Wayne Rooney’s sixth birthday fell on 24 October 1991. He celebrated it, as usual, with his mum doing her son the honours with a sit-down tea, tablecloth, place names – they do that at Buckingham Palace too but somehow it feels classier in Crocky – ice cream and jelly, Jaffa Cakes and games. Afterwards there would be a knockabout with his cousins and mates in the back streets of Crocky. That month, in a different part of the forest – 200 miles down the M6, to be precise – a silly man had done something silly. His name was Sir Allan Green, he was Her Majesty’s Director of Public Prosecutions – the man who had decided that no one had been criminally irresponsible when ninety-six people died at Hillsborough – and he had been caught kerb-crawling for prostitutes in King’s Cross, London.
Private Eye, Britain’s journal of record of Establishment folly, came out on Little Wayne’s birthday and gave the lowdown in its ‘Street of Shame’ column on how Fleet Street had reacted to Sir Allan’s fall from grace. The Eye reported that the morning after Sir Allan’s resignation, The Sun’s front page had a huge headline: ‘I’M THE TART’. A 23-year-old prostitute calling herself ‘Samantha of King’s Cross’ told the newspaper, ‘I lost the ******* Director of Public Prosecutions his job!’ (Their asterisks.) The Eye went on to report that on the front page of the Daily Mail the same day, the headline was ‘SIR ALLAN AND ME, BY THE VICE GIRL’. Nicola Evans, twenty-one, claimed that she was the tart that Sir Allan had propositioned. Clearly, the Eye noted, one of these stories was badly wrong – and then Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie soon discovered it was his. ‘Cunning as ever,’ said the Eye, ‘he set about trying to spoil his rival’s scoop by telephoning the Mail’s easily shockable editor, Sir David Fester.’ (The real name of the late editor of the Mail was Sir David English, but for reasons that were never quite clear to anyone, the Eye called the newspaper grandee Fester. Perhaps it was a tribute, of sorts.) ‘I think you ought to know,’ Kelvin cheerfully warned Fester, ‘that your tart is actually a man.’
The horrified Fester was galvanised into action. His news editor, Ian ‘Mad’ Monk, so nicknamed by Private Eye – who years later pops up in the Rooney narrative as the soccer star’s PR man, working on press releases admitting that the star had been going to see prostitutes – immediately contacted Mail hack Paul Henderson, who was ‘minding’ the delightful Nicola at a hotel in the London suburbs, and ordered him to establish her gender. (To be fair to the Mail editor and ‘Mad’ Monk, it may not have just been prurience that led them down this track. Nailing down the tale that the DPP had lost his job to a tranny could have been a bloody good story.)
‘I will do almost anything for the Daily Mail,’ replied Henderson, an amiable Cockney, ‘but I won’t examine a tart’s fanny.’
Monk’s next idea was to send for Dr Cope, the Mail’s company doctor. But Private Eye reported the good doctor was unavailable. So the magazine alleged the assignment was passed to hackette Tracey Harrison, who carried out a gynaecological survey of Nicola’s pudenda and sounded the all-clear.
The editor and news editor still weren’t happy. What if Nicola was a man who’d had a sex-change operation? Fortunately, it was the right time of the month: Harrison reported that she had personally witnessed evidence of nature doing its thing. Whereupon, belatedly, reported the Eye, it occurred to Sir David Fester that perhaps Kelvin had been pulling his leg.
The full comic majesty of this tale cannot be grasped, my friends, until later on in the life of our hero, but it is worth noting that one of the main figures in the scandal of the silly man in the public eye and the two tarts stars in a subsequent arrangement of the old, old story, more than a decade later, and that when Fleet Street is presented with a selection of tarts and claims that ‘she must have been with a silly man’, they sometimes make terrible mistakes and pick entirely the wrong tart. Watch this space.
Roon of the Rovers, the Boy Wonder of Crocky, was going from strength to strength. He first turned out for a proper team – as opposed to knockabouts in the street – as a substitute for the youth team of the Wezzy. Rooney came on towards the end of the game, and scored. The fixture was for Under-12s. Little Wayne was seven years old.
John McKeown sat in the Copplehouse pub in Liverpool, nursed a pint of shandy and recalled the moment he saw Rooney play football.
This kid blew me away. I was running the Under-10 team at the pub, the Copplehouse Colts, and I got a phone call from another guy, John Reilly, who was running the Under-12s at the Wezzy. He said he’d got this kid who was too young, but was I interested? Well, my team was struggling. I got in touch with his mum, and the lad came along for a trial. I remember a warm-up. Someone put a cross in and Wayne did an overhead kick and put it into top corner. His vision stood out, he was far in advance of all the other kids. He could see something before it could happen. It was like he could envisage it.
