Later, when the heroin-stuffed blue Previa was moved, surveillance officers lost the car as it turned right at a busy junction. This split-second mistake on a shabby, anonymous terraced street in backwater Liverpool allowed the heroin to fall back into Haase’s hands – and he used it to create one of the biggest judicial scandals in recent legal history.
John Haase would later accuse Chris No-Neck of shaving off 17 kilos of his consignment. No-Neck blamed it on Neil Garrett, denouncing him as a grass. Suspicions were raised after Neil was cleared of all charges, even though he featured heavily in Customs’ evidence – one time wearing compromising surgical gloves. Rumours abounded that he had secretly given evidence. Everyone was blaming each other because, at the end of the day, it was The Vulcan’s gear they had ‘shadied’.
CHRIS NO-NECK: I’ve never ever touched anything that didn’t belong to me. Respect. I didn’t have a clue even where it [the heroin] was. They had me digging. I wish I had stolen it now because of what they did for me. But I had integrity. I had respect.
Neil Garrett was a grass. How can a man come out of a house with rubber gloves on, a bag of gear and not get nicked? Months later, he’s driving around in a brand new Jag and a blue metallic Mercedes. Do I need to say anything more? That’s where the missing gear went.
I knew Garrett was a grass. He blew Haase up. I know this because get this: one day I was driving down Queen’s Drive with Haase just after he got out of prison. Neil Garrett pulls up, says to Haase, ‘You want to see me?’ Meaning, ‘Do you think I’m a grass?’
Haase goes, ‘No.’
That’s when I knew that the Customs had said to Haase, ‘You have got to leave Garrett alone because he is part of our operations.’ That’s when I fucking knew.
I’d like to meet The Vulcan and say to him, ‘Look into my eyes. I didn’t take your gear. You can’t take that away from me.’ He might scrub me. But there’s nothing in my closet but my clobber. Haase and Ben are making me out to be a patsy. They are going to blame the most innocent person out of it all. They know I don’t walk around with anyone. I may get plugged but I’m not going to walk away. My position is I’ve been on my own for a long time.
SULEYMAN ERGUN: I asked John Haase on remand where the 17 kilos was and the other 33 kilos. He just said, ‘Ask Garrett where it is.’ Neil Garrett took the 17 and cut it to pieces. Neil Garrett benefited. But the whole 50 ki is down to Haase and Ben. When The Vulcan gets out of prison, he will put it down to them. He will want revenge. That will, I’m afraid, be the end of the story.
It didn’t matter who had the heroin or money. A notorious gang of tax men known as The Hyenas, because they attacked drug dealers like a pack of animals, laughing hysterically while they tortured them, were determined to track it down and steal it. The leader of the tax-man gang was the scarily violent George Bromley. Another was called Flannagan and another possibly Tommy. The gang would never have taken liberties while Haase was on the outside – but it was a different story when he was facing a long stretch.
The tax men targeted three of Haase’s men who they thought had the money: Chris No-Neck, Neil Garrett and Haase’s money-washer The Estate Agent. The Estate Agent had invested much of Haase’s drug profits in property. The tax men were convinced that Haase trusted him enough to give him the money. The tax men also zeroed in on Haase’s and Bennett’s girlfriends and families.
Their plan was simple: torture the targets until they gave up the money or drugs and threaten to kidnap Bennett’s baby child. The tax men broke into Neil Garrett’s house and pressed his back with a red-hot electric iron while his wife and children looked on. They tried to kidnap No-Neck at his door posing as policemen.
CHRIS NO-NECK: It was hard, lad. A fucking nightmare. People tried to wrap me up. Three fellas came to me. They thought I had Haase and Ben’s money. I knew who they were when they came, right. Me door was ajar. They come in: ‘CID, blah, blah, blah.’ They tried to get me in the living room. Trying to knock me out. They had a telly aerial round me neck trying to stun me and knock me out. I thought, ‘The only way to get out of this is to get out towards that hallway.’ So what they done was try to put a trap over me head. They had a car over the road with a boot open, right. They were gonna try and put me in it. Three heavy lads, right. So I let them think I was going with them, right. So when I comes out me front door, there’s this brick wall, right. Got two of them in a headlock and back-flipped. Done all me ribs in. Was in ossie [hospital] for six days. I screamed like fuck and they shit themselves. That attracted the neighbours. They stunk of ale. Fucking cowards. Bit of Dutch courage to come and take me on.
