The Cartel The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang

by Graham Johnson

  Meanwhile, halfway across the world, in Colombia, the National Police were having similar success but on a grander scale. After years of trying, they smashed the country’s most powerful cocaine exporters, known as the Medallín Cartel. This would result in the single biggest strategic break that the Cartel would ever get – just at the point when the Liverpool ring was at its weakest and on the verge of disintegrating, because of the heroin drought. A rival group called the Cali Cartel took over in Colombia, and it was looking for partners in Europe.

  CHAPTER 12

  CRACK

  1988

  JUST AS THE police thought they were getting on top of heroin, the Cartel moved the goal posts. Crack cocaine became the new product. Within two years, Colin Borrows set up three crack houses in Toxteth, generating £40,000 a day at their height. When the market became saturated, he sent his salesmen far and wide to all corners of the UK in a bid to find virgin territory. Boasting that in total he was responsible for getting 100,000 people hooked on crack, Borrows claimed that his proliferation press-ganged numerous girls into prostitution and caused a crime wave. Not caring whether his victims lived or died, Borrows rationalised his destruction by arguing that he was simply taking capitalism to its rightful extreme.

  ‘I just did what Mrs Thatcher told me to do,’ he explained. ‘I got on my bike and built up a business from nothing. I did it to feed my family.’ Borrows described himself as the Richard Branson of the drugs world.

  However, pride came before a fall. Later that year, he was arrested for running Britain’s first fully functional, industrial-scale crack factory.

  Borrows was not the only Cartel member feeling the heat. Dylan Porter was also getting stressed out by the heroin business: too much stigma, too much attention from the busies; it was all becoming too much.

  ‘I got off to Sweden for a while for a break from it all. Obviously, I wasn’t dealing over there, but still, I couldn’t resist grafting. We ended up pillaging the place, all that “Scousers abroad” caper – cashies going left, right and centre, wage snatches, doors of shops going in etc. But it was good just to get away from the brown: robbing wasn’t tangled up with all the politics and mind games that come from selling heroin.

  ‘Eventually I came back to get involved with the business again. But by this time, my partner, the person I’d brought in from London, had got greedy. He’d taken over my round. He didn’t want to split the money. He set me up with a shotgun. He asked me to go and pick up a gun hidden on a railway line. I did – but I got SWATTED by the specialist firearms team straight away. All those guns pointing at my head – the first time a SWAT team had been used in Liverpool, according to the front pages the next day.’

  Looking on from the sidelines, Kaiser and Scarface could see the bigger picture. Too many people were getting nicked, hindering the growth of the Cartel. If they were going to expand, they’d have to relocate away from the firing line. For the first time, the Cartel was learning about what police would later refer to as ‘displacement’.

  Scarface and Kaiser started to go to Amsterdam to buy their Class A’s at a discount. The visits inspired global ambitions. Why not set up shop in the Dam full-time? Why limit themselves to sending the gear back to Liverpool? Why not start shipping drugs direct to London, Manchester and Scotland? Then to other countries – Ireland, Germany, Russia? ‘The World Is Yours’ was their motto. Props, of course, to Tony Montana.

  The grand plan was to create a mobile global commodities outfit that could buy drugs at the source in South America and Jamaica. Then they would smuggle them to wherever the best prices could be achieved. The model was later identified by experts, revolving around Kaiser and Scarface’s roles as ‘independent brokers’ and ‘global citizens’. The research was done by criminologists in Amsterdam, and Kaiser and Scarface’s operation was one of the first examples of the new phenomenon.

  To put the plan into action, Kaiser and Scarface left Liverpool and based themselves in Holland. Scarface had no option: he had the decision made for him. One day he got arrested and charged by police in Liverpool for a slew of serious offences. But he escaped from a police station after being momentarily left alone in a room. He put a chair through a window and jumped from the first or second floor onto the street below. He went on the run abroad before meeting up with Kaiser in ‘the flat place’.

