Gerard was shaking with fear. He had never been involved in crime. He knew his sister had gone off the rails but he had no more idea where she was than the hoods who had visited him. Gerard contacted the Dutch Police and told them what had happened. They told him he should take the threat seriously and consider moving out of his home temporarily. Overnight Gerard moved himself, his wife and their two children. Police kept watch on the property for a couple of days, but were not there when, four days later, Gerard decided he needed to use his computer and returned home alone to Uransstraat, a sleepy suburban street. As he opened his front door to leave at 7.22pm on 28 November 2002, he was approached by a man who pulled out a handgun and shot him eight times.
Dutch investigators were baffled by the murder. Here was a man who had no criminal background and who had been living a quiet life. But as their attentions turned towards his sister, Janette, they slowly began to unravel a criminal network which centred on the Dawes Cartel. They placed telephone intercepts on the phones of certain Dutch criminals which soon threw up the names of Nottingham Tony and Red Harrison, as well as Rob and John Dawes. Through a massive total of 20,000 phone calls analysed, ninety-five per cent of which were in basic drugs code, they had stumbled upon another huge syndicate sending drugs from Holland and Belgium to the UK. What they learned from the bugs was that Janette Meesters had become embroiled in the criminal network while living in Spain and had been working as a courier for the Dawes Cartel.
In autumn 2002, Janette and her friend, Madeline Brussen, had been given the job of driving a van from Spain to Holland carrying a large amount of cannabis. The couple were pulled over by Dutch police on suspicion of drink-driving after they were alerted to the erratic behaviour of the van. Inside police discovered more than 350 kilos of cannabis. When Rob Dawes found out about the drug bust, he exploded with rage; it was a shipment intended for Nottingham Tony and was supposed to be around 1.5 tonnes of cannabis. According to evidence later given in court, Dawes made the assumption that the rest of the drugs must have been stolen by the two women. He set about trying to locate them and sent a message to Daniel Sowerby, a forty-seven-year-old heroin addict who had been working for the gang since absconding from open prison in 2000. The message was clear: ‘Put the frighteners on relatives and family of these two and we will smoke them out. If the women don’t do anything, we’ll take it to the next stage.’
Sowerby recruited a man called Steven Barnes as his driver and the two of them started to trace relatives of Meesters and Brussen. First they paid a visit to Meesters’ older brother, Gerard. Sowerby and Barnes returned to Groningen on 28 November. Barnes later said he was not told the reason for the visit to the city, and claimed he thought it was for a drugs run. At around 7.15pm that night, Sowerby, who was living under an assumed name with a false passport in Breda, a city in southern Holland, took a handgun from a bag and left the car, while Barnes waited for him. A few minutes later Sowerby returned and shouted at Barnes, ‘Go go go, let’s get out of here.’
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Barnes asked.
Sowerby replied: ‘I’ve been told to kill somebody, which I have, and that is all you need to know.’
The duo stopped on the way back to their safe house in Breda and Sowerby dumped the murder weapon. Their victim was Gerard Meesters.
A week later, Madeleine Brussen’s mother, ex-husband and boyfriend received a note telling them to contact the same Spanish phone number given to Gerard Meesters. Along with the note were cuttings from a newspaper which detailed Meesters’ murder. The implications for the family should they not call the phone number were clear. Dutch police set up surveillance on the family’s properties. In the summer of 2003, the relatives received another note warning them to tell them where Madeline was or their lives would be in danger. Police set about forensically testing the material which had been sent in the post. Incredibly Sowerby had failed to check the material he posted to the Brussen family was clean and Barnes, who was known to Dutch police, had left his fingerprint on one of the newspaper clippings.
Investigations revealed that Barnes had since been arrested and was serving a sixteen-month prison term for a fatal road accident in Rotterdam after driving while drunk and high on cocaine. Sowerby had also been locked up for drug offences. Police visited Barnes first and he confessed to driving Sowerby to the scene of the assassination. Barnes said he had initially been sent to Amsterdam by the Dawes Cartel because he had stolen forty-two grams of heroin from them. He was told he would have to pay off his drug debt by doing errands for them in Holland and was ordered to become a runaround for Sowerby. After he ferried Sowerby to the scene of Gerard Meesters’ murder, he fled to Spain, where Rob Dawes had ordered him for a ‘debriefing’. The debriefing session ended with him being severely beaten with an iron bar; he suffered several broken limbs. Barnes was told he would be killed if he ever mentioned the murder.
