HOW DRUG BARONS WON ROYAL PARDON IN JAIL CON

Gang bosses John Haase and Paul Bennett posed as supergrasses in an
audacious scheme that saw them released from prison less than one year
into their 18-year sentences. Graham Johnson and Mark Townsend reveal
how these two Liverpool master criminals duped the justice system

They were the brains behind one of the most audacious plots to subvert
the criminal justice system. From their prison cells, John Haase and
Paul Bennett orchestrated the planting of 35 huge caches of firearms
and drugs across the UK in a successful ruse to secure their early
release from jail.

Last week the pair were jailed for a total of 42 years for perverting
the course of justice. By falsifying evidence on an industrial scale,
heroin barons Haase, 59, and Bennett, 44, conned two royal pardons out
of the highest powers in the land.

The cast of characters they duped reads like a Who's Who of the
justice system: a former Home Secretary and Conservative party leader,
a senior High Court judge, operatives of MI5, high-ranking Customs
investigators and detectives.

'From inside they were able to arrange the transport, finance,
contacts and firearms over a long period of time and at great cost. It
was incredible,' said Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Graham
McNulty. 'It corrupted the criminal justice system and Home Secretary
because the facts were not known to them.'

McNulty led Operation Ainstable, the two-year investigation that
unearthed Haase and Bennett's elaborate scam. Yet the case's
ramifications might be far from over. The verdicts at Southwark Crown
Court last Wednesday could alter how organised crime is investigated
in the future. A debate in Parliament this week is expected to focus
on flaws exposed in the 'supergrass' system by the case, along with a
number of potential miscarriages of justice.

Both former Tory leader Michael Howard and his successor, David
Cameron, may shudder with embarrassment. Haase and Bennett duped
Howard, when he was Home Secretary under Prime Minister John Major,
into slashing 17 years off their 18-year prison sentences after they
were caught with a huge stash of high-purity heroin. Around that time
Cameron was a special adviser to Howard on Home Office policy.

One of Howard's flagship policies was 'prison works' and its pledge to
lock up dealers with no prospect of early release. Yet the ingenuity
of Haase and Bennett would convince the Home Secretary that the
correct course of action was to allow two of Britain's most feared and
prolific criminals back into society.

The story behind last week's trial begins 16 years ago, when former
armed robber Haase joined forces with the Turkish Connection, a
pan-European drugs cartel, to smuggle heroin into the UK using 200kg
packages, a size previously unseen in Britain. Despite advances from
London gangsters, the Turkish Connection elected to work exclusively
with Liverpudlian Haase who, in the words of senior member Suleyman
Ergun, was a 'real-life Scarface'. 'Haase was fearless and armed to
the teeth. Unlike other big gangsters he was hands-on, not afraid to
go to Paris himself to pick up UKP 1m worth of gear in person,' Ergun
said.

Haase's approach would prove so fruitful that the price of heroin in
the UK during the early Nineties plunged overnight from UKP 24,000 to
UKP 20,000 a kilo. Soon his supply lines fed most of Britain, but the
sheer size of his operation meant Haase was vulnerable. In 1993 he and
Bennett were arrested in connection with Class A drugs worth more than
UKP 13m.

A Customs spokesman said their subsequent convictions were a 'turning
point in the fight against the big players'. He expected Haase to be
inside for 18 years, but Haase was not worried. During an earlier
spell in prison he had met 'Mad' Frankie Fraser, who explained how
London villains planted their own guns and then 'grassed', pretending
they were someone else's. In return for such valued intelligence, the
'supergrass' was granted early release.

Haase decided to pull the same stunt, but on an unprecedented scale.
Mobile phones concealed within the pram of his baby girl were smuggled
into prison by his wife Debbie. Haase ensured the handsets remained
hidden by 'bottling them', concealing them in his anus.

Despite being incarcerated in a high-security cell, between October
1993 and January 1995, Haase used a war chest of UKP 1,150,000 to
acquire a huge arsenal of high-calibre weapons and hired 'planters' to
carry out his plan. It was logistically complex, but he was meticulous.

Weaponry was ordered from two armourers. More than 150 illegal weapons
and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, including bullets and grenades, AK-47s
and fake Semtex were planted by Haase and Bennett in 35 UK locations.

Once in place, Haase approached an informant handler - Customs officer
Paul Cook - and offered information on where the weapons were stashed.
The authorities listened.

With hindsight, police last week admitted Haase's information was too
good to be true. McNulty described how stashes of guns were left
unattended in cars bought weeks earlier, with no attempt at haggling,
or otherwise left in unlocked, deserted houses.

In addition, details supplied by Haase were unusually precise. On one
occasion he practically gave police a treasure map to find weaponry
buried at a Merseyside squirrel sanctuary in Formby.

'It was literally 10 yards west, five east, and so on,' said
McNulty.

At one stash in a Toxteth flat, police found four machine-guns, a
Smith and Wesson revolver, a Sten gun, silencers and ammunition.
Another, in a van outside a McDonald's restaurant, contained 80 new
shotguns.

Cunningly, Haase played on fears of an IRA attack following the 1993
Bishopsgate bomb at the height of the troubles. At one cache, police
found details of a British army recruiting office as a potential target.

