Pubdate: Sun, 02 Sep 2007
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2007 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: Jamie Doward

DRUGS TURF WARS BRING GUN RULE TO THE STREETS

The death of Rhys Jones, a triple murder in Bishop's Stortford, a 
shooting in Letchworth - as Britain wakes up daily to stories of 
violence, Jamie Doward reveals how gangs are bringing chaos to the UK

When Curtis Warren went down, things changed on Merseyside. Worth an 
estimated UKP125m, Warren built his massive criminal empire by 
importing vast quantities of drugs. He was just one of a number of 
the country's Mr Bigs who have laid the foundations for a gang 
culture that has left a series of deep scars across Britain.

Police are warning that the fire is spreading, from London, 
Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester to smaller towns.

A shooting in Letchworth this month and the triple murder in Bishop's 
Stortford last week, where the only person in the house left 
unscathed by two gunmen was a three-year-old girl called Angel (even 
the dog was shot dead); the nightclub shooting in Liverpool a few 
days after Rhys Jones was killed: all serve to highlight the brutal 
symbiosis of drugs and guns. Warren had money; money that he poured 
into property both in Liverpool, where he owned an estimated 200 
houses, and abroad. Some of the cash went to tax havens, some into 
casinos in Spain. Not bad for a boy from gritty Toxteth who left 
school at 11 to become a small-time drug dealer working the most 
deprived estates of south Liverpool.

But on 24 October 1996, 'Cocky' Warren was brought crashing to earth. 
He was arrested by Dutch police while attempting to ship 1.6 tonnes 
of cannabis resin, 750 kilograms of cocaine and 50 kilos of heroin 
hidden in steel ingots into Britain. Merseyside's enemy number one - 
a criminal mastermind with a photographic memory that enabled him to 
control his empire without the need for incriminating files - was 
suddenly off the streets.

Sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 1997, Warren was later given a 
further four-year sentence for manslaughter for kicking a fellow 
inmate to death. He resurfaced last June when he was released, 
stressing he wanted to live a quiet life with his family. Barely a 
month later, Warren was arrested on suspicion of attempting to import 
UKP300,000 worth of cannabis into Jersey, where he is now in prison on remand.

Warren's incarceration created a vacuum at a dangerous time in 
Liverpool. The city had become the main route via which drugs enter 
northern England. Taking advantage of Warren's absence, a small 
number of criminal families started to muscle in on his old 
distribution network, fuelling a turf war that years later was to 
become inextricably linked to the murder of Rhys Jones. Car bombs 
were detonated outside leading nightclubs, and parts of Liverpool 
became no-go areas for the police.

As the drugs poured into the city so did the guns. 'There's always 
been a connection between Liverpool and Ireland,' said Neil Thompson, 
a former detective superintendent with the National Crime Squad who 
specialised in targeting organised criminal gangs. 'When the IRA was 
operating, there was little drug culture in Northern Ireland, but now 
there's a lot more drugs going from Ireland to Liverpool and more 
guns, too. There's massive profits to be made and people want to 
protect their area.'

Ireland was not the only source of weapons. The post-Cold War world 
saw a surfeit of arms enter the black market through Eastern Europe. 
Prices crashed. 'Back in the time of the Krays only a small number of 
very violent gangs had guns,' said Thompson, who now runs his own 
security company, Red24. 'But at the end of my career in the Nineties 
there were loads of guns coming in from Ireland and Eastern Europe. 
Their availability meant lots more people had them.'

Much of the drugs money went into Liverpool's regeneration, buying up 
apartments around the docks. Today police sources believe the big 
drug barons are paying inflated prices on new developments so that 
they can fix the property market and keep prices artificially high. 
Amid the rush to build, officials were bribed to turn a blind eye if 
bureaucracy got in the way of profits. Several of the city's plethora 
of tanning salons and hand car washes became prized money-laundering 
operations.

Synergies quickly developed between the illegal and the legal. 
Legitimate businesses were used as cover for the shipment of large 
amounts of drugs. One Merseyside Police operation, codenamed Lima, 
uncovered a scaffolding business that would ship poles for fake 
construction jobs in Spain, only to be returned stuffed full of 
cocaine. The same gang also used a company importing granite kitchen 
work surfaces for similarly illegal purposes.

It wasn't long before the city's building boom saw the gangs, 
dominated by a handful of criminal families, move into protection 
rackets, offering 'security' on Liverpool's building sites. Firms 
that didn't pay quickly found their sites torched. The security firms 
also 'owned' the bouncers at many of the city's pubs and clubs, 
allowing them to control the distribution of drugs inside. Last year 
Merseyside police launched Operation Seahog to target the rogue 
security firms. In a series of dawn raids on one day in September, 
officers seized a large quantity of drugs, firearms, cash and stolen goods.