I went in to see Ben, had a little shiner, few marks and that. You know what: Haase and Ben didn’t even want to deal with it. One of those that did it went to prison but he’s out now. I’ll walk into him one day, right. Eight o’clock in the morning. When they’ve just woken up and that, right.
Chris No-Neck planned the gun-planting operation down to the last detail so as not to leave any clues. The priority was to find criminals to stash the guns who wouldn’t talk about it to anyone – so No-Neck only hired trusted, long-standing partners-in-crime. However, even within the inner circle, betrayal was never far away, criminals being criminals. One of the main threats to No-Neck came from the money-launderer The Estate Agent. The Estate Agent had been appointed by Haase and Bennett to invest their heroin profits in property before their arrest. He also owned and managed property bought with drugs money for Chris No-Neck.
Following Haase and Bennett’s arrest, The Estate Agent planned to rip Haase, Bennett and No-Neck off by selling all of their property and keeping the money. According to underworld sources, he knew that No-Neck was the only one who stood in his way, because he was not in prison, so he plotted to have No-Neck killed. The alleged hit-man was called John.
The Estate Agent tried to get No-Neck to employ John as a gun-planter to give the hit-man an opportunity to get close to his target.
CHRIS NO-NECK: When I took that job on [of gun-planting], I was hiring and firing [the criminals who did the plants] so I knew the history of everyone we used – where they come from. The rule was, ‘If I don’t know you, tara!’
But The Estate Agent tried to set me up. The Estate Agent tried to get me ironed [assassinated]. I didn’t trust him but he had some of Haase’s dough [tied up in property]. He introduced me to a fella called John with a view to helping us, getting the guns and that. This John was a super-duper hard-case. A fucking man-eater. Fucking horrible, he was. I met this John in Stanley Park car park with The Estate Agent. The Estate Agent starts going on about all these things and all that [secret things which he should not have discussed in front of John]. I said to The Estate Agent immediately, ‘No disrespect, mate. I know who you are and where you’re coming from. But I don’t know you [John]. And I don’t talk shop out of school.’ So I turned to John, shook his hand and said, ‘Me and you are finished.’
Now, Ben couldn’t see that The Estate Agent was not to be trusted. He wanted to work with The Estate Agent. So I had to put my feeling aside and get on with it. But all’s that The Estate Agent wanted to do was pick my brains. He knew that we as a firm were already up there [a top criminal organisation] so he wanted our secrets. He was trying to get all the info off me. He was saying, ‘Did you do that?’
I said, ‘I’m telling you fuck all, mate. Between you and me, I don’t like you. You’ve never done a fucking tap. You have never robbed a handbag. And you expect me to tell you everything I know? You can fuck off!’
So eventually I goes up to see Ben [in prison], right. Ben goes, ‘You’re out of order. You should have told John this and that.’
I said, ‘I’m your mate, not his. You want to play with him, you see how far you get.’
In the end, I was right. He stole all of my property [and according to underworld sources he fled to the US with £1 million of Haase and Bennett’s money as well]. The bottom line was that I had to be on my guard all the time d
uring the gun-planting. I had to meet fellas all the time and weigh them up like a shrink, mate. I had to analyse fellas. I was meeting people and I was thinking all the time whether I could trust them. I would let them talk to me and I could decipher whether that fella was kosher or a complete waste of time. All that crap with The Estate Agent and the tax men was going on while we were doing the planting.
JOHN HAASE: Just after we got nicked, three fellas came to No-Neck for tax purposes. Never got him, though. Fought for his life. He had a right fight, didn’t he? Ended up in hospital. He ended up with broken ribs. It was in the Echo and everything. One of the tax men is dead now, little shit.
