Powder Wars

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Epub ISBN: 9781845968939

Version 1.0

  

Copyright © Graham Johnson, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD

7 Albany Street

Edinburgh EH1 3UG

ISBN 1 84018 793 X

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

1

The Early Days

Paul Grimes was born on 26 May 1950 in a post-war prefab on a Liverpool street that had been flattened by Hitler's bombers ten years earlier. At the age of ten, he was introduced to organised crime by his grandmother, Harriet Mellor. Fresh faced but streetwise, Paul was recruited as a decoy into a notorious firm of professional shoplifters run by his grandma.

Foul-mouthed Harriet was a 16-stone gang boss who drank Scotch neat and was known on the street as ‘The Fagin'. She sat at the head of three prominent Liverpool crime families: the Grimes, the Mellors and the Moorcrofts. Amongst their inter-married members were some of the most notorious and prolific gangsters in Britain.

Billy Grimwood was a rising star on the national crime scene and a close associate of the London-based Kray twins and their clubland enforcer Johnny Nash. He was a criminal all-rounder: armed robber, hijacker, protection racketeer, killer, warehouse raider and safe-cracker.

Grimwood had married into Harriet's clan after falling for her daughter Joan, an expert ‘carrier outer' in the family's shoplifting crew. Ambitious and smart, Grimwood soon became Harriet's underboss. The fearlessly violent six-footer had graduated from petty crime (in 1954 he was jailed for stealing a £90 tape-recorder from an office) to hard-core safe-blower and nightclub impresario.

In June 1960, the same month in which his nephew, Paul Grimes, was being introduced to the family business on a shoplifting spree, the 29-year-old Grimwood was sentenced to three years for hiding three ounces of gelignite in the coal-bunker of his two-up, two-down terrace. The sticks of explosive were leftovers from the gang's most recent safe-blowing operations. But for Grimwood, doing time was not particularly bad news. Being sent to jail was a holiday, especially from his wife, who regularly laced his evening meals with rat poison in the hope that he would die. Long-suffering Joan rightly suspected her husband was a serial adulterer.

In Liverpool's Walton Prison, Grimwood was already a living legend. Amongst the cons it was widely believed that he was more powerful than the governor. Grimwood controlled the allocation of the best cells and privileged jobs. During his sentence he smuggled in a television set (stolen from Liverpool docks) and opened up a gangsters' cocktail bar in a basement cell. He fixed it for cons like armed robber and contract killer Charlie Seiga to join him in his exclusively luxurious I wing. In his book
Killer
, Charlie Seiga recalled:

When he wasn't in jail, the sharp-suited Grimwood acted as a mentor to Paul, grooming his nephew for life as a one-man crimewave. In later life, Paul would repay the honour by acting as his minder and bodyguard.

Grimwood's safe-cracking team consisted of Paul Grimes' father, Harold, and his uncles, Ronnie and Ritchie Mellor. Harold Grimes had married Harriet's second daughter Doreen and, by default, into a life of villainy. He regularly escaped the clutches of the police investigating the growing trend of high-value safe burglaries by jumping ship onto a whaler bound for the North Atlantic, sometimes for two years at a time. Clad in rain-lashed oilskins and a sou'wester, he laid low, safe in the knowledge that the long arm of the law did not stretch as far as the fog-saturated ice caps of the Arctic.

Billy Grimwood and Harold Grimes made criminal history in 1969 when they stole £140,000 by tunnelling inside a Liverpool city-centre bank. Grimwood and Grimes were the first British criminals to use thermal lances to burrow through a strong-room door. The infamous ‘Water Street Job' was masterminded by Grimwood and underworld hombre, Tommy ‘Tacker' Comerford, who would later go on, according to Customs and Excise, to become Britain's first ever large-scale drugs baron.

Though the gang spent two days over the August bank holiday tunnelling into the bank from a nearby bakery, Grimwood and Grimes insisted that they only be brought in for the pièce de résistance. They were probably the only criminals in Britain able to operate the burners effectively and their bargaining power paid off. Grimwood and Grimes were the only two members of the gang to evade capture.

Although Grimwood was pulled in for a grilling, he did not fold under questioning. Comerford received ten years in jail for his part in the heist, which sparked a wave of copycat raids in the capital and elsewhere. The judge commented: ‘This was top-level, professional organised crime, carried out with the most modern sophisticated equipment and with all the planning and precision of a commando raid.' Scores as lucrative as the Water Street Job did not happen everyday.

On routine safe-cracking raids, the backbone of the gang was Ritchie and Ronnie Mellor, who, despite being Harriet's beloved sons, ceded day-to-day operational control to Grimwood. Former boxer Ritchie Mellor was known in the underworld as ‘Dick the Stick' on account of his dexterity at opening doors and windows with a short crowbar he concealed up his sleeve.

Dick the Stick would later perfect his breaking-and-entering skills as leader of the ‘Hole in the Wall' gang – a fast-moving gang of warehouse raiders he set up with nephew Paul Grimes. Again, on the instructions of Grandma Harriet, Dick mentored Paul and recruited him regularly into his criminal enterprises.

His brother Ronnie Mellor was a psychotic shooter-merchant and compulsive commercial burglar. He was thoroughly untrustworthy and was held in contempt, though not to his face, by many of his underworld peers. One former safe-cracker partner recalled: ‘If honour and trust were the measure of a man, there would be difficulty finding Ronnie Mellor under a microscope.' Utterly faithless, Ronnie was caught burgling his best pal's house after he had suggested the man go out for a drink.

Despite his shortcomings, Ronnie's wanton brutality had allowed him to gain control and run his own ‘team' independently of the family for a while. He appointed his son, also named Ronnie, as his right-hand man. ‘Young' Ronnie Mellor – dubbed ‘Johnny One Eye' by gang members because of a debilitating cataract in his left eye – grew up with Paul Grimes and was able to pass on his extensive knowledge of crime. He taught him the value of savage violence as a tool for doing business and later invited Paul to be an accomplice on an underworld hit.

In 1990, Ronnie was jailed for ten years after masterminding a £135,000 cocaine importation from Amsterdam. On his release, he moved into kidnapping and ‘taxing' drug dealers. He was later jailed for three years.

The Moorcroft family married into Harriet's firm following the union of a capacious thief and home-breaker called ‘Big' Christy Moorcroft and her third daughter Roseline, a shoplifter. Their son, ‘Young' Christy Moorcroft, followed in their footsteps and was a criminal associate of his cousin Paul Grimes.

Finally, there was Snowball, a younger member of the family, less equipped to deal with violence, but who nevertheless grew up to be a professional thief, armed robber and drug-dealer. Of them all, Snowball was closest to Paul Grimes and predictably the pair enjoyed a long-lasting partnership-in-crime.

As for brothers, sisters, in-laws, cousins – all were mixed up in the rackets in some way: whether it was fencing stolen jewellery, card-marking a safe full of cash ready for the taking or stashing a lorry load of swag ‘zapped' from Liverpool's booming docks. They may not have been an Italian crime family but Harriet's crew was nevertheless a self-contained, highly organised crime gang turning over tens of thousands of pounds a year at a time when the average wage was £10 a week and the average post-war worker relied on hire purchase to buy a Hoover.

It was an ideal breeding ground for a wannabe gangster. By the age of 12, Paul Grimes was a veteran of some 20 organised shoplifting sprees, meticulously masterminded by his grandmother Harriet. Paul was learning fast that crime paid if the criminal committing it paid special attention to the planning, preparation and execution of the crime in hand.

PAUL: She was not like a normal grandmother, Harriet, in all fairness. She ran her shoplifting routine like a professional team, as ruthlessly as any of the safe-cracking and armed robbery gangs that were all the go at the time. She had a bit of a dig on her and all, too. So no one stepped out of line. If you did, you got whacked. No back answers.

She took me out grafting when I was ten. She made me wear short pants. I wasn't on my own. It was a family outing: Harriet, her three daughters Joan, Roseline and my mam Doreen came along and their friend called Carli. Was a pure firm, nonetheless. They were dressed up to the nines: hats, fox furs, the pure works. Each of them had a specific role on the team. It wasn't like the smackheads and that out grafting these days. It was more like a military operation. For instance, Roseline was just there to memorise the faces of the floorwalkers – they were the store detectives. She took it pretty seriously. Remembered what they wore, so if the floorwalkers appeared in the aisles, Harriet's mob were straight onto them – was Game Over for them, in all fairness, all the time.