Powder Wars

Paul was shocked at the sheer intensity of Haase’s criminal force. Having been a gang boss himself, Paul was no stranger to how an organised crime unit worked. To keep the kiddies fed, there had to be a production-line mentality. But this was in a different league altogether. This was the General Motors of gangsterism. It defied belief.

One day I walked in the office about half eight in the morning. Haase was sitting at his desk cleaning guns. I just looked at him and he started laughing. I went to the offices a few more times and took a note of the crew Haase had got around him. There was a few old faces – for instance Haase’s nephew, Paul Bennett, the drug dealer who had got out of prison with him in ’96.

Bennett had a sidekick called Baz who was a bagman. He specialised in running drugs and guns. There was also an ex-boxer called Chris No-Neck, who was expert at testing consignments of drugs for purity and so on. He was also a heavy who Haase used to twat people. There was Kenny Doorteam, who ran Haase’s door operation, taking care of security on nightclubs, pubs and hotels. (It was a big earner.) Thomo was a student at the university doing a degree in sociology or psychology, something like that. He was also one of Haase’s heavies.

Paul was a half-caste lad who was Haase’s main drug courier. He went all over the country picking up tackle for Haase and bringing it back to office for testing and distribution. Paul was Haase’s main man for drugs, but he looked like a student. All of Haase’s drug people were like that. They dressed like beauts. They looked like harmless students with scarves and woolly hats and suede jackets and that. The police wouldn’t look twice at them. They should have – on a run they’d be carrying up to six kilos of brown each.

A lot of big villains were coming and going from the office, buying and selling tackle and that. All the time, there was new motors with new faces. Was a big operation. I started passing that on to the Customs.

Haase did a lot of debt collecting, mainly for other villains, on deals that had gone wrong. There was a hardcore of boys whose job was to fill people in, kidnap them, tie-ups, whatever. Griff was one of them. He was a karate expert. His job was to simply knock fuck out of people. He made plenty of money out of it. To me he was an ordinary feller, he was an auld feller, but because of the kung fu and karate, he had a good dig on him.

At first this was the only type of stuff John allowed me to see – the knocking fuck out of folk, the low-level stuff. One day we went to this feller’s house, I think he owed Haase money. Griff broke his jaw straight-off, no back answers, with one dig. Haase’s methods were often too crude for some clients. A demolition man called Joe then came to see Haase wanting a so-called debt recovered. Joe said a solicitor from Crosby had had him over for all kinds of money. Joe just asked Haase to go up there and have a quiet talk with him, get it all sorted on the QT. Gentleman’s agreement and that. Not Haase. He steamed straight up there, into the solicitor’s office and smashed fuck out of it. Could not believe it, la. This solicitor was well connected to the busies and the judges. He wasn’t a fucking gangster, he was a civilian and a fucking brief to boot. But John didn’t care. These were the new rules. ‘I’m John Haase – I’m invincible’ was his attitude.

There was no money in the solicitor’s office. So Haase found out where the solicitor lived and sent someone down to smash his windows in and blow his car up and all that carry on. The solicitor got on his toes in fear for his life. In the end, Haase put so much pressure on the solicitor that he called in the busies. Joe the demolition man got pulled in for it. But Haase couldn’t give a fuck. His attitude was ‘If the busies interfere in my business they’ll get the same treatment.’

I started to pass things like that on to Customs. One morning Haase said we were going to Blackpool. Is right, I thought. Works day out, see the illuminations and that. There was me, Kenny Doorteam and another heavy who was also a drug dealer who drove a four-by-four. We travelled up with Haase.

We were going to lean on this businessman who had let Haase down on a big ciggie deal. Basically this businessman, who was just a normal feller in his late 30s, had promised to invest £50,000 into a deal to buy £150,000 worth of bent ciggies abroad. This wasn’t a particularly brutal escapade compared to Haase generally, but it’s a terrifying example of how ordinary people can have their lives ruined if they try to make a quick buck.

John set the ciggie deal up with his foreign investors, and if it went well, they expected to make £1 million in profit. The thing is, is that the Blackpool man backed out. He’d probably realised he was out of his depth. Fair enough, he’s got the right to do that. Not with Haase, he hasn’t.

Haase blamed him for fucking up the deal. He said that the ciggies couldn’t come to Britain without his financial input and the deal couldn’t go through. Haase said he was having problems with these people from abroad, who were in on the deal, and they couldn’t bring in the two wagonloads of ciggies. So we went to Blackpool, picked this feller up and kidnapped him. They battered him and all that. They took him down into the basement of the Dock, an underground warehouse, where no one could hear his screams. Put handcuffs on him and tortured the poor cunt. Fucking bats and knives and everything. Put him in bulk and dumped him.

Before they threw the Blackpool feller out, Haase told him that he had to come up with £5,000 a month, every month, until the £50,000 was paid off. (Even though there were no cigarettes.) And then, because he had fucked up the deal, he’d have to come up with the (forecasted) profits that they’d lost out on. The opportunity cost, if you will. That could be up to £1 million. Bad one for him, la. Haase basically was going to tax this poor cunt for the rest of his life. I’m afraid that’s what happens when you get mixed up in the rackets. Them’s the rules. So this feller had to bring down £5,000 from Blackpool every month.

Haase kept everything running smoothly because he was punctual and systematic. On the Blackpool payday every month he would phone me up and tell me to be at the Dock at eight or nine o’clock to meet the Blackpool feller, take the parcel and put it in the company safe. The next morning he would sit there counting the money.

A couple of times the Blackpool lad missed payments. On the dot, Haase sent a crew member up to Blackpool, instantly, to throw bricks through his windows and set his car on fire and all that. That was a bit of gentle remittance advice in Haase’s opinion. Within hours he would get paid. The payments were crippling this feller and he was having to borrow off his friends and family to keep them up. Haase didn’t give a fuck.

One night the Blackpool feller turned up for his monthly drop-off. He was dressed like a normal feller with a pair of trackies on and a top. I felt sorry for him. He probably owned a porn shop on the sea front and thought he was a bit of a wideboy, but he had met some real gangsters and it had come badly ontop for him.

I suspected immediately that he didn’t have the dough. He hadn’t parked his car in the Dock, the usual place. He’d left it in a backstreet where we couldn’t see it, obviously so Haase couldn’t confiscate it off’ve him when he gave him the bad news. That’s how I knew he didn’t have the money.

I opened the door to him and he said ‘All right’ and I knew his arse had completely gone. He was terrified. I could see it in his face. I took him upstairs to see Haase. He was in the front office and I went in my back office. I switched on the CCTV monitor, which gave me a picture of what was going on in Haase’s office. Haase didn’t know I could get access and I’d also put some tape over the red dot on the camera in his office so he never knew it was on.

I could see the Blackpool feller telling Haase he had nothing with him and he’d just come down to tell him he couldn’t get the £5,000, blah, blah, blah. It was the pitiful body language of a man under extreme pressure. Kenny Doorteam just fucking chinned him and cut all his eye open. The next thing is Haase was shouting for me to come in to his office to clean him up. He just pointed at the crying Blackpool feller as though he was a piece of shit and said: ‘Sort that out.’

They didn’t feel sorry for him. Haase simply didn’t want evidence in the form of blood going everywhere. I got the first-aid box and put butterfly stitches on his eye to stop it bleeding. We had a good first-aid box for obvious reasons. The blood was going all over the show so I had to put gloves on ’cos of the fucking Aids thing and all that. Haase was pissed off ’cos the longer it took to put the gloves on, more blood was shooting out. But it was lucky for the Blackpool feller. While I was there fixing his eye, I knew they wouldn’t whack him and I knew from experience as a villain that it was one of those situations that could have ended up in someone getting killed.

I made a big deal of the wound, making out it was worse than it was, just so Haase wouldn’t set the goons on him further. Also I knew if I played for time, the more blood would spill out and the more evidence there’ll be to clean up in the event of something going badly wrong. No one wants a body and a scene all bladdered with blood. They didn’t like that. That night the lad didn’t know how close he’d come to getting popped.

By the time I’d finished Haase was more worried about the blood up the walls and all over his office. A few minutes later he was shouting to me to let Blackpool lad out of the building. I breathed a sigh of relief. By then Haase and the crew were all laughing about it. Haase was saying: ‘He didn’t half give him a dig, didn’t he?’

He was really thick like that, he thrived off it. He had a look in his eye, like bloodlust. I think he’d have come his fucking load in his pants on it. He loved the power of being able to order his heavies to knock fuck out of people – while he just stood there like the commandant. I thought he was an owt nowt fucking prat for that side of him, to tell you the truth.

There was half a happy ending though. A few days after his dig, the Blackpool feller phoned up the office to thank us. The lads were like that: ‘Why the fuck are you thanking us. We broke your jaw the other night.’

The Blackpool feller said that he’d gone to hospital to get it sorted and as the doctors were examining it they had found a cancer growth in his cheek. So the Blackpool feller was like that: ‘Nice one. If you hadn’t had twatted me I’d have probably died and what have you. Every cloud had a silver lining and that.’

Even if you were close to Haase, if it came down to money, it was just business. Even for his partner. Paul Bennett owed Haase some money, but when he couldn’t pay it back, Haase seized a mobile home from outside Bennett’s kennel. It was a Dodge and the registration was JFK. He started to rent it out to clients as a security HQ on building sites until it made back the dough Bennett owed him and then he sold it in the Loot for £3,500.

But Bennett knew that he owed his whole existence to Haase. Bennett was doing drug deals on the side, and on one, he fucked up. He ended up owing a lot of money – £1 million no less – to two black lads who were making a name for themselves in the city. Today they are very hard hitters in fact, tie-up merchants and that who have moved out of the ghetto and now own a security company on the Wirral.

One of these teamsters came down to the Dock in a T-reg Porsche. John had to do a deal with him. They came out of respect. He said to John that if it would have been anyone else Ben would have been done in. But because he was Haase’s nephew they’d given him a walkover for the time being and were coming to John to respectfully get it sorted.

One strange thing that did happen though was that my middle son, Heath, started to work for Haase. Ever since Jason had died Heath had gone off’ve the rails. He had never been the same since he had been forced to ID his older brother, who he adored, on the mortuary slab in Plymouth.

It started off innocently enough when Heath used to come and visit me of a night while I was guarding the sites. Then behind my back Thomo offered him a job as a security guard. I was fucking furious when I found out and told Heath to get out, but he wouldn’t listen. Then John started to suck him into the rackets, like the fucking Fagin wretch he was, knowmean? I took Heath aside and warned him to stay well clear of Haase, but he just smiled. It was as though he revelled in rebelling against me. Haase was paying him top dough to buy his loyalty.

I couldn’t tell him direct that Haase was doomed. I toyed with the fact of telling him that I was working for Customs. But there is no way Customs would have gone for that – it would have compromised everything. Son or no son, he was just a young lad.