A Dutch court gave Barnes, described as a ‘victim of a criminal organisation’, an eight-year sentence for his involvement in Meesters’ murder. He had known the Dawes brothers from school and made a number of visits to Amsterdam with Rob Dawes, acting as a drugs tester before being ‘exiled’ to Holland to repay his heroin debts. His lawyer pointed out that once he became a soldier for the gang he could not just leave. His life and the lives of his family would be in grave danger. If he was arrested or tried to flee, the gang would assume he was a risk and could compromise their operation. Sowerby, who was described by the Dutch judge as a ‘very dangerous man’, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He had already spent much of his life behind bars, having previously been serving a life sentence in the UK for the brutal murder of sixty-six-year-old Harold Burdall, who was beaten to death during a burglary in Lincolnshire in December 1977. Sowerby had fled North Sea Camp open prison in 2001 before initially going on the run in France and then Holland, where he was recruited by the Dawes Cartel. Both men refused to give any details of the people they were working for.
‘I have to think of my family and relatives,’ said Sowerby. ‘If I confess the murder, I have no life any more. Then I fear for the lives of my brothers, nephews and nieces. I will never confess.’
Barnes said, ‘What happened to Gerard Meesters is not unusual. These people know how to deliver pain in your life.’
Throughout the investigation, Dutch police were only able to speak to Janette Meesters once, while she was in Spain, before they lost contact. ‘We have no idea where the two women are,’ one investigator said. ‘The trail ended in Spain. We don’t know whether they are alive or dead.’
The spin-off for National Crime Squad investigators in the UK was that, as a result of the Dutch phone taps, they now knew that the Dawes Cartel was a ruthless, calculating gang willing to murder on the same scale as the Bestwood Cartel, and they were dealing in much larger quantities and with wider networks than had previously been thought. The telephone taps had also thrown up a link between large-scale drugs shipments flowing from Spain, Holland and Belgium and the cartels runs by the Dawes family, Keith Harrison and Anthony Handley, and the Bestwood Cartel. All roads were leading back to Nottinghamshire and southern Spain, where Rob Dawes was still holed up near the town of Fuengirola.
OPERATION NORMALITY, THE probe into the Dawes Cartel, was in full swing. After bringing down some of the Dawes lieutenants and realising that the Cartel was bigger than they thought, officers began to take a closer look at the financial transactions of the gang. They found more than £8.5 million going through their hands between November 2002 and June 2003. In addition, members of the gang were logged on more than forty flights coming in and out of Malaga and Amsterdam over a two-and-a-half year period. In the midst of Operation Normality, Nottinghamshire Police had to deal with the murder of David Draycott, shot dead outside his home in Sutton-in-Ashfield in October 2002 over a £30,000 debt to the Bestwood and Dawes gangs. John Dawes was given a police liaison officer on the basis that he might be at risk because people believed he was linked to the murder. Dawes e
ven had the cheek to offer the detective constable a job. In October 2002, he telephoned the officer.
‘When are you due to hang up your truncheon?’ he said. ‘You know we are always on the lookout for lads like yourself – you know, due for retirements. With the kind of stuff you could help us with, you would shoot up the promotional ladder in our organisation.’
As officers listened in to calls between the group, they heard the coded names of mystery figures the Cartel was dealing with: The Fisherman, High Tower, Special Bill and Carlos. As arrests began to take place in 2003, police also managed to turn some of the Cartel’s drug runners, despite the threats of violence which were being levelled against them. Crucially it led to four runners – Richard Carrington, Marc Simpson, Lee Blackmore and Kristian Barsby – giving detailed accounts of how the Cartel operated. Marc Simpson told police how he had been recruited by John Dawes after coming out of prison in January 2002. Two months later, he and a friend agreed to sell heroin for John Dawes. Anything they made above £750 per ounce would be profit. A meeting took place at which Dawes and Gary Hardy were present and outlined the areas where the runners could sell. Dawes told Simpson he would let him sell heroin in Sutton and that another man would handle Kirkby-in-Ashfield. Simpson always took the money to Dawes, usually at his house in Tudor Street but once at a public house. On two occasions he picked up ten kilos of amphetamine and Dawes told him where to drop them, but some of the speed went missing and Dawes exploded with rage. ‘Ten minutes later John Dawes came round and battered me round the head with a cosh, then they got my hands and smashed them,’ said Simpson. ‘I was absolutely terrified, I soiled myself.’ He said Dawes had beaten him senseless with a baseball bat on another two occasions. ‘If you lied to John, he hit you. He was an absolute psychopath.’