Haase referred to the tax men’s attacks in his taped plea-bargaining session with Bennett, Paul Cook and Tony Nelson. They talk about an attack on a victim in their gang, possibly Neil Garrett or The Estate Agent. At one point, Haase is even blamed for being behind the attacks to get revenge on Neil Garrett and The Estate Agent for dipping into his war chest.
JH [to TN]: News on anything? Any of our friends? The victim or anything?
PB: [The victim is in hospital] with iron marks all over him.
TN [defending Haase and Bennett to Cook]: Nothing to do with us . . . nothing at all to do with us . . .
PB: They went round his house and went for his kids.
JH: They’re gonna say I asked him [the tax men to do it].
TN: No.
JH: Are they the same people who threatened quite a lot of people? [To Bennett] You?
PB: My kids . . . that’s what they said . . .
TN: That’s disturbing . . .
PB: That’s what the victim said. He’s in hospital . . .
PC: With burn marks . . .?
JH: Someone said they’d seen him in the hospital and he’s got iron marks all up his back, over his private parts.
PC: When the victim came to see you, he said you did it. [You were behind the attacks.]
JH: No!
PB: No! Anything else?
PC or TN: Kidnapping on Saturday night. The victim’s flat’s burnt . . .
JH: It may transpire that the victim’s wife knew more. They got to the victim’s wife. They never got the target himself.
PB: They wanted money and stuff. The men said, ‘We know you’ve got money in your purse. You lying fuckers!’
PB: One of our girlfriends, at three o’clock in the morning, she gets a phone call – half an hour before the attack happened – get out the house!
JH: One person had been branded [with a red-hot iron], and another basically been threatened.
PC: Was it [the threat] genuine?
JH: Don’t know.
PB: We haven’t seen the burn marks . . .
PB: All the time he’s in hospital, he’s got bruises, cuts, this, that and the other, hands all bruised, burns all over. The attackers were smoking cigars, everything.
JH: They are trying to do me.
The tax men never managed to get the money. But sources suggest that Haase later got revenge on most of the gang – either directly or by proxy. Bromley was assassinated, possibly on the orders of Curtis Warren’s boss, The Banker, over a feud with his son. Ironically, Paul Bennett would draw cold comfort from this – the triggerman employed to do the job was his own white-supremacist assassin, linked to six killings. Flannagan was later attacked by Haase and No-Neck. Haase allegedly cut his throat. Another villain called Tommy, who had plotted to kidnap No-Neck’s wife in a bid to get drug money, possibly the war-chest cash, was shot four times in the arm and now suffers complete loss of feeling there.
16
THE TRIAL AND THE REPORT
On 10 February 1995, as one of the conditions of the secret deal with Customs, John Haase and Paul Bennett pleaded guilty at Liverpool Crown Court to conspiracy to supply heroin between 17 December 1992 and 28 July 1993. It was a good decision. Customs had agreed that a second, more serious charge of importing would not be brought against them as their part of the bargain. Pleading guilty was common sense, as the importation evidence against them was overwhelming. It resulted from journeys taken by Haase’s gang to Paris to collect heroin from the Turks for importation back to the UK. There was never a chance in hell of beating the case – hence the motivation to do a deal. Pleading guilty also meant they did not have to stand trial, preventing close scrutiny of their shady bargains.
Smuggling supremo Yilmaz Kaya was in the same boat, up the same treacherous creek, but unfortunately he did not have the Customs and Excise-issue paddle that had been so conveniently supplied to Haase and Bennett. He had no way of navigating the tide of negative evidence against him. One Customs surveillance officer joked that his face was more photographed (by them) than Princess Di’s and he had more false passports than Lord Lucan. To boot, he had fallen for Haase and Bennett’s blag that they would use some of the gun-planting credit to help him. That was his only hope and it didn’t come true. In desperation, and after taking sly advice from Haase to do so, Kaya pleaded guilty to being involved in a conspiracy to import heroin into the UK in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. For rolling over, for saving the taxpayer the cost of an expensive trial, Kaya was rewarded – a second charge of distributing in the UK was not brought. In the spirit of cooperation, he admitted sending between £500,000 and £600,000 of drug profits back to the main men in Turkey, giving the Crown the future opportunity to seize assets.