  The first objective was to raise the capital to buy into a big drugs deal. Amsterdam was wide open. Only one other serious Cartel member had been based there: a founding father of the Cartel and convicted heroin smuggler called Delroy Showers, who’d been popular in post-riot Toxteth street politics. A handful of Scouse potheads ran ‘bits and bobs’ around the city and back to the UK on the Hook of Holland ferry. But other than that, the competition was low.

  Scarface and Kaiser needed money because business in Liverpool had cooled off. The police were continuing to disrupt supplies of heroin, and the crack boom had levelled off as the local market became saturated. Kaiser and Scarface had ridden the first wave, but in the new dog-eat-dog environment they were being written off by the underworld because they were skint. Behind the scenes, they had been one of the first of the mid-level Cartel dealers to invest their money in properties and businesses. However, they refused to cash it in to fund the Amsterdam venture; the ‘kidnap money’, as it was known, was for a rainy day.

  Through a corrupt Asian businessman, Kaiser and Scarface had bought a block of flats with a retail development underneath in Dollis Hill, north London. In addition, they had shares in two big Chinese restaurants in Newport and London. Poncho was given the job of looking in on the businesses while they traded in Amsterdam.

  ‘Money laundering is not about getting a return on your legit investment,’ Poncho explained. ‘It’s just about keeping your money safe in the long term but at the same time gettable at short notice. You’re not looking to get dividends from it, because if you get bogged down in the details of a business then it makes you vulnerable. All they wanted to do was bounce round the world doing drug deals, not wait in for the man to come and fix the washing machine. That’s one of the great misunderstandings about the relationship between drug dealers and their money, and this whole mysterious world of money laundering.’

  The deal in the Chinese restaurants that Kaiser and Scarface had bought was simple: they didn’t want a share of the £3,000-a-week profits, just an assurance from the Asian owner that they could get quick access to their principal, and other assets if required, at a moment’s notice.

  Kaiser and Scarface began buying weed, cocaine and heroin to send back to Liverpool. To send out a message to the other gangs in Amsterdam, they played bullish. When a Moroccan dealer tried to rip them off, they threw him into a canal – which was quite unknown in the hippyish culture of the Jewish quarter and the squats that grew up around the drugs scene. But it wasn’t only their no-nonsense approach that made them stand out: Kaiser and Scarface had eclectic taste in clothes. Their trademark look included cowboy shirts and Texan-style buckle ties. On business, they wore Moss Bros suits and called themselves ‘the Management’.

  ‘They finished each other’s sentences,’ said Poncho. ‘They could read each other’s mind when it came to business.’

  In 1988, Kaiser and Scarface began planning to smuggle a 1,000-kilo load of cocaine into Britain: the first time anyone had attempted such a quantity. First, they headed for Jamaica to tap up some old pals: they wanted an introduction to the Cali Cartel, based in Colombia. They were spotted drinking champagne on a yacht with known criminals. In an upmarket Jamaican resort, they met a gay South American aristocrat. The fixer gave them a ‘who’s who’ of Bogotá’s underworld and promised to link them up with a few contacts.

  Scarface and Kaiser immediately flew to the former Spanish colony. In Colombia, they thrived on the heavy situation. Using the aristocrat’s contacts, they set up a few test deals, sending several kilos back to Amsterdam. They lived like kings off the proceeds. Even the cleaners of th
eir luxurious apartment looked like models, according to Poncho, who visited later. The housemaids often spent more time in between the Egyptian cotton sheets, getting ‘sorted in the morning’, than cleaning the bathroom.

  Fun times aside, Bogotá was a dangerous place. Kaiser and Scarface witnessed a bar being blown up. Gunshots were common. The local news was full of judges and cops being assassinated for going up against the drug barons.

  Instead of being put off, Kaiser and Scarface were ambitious to move on to the next level. Rather than a few kilos here and there, they wanted to purchase a metric tonne. But so far, their Colombian contacts had been reluctant. Either they were too small fish or they wanted huge deposits, way out of the reach of a couple of opportunists.

