Powder Wars, page 21
It took me about six months before he invited me to get involved with the real villainy. And, la, was I surprised?
23
* * *
Round-the-Clock Rackets
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.
* * *
PAUL: The first time I come across Haase up to no good was just on the off chance – it was a minor thing.
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.
Haase was like that: ‘Ben’s been out of order. I’ll get it sorted.’
But if John hadn’t stuck up for him, Bennett would have been in deep shit. I think he resented Haase for having that hold over him.
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.
24
* * *
Protection and Extortion
After a typical day of violence, Haase would shift his attention to the protection-racket side of his business. Under cover of darkness his specialised extortion team would petrol-bomb nightclubs, pubs and hotels whose owners had refused to allow Haase to ‘take over the door’ – i.e. provide bouncers.
* * *
PAUL: It was just villainy all the fucking time. Kenny Doorteam ran the door side of the operation. He was a hard hitter himself but he needed Haase as backing so he could muscle in on the doors all over town.
If Kenny couldn’t get a door he used to cause trouble for the people who owned the door until he got it. Haase didn’t let up until he got it. Every month Kenny had to make sure that the door side of things put a good few grand in Haase’s backbin. So the pressure was on him to ‘grow’ the business. That meant stabbings, shootings and firebombs.
One day Chris No-Neck came into the office and said he was having problems with a door. It was just like a business meeting. A course of action was decided on immediately. Haase, No-Neck and Kenny went to see the feller to try to persuade him to come on board for the big win. No-Neck smashed both his hands in, Kenny done his jaw in and Haase cut him up with a knife. Sliced his throat. No-Neck punched him that many times his hands swelled up just like two balloons. Put the poor cunt in pure bulk. Straight to hospital.
Every day there was pure devilment like that. If clients weren’t persuaded by a tolchocking [beating], then their businesses simply went up in flames. End of story. Heath was the top arsonist; he became a specialist at it. There was a club in Bootle which wouldn’t pay up after repeated demands; they refused to give Kenny the door, so Haase dispatched our Heath down there to blow it up with a petrol bomb. End of. Get paid.
Heath was getting in too deep. Had a word with him: ‘It’s fuckin’ serious, this fire palaver. Someone will get killed.’
But he was too big for his boots now. Fucked me off he did. In the end, I thought, ‘Right, you little cunt. If you’ve got more loyalty to Haase than to me then I can’t protect you. I’m going to have to turn my back on you.’
It was a gut-wrenching dilemma for me. What the fuck do I do? Stand back and let my son turn himself over or let the cunt carry on and teach him a lesson? On the first two arson jobs I actually went with Heath. I drove him to the fucking buildings with the fucking petrol. Other dads drive their lads to the match and that. I was taking mine to carry out his work. I was just trying to keep a look out for him.
Haase paid Heath £2,000 to do it. I thought Heath was ripping him off by charging him that much, in all fairness. Everyone knew the going rate for a firebomb was no more than five tonne. But that’s how much Haase regarded Heath’s professionalism. Haase always took care of his crew.
Then there was the Sporting Club. The feller who owned it owed Bennett money. Bennett come to see Haase about it at the office. A decision was rubber-stamped. Heath was awarded the contract. Two weeks later Heath went to work. Again, I drove him there. His modus operandi was always the same. He pinched a ladder and run up onto the roof. He took away some of the slates off the roof to make a hole, poured in the petrol and set it on fire. End of story.
Haase phoned me up to ask if it was burning. Haase didn’t know I was with Heath doing it so I had to pretend to drive all the way over from the Wirral to check. He was into that – quality control and that. Job done. All in a night’s work. Onto the next one. That’s what Haase did with every building he couldn’t have – he burned it down. Heath set another club in town on fire and smashed up another – to force the owners to hand over the door. They did.
Then Kenny wanted to go after the big hotels and clubs. There was this one called the Devonshire Hotel. A lot of businessmen stayed there and it had a big nightclub attached to it called Reds. Pure goldmine, it was. Kenny came down to the office and they had a meeting about the best way to go about it. Haase planned the takeover like a military operation. First they went after the club Reds. There was only one slight problem. The door was run by an old pal of Haase’s called John Lally. Lally was old school. He was hard. But Haase didn’t give a fuck about any friendships. He sanctioned Kenny to take it anyway.
First the club got smashed up and then Haase sent Heath down to petrol bomb it of a night. He didn’t manage to fire it, but Heath carried on doing the damage with sledgehammers and bricks. Then Kenny approached the management and said he could stop it, so Lally got fucked off. We got the door. Get paid. Haase was ruthless. But he was always careful to make sure he was never around when the damage was being done. The dirty was always done by someone else.
Then Haase and Kenny turned their eye on the hotel and car park. Heath smashed up the hotel. Then he done all the cars in so that we ended up with the screw on the car park. Every single car in the car park – about 50 including rows of BMs, Mercs, everything – owned by the guests who were staying at the hotel were smashed up. Sledgehammers, baseball bats, the works. The next morning it looked like a riot scene. Eventually after a campaign of hassle we got the full contract for the Devonshire.
