I picked the bag up at twelve. That gave me four or six hours to get things together. I worked out that it would take me three and a half hours. I used to do it that often, I knew how long it’d take me to get there.
I stuck it in me ma’s first because I wasn’t ready to go. I’d been on the piss the night before so I was a bit rough. So when they phoned me to tell me the job was a goer, I picked the bangers up, put it in me ma’s and said to me ma, because she’s a nosy get, ‘I’ll just put that in your old cupboard.’
And she said, ‘What’s in it?’
And I said, ‘Money, mother.’
She said, ‘What do you mean, money?’
I said, ‘An awful lot of money. I’ll be back in an hour. I’m going to get ready.’
I always used to wear a shirt and tie. So I got off and got ready. So when’s I come back and I was leaving the house, she says to me, ‘I thought you were going to show me what was in the case?’ So I threw it on the table and opened it up.
I’d seen a million pound before. There was no necessity for me to count it. You must be joking! As a rule, when I took money down, I wouldn’t tell them [the bosses or any member of the gang] any of my plans. No one was throwing me in. My work is my work. So long as it gets there, a day late, a fucking week late, as long as it gets there, there’s no problem.
At the drop, I had just been told to meet so and so. It was a fella I’d actually met down there before, I think. It was a set time, that one. I met him at a Greek or Turkish café on Edgware Road, next to Paddington Green police station, facing the police station, a bit further up. There’s a market there of a Saturday on that road [Church Street Market]. There’s all market stalls of a weekend. They block the road on both sides. I know the road well because that is where I’d meet the others, the other people I’d do drops to. I’d meet them about 50 yards away.
The man I handed it to was, I think, a fella I’d met there before. But because it was so long ago, I’m not sure. I just passed it in to him and said, ‘Here you are.’ I was paid £2,000 for it [by No-Neck]. I think he had a dark complexion. I remember there was two of them. One of them I definitely knew. Just passed it to him in the café. Said, ‘Here you are . . .’ Then walked out with him and gave it to him.
No one gives a fuck who’s carrying what in London. You’re just a non-entity. I used to do drops in London where you were given something in exchange. I used to go up and down to London once, twice a month. I knew London well. Me two cousins are posties (postmen). That’s how I got to know it well. They took me round and they showed me.
I’ve always thought since that for what I done for them [Haase and Bennett], I was going to get a pull [be arrested]. That was the money. I didn’t know that job was existing. It was only afterwards that the person involved said to me, ‘That was the fee. That was the pay-off.’ What they [Haase and Bennett] took up [to London]. I was told it was a mil.
I knew who I was making the drop for because I’d done work for them before. But I’m not saying fuck all, lad, about their names. I’d done graft for people, yeah. I was trusted. Fucking hell, I’ve got kids. It was just work. I was paid a couple of [thousand] quid for it. About two or three quid. For other things, you’d get five quids and seven quids. They [Haase and Bennett] weren’t greedy bastards.
I’d done a couple of drops before this one. I was trusted. I don’t think fuck all about it [the bribe allegations]. It was just a job. Got nothing to do with me who they [Haase and Bennett] threw in and that they were grasses. They never done me no wrong that way. I’ve got fuck all against none of them.
I had never done a million-pound drop before. I’d done halves, but I’d never done a full one. It was halves and halves of halves. The big drop was for that one client [Haase]. They were the ones I worked for. To be honest, that was the last one I ever done. Because the shit hit the fan after that, didn’t it? I knew exactly what it was about. But it had fuck all to do with me. I thought they were doing a good thing here. I didn’t know about the grassing caper. But I thought for what I done for them, I’m going to get a pull here.
When they got out, they weren’t indebted to me. But I didn’t even see them. Then something else happened. The shit hit the fan [in an unrelated incident] and they left me swinging. [Following the alleged payments, Scanlon was convicted of a crime in Spain for possession of 50 kilos of pot. When he asked his bosses, Haase, Bennett and No-Neck, for money to get him back, they ‘let him swing’ and refused to help him.] After that, I just fucked them off. It wasn’t that they informed on me, but they left me swinging, so we lost contact.
You’d be fucking soft to think No-Neck doesn’t know more than he’s letting on about the payment. With them two sitting in the big house [prison], who’s running the show? He was the conductor. He knew about this thing.
To be honest, I haven’t seen him for a long time. He was a good friend of mine. He introduced me to the firm. It was him who trusted me a million per cent. So I wouldn’t like to slag the fucker off. No-Neck was The Bank Manager because he orchestrated all the moves. Fucking right he did. I knew about all the gun plants but I’ve got no comment on whether I did any of the plants for them two fellas. Half the city knew. I’m surprised it wasn’t in the Echo. But no one knew about the grassing. They’ve done a boss little move there.
They’ve walked [been released] and nobody’s been thrown in. But then there were rumours that they had informed properly on certain people. John Haase had a fucking good reputation up until then. But he made Eddie [Croker] do the dirty work – put his name to everything. Making him look a cunt.
I started working for No-Neck in ’89, ’90. I could stop at any time I wanted.
