Powder Wars (17 page)

More than anything I couldn't believe how quickly he descended into a drug addiction. A smackhead who would do anything for drugs. He turned into a robber just like his auld feller. He started following cash vans around and having them off. Because Plymouth hadn't caught up with Liverpool in the robbing, security was much more lax. His speciality was snatching the takings from the vans that went round to collect the money from slot machines.

Could not believe it. I tried to help him. I brought him back to Liverpool and gave him a job in my stone-cleaning business. But as soon as I would leave the particular job I'd put him on he would disappear, looking for drugs. We ended up having a fight in the middle of Molyneaux Street. Then I wouldn't see him for months. I was helpless. I was angry. The drug dealers were killing my son and there was nothing I could do.

One day I went to the bookies in Park Road. There were Mercs and BMs and RS Cosies parked outside. These were the drug dealers who just sat off in the bookies all day placing £500 and £1,000 bets on the dogs. Although they were the new generation of drug dealers I knew them all. I knew their auld fellers, their brothers. I had shared cells with them. One of them had a plazzy bag with £30,000 in it stashed inside his zipped-up tracky top. Just dipping into it he was, taking out £500 at a time and betting on the dogs. He didn't even write out his bets. He just shouted the trap number to the girl behind the bullet-proof screen. Some of them were snarling at me. But I just burned holes in them with my eyes. I could have massacred them there and then, with my own bare hands. These were the men who were killing my son. But I had my own plans. They'd have to wait.

A few weeks later Paul's scrapyard was raided by Customs and Excise. Instinctively, he knew they weren't looking for contraband. It was too businesslike. Just a short, bearded officer taking notes and a few investigators asking questions and sniffing around. On the first visit, Paul managed to convince them that he wasn't who they thought he was and that he didn't own the business. They went away. Two hours later his shaken accountant phoned: ‘Are you sitting down? They don't care who owns the yard. They want £170,000 off you in unpaid VAT.'

Paul put two and two together. They must have had him under surveillance for a while. The surveillance cars he'd sussed on the day he had beaten up Curtis Warren were most obviously in hindsight Customs.

PAUL:£170,000? Off've me? As if, la. As if I was going to hand off 170 grand to these folks.

I had the dough all right, goes without saying and that, but as if in a million fucking years they were going to get their hands on it. Not going to happen, is it, knowmean? When they came to the yard I was like: ‘No I'm not here. Doesn't work here. Sorry, can't help you and that.'

Then I went to this meeting at Customs' HQ on the Dock Road. There was the small feller with the beard. We'll call him Dominic Smith [not his real name]. There was also a big cunt, six feet tall, with a nose all over the place. They started giving it good cop, bad cop routine. I told this big fucking feller that if he didn't shut his fucking mouth I'd straighten his fucking nose for him. Then I declared the meeting over. The accountant was having a fucking heart attack.

A lot of businessmen are intimidated by the Customs and Excise. They come with the health warning that they are ‘more powerful than the police'. But what they didn't understand is that guys like me weren't arsed about them. I told them straight: ‘If I have to give you a cheque for £170,000 then I'm on a plane out of here – with the fucking cheque. And what can you do, put me in jail? No one is going to win this argument.'

Then I got to thinking. I could purely use this situation to my advantage. I'd already been toying with the idea of approaching the busies with a deal. Of ratting on a few ‘community leaders' and that. So I got to thinking of cutting a deal with the Customs instead and killing two birds with one stone. Get them off've my case for the VAT they said I owed them and grassing up a few hard hitters into the bargain. So I had another meeting, this time with just Dominic Smith and that. I still told him that I didn't owe them the VAT and that if they wanted it they'd have to go and get it off've my customers. At the end of the meeting I said: ‘Drugs are becoming rife now. If I hear something I'll let you know.'

He understood what I meant. So I left it at that.

At first I didn't really know whether I could trust them. So I figured that I would test them with a few smaller fish. At the time, as well as drugs, my other big beef was with the proliferation of firearms. All hands were now using guns to do armed robberies. High on coke they were, shooting up innocent people. I took a very dim view of this. It came as no surprise to my good self that this new breed of trigger-happy shooter merchants were often drug dealers as well.

The script was that they were often doing their bloodthirsty armed raids to raise dough to fund bigger and bigger drug deals. That's the way it went. So I decided that this type of crime would be my tester with the Customs. I'd got wind of one such job, which was just about to go off. It was being planned by my old oppo, Snowball. After I'd retired, he'd got mixed up in other stuff. I couldn't believe it, la, one of my own into that! But that's the way it was going then.

Snowball used to confide in me. He told me that he was working for a family who were connected to the drug dealers. They had a demolition firm and they'd made him a foreman and driver. At the time this firm got a contract to gut one of the warehouses at Littlewoods Pools and make it bigger. It was next to the warehouse that Littlewoods delivered all the cash from the pools collectors. Every week hundreds of thousands of pounds went through this little hatch and all that separated it from Snowball and his team was a sliding door.

They planned to heist the room with shooters and have the money off. Snowball even invited me down to Littlewoods to ask me my appraisal of the job. It was easy enough, but I realised that shooters were involved and that these were the type of fellers who'd have a snort beforehand and would damage every cunt within a three-mile radius. As far as I was concerned there were two types of armed robber and these were the worst kind. I told Dom Smith of their plans. He told the busies. The busies told Littlewoods and they managed to block the robbery before it went off. They simply secured the big panel door and beefed up security. Snowball and his team soon realised they couldn't do it.

That was my first grass. That was it. A few weeks later Littlewoods invited me down. Their head of security thanked me and they give me £250 as a reward. It was a weird feeling, being one of the good guys, but I kind of enjoyed it and weirdly enough I did actually think I'd done the community a service. Snowball didn't even know he'd been grassed on. One day he just said: ‘Remember that thing we were looking at. Forget about it.'

Then he added: ‘Anyway we've got another one going off. It's bigger and better.'

That night we went for a pint. Snowball couldn't help spilling the beans to me about this other armed robbery he was planning. He told me that they'd been gutting an army base in Wales. They'd come across a hand-held rocket launcher and robbed it. The plan was to use it on a post office van. They weren't going to fire it, just use it to scare the drivers. They'd already got a little team together. I realised that Snowball was doing a lot of armed robberies.

A few days later Snowball said that he'd got a get-away car, a two-litre Cortina Ghia, and he asked me to hide it in my yard. As soon as he dropped it off I phoned Smithy and told him. The busies came round and got the car and then nicked Snowball and the owners of the demolition firm. To keep my cover the Customs arranged for me to get arrested as well.

Even the busies didn't know I was the informant. At the station they gave me a hard time. They were playing good cop/bad cop and I was screaming all kinds of abuse at them making sure that if Snowball and his team were in the other cells they'd hear me. After about an hour of this charade I mentioned the name of a sergeant that I'd been given by Customs. It was like a signal and the busies eased off. After that, they knew the score and it was allday.

I still had to make a statement for appearances' sake, not one that admitted that I was a grass, but one that said I was just a scrap dealer who had been asked to hide a car for a few days. In the end, they all got time for it. For me it was only the beginning of fighting the criminals that I didn't approve of. Now I turned my sights on bigger targets.

12

Curtis Warren

Paul set himself a simple task. From now on his aim was to infiltrate the Mr Bigs behind Liverpool's rapidly growing cocaine and heroin cartels. Why? Because they were the specific narcotics that were killing his son.

In 1990, when Paul was thinking about how he might penetrate the Liverpool drug rings, he did not know exactly who his targets would be. Though he didn't know it yet, it turned out that he was setting out on a journey that would end with the capture of two of Britain's biggest drug dealers: Curtis Warren and John Haase. Curtis Warren would go down in history as the ‘richest and most successful British criminal who has ever been caught'.

He was primarily a cocaine dealer. Up until that point Paul and Warren's paths had only crossed twice by two weird twists of fate. Warren had first come to Paul's attention when a prostitute he was guarding in a brothel under his protection told him how a couple of 18-year-old Toxteth scallies, one of whom turned out to be Curtis Warren, had set up their own racket blackmailing streetwalkers and their punters.

Then a few years later Paul came face-to-face with Warren when Warren walked into his scrapyard and demanded protection money. The confrontation ended quickly and Warren was rushed to hospital after being ‘made to lie down and go to sleep' (left bleeding and unconscious) in the cobbled street outside the gates of Paul's premises. Paul, an old hand at the extortion game, had been unamused and unimpressed by the young buck's ‘performance'.

After targeting Warren, Paul turned his attention to his old hombre John Haase. To his disgust, Haase had followed the now well-trodden route map from armed robbery to drugs baron with spectacular results. Like most of the Liverpool Mafia that went before and after him, he was jettisoned at the touch of a portable phone into a stratospheric world of mass cash and wildly disproportionate, pan-continental power: power which would bring him into the bosom (and equally into conflict) with the highest lawmakers and politicians in the land. But to fully explain Paul's transformation into a supergrass it is necessary to first understand how his first big drugs target, Curtis Warren, rose from a rooting-tooting scallywag to become Interpol's Target One.

Curtis Francis Warren was born on 31 May 1963 into a working-class, immigrant family at a fading former merchant's townhouse in Upper Parliament Street, Toxteth, Liverpool. His father, Curtis Aloysius Warren, a mixed-race seaman from South America, had jumped ship in Liverpool from the Norwegian merchant navy in the 1950s and married local girl Sylvia Chantre, also of Latin descent, in 1960. Warren was part of the second generation of dockside settlers who would accelerate Toxteth's decline from a largely peaceful but exotically lively melting pot into a riot-torn, crime-ridden, no-go ghetto with international drug links within 20 years.

Two centuries earlier the wealthy merchants of Toxteth had controlled 80 per cent of the world's slave trade. Ironically, Warren would make Toxteth the hub of an equally distasteful global trade network once again. For a period in the 1980s and 1990s, the ‘merchants' of Toxteth controlled a similarly high proportion of the cocaine entering Britain.

Warren's criminal record began at the age of twelve when he was placed under a two-year supervision order for joyriding by Liverpool Juvenile Court. At 13 the serial truant was sentenced by the magistrates' court to a day's detention for burglary. His gangland apprenticeship coincided with a massive explosion of youth crime in Liverpool, a legacy which has hung over the city's reputation like a black cloud until the present day. Warren was truly a leading light in the city's first generation of ‘scallies'.

Over the next two years he was caught for theft, stealing cars on four occasions, robbery, offensive behaviour and going equipped. After three months in a detention centre he came straight out and was fined for assaulting two policemen. At 16 Warren mugged a 78-year-old lady on the steps of Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral along with two other accomplices. His victim fell badly, suffering horrific, headline-grabbing injuries. After magistrates dealt with a second separate assault on the police, Warren was sent to borstal for 11 months.

Warren's teenage crime spree had been played out against a background of structural change in Liverpool. Since the mid '70s unemployment had been rising. Under PM Margaret Thatcher it rocketed to its highest rates in the country. One-fifth of UK manufacturing capacity was wiped out in a shock recession. This had devastating knock-on effects for the struggling port and even more so for ethnically diverse, docks-dependent Toxteth.

Liverpool's sea trade fell off the scale and in an attempt to salvage the residue the docks were relocating from the south end to the north end of the city. Unemployment shot up to a staggering 80 per cent. To add insult to injury, a new phenomenon was thrown into this potentially explosive mix: a breakdown in police community relations. Residents of Toxteth were complaining of racially motivated police heavy-handedness, aggravated by the widely despised suss laws which gave them arbitrary stop-and-search powers.

On 3 July 1981, structural change gave way to tectonic upheaval. Toxteth erupted into rioting, following hot on the heels of earlier disturbances in Brixton, south London. Warren, who had been released from borstal earlier that year, was back in the thick of it. The civil unrest would result in CS gas being deployed on the mainland for the first time and although a string of copycat riots flared up across Britain, none would come close to the scale and savagery of Toxteth. There were 244 arrests and 700 out of 4,000 police officers who held the thin blue line were injured.