McKeown, wholly unprompted by me, was touching on Rooney’s genius. Young Wayne was not Doctor Who. He could not travel backwards or forwards in time, he could not surf along a rip in the space–time continuum. But he could look up at a ball falling towards his part of the pitch and work out where it might land and where he could kick, head or chest it at a speed so lightning fast that it would appear to less talented people that he had the gift of foresight.
McKeown continued.
And he was a winner. A big boy, brawny, unafraid. If he hadn’t been a footballer, he could have been a runner or a boxer. His dad was a big boxer. For a boy that age, seven going on eight, he had powerful leg muscles, powerful thighs. He could kick the ball with a force that was far beyond his years.
We raced around to his mum’s and signed him up, and then he started scoring goals. Our crowds got bigger and bigger. Before it had just been mums and dads. But word got round that this kid is a bit special. He was a joy to watch.
I asked him how he coped with the other kids, and they with him. ‘He was very quiet, very well mannered. Never rowdy. Very shy. The other kids appreciated him. Mum and Dad never missed a game. Even when his kid brother, Graeme, played for the Under-9s, they would split up, so there would always be one parent supporting each boy.’
Did he ever see anything of Rooney’s famous red mist?
He was never dirty. He didn’t need to be. He was too skilful. But other kids, other managers, targeted him. They knew that if they could take out Wayne, they had a chance. He was never booked, never even spoken to by a referee. And he had great lumps kicked out of him. I’ve got a video of a terrible tackle when this boy took lumps out of him. And he just got up and walked away. He’s only a boy. It must have been hard for him. He didn’t have to train. He had natural ability. He was born to play. In one season for the Walton and Kirby League, he scored ninety-plus goals.
The legend says ninety-nine goals, and, as ever, the journalists have gone with the legend.
McKeown’s partner coach at the Copplehouse Colts was Nev Davies. He told Geoff Sweet of the News of the World that ‘Wayne was unbelievable, always playing in the team a year above’. Davies said they had Roo for eighteen months. He scored on his debut and once hit twelve in a fourteen-goal onslaught. From the off Davies thought he would be better than Michael Owen and Robbie Fowler. He always had big strong thighs and was more in the Alan Shearer mould, riding the tackles and playing with a fantastic awareness. He was so good he never practised with the team. He was a throwback to when lads learnt their craft in the streets.
It’s hard to get it straight that the football star-in-the-making they were all raving about was seven years old.
But everybody has to start somewhere. For example, at roughly the same time that Little Wayne was banging in goals for his first pub club, Moscow’s finest were accusing a young wheeler-dealer of stealing a train carrying fifty-five wagon tanks of diesel worth nearly four billion roubles. His name? Roman Arkadievich Abramovich – the Russian who went on to become the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, which I’ve read is a team of some minor importance in parts of west London, and an outfit that fancied buying up Rooney the star.
Abramovich is now a big player in the pantomime of British football, so his early career, running parallel to, if 2,000 miles to the east of, young Rooney’s, is worth having a look at. Did the owner of Chelsea really nick a train? Surely that can’t be right.
Russia is like the Wezzy. You go there at your peril. But it’s never boring. In late 2006 BBC1’s Panorama sent me to Moscow to investigate who poisoned ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko in London with four billion becquerels of polonium 210. The man who ordered the hit, according to some, was none other than then President – now Prime Minister – Vladimir Putin himself. Litvinenko had written a book, Blowing Up Russia, accusing Putin of being behind the bombing of two apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists but others – journalists, opposition MPs – wondered aloud whether the bombings had been carried out by Putin’s secret police, the FSB. Litvinenko wasn’t the first Russian to die mysteriously after having accused Putin of blowing up Russia, but the sixth.
In that light, the Wezzy’s not so bad after all.
I was on the Litvinenko trail – as it happens, finding out about a great Russian troublemaking journalist called Yuri Shchekochikhin who had been mysteriously poisoned in 2003: his skin fell off him after a trip to Ryazan, a town where another ‘Chechen’ bomb had, some say, been actually planted by the FSB – when some bloke with snow on his boots, who had been a friend of Shchekochikhin’s, gave me a sheaf of papers in a pub. It was a copy of what appeared to be the initial police charge sheet against Abramovich, and a case number: 79067. True or untrue, it makes for fascinating reading. The charge sheet, dated 9 June 1992, says that Moscow police suspected that Abramovich, while working as a director of a small business called AVK, based at 108 Leningradskoe Shosse, Moscow, aimed to embezzle or misappropriate state property on a particularly large scale by swindling the Ukhta Oil Refinery by means of a fictitious order issued on 28 February 1992 and other documents known to be false. The train, carrying 3,585,337 kilograms of diesel fuel, had been destined for Moscow but the fake warrants led to it ending up in the Russian micro-colony of Kaliningrad on the Baltic. The charge sheet appears to suggest that Abramovich may have been in custody at one point, and calls for more investigation to be carried out. But something happened and the whole case was kicked into touch. Nep + S, a local paper in Ukhta, reported in 1999 that the prosecution failed and spun a confusing tale of a last-minute intervention by a mystery benefactor.