Richard Carrington told police how he worked as a courier for Rob Dawes from 2000 until early 2002. Carrington was also involved with John Dawes and saw him operating an electric money-counting machine at his house, putting notes into bundles of £1,000. In 2001, Carrington went to the Colwick unit, used for making ecstasy tablets and cutting cocaine and amphetamine, to pick up some drugs. He told police how he would usually pack the drugs under a spare wheel on John Dawes’s Shogun 4x4. Among the other tasks carried out by Carrington were shipping drugs to Rugby and Manchester and moving money to Holland and Spain for Rob. Carrington would fly from Heathrow, East Midlands and Gatwick airports to Amsterdam and Malaga with wads of cash secreted in shoes or the false lining of suitcases.
Lee Blackmore was released from prison in June 2000 and began selling heroin for himself before John Dawes told him he would have to work for the Cartel ‘or suffer the consequences’. Blackmore told police how Dawes used a myriad of burial sites, safe houses and runners to keep his own fingerprints off the drug shipments. Marc Simpson would collect heroin from Matlock and bring Blackmore seven ounces a week, which he divided into half-gram bags. He paid Simpson. After a while Barsby replaced Simpson and supplied Blackmore. Both Barsby and Blackmore became stressed after a load of heroin went missing and first Barsby went on the run, eventually walking into a police station to confess all, closely followed by Blackmore. Barsby’s role was to take heroin to Blackmore and then divide it into ounces. They were supplying two or three people every day with an ounce of heroin, selling it at £900 a time. It would be collected from a Tesco car park in Nottingham once a month. Barsby would make a profit of £75 per ounce. He also collected amphetamines from the same place in Nottingham, the smallest quantity being two to four kilos and the largest twenty kilos. Like Marc Simpson, he suffered from the gang leader’s uncontrollable rages: Barsby told police how John Dawes beat him up badly because he did not like the girl that Barsby was going out with.
The Dawes brothers’ fifty-nine-year-old father, Arthur ‘Eddie’ Dawes, posed as an antiques dealer, even allowing another Essex-based cocaine gang with close links to the Dawes Cartel to use his addresses for bogus businesses. Between 1997 and his arrest in 2003, Arthur claimed thousands of pounds in disability benefit, but appeared to be quite capable of helping his son transport drugs from place to place. He lived in Ingoldmells, on the Lincolnshire coast, in a modest house in Central Avenue with his partner, Rebecca Bridge. When police eventually raided the property they found £10,000 in cash, two bank note counting machines and a Dutch mobile phone in a bedside cabinet. In another room was a holdall with two maps, one of Barcelona and one of Santander, with hotels marked in rings. In a sideboard cupboard in the living room was a 2003 diary with the entries ‘in’ and ‘out’ for the period from February to 12 June and references to names, places and flights. Also in the lounge were a large number of receipts for mobile phone cards, ten phone chargers and a number of other items. Among the items in Bridge’s handbag was a book containing a number of phone numbers in a mixture of her and Arthur’s handwriting and the names of middle-tier suppliers, which had come from Anthony Handley. Arthur Dawes had also been observed at Newport Pagnell service station on the M1 motorway handing over a Tesco coolbag to the driver of a black London cab. The cab was pulled over as it left the service station and police found £100,000 in the bag. Dawes said the money was for Anthony Handley.