In another, Haase persuaded his wife Debbie, 35, and her best friend,
Sharon Knowles, 36, to create a fake IRA gun haul inside a car parked
near the Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry terminal in Anglesey, north Wales.
Irish newspapers and cigarette stubs from Dublin pubs were strewn
alongside to promote the haul's paramilitary authenticity. Bin bags
containing thousands of bullets and heavy machine-guns were found at a
time that coincided with the delicate Northern Ireland peace talks.

Yet Haase's carefully crafted duplicity would be undone by involving
the person he most trusted. To prove the extent of the caches, Debbie
had taken pictures of them using the family camera. When officers from
Operation Ainstable began investigating the scam in 2005, they found
15 Polaroid pictures inside Debbie's home. Tests in Germany proved
that photographs of the secret arms caches had been taken on the same
camera. Whoever took the smiling portraits knew all about the
locations of the weapons dumps long before they were found by the
police. The Met began focusing its inquiries on the women. Another
breakthrough would soon follow. Debbie's fingerprints were detected on
the Holyhead bin liners containing large quantities of bullets.
Furthermore, the ferry booking to Ireland was linked to Sharon.

Debbie was last week jailed for four years and Sharon for five years.
Unlike the stony features of Haase and Bennett, both were visibly
traumatised at the sentence. Yet as officers continue to celebrate the
outcome of the trial this weekend, many still wonder how the informant
handler Cook failed to identify the con. Cook even went as far as
sending a letter to the original trial judge praising Haase and
Bennett. He wrote: 'It is a very rare occurrence when the authorities
have such a vein of information on quality criminals. More so, when
the information can be shown to be genuine and 100 per cent accurate.'

To protect Haase and Bennett from any reprisals for their roles as
supergrasses, Judge Lynch sentenced the pair in open court to 18 years
each at their trial in 1996. But behind the scenes he wrote a letter
to Howard recommending royal pardons. Now, though, the retired judge
says that he 'wouldn't have had anything to do with it' if he had
known the caches were bogus.

In 1996 Howard granted Haase and Bennett the royal Prerogative of
Mercy, a rare occurrence.

MI6 officer Harry Ferguson, who had originally helped Customs nail
Haase in a fraught surveillance operation, said: 'We were shocked and
angry. All that hard work down the drain.'

Yet instead of going into hiding in South America, as they had
promised after their release, Haase returned to Liverpool believing he
had become a government-sponsored untouchable. Far from avoiding
crime, he expanded his empire to include gun-running, extortion,
protection rackets, kidnapping, hijacking and contract violence.

The frustrated Merseyside police launched an operation to bring him
down for a second time. In 1999 Haase was jailed again for drug
dealing and money-laundering. He attempted to call Howard as a witness
in his second trial, prompting his barrister, Lord Carlile, now the
government's independent reviewer of terrorism laws, to resign in
protest. Haase received 13 years.

In jail, he remained confident that he could go free again, this time
by informing on how he had got out earlier. In 2004 he made a signed,
taped affidavit to Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle that described how he
planted the phoney guns and claimed that he had given a UKP 400,000
bribe to Howard and UKP 100,000 to Cook. It said: 'They [the police
and Customs] can't be that thick, but they are, believe it or not. How
can I be in prison and know information like that? Because from day
one I was scheming.'

In 2005 the affadavit was passed on to police and Operation Ainstable
was launched. When it came to court, however, Haase denied paying the
bribes.

Scotland Yard also revealed last week that it could find no evidence
of bribes being paid to Howard or Cook, who was also exonerated by an
internal inquiry. Of greater concern to detectives, however, is that
Haase's plot might not have been the last of its type. Convicted
underworld armourer Tony Mitchell, who testified against Haase, said:
'It's still going on now. The last one I know of was in Christmas
2007. The police get a result. The villains get off. The public feels
safe. Everybody is happy.'

Kilfoyle: MP On Trail of the Truth

Rumours that John Haase had bribed former Tory Home Secretary Michael
Howard for a royal
pardon first emerged from Liverpool's criminal underworld in the mid-1990s.

Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle set out to investigate the claims, finally
meeting Haase face-to-face in high-security Whitemoor Prison in 2004.
Haase did not disappoint, offering Kilfoyle potentially explosive
revelations. The convicted criminal taped and signed an affidavit
telling the MP how he and Paul Bennett had bribed Howard with UKP
400,000 and a Customs handler with UKP 100,00 to free them.

Journalist Graham Johnson later infiltrated Haase's gang and collected
taped statements that guns had been planted to fool the authorities
and that the alleged bribes were paid.

In 2005 Kilfoyle reported his concerns to Her Majesty's Chief
Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Keith Povey, who in turn contacted
Scotland Yard. Later that year Operation Ainstable was launched,
leading to last week's sentencing of Haase and Bennett.

During the trial, Southwark Crown Court heard how Howard had
telephoned Kilfoyle and asked him not to speak publicly about Haase
and Bennett being freed early from jail. The then Home Secretary said
that lives would be in danger if Kilfoyle went ahead with a television
interview about the release. Kilfoyle was so surprised he called Jack
Straw, then shadow home secretary. Police have found no evidence that
bribes were ever paid by Haase and Bennett to Howard or Customs officials.