Abramovich has denied ever nicking the alleged train. In the biography Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere, Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins write that one of his senior lieutenants approached the Russian: ‘I asked him about the train story. I felt bad about doing so but I felt that I had to know the truth. He simply looked at me and said, “It never happened.”’
Back in Crocky, Little Wayne was playing an angel, of sorts. Jeanette Rooney’s favourite photograph of her boy is young Wayne, aged nine, wearing a shiny blue suit, red bow tie and red sash for his first communion, with his hands clasped together. He looks like a little cherub, though the smile gives a slight hint that in a few years’ time the cherub might be able to kick the living daylights out of you, if he was so minded. But there is a genuine niceness and innocence about the photograph: you cannot look at it and not smile. Rooney admits that he hated both the sash and the bow tie, and the moment he got home he tore both off.
Although Crocky has a love–hate relationship with its most famous son (some damn Rooney for leaving Everton and the city of Liverpool), most are proud that one of their own has made it to play for England. His old primary school, St Swithin’s, still loves him. Little Wayne’s former head teacher, Tony McCall, does nothing but gush about Roo in Sue Evison’s book: ‘Wayne was always a very respectful pupil.’
McCall says that whether Roo was on the football pitch or the stage, he always gave everything his best shot. He came alive on a pitch. He was always very, very shy but he came out of his shell when he was playing football. He was good in his lessons, always tried to give of his best, never caused any problems.
The unauthorised biographer can only read this stuff and go into the corner and have a little cry.
I tried – you hang out in Crocky for more than ten minutes doing your utmost not to look like a policeman or a social security investigator or, worst of all, a reporter – but I failed miserably to come up with any other story than this: Little Wayne Rooney was, when on the ball, a genius; when off it, a reserved but thoroughly normal kid. He wasn’t the Archangel Gabriel, but no one in Liverpool 11 is. He never did anyone any great harm, never robbed anyone, never beat anyone up. The women who run the library in Crocky – they lend books behind steel shuttering you’d normally associate with a bullion reserve – remember the three Rooney boys: ‘We used to get a bit worried about the behaviour of the younger two, giving us a bit of cheek, but young Wayne never gave us any trouble. He’d be with them, but at the back. If there is one word to sum him up, it would be shy.’
Throughout his boyhood young Wayne’s bedroom was a shrine to Everton: blue was the colour of his wallpaper, his bedside lampshade, his posters, and he even had a car number plate in the window spelling out his club’s name. Roo’s great hero was Duncan ‘Big Dunc’ Ferguson, once described by one of the papers as ‘icon, hooligan, man of principle, shameless mercenary, tender bird lover, vicious thug, generous teammate and waste of space’. Ferguson was a brilliant, erratic and tortured Rangers, then Everton, centre-forward, who was more often in trouble than not.
Big Dunc was fined for butting a policeman in 1991, fined for kicking a Hearts fan on crutches in 1993, and then later that same year put on probation for assaulting a fisherman in an Anstruther bar – one wonders whether the fight started with a crack about bloaters – but the incident that blackened his name happened in April 1994. Rangers were playing Raith Rovers and Ferguson had a nasty falling-out with the Rovers’ John McStay, a disagreement which culminated with Big Dunc head-butting the rival player. It was stupid and foolish, but hardly unknown on a football pitch, where tempers can get out of hand. The Scottish football authorities got tough, and the police north of the border began a long, painstaking investigation which led, eventually, to a prosecution.
In the meantime, Big Dunc decamped south and switched to Everton, becoming young Wayne’s favourite player. Big Dunc knew how to endear himself to the Blues. At a press conference on Merseyside, he was asked whether he would ever play for Liverpool and replied: ‘Who?’
The striker swooped, he scored, he ran rings around the opposition and then, when he was playing very well for the Toffees, the fracas in Scotland caught up with him and his case finally came to court. Ferguson was convicted and ended up serving a 44-day jail sentence in Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison. It’s not exactly the Black Cat Club in St Tropez.
Wazza says in his autobiography that he wrote to his hero in prison when he was around nine years of age. Little Wayne told him he shouldn’t be in jail, and that he and his mates were desperate for him to come back and play for Everton. Ferguson wrote back, thanking Roo for his letter. There is a picture of Wayne, his two younger brothers and Big Dunc, towering over them with a silly scowl on his face.
A few years later Rooney and Big Dunc would be Everton teammates. As role models go, Big Dunc is not exactly Scott of the Antarctic – a posh bungler whose lack of concern for his shipmates led them to be soaked in pony piss as the crew was housed directly underneath the pony stalls on the ship to Antarctica; he valued ponies over huskies in extreme cold against all common sense and preferred walking to skiing on snow – or the founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden-Powell, who in 1939 noted in his diary: ‘Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book.’ Of the three role models, Big Dunc seems the least ghastly.
A blurred photograph of Little Wayne tells the story of this time better than anything else: it shows the star, his face a mass of freckles and sticky-out ears, his head almost disappearing into a baseball cap, clutching two trophies, one of them the ‘Copplehouse Player of the Year’. His T-shirt shows off a brace of Everton stars beneath the Gothic script ‘Dogs of War’.
Merseyside had other ‘dogs of war’ for Everton’s puppy of war to admire and emulate, if he so chose. One was Davey Ungi, another Johnny Phillips, a third Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, and they were all successful local entrepreneurs on Merseyside. But none of them was raved about in the chamber of commerce.
It’s a credit to young Rooney that he did his best to avoid the city’s gangsters when he was growing up. But, once he was successful, they wouldn’t leave him alone. Organised crime was to prove yet another massive pressure – along with the tabloid celebrity meat grinder – with which the young footballer had to contend, and, as far as his reputation was concerned, fail. His repeated visits to prostitutes – not just on one occasion, but several times – opened up the Wayne Rooney legend to being preyed on by the underworld.
The prostitution racket is often protected and run by organised crime. Sleep with a series of prozzies, and someone pretty nasty is likely to know all about your secrets and be willing to sell them to the highest bidder. To understand how the gangsters succeeded in getting their hooks into the Wayne Rooney legend, it’s important to know the background of a murderous turf war that started in his home city when he was just nine years old. It’s a story that takes in race hatred, animal savagery, official incompetence, the failure of the War on Drugs – The Onion, the American version of Private Eye, says: ‘The Drugs won’ – and the raw power, in our society, of greed.
If you think Wayne Rooney is rough, think again.
Davey Ungi was an amateur boxer from a family of white Irish toughs, shot dead in mysterious circumstances; Johnny Phillips a psychotic black bisexual drug dealer who reportedly had the Aids virus but used to bugger his drug debtors openly on the streets of Liverpool. And Warren? He is reputedly Britain’s richest career criminal.
Once upon a time, a Scouser in a shell suit with the head of a bullet on the neck of an ox turned up at the Squires Gate helipad in Blackpool and went for a flying lesson in a helicopter. He paid £750 in cash. The notes, like snow in the Christmas carol, were deep and crisp and even. The chopper flew up and away over the Irish Sea, leaving the effluent plume from the Mersey and the metal prick of the Blackpool Tower far below. The chopper flew north over the grey, scudding sea to the peninsula of Barrow-in-Furness where they turn out nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. The Scouser pointed to a big square of grass down below, the grounds of the non-league Barrow Athletic Football Club, and said: ‘I own that.’ A preposterous boast – but it turns out that he had an estimated fortune of £185 million.
The scally’s nickname, ‘Cocky Watchman’, is, some etymologists say, Scouse slang for a crooked caretaker, and he was, some say, the Cali cartel’s agent for northern Europe. Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise had a different name for him: Target One. Warren did a long stretch in the tough Nieuw Vosseveld prison in the Netherlands, where inmates are advised to bring their own bars of Camay. In 1997 Warren got twelve years for importing enough cocaine into Europe to keep the London advertising industry happy until the year 2050. While he was inside, a Turkish murderer called Cemal Guclu started hurling apparently unprovoked abuse at Warren in the prison yard in September 1999. Guclu tried to punch Warren, who pushed him against a wall, knocking him down. Guclu moved to retaliate but Warren kicked him in the head three or four times, killing him. Warren got four more years, was released, went to Jersey, started to make some phonecalls from a payphone that the police were interested in, got nicked again and in December 2009 got thirteen years for plotting to import drugs.
Meanwhile, British customs officers and policemen, working in tandem for a Dutch judge, are trying to unpick a fraction of Cocky’s missing millions. Forget Kenneth Noye. He was just a fence, albeit for the Brinks Mat gold bullion robbers, and one with a nasty temper. Forget the Krays. They were just pathetic minnows. Law enforcement on the track of Cocky’s treasure have thus far uncovered some £20 million, though they have yet to get their hands on it. They suspect that he is worth a lot more. One customs officer on his case suspects he might have £150 million buried away. Another former associate has referred to a fortune worth £185 million. Cocky, through his solicitor, says he has been fitted up by a ‘whisper campaign’ by Customs, that he only owns two very small properties in Liverpool and that reports of his ‘multimillionaire status’ are grossly exaggerated. Well, maybe.