As the drugs and the guns sloshed onto the streets so too did the 
violence. The former Brookside actress, Jennifer Ellison, found 
herself caught in the crossfire when her then boyfriend, Tony 
Richardson, 28, became a target of the rogue security firms. Once, 
the couple's home was sprayed with bullets in a drive-by shooting. On 
another occasion, a gang wielding machetes attacked them when they 
were out in Ellison's BMW. The couple escaped only after Ellison 
drove her car across a central reservation. On 7 April 2004, 
Richardson's younger brother, Mark, was shot in the back by two 
gunmen, one using a sawn-off shotgun, the other a 9mm pistol, while 
he was in a Ford Galaxy accompanied by Craig Barker, an enforcer 
known as 'Burn Out Boy' because he blew up dealers' cars if they 
didn't pay up. Barker died from his injuries in hospital a few hours 
after the attack. Darren Gee, a notorious member of a leading 
Liverpool crime family, who was also in the Ford, escaped unhurt, 
vowing revenge.

It wasn't long in coming. On 18 May 2004, David Regan, a 
father-of-five, was shot dead on the forecourt of his car-wash by 
hitmen working for Gee, now serving an 18-year-jail term for the 
murder. Gee, from Everton, north Liverpool, who had close links to 
the rogue security industry, believed Regan was responsible for 
Barker's killing.

The battle to own the drug distribution networks filtered down from 
the security firms dominated by the likes of Gee to their loose 
network of lieutenants, the teenage gangs such as the Norris Green 
Strand gang, also known as the Nogzy soldiers, and the Croxteth 
'Crocky' Crew, both from north Liverpool. A similar tale could be 
told in London or Birmingham where gangs such as the Burger Bar boys 
facilitate low-level drug and gun running for the bigger, organised 
criminal gangs.

The gangs - some members of whom are as young as 13 - are useful foot 
soldiers for the established criminal families. They can be used to 
hide guns, run drugs and intimidate shopkeepers who refuse to pay for 
protection. For a while the gag went that the skirmishes between the 
Nogzy and the Crocky Crew seemed to have come from an A Team script. 
'Lots of bullets, no one hurt,' the two gangs used to joke. Then, on 
New Year's Day 2004, the leader of the Crocky crew, Danny McDonald, 
19, was shot dead in the Royal Oak pub in Norris Green, apparently in 
revenge for a failed nailbomb attack he had carried out on the Dickie 
Lewis pub in Kirkdale, north Liverpool.

The territorial feud between the Nogzy and the Crocky crew 
intensified as old scores were settled. On 23 August 2006, Liam 
'Smigger' Smith, a leading member of the Nogzy, was shot dead after 
visiting a friend at Altcourse prison.

A year and a day after Smigger was gunned down, Rhys Jones was shot 
dead in Croxteth Park, a relatively affluent part of north Liverpool 
but one bordered by the two gangs' neighbourhoods. There is 
speculation the killer - believed to be as young as 15 - was aiming 
at a rival gang member as part of his initiation, the date chosen to 
mark the anniversary of Smith's death. Police fear there will now be 
reprisals, both among the teen gangs at the bottom of the food chain 
and the security firms who supply them with drugs and use them to 
perpetuate their protection rackets.

A source in the Merseyside underworld told The Observer that one of 
the firms is angry it has lost a major protection 'contract' for a 
supermarket building site, and is now planning revenge. The head of 
the firm is well known on the protection scene. 'I'll be dead by the 
time I'm 38,' he has declared. 'But I'm taking everyone else with me.'

This 'get rich or die trying' philosophy should spark fear not just 
in Liverpool but the whole of Britain. A recent threat assessment by 
the Serious and Organised Crime Agency recognises the city's pivotal 
importance to Britain's drugs trade. 'All types of class A drugs are 
distributed from London, Liverpool and Birmingham to other areas of 
the UK,' the assessment states. 'However, other smaller cities and 
towns are becoming more prominent, and the overall picture is 
increasingly complex and diverse, with markets providing both crack 
cocaine and heroin now well established outside urban centres.'

This bleak prognosis looked eerily prescient last week, when hitmen 
executed three men and seriously injured two women in the 
Hertfordshire town of Bishop's Stortford. The killings, at a house in 
a quiet cul-de-sac, appear to have been over unpaid drug debts.

'The situation with guns in this country is deteriorating, there's no 
doubt about that,' said Roger Gray, author of Armed Response, an 
account of his time with the specialist armed response unit of the 
Metropolitan Police. 'We are never going to be able to turn the clock 
back because there are elements within society for whom the use of 
firearms has now become endemic.'

At the end of a month in which Britain's immersion into gun culture 
has become the subject of national debate, it appears violence has 
become a currency. It links big-time criminals like Warren to the 
wannabe gangsters of the Nogzy and Crocky Crew, who buy and sell the 
drugs and guns distributed by his successors. The unpalatable 
conclusion is whoever killed Rhys Jones did not act alone; he is part 
of a warped ecosystem spreading across Britain. One that shows no 
sign of dying.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom