Powder Wars

In the years since they had drifted apart sometime in the 1980s Paul Grimes was unaware that his old pal John Haase had become one of Britain’s most feared gangsters.

Haase had made the transition from armed robber to international drug dealer at exactly the right time – and struck gold. In fact, senior-level villains in Liverpool now look back on the late ’80s and early ’90s with rose-tinted glasses, fondly remembering them as the glory years of drug dealing, in much the same way as Victorian mill owners must have looked back on the Industrial Revolution.

Haase was now a multi-millionaire heroin baron. At the same time as Paul Grimes was waging his one-man crusade against Warren in the early ’90s, Haase was secretly expanding his empire. Haase had secretly pioneered the Turkish Connection to the UK; the trading route from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the cafes of Stoke Newington, controlled by the fearless Turkish Mafia. Haase had grown so close to the Turk babas or godfathers, and his buying power was so huge, that he was granted direct access to the mujahideen warlords in Afghanistan. He often left his suburban home in Liverpool to fly to their mountain redoubts in person to inspect the goods. He had come a long way since his days as a small-time crook.

Haase picked up his first conviction in December 1963 when he was given a conditional discharge for minor offences at Liverpool City Juvenile Court. One year later he was nicked for larceny and breaking into a shop, and in January 1964 he was sentenced to probation, again at Liverpool City Juvenile Court.

Like many a young Scouse rapscallion before him, he had invaded the relatively peaceful pastures of north Wales to pillage the rich pickings. In March 1964, he was given two years’ probation at Llangollen Juvenile Court for unlawfully taking a mailbag. Two years later he was fined £5 at Liverpool Magistrates’ Court for stealing a box of grapes. In April 1966, he was sentenced to six months in prison, suspended at Denbigh Quarter Session for larceny of lead.

In March 1969, he was sent to prison for the first time after he breached the conditions of his suspended sentence when he was caught taking a car without consent. A year later, in March 1970, Haase was jailed for 18 months at Liverpool Crown Court for burglary and theft. Then for a string of similar offences he was given two years’ probation at Preston Crown Court in June 1972.

In March 1973, Haase got seven years for his part in five armed raids on post offices and betting shops and two attacks on police. Jailing him, Judge Rudolph Lyons said: ‘The time has come for your reign of terror in Liverpool to come to an end. You are an evil, dangerous man.’ A detective who worked on the case later told the Daily Mirror newspaper that a female employee who had stared down the barrel of Haase’s trademark shotgun never recovered from the ordeal. The detective said: ‘She was totally traumatised by what happened to her.’

By the late ’70s John was the leader of a ruthless gang of armed robbers known as the Transit mob. Their trademark MO was to spring out of the back of a Ford Transit van, armed to the teeth, and pounce on their victims. But despite being super tight and supposedly impenetrable, they were caught and in July 1982 Haase got 14 years for armed robbery on two post office vans. Haase was then 34. Haase’s co-conspirator, danny Vaughan, was jailed for 13 years.

Haase always blamed a supergrass called Roy Grantham for informing on the Transit mob. Several years later Grantham allegedly committed suicide after mysteriously disappearing at sea on a boating trip. Underworld sources maintain he was killed in revenge for betraying the Transit mob.

The case was further complicated by evidence given at the trial by a second supergrass called Dennis Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a violent and sadistic veteran of the Scottish underworld. In the early ’80s, he was arrested for attempted murder, indecent assault, extortion and robbery on a young man. On remand, he claimed that he had befriended John Haase and Danny Vaughan. Facing a possible 20-year sentence, Wilkinson swore under oath that Vaughan and Haase had confessed in the prison exercise yard to the Transit mob robberies. His evidence was crucial in convicting Haase and Vaughan.

Wilkinson later retracted his statement, claiming in a Sunday People story that he fitted up the pair on the instructions of a bent copper who had passed him Vaughan’s confidential file and told him to memorise the evidence. Wilkinson claimed that he had perjured himself.

Seizing on an apparent miscarriage of justice, in 1984 friends and relatives of Haase and Vaughan climbed the 120-foot Wellington Monument in Liverpool to protest at their imprisonment. However, the protest, which later inspired the ‘Free George Jackson’ campaign in the soap opera Brookside, was in vain. It did not result in freedom.

Following his release in 1990 Haase realised that there was no future in armed robberies. He noticed that his contemporaries in the Liverpool Mafia were riding the crest of the drugs boom and he wanted a piece of it. What’s more, Haase had the respect and the firepower to muscle in and that is exactly what he did.

Haase’s point of entry into the drugs business owed itself to contacts he had made in jail and his nephew, Paul Bennett, a 30-something gangster who in the late ’80s/early ’90s was doing to heroin what Curtis Warren had done to cocaine. Bennett had excellent distribution networks in Britain. Whilst Haase had been in jail, he had cultivated a relationship with one of Turkey’s most powerful babas, known as the ‘Vulcan’.

This mysterious crime boss controlled the wholesale poppy market in Afghanistan and the trafficking lines through Turkey, the Balkans and around the Caspian Sea known as the ‘southern route’. His vast wealth ensured that every time the Vulcan had been sent to jail, he had managed to buy himself out. The police complained that his organisation was immune because he owned politicians, judges and senior law officials.

The Vulcan was impressed enough with Haase to put him in the safe hands of his own son-in-law, a heavyweight heroin baron called Yilmaz Kaya. Haase introduced Kaya to Bennett. Recognising that Haase had the muscle and the experience to run a large criminal enterprise the Turks were more than impressed. They began dealing directly with Haase. Business boomed.

Within a relatively short period, Haase had taken over a large slice of Liverpool’s and thus Britain’s heroin import. Between 1989 and 1993 his trafficking ring was the biggest in Britain. Unique amongst the Liverpool Mafia, he did business alone. He was not a team player, more of a maverick who was suspicious of their cliquiness, taking comfort in the anonymity of doing business with firms far afield.

Haase feared no one. To prove it, he even leant on the untouchable Curtis Warren. Haase had met Warren in 1990 and helped him sell a consignment of cocaine, but when a business deal with one of Warren’s top bosses had gone badly wrong, Haase stepped in. As punishment Haase kidnapped the gangster involved and ‘taxed’ Warren’s crew for £50,000. The victim protested, using the defence: ‘You can’t do this. I work for Curtis.’ Haase replied: ‘So fucking what? Get the money or you will be killed.’ The ransom was paid.

At the height of Haase’s success there occurred one of the most extraordinary events in British judicial history. It mirrored the strange and sinister legal workings that had loomed large in the Warren case and in another striking similarity with the case, Paul Grimes was to become a key figure.

In the summer of 1992 Customs and Excise officers put John Haase under surveillance. Rightly they believed him to be the British-end kingpin of a Turkish heroin smuggling ring. Unable to infiltrate the gang, Customs officers decided to ‘follow the money’ in the hope of unravelling their modus operandi. They watched as nearly £2 million was handed over to a North London Turkish outfit headed by 26-year-old godfather, Yilmaz Kaya. The cash was spirited back to Turkey via Heathrow airport.

However, the real money was being made in Liverpool. Two of the Turks were regularly followed on frequent visits to Liverpool where they met Haase, who by then had firmly installed his nephew, Paul Bennett, as his deputy and a dealer called Edward Croker to oversee distribution on the street. Watching in secret, the Customs officers looked on in amazement as bundles of cash the size of house bricks were handed over in a heavy plastic bag at the Black Horse pub in Liverpool.

In July 1993 Customs moved in on the gang. A staggering 55 kilos of heroin with a street value of £18 million were discovered in the bedroom of a safe house in Evesham Road, Walton. Haase immediately suspected that Customs had been helped by a secret informant. He blamed a businessman called John Healey, who was indebted to Haase for over £1 million. Haase raged that Healey had ratted him out in order to avoid paying back the money and that it was a fit up. His protestations fell on deaf ears.

Two years later in August 1995 the eight men involved were jailed for a total of 110 years. Haase, then 46, was sentenced to an unprecedentedly severe 18 years, as was Paul Bennett, then 31. They had £840,000 in cash confiscated. Croker, then 31, was jailed for 14 years and had £110,000 confiscated. All three Liverpool gangsters had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply heroin. Judge David Lynch said: ‘It is rare that the courts deal with people so high up the ladder. It must be marked by a heavy sentence.’

The five Turks involved – Suleyman Ergun, 26, Mehmet Ansen, 54, Yilmaz Kaya, 29, Bulent Onay, 39, and Manuk Ocecki, 37 – also received hefty sentences. It was a major coup for the Customs and Excise, who were still reeling from the fallout of the collapsed Warren case.

We were delighted with the result. For us it was a turning point in the fight against the big players. We had managed to bring down a complicated international gang successfully. And we were confident we could do it again.

The sentences were deservedly harsh. Without time off for good behaviour. And we were confident that Haase would get as little as possible off because he is notoriously uncooperative – he was expected to be released in 2013. We couldn’t have wished for better. He was a dangerous man best kept off the streets.