Powder Wars (19 page)

But first they had to endure a nail-biting wait for the ingots to clear Customs. Luckily, the recent intelligence from the Caracas police had been flagged up to the dock's search teams and as routine they began ‘turning them over'. Unluckily, they did not possess a drill bit any longer than 25 cm and failed to find the secret steel-lined compartments within the lead that contained the coke. Later, it would be claimed that the Cali cartel knew in advance the exact length of Custom's longest drill bits and had buried the coke deep enough to beat them.

Over the next 12 days Customs took photographs of the load and explored further. But increasingly uncertain that this was the suspicious lead they were looking for, the officers were forced to let it go. On 30 October, 500 kilos of cocaine were waved out of the secure docks area into the possession of a firm of hauliers. Customs paid no further attention to the consignment. By rail and lorry it headed for Aintree.

The first week of November 1991 was a key stage in the saga for all parties. For the villains, the police and Customs and Excise it was a decisive, watershed period. Not least because it was the first point at which Paul Grimes got involved.

At the warehouse in Liverpool the cocaine was extracted from inside the lead ingots. Enter Paul Grimes' former partner-in-crime Snowball and his team of armed robbers. Crucially, they had been drafted in for the laborious task of drilling into each of the two-tonne ingots and removing the inner steel box, each containing an average of 16 kilos of white powder.

The tight-knit group of men were ideally suited for the task. As a front for their criminal activities they owned a demolition firm and were more than used to dangerous heavy-duty work. They were also equipped with the hydraulic plant needed to lift the ingots off the ground while they burrowed inside from underneath.

Their work was supervised by Conar Corporation executive, Jesus Camillo Ortiz Chacon, who had flown in because he knew the exact position of the cocaine within each mass of lead. As Customs officers at Felixstowe had found out, without detailed knowledge the cocaine was near impossible to find.

Dripping with sweat, despite the cold November evenings, the extraction team worked through the night to crack open each one of the 32 ingots. On several occasions their hammer drills accidentally penetrated the cocaine parcels, showering the men underneath with white powder. The men grinned maniacally, not sure whether to put it down to their growing success-fuelled excitement or the side effects of the drug. As the air became thick with particles an air-purifier was brought in. It was a good job.

Then out of the blue the warehouse's insurers had decided to carry out a routine inspection of the building. Desperately, the owner tried to stall them until the job-in-hand was finished. By 5 November the extraction process was nearing completion and as Bonfire Night fireworks exploded in the distant sky, the irony of the celebrations underway was not lost on the gang.

At the same time, 350 miles away in London, Mario Halley had already begun spending his share of the profits. He was allegedly washing his loot by buying new BMW saloons to ship abroad.

The last phase of the operation involved destroying the trail of evidence. Events had moved fast, but it was still only the first week in November. Transport manager Brian ‘Snowy' Jennings instructed his innocent brother-in-law, a skip-hire boss, to get rid of the lead ingots. The senior hierarchy of the operation had resolutely decided that they should be buried, preferably on a piece of secure land controlled by them, and left for good. Jennings' brother-in-law quickly found the ideal location – the demolition yard used by Snowball and his team. All parties were paid extra to bury the ingots and forget about them for a long time or until further orders.

By the end of the first week of November the main players were already moving large amounts of cash around their money-laundering networks. In Columbia, they had paid £7 million for 500 kilos at £14,000 apiece. In Britain, cut and ‘bashed', the 500 kilos yielded an estimated bulk of 900 kilos, each worth £80,000 on the street. That equated to a cool £70 million profit.

To all intents and purposes the biggest cocaine smuggling operation in British history had just gone down without a single hitch. Even armed with pre-op intelligence the Customs and police had, somewhat surprisingly, not gotten a sniff. Now the main evidence was flooding out onto Britain's streets and rapidly disappearing up peoples' noses. Without a decisive break in the next few days the case would be lost forever.

14

The Key

Enter Paul Grimes – the key to unlocking the mystery. Within seven days of the consignment's arrival at Felixstowe, Paul had learned of it and gleaned enough hard, accurate intelligence. He tipped off his handlers at the Customs and Excise and put them on to the drug crime of the century.

If that wasn't enough there was a killer twist in the tale. Paul had stumbled across the deal purely by accident. As Paul Grimes revealed how he had infiltrated the gang, Customs officers could not believe their ears and their luck. The gang had made one mistake. They had gotten greedy. Not content with their share of the £70 million profit, Snowball and his gang decided to double-cross the cartel's bosses. Instead of leaving the lead ingots buried in the ground as ordered, they could not resist trying to fiddle a few shillings on the side.

Snowball and Jennings' brother-in-law dug them up and sold the 32 tonnes for scrap. And who did Snowball call to buy the lead? None other than his trusted old confidante and underworld scrap dealer, Paul Grimes. For the sake of a few hundred pounds they had sold out the biggest drugs cartel in British history.

As the wide-eyed customs officers listened, they had to bite their hands to stop themselves from laughing out loud. This was the breakthrough that Customs and Excise had been waiting for. It was, to say the least, explosive. Not only were they in possession of specific, checkable data, such as the location of the warehouse, the nature of the ingots and the identities of the criminals involved, they had a reliable mole now on the inside.

Smugly, the Customs and Excise officers debated the best way to break the news to their somewhat frantic police colleagues. An intense rivalry compounded by mistrust had now grown up between the two agencies. Customs officers were now openly questioning the value of the police's mole, Brian Charrington.

As if to emphasise the point, one week after Paul Grimes had begun feeding intelligence to Customs, Brian Charrington popped up once again. Whetting the appetite of Regional Crime Squad DS Weedon, he ‘revealed' that a 500-kilo load had entered Britain. He boasted to the police officer that the operation ‘had gone off perfectly right under the noses of Customs, who did not have a clue'.

Charrington was wrong. As he spoke, Paul Grimes was infiltrating the gang and hoovering up vital clues at a frenetic rate. Charrington was certainly talking a good game. Clearly bigging up his own value as informer, he showed his police handlers a bag containing £900,000 in cash. It was, he said, profits from the deal which the gang was ‘washing' through a bureau de change in London.

But despite this show of histrionics Charrington could not furnish them with any detailed information about the operation. Astonishingly, he claimed he had only learned the specifics after the load's arrival, pleading that he could not have warned the cops in advance. It meant that Paul was single-handedly left to shoulder the responsibility of bringing down the gang.

PAUL: It all started with a phone call from one of Snowball's team. It was the first week of November 1991. They asked me whether I wanted to buy 32 tonnes of lead. I don't know why I got onto the fact that there was something shady going on, but I did. Straight-a-fucking way by the way. Call it instinct. Say it takes one to know one and that. But I felt it in my bones that there was a big fuck-off caper going off and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Over the next few days I got into Snowball's head. I took him out on the town and got him pissed. After two pints, he was purely singing. Like a fucking canary and all. It's the egos with these pricks.

They can't help themselves. They love telling you what great criminal masterminds they are.

Within minutes he's telling that the lead was used to smuggle a load of white into Liverpool. I'm like that, ‘No!', and he's like that, ‘I know yeah. Get paid or what?' He's getting real cosy now. With the ale and the glow of the optics at the bar on a winter's night and that. Next minute he's in bits telling me how when he's cutting the yayo out of the lead and that, the bags are bursting open and they're getting covered in powder. He is laughing and clacking his fingers Granbystylie.

‘Showered with coke we was,' he said, like he's a fucking workie talking about a bag of plaster that fell on his head. But he's like that: ‘We weren't arsed because there was piles and piles of it. Pure fucking Tony Montana, knowmean? Kis and Kis [kilos] all over the show.'

‘What?' I'm thinking, having to stop myself from falling over. Could already feel my good self getting half a glad on over this. Got to ring this one in, I'm thinking, no two ways. Snowball wasn't stupid enough to reveal who the Mr Bigs were at that stage, but I knew anyways that they'd have to be pure heavyweight to put up the money for this kind of carry on. That went without saying. But the payoff was still to come.