On the other hand Cocky may well be the richest criminal in British history. Law enforcement sources say some of it was stashed in tax havens and Swiss banks, some of it placed in a beautiful flat in Liverpool’s fancy Wapping Dock development, bang opposite the Customs museum, a small fraction on motors, normally a quietly unfussy Lexus, air con as standard, some of it on office blocks, some on 200 properties in the north-west, mainly let out to DHSS claimants. Not forgetting, it was reported, a mansion in the north-west, a villa in the Netherlands, a casino or two in Spain, a disco in Turkey. The interesting question is, where’s all that money now?
Cocky, with his Desperate Dan pecs, his head shaved as round and smooth as a billiard ball and his thick black eyebrows marching across his face like lunch-seeking millipedes, doesn’t look the part of a multimillionaire entrepreneur. But he is. Successful drug barons are smart, streetwise, yes, but subtle too and, above all, intelligent and keen to use intelligence. And Cocky was very good indeed.
I remember vividly the first time I ever heard the name Curtis Warren. Veronica Guerin, the brilliant Irish journalist, had been shot dead in Dublin in the summer of 1996, for going after the heroin barons who were making themselves rich while a generation of Irish kids were getting suckered on smack. Her mission had been simple: follow the money. The Observer sent me off to find out who, and why, and how. And what were the names of the British Mr Bigs.
In Dublin, I saw a young mother, who was eight and a half months pregnant, inject herself with heroin because her craving for smack was more powerful than her love for her unborn child. The unborn baby was a junkie, too, quivering inside her stomach for the heroin. When it was born, the first thing the doctors did was put it on infant methadone, to ease its pain. It was one of those things you see with your own eyes and cannot believe and never forget.
In search of the British Mr Bigs, I had gone to a pub to meet a Customs investigator, the late Bill Newall, who at that time was working for the heroin target team. Bill had hollow legs and an ear for a good story well told. Bill had ‘called the knock’ on many heavy-duty nasties, including a number of Turkish heroin traffickers, and on some more amusing outlaws, including a judge he had nicked for smuggling too much booze from the Continent back in his yacht.
I asked Bill about the Mr Bigs, the ones that always get away. He took a pull on his pint and said: ‘Then you’ve got to go to Liverpool. And ask them about Curtis Warren.’
Who?
‘He’s nothing much to look at. The usual big Scouse tough guy in a shell suit. But this one is good. He doesn’t drink, smoke or use drugs. He’s got a photographic memory for telephone numbers, numbers of bank accounts and the like. We’ve been looking for where he keeps his stuff. On a computer? In notes? No way. He carries it all inside his head.’
Curtis Francis Warren was born at home on 31 May 1963, his father a mixed-race sailor with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, his grandfather listed as a coffee manufacturer in the Americas. His mother was Sylvia Chantre, the daughter of a shipyard boiler attendant and a mother with a Spanish name, Baptista, originally from Bird Island, South Africa. The young Warren was brought up in the Granby district of Toxteth, which wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the Cheam of the north-west. It looks bomb-damaged, but then you recall that the Luftwaffe haven’t been this way for more than half a century. The Toxteth riots in the 1980s provided the coffin for the area’s reputation. That, and the sad fact that insurance rates for the Toxteth postcodes are some of the highest in the country.
Today you can see the scrotes hanging out, on the lookout for coppers, Customs, strangers. The taxi driver who took me around offered the following advice: ‘It’s fine for you to walk around and chat to people. Just give me all your money first.’
But from these lowly origins, Cocky became so rich he made it on to the Sunday Times Rich 500 list, the highest-placed mixed-race plutocrat in the country. The odd thing about all this wealth is that he had, as they say, no visible means of income. On the contrary, the word was Cocky had made the lion’s share of this fabulous sum of money importing stupendous amounts of heroin and cocaine, guns and amphetamine tablets, the drugs direct from the Colombian narco barons themselves.
He left school around the age of eleven, and was picked up every now and then for bits and pieces of crime. Tony Barnes, Richard Elias and Peter Walsh, the authors of his compelling biography Cocky: The Rise and Fall of Curtis Warren, Britain’s Biggest Drugs Baron, had no luck whatsoever in getting Cocky’s family or schoolfriends or teachers to talk about his early years. Nor did I.
Liverpool cops say Cocky started out life on the doors as a bouncer, then he moved up a level and began organising bouncers. He became friends with a fellow bouncer, Mike Ahearne, who grew up to be Warrior in the TV show Gladiators. Another pal was Johnny ‘Sonny’ Phillips, a black bouncer and a ferocious enforcer. A third was Stephen Mee, who later made a name for himself by leaving a prison van, without prior consent, in the middle of the Pennines.
