Powder Wars

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.

Toxteth’s criminal fraternity were quick to take advantage of the chaos. From the smoking ruins, they were able to forge a community in their own image, a base from which to wreak havoc on the rest of the world. Liverpool 8 became a de facto police no-go area. The seething population effectively cut itself off from the rest of the city, which in turn had cut itself off from the rest of the country in a wave of militant-inspired revolt. Suspicious and angry, Toxteth turned in on itself, fiercely protecting its own at all costs, even if they were criminals. A haven for lawlessness soon established itself. A perfect breeding ground enabling the exponential growth of street criminals into gangsters in double-quick time.

Drug dealing, ram raiding and muggings were seen as legitimate earners. A self-sufficient black economy boomed, employing whole families and streets from grandmothers to children. Even the chief community leader and council appointee Michael Showers was an international heroin dealer and racketeer.

At 19 Warren was sentenced to his first spell in a ‘proper jug’ after he was convicted of blackmailing a prostitute and a punter in a crude backstreet extortion racket. His accomplice was Johnny Phillips. Phillips would go on to be Warren’s right-hand man in the cocaine business, notoriously declaring a fatal war on the Ungi clan on the way. It was a turning point in Warren’s criminal career. On the wings, he was exposed for the first time to members of the Liverpool Mafia, the white, middle-aged crime godfathers who controlled the big-time action in the city.

At that point in time, many of them were plotting the strategic switch from old-fashioned racketeering to drugs. It was a match made in heaven. Here was an extremely bright and hard 19-year-old black villain who was closer to the heart of the deep-rooted but essentially piecemeal drug trade in Toxteth than they were. It was a case of ‘I’ve got the brains; you’ve got the cash. Let’s make lots of money’. Numbers were exchanged and the seminal foundations of the future cartel laid down.

When he got out, Warren stepped up a gear, holding up a Securicor van with a pistol and a sawn-off shotgun. After smashing in the skull of a have-a-go hero, the gang fled with £8,000. Warren was caught and handed down five years. He continued his criminal education, consolidating his connections with the Liverpool Mafia and also networking with villains from Manchester and London.

On the outside the Liverpool gangs were making quantum leaps in their drug-trafficking enterprises. Heroin and cannabis abuse was spiralling out of control. In 1985 Tommy Comerford was convicted of a huge cannabis conspiracy and the Godfather of Toxteth, Michael Showers, was busy organising the heroin consignments for which he was later jailed.

On his release Warren was prevented from getting a piece of the action by a lack of funds. Instead he jumped on the scallywag bandwagon headed for Europe. For several years the city’s top urchins had been plundering the sports shops of Switzerland and Germany, blazing a trail of havoc in the wake of their beloved football teams and shipping the exotically rare designer clobber ‘zapped’ from the shelves back to Liverpool. From mass sportswear theft, the phenomenon escalated to robbing jewellery shops and snatch raids. Some of the ‘teams’ had colourful names, such as the ‘Cuckoo Clock’ gang, distraction thieves from Croxteth’s Smack City who specialised in stealing high-value jewellery from specialist cuckoo-clock shops in Switzerland.

Warren joined the Trans Alpina exodus, but in Christmas 1987 was caught stealing £1,250 from a super-sleek shoe shop in the chocolate box Swiss resort of Chur. Warren was jailed for 30 days after the judge heard how he violently attacked the female shop assistant before making off with the till.

Following his stint in jail, Warren returned to Liverpool and set up shop as a street dealer in Toxteth. His unique selling point that made him stand out from the army of dealers on Granby Street was that he served up heroin. Pre-Warren, a gang of vigilantes had kept Toxteth gear-free, using extreme violence and the catchphrase ‘This is Toxteth not Croxteth. No smack’. Warren moved up the ranks quickly by warning off the vigilantes, exploiting the competitive advantage in heroin and opening the floodgates.

Over the next three yearsWarren moved up the Class A ladder from street dealer to wholesaler to importer. He befriended Liverpool Mafia boss Stan Carnall and flew to Amsterdam regularly. Carnall was typical of the older generation of white armed robbers who’d moved into big-time dealing. Paul Grimes knew of him and hated him. It was around this time that British Customs first became aware of Warren’s smuggling activities. Intelligence reports and phone calls linked him to a one-off heroin run from the Dam to Liverpool.

As with the Toxteth riots and then his frontline heroin revolution, Warren was quick to take advantage of market changes to build his business. Modern commercial tools such as cheap international flights, computers, mobile phones, integration with Europe, deregulated banking and English as the international business language helped push his growth rates into mind-boggling figures. The free availability of firearms was also a factor, but the biggest factors of all were as old as trade itself: supply and demand.

Two distribution networks set up by the £10 billion Medellin cartel to flood Britain with cocaine were simultaneously smashed in 1987, instantly cutting off bulk supplies. Meanwhile, demand was rocketing. Street seizures were at record levels and in June 1988 Britain’s first crack manufacturer Colin Burrows, Warren’s business partner, was caught in Liverpool. From then on, crack would drive demand for cocaine, leading to a year-on-year exponential growth in demand. The Liverpool Mafia responded by setting up a home-grown network in alliance with south London gang boss Eddie Richardson. But the organisation, which had not yet got Warren fully onboard, was unfocussed and flaky.

In 1991 the police first became aware of Warren’s independent smuggling operation after an informant in Operation Bruise, a Midlands-based task force targeting organised crime, named him as a maverick middle-ranking operator who specialised in 50-kilo-at-a-time shipments. It wouldn’t be long before the Liverpool Mafia would realise Warren’s full potential and headhunt him into an executive position and it wouldn’t be long before his path would once again cross that of Paul Grimes. A collision course was in motion.