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.