Powder Wars, page 15
14
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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?
The effect on the Customs was jaw dropping to say the least. Not only had I led them to the one just gone, but I was getting them into the next one. That would give them a good chance of copping for the gang red handed. Get paid.
15
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The Bust
Shortly after Christmas on 12 January 1992, exactly as Paul Grimes had predicted, the second consignment of cocaine arrived in Britain. Bingo! The 32 cylindrical ingots contained a staggering 905 kilos of cocaine worth £150 million at street prices.
Acting on Paul Grimes’ intelligence, Customs had been able to track the contraband continually throughout its journey through December from Venezuela to Felixstowe. Joey Kassar arranged for the ingots to be stored in a holding depot in Derbyshire. The Customs’ plan was to hold off from swooping on the gang until later, by which time it was hoped that as many of the suspects as possible would have been drawn into the net. Until then it would be a waiting game.
But suddenly the British authorities were rocked. On 18 January, police in Holland raided a warehouse and discovered 35 similar lead ingots containing 845 kilos of cocaine. Conar Corporation executive, Jesus Camillo Ortiz Chacon, the technician who had bored out the cocaine from the Liverpool ingots two months earlier, was caught red-handed in the drilling position.
The Dutch bust caused the Cali and UK cartel to immediately batten down the hatches. The Liverpool Mafia ordered Kassar to leave the ingots well alone, but he ignored the instruction and transported them to a second warehouse in Stoke-on-Trent. It gave Customs officers a chance to covertly examine the ingots.
Over the next few days a special search team worked secretly and silently to extract the cocaine from the ingots without Kassar realising.
Each one yielded about 28 parcels of 90 per cent purity. The total, a whopping 905 kilos, was the largest amount ever recovered up to that point from a single shipment.
Over the next two months Kassar played cat and mouse with the Customs surveillance teams, moving the ingots erratically between warehouses around the North West. At one stage the gang took away a single ingot on a flatbed truck for testing. To foil surveillance the ingot was shunted around for nearly a month before they felt comfortable enough to examine it. The gangsters quickly found out it was empty.
Knowing that the gang had realised they had been rumbled D-day was quickly arranged. On 29 March, over a dozen men, including Curtis Warren and Joseph Kassar, were arrested and later charged with conspiring to import cocaine.
* * *
PAUL: It all went off. To keep me safe and to keep my role as an informant secret, the Customs hatched a cover story. Is right and that. The sketch was this. It would be arranged that I would be nicked along with the gang so it looked as though I was in the shit as well.
First they’d nick the Mr Bigs. Then they’d nick me. And then they’d nick Snowball and his firm of gobshites. To Snowball, the beaut, it would look like I was a pure stand-up guy, knowmean? Also, in the window between the Mr Bigs getting an early morning call and me getting collared I would be able to pump Snowball for more inside info. Devious, I know, but I was getting right into being a grass by then. Terrible, isn’t it?
After the plan was sorted I was told by Customs to just go home and wait. Then one day I switched on the telly and lo and behold it was all over Granada Reports. A big drugs ring had been smashed. Pictures of the ingots came on. That Manc newsreader, Tony Wilson, was going on about it. It was clearly a big deal. He was getting a real hard-on over it, if the truth be told.
So was I. Was like that, ‘Nice one. Pure jug for youse scoundrels now.’ Rubbing my hands together with glee, I was. Just like Michael Owen does after scoring a goal. Obviously the news report was the signal that I would be nicked soon. After I’d seen it on the telly, I phoned Snowball up and met him the next day. He was keeping his head down working on a demolition job by Hill Road Hospital in Everton. I pretended to be half head done in about it all, a bit worried, if you will, and I asked him about the ingots I’d seen on the telly.
I said: ‘What the fuck’s going on? All this gear and all that.’
He’s like that, going: ‘Ssshhh. Calm down will you. It’s only telly talk and that.’
I’m secretly buzzing inside, but giving it loads on the panicky front: ‘What’s all this fucking FBI and that? The Customs and Interpol involved in all this shit?’
Fairplay to the nugget, he just started laughing at me and said don’t worry about it. ‘I’ll give you a ring later on,’ he said.
He thought none of it would go back to them. Of course, I knew it was coming right back to them, knowmean? It was going to be real horrorshow for them over the next few days, no two ways.
The next day the Customs raided their yard and ripped it to fucking pieces to find the gear, which hadn’t been recovered from the first shipment. Of course, it was well gone by then. Then I phoned my Customs’ hombre and had a meeting with him in a car on the Dock Road.
He said, ‘We are now going to start nicking them all.’
I told him that I wanted to get nicked outside my sister’s house in Huyton. It was just something that came to me. We fixed the exact date and time; a couple of days later. They wanted to do it early doors and all that.
‘Forget about that,’ I said. ‘I want to have some brekky and go the gym and that first.’
So it was fixed for three or four o’clock in the afternoon. It was the 6 April 1992. When they came for me I was sitting in the Jag on my new phone. It was one of those big fuck-off, prehistoric NEC porties they had in old days. There was about three or four officers. I was just sat there on my cream doe-hide leather seats waiting for them. One of them drove my car down to the Customs’ HQ on the Dock Road.
They arrested me. I was making all kind of phone calls to solicitors and all that carry on to make it look like I was irate and that. I had to give a blag statement the next day to make it all look straight up. Of course, it didn’t mention that I was the grass. It just covered my involvement with the ingots as an innocent and legit scrap dealer. End of.
To make it look legit to Snowball we also arranged that the only person I phoned in the family was me mam. Using my experience as a gangster I also designed a few nice details of my own into the cover story, to make it sing and that. Before I got nicked I had arranged to stash a load of bent booze in my sister’s ken. It would appear to Snowball that I was still up to devilment, still one of the rooting-tooting lads and that. It was brandy and Scotch that had been robbed from a warehouse. In the phone call to me mam I told her to make sure they got rid of the whisky from my sister’s before the rozzers got there. In code of course, ‘bagack slabang’ and that.
Sure enough by the time the Customs turned my sister’s over there was nothing there. In Snowball’s eyes, it’d look like I was half a hero for thinking of the family first. I knew that was a nice detail which would impress him. The bottom line is this – when someone gets nicked on a big caper, the people involved are para to fuck. Constantly looking for signals, they are, that you’re not talking and that. I had been a gangster all my pip. I knew exactly how they thought.
The Customs officers who were interviewing me knew that I was an informant so they were just going through the motions. They fixed bail so that I could go and get more info from Snowball. Snowball wanted to know why I hadn’t used the solicitor the gang had sent down for me. He kicked off about it, but he was still none the wiser that I was turning him over. The prick. Then they all got nicked.
It was only at that point that I fully realised how big the big players really were. They were international super-heavyweights for sure. They had the money and the power to bribe busies and judges if need be. And if they found out I was the midnight mass, it was pure curtains for me – no two ways.
That’s when I started carrying a shotgun round with me, just in case they fancied a pop. I even showed my shooter to the Customs fellers. They went mad, knowmean, but they understood that I was dead man walking. Even so, they said they couldn’t sanction a shooter. But I kept it anyways.
I went down to Plymouth to get out of the way. My son Jason was still down there but he had deteriorated loads. He was using a lot of gear. It broke my heart, in all honesty, but at the same time it hardened my resolve to give it to these bastards. While I was down there the police in Plymouth turned over the car and found the shotgun.