I asked Snowball why he wanted me to get involved. He said that they wanted me to weigh the lead in, so that they could make a raise off've it. He laughed and told me that the Mr Bigs had told them to keep it buried and leave it well alone. But being pure scousers Snowball and his cheapskates wanted to diddle them and get the scrap money. Can you believe it? I could not believe how small-time these pricks were. It made me want to turn them over even more.

The next day I phoned my man at the Customs and Excise. Met him in a car on the Dock Road. Then I phoned Snowball back with a best-price quote for the lead. I told them that I couldn't buy it personally because I couldn't give them the best price, so I'd phoned up a mate of mine, Mick Burns at M&A Metals in Ditton. He said he'd give them £10 or £12 per hundredweight. There was no ulterior motive by doing this; it's just the way I would have done it anyway.

The next day one of Snowball's team phoned back and told me that they were considering the offer. He even told me that they'd rung round several scrap dealers to get more than one quote to make sure they weren't getting ripped off. Could you believe these cheeky twats? Making millions off've the gack and that, and quibbling over a few quid on some jarg South American lead.

One week later, during week two of November, Snowball phoned me and said: ‘We'll take the lead to your man.' Meaning we'll take it to Mick Burns.

The Customs told me that they wanted a sneaky picture of the ingots because they weren't sure what they looked like. So I took a camera. The next morning I arrived at their demolition yard at nine thirty. Snowball was on the Bri-Mac machine digging out the lead from the rubble. One of his crew tried to blag me off, saying that the lead had been ballast from a ship. They'd been buried ten feet down in the ground.

They filled a skip with about eight of these ingots, which in all fairness looked like massive buckets with eye hooks on either side. Then the skip was put on top of the wagon. The remaining ingots were loaded onto a 20 tonne tipper wagon and another lorry. A couple of them rolled onto their sides and I saw big holes in the bottom. I asked Snowball what the holes were for and he just laughed. One of Snowball's team had changed the number plates on all of the wagons just for the journey.

When we got to Mick Burns' yard they were unloaded and weighed and his secretary handed me an envelope containing the cash – the moneyfor the scrap plus the VAT. I couldn't believe it. Snowball told me to take out the VAT, which was £700, and told me to tell the other lads that it was a cash deal and there was no VAT. He was not only ripping off the big bosses by selling the lead, now he was skanking his own team by diddling them out of the VAT.

He gave me £350. Could not believe him, la. Then he even tried to rip me off. He told me that my cut was £500, but I later found out that they'd agreed to give me a bag of sand and he was going to shady half of it for his good self. Cannot trust anyone, can you? But the fucker was purely scuppered on this score because his boss went out of his way to give me the grand directly and it was wrapped in a cellophane bank wrap so no cunt could shave any off.

It had been too risky to take a photie for the Customs that day, but a few days later I took the Customs fellers to Mick Burns' yard where they were still stacked up so that they could eyeball them.

About a week after I'd delivered the ingots to Mick Burns' yard, Snowball's team were on the phone asking whether the ingots had been melted down yet. Obviously they were getting a bit jumpy because they had handed over a shit load of potential evidence against their bosses to a third party. If the bosses found out there'd be untold, to say the least. All's I said to them was that I didn't know if they'd been melted and it was nothing to do with me. One of them. Just fucked them off.

The third conversation was a bit hectic. The feller said that there were heavy people involved with guns. It was half a veiled threat. It was half to get across how important it was to find out they'd been melted.

A few nights after the ingots had been taken to Mick Burns' yard I took Snowball out on the piss again. What he told me was pure fucking explosive. The next day I met up with Customs. They were made up with what I'd given them so far and thought they had enough to bust the gang right then. They wanted to hit Snowball's yard there and then, but then I told them what Snowball had told me the night before. The gang were planning to bring in an even bigger load of cocaine at around Christmas time by the same fucking method. Loose lips sink ships or what?