The venue of the handover was most likely the Turkish-run Metropolitan Café, situated right opposite Paddington Green police station. The café has been there for 26 years and is run by a nice guy called Shimel. The owners and manager of the café were not in any way involved with the transaction, nor had any knowledge of any wrongdoing, and the bribes were allegedly paid to government officials connected to the case.
KEN DARCY: I first heard about the money about six years ago [1998]. I’ve known Scanlon for 20-odd years. This lad has been a staunch friend for 20 years. I’ve watched his kids grow up and everything.
It wasn’t until I came out of jail, spoke to him and it was him that mentioned it to me – that Haase and Bennett paid a million quid to someone who was able to have influence. The reason he hadn’t told me before is because he probably thinks I’ve known about it, having done some graft for Haase and Bennett before. He might have thought, ‘He probably knows this already.’ But I was fucking gobsmacked.
We were talking in general about the graft and then, you know, Paddy said, ‘I done all kinds for them as well.’
And I said, ‘Like what?’
And he said, ‘I took money.’
And I said, ‘What money?’
And he said, ‘I took a million pounds in a bag.’
And I said, ‘Fuck off!’
And he said, ‘I did.’
They were determined to get out of jail. That’s the way I’ve looked at it. They’ve paid someone in authority to get out of jail. Big dough, yeah, but they could make that dough back in 12 months.
Paddy was chosen because he had already done graft for them. Drops here, there and everywhere. They knew he could be trusted. The person he picked it up from was a lad called The Bank Clerk. He’s just some shitty-arsed kid. That’s all he was: a bank clerk – minding money. This kid’s straight; that’s why he was trusted. Nice kid. Not like us. Straight head, goes to work. He had the money. So that’s when I wanted to buy Semtex, firearms. It was that kid who brought the dough around. No-Neck had trained him. He’s been well looked after. He was given mountain bikes worth a couple of grand as presents. He was too scared to turn Haase over [steal the money]. He probably thought, ‘If I get off with that [steal the money], they’ll probably come round and kill me.’ And you’ve got to
remember he’s had good wages out of it as well.
Paddy drove up to London then, but before he actually went, he left money in his mother’s house because he had some business to take care of first. In London, he’s passed it over. He’s gone his way, the other fella’s gone his way. Joe Bloggs has got off to do whatever he does with it. There were several things that helped to get their freedom. It wasn’t just the Strangeways gun, it wasn’t just the bung, but they were the major factors in the case. Plus the fact that they threw the Turks in.
A million pounds is a lot of money. The people who got it probably thought that nothing was ever going to come of it. They were under the impression that Haase and Bennett were going to come out of prison and lead a normal life. It was stated in their case that their crimes were a one-off. Forty-two armed robberies and it was a one-off? They’ve made them out to be saints.
Time, scale and process. First it was the firearm plants. They’d already been working a deal with Customs through Nelson, although he didn’t know that Haase was doing it deliberately. Then the firearm in a prison puts you in line for the Royal Prerogative. The bung would have been the icing on the cake. It all made sense to me.
The third alleged bribe, of a similar amount of money, was arranged in much the same way. The payment was approximately £850,000. The Liverpool team consisted of three ‘organisers’ and one minder. One of the organisers was a fence, a trader in stolen goods, who later became a trusted confidant to Haase. The fence, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was chosen because he was essentially a non-criminal, a small businessman who was bright and well organised but who also had an understanding of planning complex underworld activities. In this respect, he was unique. He had grown close to Haase through neighbourhood connections, swearing undying loyalty after Haase had protected him in a dispute with a well-known Liverpool crime family.
According to the fence, the alleged payment was bound for a high-ranking official with foreign connections who claimed that he could influence the case. Furthermore, he believes that some of the payment may have ended up in the hands of a number of lawmen associated with the case, although he is unsure whether the lawmen contacts were simply involved because they may have helped to organise the handover.
For the Liverpool team, the first part of the operation involved a secret meeting with two representatives of the alleged recipients in a pub. The pub, in south-east London, was chosen because it was owned by an expat Scouser, a former professional sportsman, who was used to setting aside quiet parts of his premises for criminals to discuss ‘graft’. The Scousers chose the venue because they feared they might be getting set up by the police. So they demanded a safe venue which they knew would be bug-free. It has also been claimed that the Liverpool team chose the venue of the first meeting so that they could secretly video- and tape-record the meeting. Haase was obsessed with covering his back.
The purpose of the meeting was to lay the ground rules of the handover: venue, date, time, action. The two men who came on behalf of the recipient were smartly dressed and well spoken. They asked that the money be handed over at the London Park Hotel, near Elephant and Castle in south-east London. (The staff there were unaware of what was going on.)
After the meeting, the Liverpool team, who did not know where the hotel was, jumped in a cab to do a recce. That was at approximately 1.00 a.m.
THE FENCE: The money was just under a mil, about £850,000. It was just brought down to London in a low-key way by two lads. I went down there separately. When we all rendezed, there was four of us in total. We went to see the fellas from the other side. We met in a pub owned by a mate of ours. That was in the afternoon. They were all right. They were like businessmen. Very straight. We had a drink with them. They were sound. They were relaxed.