  However, a chance meeting in a Bogotá bar would change their fate – and that of the Cartel – for ever, giving them a shot at the big time while simultaneously offering the Cartel an opportunity to go from a ragtag collection of petty criminals and mid-level dealers into an international drug-trafficking gang that would be capable of swamping Europe with drugs for years to come.

  For several weeks, Scarface and Kaiser had been monitoring what they called a ‘big bad crew’ that occasionally turned up in a bar that they frequented. Scarface told Poncho he could spot them a mile off, telling him, ‘They wore suits, they turned up in Mercs and 4 × 4s and they always had big lads hanging around them.’

  Time and funds were running low, and soon Kaiser and Scarface would have to return to Europe empty-handed. According to Poncho, one night, a frustrated Kaiser decided to try his luck with the curious barflies who looked like gangsters straight from central casting.

  ‘Hi, I’m Kaiser,’ he beamed to the boss, hand out in peace. ‘I know who you are and I want to do business with you.’

  At first, the gang seemed friendly, but an hour later Kaiser found himself in the back of a car being driven into the mountains. Scarface had become separated from the group as the bar had got busier. One of the gang cocked a gun to Kaiser’s head. ‘I think we should kill him; he’s DEA.’

  On the inside, Kaiser was sweating, but in his mind he was thinking: ‘There’s no way I’m gonna let my nerves get me killed.’ He did what he’d been brought up to do when faced with a stressful situation: he made a joke of it. He began ‘arsing about’, as Poncho put it, disarming the Cali bosses with his mischievous charm.

  Instead of killing Kaiser, the gangster gave him the benefit of the doubt. Instead of being buried in a shallow grave, astonishingly he was invited to stay at the family’s ranch for a few weeks. A driver was sent back to the bar to pick up Scarface.

  According to Poncho, the pair spent a month galloping around the plantations on horseback. More like a holiday than a drugs deal, they posed for pictures wearing panama hats, bandoliers and two handguns in side holsters. The Scousers found that the Colombians were on their level.

  The plantation was run by a high-level Colombian cocaine salesman called Lucio and his younger brother. The brothers were part of a powerful mafia which was connected to and ultimately headed by first cousins Raul Grajales Lemos and Luis Grajales Posso. The notorious Urdinola Grajales family publicly portrayed themselves as legitimate businessmen, but most of their companies were fronts for their drug and money-laundering operations. Bribery, corruption and violence had allowed them to build a huge cocaine empire. A fleet of aircraft and sea vessels transported tons of cocaine to Western Europe. Their trademark method involved concealing cocaine inside containerised shipments of fruit. At the time, the Grajales organisation was becoming active in Western Europe. Later they established new routes into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They needed salesmen in Amsterdam; hence their sudden friendship with Kaiser and Scarface.

  Kaiser and Scarface weren’t fazed. The irony was that Scarface and Kaiser didn’t really believe the hype of the underworld. Instinctively, they understood that most gangsterism was an act. In real life, the Colombian overlords looked like family men. The phoney image applied to themselves also: Scarface and Kaiser understood that they had no real power. They traded on the fact that people were conditioned to react to gangsters in a certain way. In Liverpool and Amsterdam especially, they manipulated that fear and winged it to their advantage.

  ‘The reason they got on with South Americans,’ Poncho said sentimentally, ‘is that they were friendly and family orientated – much like the people back home.’

  After a few weeks, Kaiser and Scarface put their proposition to South Americans, spelling it out that they wanted to export a superload of cocaine from Colombia to Holland. It had never been done before. Curtis Warren and Colin Smith, the future Cartel bosses who made 1,000-kilo imports standard, were still relatively small-time dealers back in Liverpool. The Colombians liked Kaiser and Scarface so much that they agreed to waive a big up-front payment. They would supply the load ‘on tick’ on the condition that the Scousers provided the transport from Venezuela to Europe. Kaiser and Scarface would only have to pay a small deposit to cover local transport and storage costs.

  Poncho said, ‘One of the Colombian brothers called Lucio had grown very fond of Kaiser and Scarface. He described them as “humorous” and “warm-hearted”. He offered them a deal. In the end, they would only have to pay a £25,000 deposit to cover the cost of wrapping up the cocaine in sealed plastic and transporting it from Colombia to the coast in Venezuela. That’s a dream deal.

  ‘Kaiser and Scarface had been saving up a kitty for a while, thinking that they were going to have to pay hundreds of grand, which they didn’t have. So financially, it wasn’t a risk for them.’

  The basic plan was to smuggle 1,000 kilos from Venezuela to the Caribbean and then to Holland. Kaiser and Scarface decided to keep the operation as simple and low-cost as possible. They would buy a small yacht and sail it themselves on the 5,000-mile (8,000-km) trip, the model that’s known in the trade as ‘crashing the port’.

  Kaiser and Scarface immediately returned to Holland via Jamaica to put all the pieces in place. In Amsterdam, they recruited a red-haired, mustachioed Dutch aristocrat who had fallen on hard times. The posh smuggler needed fast money to save his family’s property portfolio from being repossessed. Every week, Kaiser and Scarface met up with him and his wife at the upmarket Harry’s American Bar in Amsterdam. The joint was a popular haunt for visiting Hollywood stars, but the group could often be seen sitting in the corner animatedly planning the venture, which they dubbed Operation Swagger.

  A smuggling operation is a complicated business requiring hundreds of decisions to be made. The team decided to hire a couple of experts to share the load. Two German businessmen, who later made a fortune manufacturing Ecstasy tablets, were recruited to take care of logistics, which included buying a suitable boat, testing the boat, renting a safehouse, buying a van, taking care of paperwork and planning the route. A fourth man, a South American who had experience of working in the Caribbean, was hired as a translator and general all-rounder.

  From the start, Scarface decided that he was going to do the important bits himself. He would sail the boat, despite having no experience of yachting or navigation. That would cut out middlemen and reduce costs. Kaiser would stay in Amsterdam to drum up interest in potential buyers. Scarface chose his crew – the Dutch aristocrat and the South American – leaving the Germans on land to help Kaiser.

  Poncho said, ‘Scarface was good at everything, one of those competent all-rounder types who do well in life. He had a can-do, kinda DIY attitude that is common among those Scouse drug-dealer types: “I’ll do it my way, it can’t be that hard.” It was a kind of arrogance, but part bluff and part youth as well. He was jammy. His attitude was, “If you take the risk, you get the rewards.” He was right. And if you’re looking after the coke, you’ve got control, and ultimately you decide who gets a share of the profits.’

  Back in Liverpool, the police had no idea what was going on. The crack boom had been taking place on and off for two years, but officers on the beat
were just becoming aware of it. The last thing they were expecting was a second wave of cheap cocaine to come flooding in.

  The Analyst said, ‘The first time I came across crack was in 1988. We were bringing a stolen car back into the station at around three o’clock in the morning. We were in uniform and a taxi driver flagged us down and told us that there was a woman being raped by the side of the road. So I got out, ran over and the suspect stopped what he was doing and got on his toes down an entry. I ran after him. He waited at the end of the alleyway and it turned into a fight and a free-for-all. I hit him as hard as I could with my truncheon, but he shook it off, like something in a cartoon. It didn’t make a blind bit of difference.

  ‘My mate came looking for me, and eventually we got him back to the station. In his pocket there were 40 or 50 wraps of crack cocaine. The next day he had no idea of his behaviour or what had gone on. That was crack.’

  But the effects weren’t just physical. Crack reset the relationship between police and criminal. The dealers became increasingly hostile. In court, one criminal threatened to steal the officer’s new car.

  The Analyst said, ‘It’s not just a myth. Before drugs, criminals almost had a respect for the police. They saw us more of an occupational hazard rather than something to be hated and resisted at all costs.

  ‘I remember I was in a restaurant with my family having a meal, and a guy who I’d nicked for a commercial burglary came over. There’s always that moment, a bit of tension when you think, “What’s going to happen here?”

  ‘But he said: “Can I buy everybody a drink?”

  ‘It was a relief. Of course, I said no, but his attitude wasn’t hostile. That started to change – the dealers started to threaten us when we were giving evidence in court.’