Following the lead from these main players, all of the lower-ranking members pleaded guilty before the case went to trial. Eddie Croker blew everyone up in a big statement in a bid to get a lesser sentence, again under pressure from Haase, as well as secretly being assured by Haase and Bennett that they were going to help him get out of prison. He pleaded guilty to possession with intent to supply.
Bagman Mehmet Ansen, The Colonel, tried to squirm out of the evidence, changing his story so many times that it was embarrassing. At the end of the day, he was hung by his diary, which listed every money drop with The Vulcan’s name next to it. Oh, dear! On one page, there was even a drug-related diagram of a chemical molecule, so suspicious it raised the alarm during a random search by a German Customs officer. Initially, the bumbling Ansen denied any knowledge of carrying money out of the country. Then he said that he had taken money out of the country only once, for a man whom he could not identify, that he had met only once, in a London restaurant. He said the money was the proceeds of gambling. In his third interview, Ansen was more forthcoming. He gave an account of his dealings with Yilmaz Kaya. In interviews four and five, he went into more detail, including the role played by The Vulcan and the occasions that he had met this man in Europe. He also agreed that references in his diary to ‘Mr V’ were references to The Vulcan. With no hope, Ansen pleaded guilty to three offences of transferring proceeds of drug trafficking out of the country on 29 November 1992, 17 February 1993 and 24 March 1993.
Distributor Bulent Onay was collared with a wardrobe full of flashy Turkish clothes – and 36 kilos of heroin. He was the gang member arrested very early on in December 1992. He had had to wait on remand to go on trial with the rest of the gang. Even so, evidence-wise it was end of story. He pleaded guilty to two offences of transferring the proceeds of drug trafficking and to one offence of possession of the heroin with intent to supply.
Bagman Manuk Ocecki pleaded guilty to one sample offence of removing the cash proceeds of drug trafficking from the jurisdiction on 8 July 1992.
Safehouse supplier Mark Drew admitted he had been asked by pal Neil Garrett to find premises for an illegal purpose, but thought it wise not to ask questions. He later smelt an odour that he associated with drugs, though he himself never saw them. He was supposed to be paid £200.
But underboss Suleyman Ergun was having none of it. He was a fighter. ‘Me? Go guilty? Fack off.’ That was his standard reply in his sharp Cockney accent to anyone who tried to persuade him to do otherwise – including Haase, Bennett and his own lawyer. As far as he was concerned, he was a prisoner of war – the
war on drugs. End of story. It was his duty not to cooperate with the enemy, no matter how hopeless his position. Ergun was facing two charges: one for importing and one for distribution.
In his defence statements, Ergun limply tried to pass himself off as a chauffeur, saying that he was simply Kaya’s driver who had been paid between £100 and £200 each time he did a trip to Liverpool or given free, all-expenses holidays if he went abroad with his boss. Little did he know that Croker had already admitted handing him between £500,000 and £2.5 million inside black bin bags at various meetings in Liverpool. Ergun’s statements were littered with ‘no comment’ and ‘no reply’, but on the odd occasion he tried to mount a defence, his explanations were rubbish. He said that he took the job with Kaya after the textiles business, Dressmodel, that he was a director of closed down.
His trial kicked off in the summer of 1995, nearly two years after the arrests. The prosecution went to town on him. Reams of photos and compromising logs littered the trial. He was described as a major figure in the conspiracy – the link man between the Turks and the Liverpool connection. In the conspiracy to supply, it looked bad because of his strong and frequent links by mobile phone and in the 23 drug-related visits he made to Liverpool in the first six months of 1993.
The court was told, ‘When Ergun was arrested, his home was searched and documents which were found showed that he owned a Vodaphone which had the number 0836730636. Analysis shows that the user of the phone made extensive use of certain telephone facilities which help preserve the anonymity of the callers, such as pager and message-deposit facilities. The Crown allege that is how Ergun got in touch with the Liverpool connection. He also used the paging system. Ergun had the sophistication to use these devices and was the vital link man between the Turkish and Liverpool connections. He was a Turk who, by reason of his upbringing in the UK, was a fluent English speaker able to act as an interpreter or translator.’
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