We were told that we had to take the money at a later point to the London Park Hotel. I thought it was the Park Lane Hotel, but it wasn’t in that part of London. I remember it being near a big shopping centre on a big roundabout, near Elephant and Castle.
Later, we jumped in a private-hire cab to find the hotel so that we knew where it was all going off. I remember the driver was a foreigner and I remember going over a bridge, which didn’t make sense. But there were roadworks so we had to jump out rather than him turn round and walk the rest of the way. So we recced it up. It looked quite a nice hotel but it was in a bad place.
Later, at the drop-off, the money was taken to the hotel and handed over to the concierge. That was it. At first, they wanted us to put it in a room, which was sound, but then it got changed to the man in reception. We had someone outside sat off watching everyone that came and went. In fact, we were videoing it for John, just in case.
I know who most of that payment went to. A lot of people have speculated that it was for someone inside the Home Office. But it wasn’t; it was someone outside but who knew people in there, who moved in those circles. It was a very high-up fella, someone in the Establishment, an official who knew certain people and might be able to influence them, maybe put a word in without anyone realising. I think that’s how it worked. This man was already rich and he had very good foreign connections. He may have given some of the money to someone who could directly help, but once it left us, I don’t know – was not my job.
After it went off, an official who John had contacted about all this phoned him to say that he was fine. He also said something about certain people being involved.
Further corroboration of the bribe allegations has come from Suleyman Ergun. He claims that Bennett told him that some of the £1 million the Turks were owed was used to fund the bribes.
SULEYMAN ERGUN: They first told me about the bribe plan when at the meeting in Strangeways prison in which they were trying to get me to plead guilty. I didn’t really think they were trying to help us but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Haase was cunning. He did mention who it was going to – but he was saying less than Ben, not going into detail. But he just said that they had the connection to buy someone off in power.
Then Bennett came to visit me in Norwich later and he told me in detail about the payments. He again told me the name of the powerful man they had targeted with the payment. Bennett would only go into detail when Haase wasn’t around. He said money had definitely been exchanged. Eddie [Croker] told me more, because I was banged up with him for a long time. He said that the bung had been done in three drops and that it was over a million. He thought it was more like two million, but he deffo knew it was over one. Haase and Bennett were telling him a lot. Then he’d pass it on to me.
Chris No-Neck has always denied any knowledge of the alleged bribes, claiming that they were invented by Haase to cover his tracks as an actual informer. Although Haase says that he was not a proper grass, and that no criminals were convicted in connection with his bogus gun plants, No-Neck and many other underworld figures believed that Haase also informed on real criminals who later paid the price. For instance, there was Thomas Bourke, the Turks and a controversy over drug dealers arrested in an infamous drug raid called the West Derby Job. Haase knew that his imminent release would raise suspicions that he was a real grass and the bogus gun-plant story would not hold water for very long. So No-Neck’s theory is that he invented the bribes to divert the attention of star-struck underworld gossips from the real issues. And he does have a point. For example, there is no direct evidence of the bribes – except for the testimony of the bagmen, members of Haase’s gang, underworld figures and Haase himself. Some of the evidence is corroborating but so far none of the videotapes or recordings of the alleged handovers have surfaced. On this basis, sceptics dismiss the allegations as a wild conspiracy theory – one perpetuated by the master of the entangled web of multi-layered deceit: practised liar John Haase.
No-Neck suggested there may have been confusion over cash being sent to London, that it was for money that the government had seized as drug profits. But there were serious contradictions in his story. After initially denying he knew John ‘Paddy
’ Scanlon and The Bank Clerk, he then said he did. Then he tried to deny that Scanlon’s drop was a bribe, explaining that the drop did occur but the payment was for an unrelated matter. He said, ‘He did a drop for me, not for them [Haase and Bennett].’
However, Ken Darcy is convinced that No-Neck knows full well about the bribes and that he will not admit it because he fears comeback from sinister corners.
CHRIS NO-NECK: I don’t know anything about the bribes, but I think it was just another crazy scheme put around by the other fella to cover his tracks. If it did happen, they never told me that, because I never jumped into bed that way. It was on a need-to-know basis, you understand. You have got to be careful when looking into this, because if they’ve thrown bodies in, then they’ve fulfilled their deal and they could use the payments to make people look the other way. That’s why I never crossed the line. I’m not going to give them my soul. I never let them control me. John had the influence over everyone. Everyone except me. Ben was scared of him but I wasn’t. Knew he was a dangerous cunt. He knew at the same time he couldn’t make me do what I never wanted to do. The name he had, that was solid gold. I know that somewhere along the line I am going to get entangled. I’ve always been like . . . if you don’t say nothing, they can’t do nothing to you. I know I haven’t crossed the line. Why should I not admit it all my life, for friends just to go on record and admit it now? That’s the whole point. To avoid jail.
I can’t help you with the bung because I know fuck all about it. I know nothing about the bung. What you’re hearing and what is reality are two different things. That never happened. People have got this tunnel vision and you’ve got to remove this tunnel vision. Start to remove that and then clarity will set in. You’ll understand the threat is they become grasses.
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