While still in his teens, Cocky was selling heroin. By the late 1980s, he had moved into the wrong kind of snow, big time. He teamed up with another drugs trafficker with style, Brian Charrington, who worked the north-east of England, to Cocky’s north-west. Like Cocky, Charrington was enormously wealthy, but had no obvious means of income. Charrington had a yacht. Well, doesn’t everyone?
The two of them went to France on British visitor passports. Once in France, they took out their cached ten-year passports and flew to Venezuela, which is next door to Colombia and awash with cocaine. There, the two men fixed up a deal to import huge amounts of coke in steel boxes sealed inside lead ingots, which were not so easy to slice open and impossible to X-ray. Customs were suspicious of the lead ingots. They had cut into one ingot in a first shipment of lead from South America, but had found nothing and let the whole shipment through. Too late, Dutch cops tipped them off that the coke really was hidden inside steel boxes deep inside the lead ingots. They just hadn’t drilled into the lead deep enough.
Customs stopped a second shipment, found the coke, and arrested Cocky and Charrington. They had them bang to rights. Oh, no, they hadn’t. It turned out that Charrington had been working as a police informer.
The effect of the police championing Charrington as a valuable informer was to torpedo Customs’ case. When Charrington walked, the case against Cocky at Newcastle Crown Court in 1992 fell through, too. Legend has it that Cocky went back to the ashen-faced Customs officers, gnashing their teeth at this reverse, and said: ‘I’m off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can’t fucking touch me.’
Cocky’s Liverpool lawyer has denied this boast, but the legend is the better story.
Three years on, in 1995, Warren sat, informally, at the centre of a vast industrial combine. One police officer described it like a wagon wheel, with Cocky in the middle and great spokes leading from it – and down each spoke huge amounts of cocaine and heroin would flow. But for Warren’s organisation to function effectively he needed soldiers out on the streets, selling his wares and protecting his interests. They, too, made grotesque sums of money – and that attracted envy and unpleasantness from rivals. This was the background to a ‘straightener’, a bare-knuckle fight that March between Davey Ungi and Johnny ‘Sonny’ Phillips.
Phillips was Warren’s top muscleman. It is hard to describe just how frightening Phillips was in his heyday. You crossed him at your peril. He pumped iron, guzzled steroids, buggered men, shot people. He had all the trimmings, a showcase wife, a snazzy car and a fine house. (Much of inner-city Liverpool boasts superb Georgian architecture. But the ships’ captains and brokers have long since moved on.) One police officer who visited the Phillips home in an official capacity uncovered the reality behind the bling when he discovered ‘there was dogshit in the middle of the kitchen floor’. Another detective added, ‘No matter how much Chanel you spray on shit, it’s still shit.’
Davey Ungi was one of the very few men in Liverpool who dared to challenge Phillips. The Ungis are originally from the Philippines and made a name for themselves in the Mersey tugboat business. They were related by marriage to the wider Fitzgibbon clan, a close-knit extended family of white Liverpool Irish whose members were in and out of the nick, and hospital. In February 1995 Colin Fitzgibbon, aged twenty-four, was walking home in the Kensington area of the city when he was shot in the back with a shotgun. Three men were charged with attempted murder, including one Mark ‘Sonny Boy’ Osu. The charges against him were later dropped.
The mainly black Warren organisation, centred in Toxteth, and the mainly white Ungi–Fitzgibbon families, based in Dingle (it sounds twee but it isn’t), were at loggerheads over the right to control the doors of the city’s nightclubs, the prize being, it is said, if you control the doors, you control the drugs. The ‘straightener’ fight, which took place on 20 March, was formally over the ownership of Cheers, properly described in Cocky as a ‘dismal, flat-roofed concrete block’ which, in a previous life, had been a Conservative club. Ungi won the fight, though Phillips’s seconds claim that he cheated and secretly concealed a knuckleduster under flesh-coloured gloves. This is nonsense. Phillips was a huge, steroid-enhanced monster, but Ungi was an amateur boxer of quality, and he won, fair and square.
But, more fundamentally, the fight was about dominance and control of black-market Liverpool – drugs, guns and prostitutes – and whether the mainly black Warren organisation or the white Irish Ungis would be top dog. And that’s why the straightener straightened nothing.
The very next day someone tried to shoot Ungi and missed. The word on the street was that the wannabe killer was Johnny Phillips, who had not taken his defeat well. On 1 May, Ungi was driving his car along Dingle’s North Hill Street, not far from the city centre of Liverpool, when he slowed down for traffic lights. A black Volkswagen Golf GTI blocked the road. Inside were two black men. Ungi objected and he was shot dead with a Tokarev 9mm, an old Soviet pistol, dirt cheap and as reliable as a Russian tractor and Liverpool’s then weapon of choice.