By late spring, with a number of arrests having already broken the gang down, the Dawes Cartel began to unravel, first as a result of an accident. On 29 April 2003, one its couriers crashed his car containing two kilos of heroin. Analysis of a mobile phone in the car showed a link with the major drugs dealer Donny Quinn. Then John Dawes himself was arrested. Having lost many of his troops, he had been forced to get hands-on. On 23 May 2003, the police saw his fellow boss Gary Hardy driving a black Porsche near Sutton-in-Ashfield. It paused at a junction long enough to give the impression that it was waiting there, before pulling round the corner. The police then saw John Dawes at the passenger door. He got into the vehicle. Police saw body movement in the Porsche, as if something was being handed over, and moved in as Dawes stood on the pavement with a carrier bag and the Porsche drove off, arresting Dawes as he got into his car. The carrier bag contained £14,000. Other members of the gang were also rounded up, including Arthur Dawes, Rebecca Bridge and Ryan Smith, who had been acting as one of John Dawes’s lieutenants.
TONY HANDLEY AND Red Harrison were the next to trip up. Thirty-three-year-old Handley, who was also known as ‘Spunky’, worked with Harrison as the kingpin in charge of distributing drugs, including ecstasy, amphetamines, cocaine and cannabis, to the west of the UK after they had been imported from Holland and Belgium. When their Dutch counterparts informed them that Handley and Harrison’s names had turned up on bugs connected with the murder of Gerard Meesters, National Crime Squad officers from the Midlands launched Operation Shearson against them in March 2003.
Handley and Harrison had got to know one another while serving time in HMP North Sea Camp in Lincolnshire, Handley for an armed robbery and Harrison for manslaughter. Handley was an unlikely villain. His father was heavily involved with a Hucknall church and Handley had been trained as an accountant. When he partnered the opening of a sport shop in March 1995, there was little sign of him becoming heavily involved in organised crime – he even gave away its first £100 to help Glaisdale School in Bilborough help replace sports equipment destroyed in a fire. But the business went under, leaving Handley to consider crime as an option to attain the wealth he sought. His first major brush with the law came in February 2000 when he was convicted of armed robbery along with two others: Dale Wright, who he would later recruit for the drug business, and Keith Staniland, a thirty-year-old, from Huthwaite. The trio jumped Robert Bolam in his Ford Transit and relieved him at gunpoint of 160,000 cigarettes on the A610 near Giltbrook on 2 November 1999. It was while serving some of his sentence at HMP North Sea Camp that Handley hooked up with Harrison.
After absconding from the open prison, Harrison, using the false identity of ‘Graham Harley’, managed to get a fake passport and driving licence and disappear into obscurity in Amsterdam. He
had been involved with ecstasy shipments before and clearly felt he could make even greater profits by being in Holland. His name first cropped up in Dutch investigations into Franciscus Peiter Beikmans, a wholesale supplier of drugs in Holland. When the name of an Englishmen called ‘Red’ turned upon the tapes, they discovered Harrison’s real identity and a link was subsequently made to the Gerard Meesters murder.
Harrison was shipping drugs to Handley after buying them from Beikmans, who was based in the city of Tilburg. Harrison had looked up other friends from HMP North Sea Camp to assist in the UK distribution and these included a number from Nottinghamshire. Handley would arrange for the drugs to be transported by lorry. Harrison only had to secure a space in a lorry driven by someone who innocently thought they were carrying a legitimate load. Millions of pounds worth of drugs would be shipped over to Felixstowe on a ferry from Rotterdam in taped-up cardboard boxes. Harrison was also shipping drugs for other gangs, including the Bestwood Cartel and Jonathan ‘Donny’ Quinn. It was easy to then use Handley for some of that distribution. He would meet the loads and arrange distribution throughout the East Midlands, West Midlands and London. The pair soon enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. Harrison had swanky apartments in Amsterdam and Breda and both men drove around in Mercedes and Audi TTs.
Handley would talk on his mobile while sipping a latte in an Internet café in Hucknall on the edge of Nottingham, listening to Harrison complain how bored he was in Holland and reveal how he spent up to £11,000 a time on raucous nights in the red light districts, picking up expensive hookers while his wife was back home in the UK. Much of their talk – monitored by the National Crime Squad – was drug shipments. The duo used basic code words in their phone conversations. Cannabis was referred to as ‘a bit of green’, speed or amphetamines were ‘them fast things’, ecstasy tablets were ‘the little ones’ and cocaine ‘the expensive stuff’. However, Harrison, who became rash when things went wrong, would sometimes fail to stick to the agreement on code words, particularly when a shipment was intercepted, and would talk explicitly about ‘coke’ and ‘speed’.
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