haase put some probably carefully calculated spin on it. He intimated that the gun had been smuggled in for a fellow remand prisoner called Thomas Bourke, who was on trial for the horrific murder of two MOT inspectors.

  PHIL CONNELLY: Cook told me that he had received a telephone call from Haase in Strangeways at 1200 hours on Thursday, 1 December. (Cook made reference to the logs and I am aware that the logs of that telephone call exist today.) Cook then said that he passed this information to a security officer in Strangeways with whom he had become friendly whilst visiting Haase and Bennett. Cook then said he was aware that the security officer contacted Greater Manchester Police. Cook said that Haase called him and the conversation was quite short, in terms of, ‘There’s a bloke on A wing for the MOT murders. A prison officer has smuggled a gun in for him.’ And Haase described the prison officer. Cook confirmed that he had not ever been interviewed by the police in relation to this.

  Garage owner Thomas Bourke, who made a fortune selling cut-price exhausts and was now on remand in Strangeways, allegedly killed the two MOT inspectors because they were probing his business. The civil servants had banned Bourke from issuing MOTs at one of his four garages in south Manchester. Family men Simon Bruno, 28, and Alan Singleton, 56, were shot dead at one of Bourke’s garages in Stockport on 22 November 1993. It was alleged that self-made Bourke donned a grotesque Halloween mask and black overalls before bursting into his own office and shooting the men at point-blank range with a shotgun. Bourke then allegedly went for a cup of tea with his strict-Catholic mother. But three of his employees made damning statements against him: one saying that he saw Bourke taking off the mask after the killing, anoth
er saying that he had witnessed Bourke making a confession and burning his overalls, and a third saying that he had seen Bourke lying in wait.

  Whatever the truth, one year after the murder, Bourke was halfway through his trial at Manchester Crown Court and things seemed to be looking up for him – issues of mistaken identity were causing observers to predict that there was a better-than-evens chance of a not guilty. The trial had been plagued by problems and stopped twice already – once because two members of the jury knew the wife of one of the victims and once because of a serious problem with the police statements. Now there were issues over mistaken identity. But however optimistic Bourke was, unknown to him, while he was busy in court beating the case, back at Strangeways Haase was pinning the gun on him and saying that he had it smuggled into the prison in a desperate bid to break out. The rumour was that Bourke was a crazed gun freak who was going to take prison officers hostage if he was found guilty and use them to escape.

  Three days after quizzing Colin, on Thursday, 1 December 1994, Principal Officer Halliwell found out the real reason why Colin had been hanging around A wing. Halliwell was tipped off about the gun by an ‘outside source’, either Customs directly or by Manchester Police, acting on behalf of Cook. Later, Halliwell went direct to a source inside the prison. He mistakenly took the informant’s word that the gun was destined for Bourke, despite there being no evidence of a link. Meanwhile, the gun find (the first for many years) was about to explode all over the papers, making it likely that Haase and Bennett would be exposed as the informants. Information was being leaked by a fellow prisoner. Cons’ suspicions fell on Haase, but he had to front it out so no one found out that he was the real bad guy. To make sure the authorities looked the other way, the pair filled out a questionnaire relating to the events for Greater Manchester Police, who were the investigating body.