Condolence messages for Ungi filled the Liverpool Echo.
‘Davey was an innocent man gunned down in the street by gangs for no reason whatsoever,’ wrote his widow Jean. At a shrine of flowers where his brother fell, Ronnie Ungi, then thirty-two, made a public appeal for anyone who saw anything to come forward: ‘All he had was a straight fight in a pub and this is how they retaliated.’ Ronnie Ungi had no truck whatsoever with the suggestion that his brother had been a gangster. ‘I don’t know where these rumours have come from. If you check my brother’s background you will see that he has no criminal record, he has never been in trouble with the police. It has got nothing to do with racketeering or drugs and that’s it.’
The anger was real and uncontrollable. The race issue ratcheted up the tension. On 2 May an unknown arsonist poured petrol through the door of Cheers and lit a match. Two days later, six houses were sprayed with bullets in Halewood, a few miles south of Toxteth. Battle had commenced. Half a dozen more people were shot in the next couple of months.
To deal with the screamingly obvious suspicion, Phillips turned himself in to the cops and presented them with his gold-plated alibi for the 1 May shooting of his boxing rival. Then, perhaps to deal with his grief, he went on holiday to Jamaica.
When Phillips returned from his break in the Caribbean sun, he was arrested at Manchester airport for the attempted murder of Davey Ungi – the unsuccessful one that took place the night after the straightener on 20 March. While Liverpool was in the middle of a full-blown gang war, Warren, ever the cautious risk assessor, moved to Holland. But not Amsterdam. He went to the lowly dorp of Sassenheim, where he set up shop in a fancy but not overly pretentious villa called Bakara. He hung a boxer’s punchbag from the attic ceiling and checked out the world from four slits in the roof. North, east, south and west were covered. It was a substantial house with a big garden, but most of the rooms were empty. It was almost as if he was imprisoned by his own ill-gotten wealth. To kill time, he phoned his Merseyside mates on his mobile, or ‘portie’, always keeping a sharp eye on the latest gossip.
He didn’t know it, but someone was listening in to his phone conversations. But being Cocky, he didn’t make anything easy for law enforcement.
No names, only nicknames.
So, according to Cocky the biography, he chatted about the Werewolf and the Vampire, Cracker, Macker and Tacker, the Bell with no Stalk, the Egg on Legs, Lunty, Badger, Boo, Twit and Twat, Big Foot, the Big Fella, the J Fella, the L Fella and many more.
Cocky’s conversations were taped by the Dutch police and are known as the ‘Dutch Product’. The transcripts show that he was a subtle player of the gangster game – for example, gently admonishing the brother of a bouncer who was causing trouble. They provide an insight, too, into what was going through his mind. The odd thing is that, rich as he was, Cocky couldn’t stop himself from shipping in more coke. Maybe it was the buzz. That must have meant more to him than the money.
The new plan was a variation on the old coke-in-lead trick. But this time the coke was going not to Britain but to Bulgaria, where Cocky had interests in a winery. There, oxyacetylene torches would cut through the lead ingots, and the coke would be retrieved. It would then be cooked into liquid and – here’s the clever bit – held in suspension inside bottles of Bulgarian red wine. The Plovdiv plonk with the kick of a Colombian mule was going to be shipped back across Europe to Liverpool, from where the coke would be taken out of suspension in Cocky’s labs and sold at a 2,000 per cent mark-up to the nation’s grateful coke addicts.
Neat, huh?
Meanwhile, one rumour on Merseyside had it that Warren himself had ordered the killing of Ungi, and had even had his own two hitmen, Bunji and Jackson, bumped off to cover up the loose ends. Warren’s chum Tony Bray put this to the great man. Unbeknown to both, Dutch police and Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise were listening in. This is the transcript of the conversation:
TONY BRAY: Tell you what, you know, the shite they think up is unbelievable. The special people [maybe this is crap code for the Special Branch?] have got the plod in Jamaica looking for the bodies of the other two.
CURTIS WARREN: Yeah?
BRAY: This what they’ve got down: you give the order to do the other fella [David Ungi], they done the business for you and then you got them out to Jamaica, right?
WARREN: Yeah.
BRAY: They wanted more money to keep their mouth shut. You have got connections with gangsters there, so you got them slotted. Fucking mad, isn’t it?
WARREN: Yeah.
BRAY: They’ve got you down as fucking putting the hit out but you got them slotted because they [wanted] some more money to keep quiet. Fuck, so now they’re all looking for these fucking two bodies in Jamaica.’
WARREN: Mad, aren’t they?
In October 1995, Phillips’s house in Aigburth and his £30,000 BMW 328i convertible were sprayed with automatic fire. He, his wife and child were lucky not to get hit. The next month David Ungi was laid to rest. A thousand mourners stood packed outside the church while 150 family and friends attended the funeral service within. The Liverpool Echo’s In Memoriam column ran to five whole pages, including a tribute from his mother Vera, using David Ungi as an acronym, beginning ‘D for Distinguished, A for Admirable …’ and ending with, as the writers of Cocky note, ‘I for Incomparable’.
That year there had been forty-two shootings in Liverpool, with twentynine people injured or dead.
And still it went on. When writing about gangsters and the victims of gangsters it is hard not to succumb to the pornography of violence. A year and a day after the straightener, Phillips was shot four times in the stomach and chest by an unmasked gunman toting, yes, a Tokarev. Phillips only survived because he was built like a brick outhouse. He recovered, but went mad. He had been taking massive amounts of steroids to boost his strength after the shooting.
Bray told Warren, who had now moved to Holland, what the latest was – and, again, Warren was being listened in to by the Dutch police.
BRAY: He’s on the really heavy thing.
WARREN: Charlied up?
BRAY: No, the one worse than that.
WARREN: Rocks?
BRAY: Yeah. He’s on that. His head’s properly gone.
The violence continued. In May 1996 Stephen Cole went for a quiet drink with his wife and a couple of friends. Cole, a former reserve for Liverpool FC and a black bouncer, was, some say, trying to move in on the club-door trade, and others say the heroin and cocaine market, in Liverpool. They didn’t like that. Cole and his small party were drinking in the Farmers Arms public house on Longmoor Lane in Fazakerley, a stone’s throw from Aintree racecourse, when a convoy of up to a dozen vehicles arrived in what Merseyside Police called ‘a very carefully planned operation’.
As Cole was returning from the bar to where his wife and another couple were sitting, a gang of about thirty men wielding machetes and knives went for him. They hacked him to pieces. As he lay dying in a pool of blood, one of the attackers sprayed CS gas into his face.
A typical post-mortem lasts ninety minutes. This one took six and a half hours because what remained of Cole was a jigsaw of slashed body parts.
On 24 August 1996, Phillips died of a massive heart attack. The Liverpool coroner is rumoured to have said that he had never seen a heart muscle so big. Davey Ungi had been avenged, and many people in Liverpool breathed a sigh of relief.
That October, a ship had docked in Rotterdam, and part of its cargo was a container load of coke-in-lead. Its rightful owner, Curtis Warren, was fast asleep in his new Low Country home when the Dutch version of the SAS moved in with stun grenades and the like and busted Cocky and his gang. The Dutch went hunting in six addresses. They found the container and got out a pneumatic drill and the long slog of drilling into the lead started, each ingot being about one metre cubed. Eventually the drill noise changed pitch, the metal filings became lighter and a fine white powder flecked the drill head. They drilled a hole big enough for an arm to reach in, and repeated the process.
Hidden in the lead was 400 kilograms of 90 per cent pure cocaine. At some of the other places the Dutch cops raided, they found 1,500 kilograms of cannabis resin, 60 kilograms of heroin, 50 kilograms of ecstasy, crates stacked with 960 CS gas canisters, a bunch of hand grenades, three guns, ammo and almost £400,000 in guilders. The coke, the heroin, the dope, the E and the rest would have netted a cool £125 million. Tax free.
The Dutch judge gave him twelve years. That’s much less than he would have got for major drug trafficking in Britain. On the other hand, some law-enforcement officers were concerned that friends of Cocky might have considered a little bit of jury-rigging: a live bullet through a letter box here, a night with a stunning whore there, and then the threat of embarrassing phone calls. Dreadful, really, to suggest it, but then Customs investigators have suspicious minds.
The death of Phillips and the arrest and conviction of Curtis Warren did not bring an end to gangsterism in Liverpool. Far from it. But they did bring one change. They appeared to knock out the Warren organisation. After Warren’s conviction in 1997, Ranald Macdonald, a senior Customs investigator, said: ‘With the conviction of Curtis Warren an entire criminal organisation has effectively been destroyed.’
The word on the street was that the Ungi–Fitzgibbon family became top dog. Drugs, whores, guns? Well, you certainly didn’t hurry to Warren’s prison in the Netherlands or Phillips’s grave for those. The Ungi–Fitzgibbons, the rumour machine says, decided to move their entrepreneurial skills a tad upmarket and get into two new, perhaps related, businesses: funeral directing and massage parlours.
One day, not so very far in the future, a valued customer for the second type of service would be Wayne Rooney.