Books

Powder Wars is the true story of the supergrass who brought down Britain’s biggest drug dealers. Gangster Paul Grimes was a one-man crimewave with a breathtaking capacity to steal. Any villains who got in his way were made to pay - often with their blood. But when his son died of a drugs overdose, the old-school mobster swore revenge on the new generation of Liverpool-based heroin and cocaine dealers. Against all odds, he turned undercover informant.

At eleven he was stealing cars. At fifteen he was beating up policemen. At twenty he was an armed robber. And by thirty, Curtis Warren was the biggest drugs dealer in Britain. Curtis Warren is the richest and most successful British criminal ever to be caught. He had a hotline to the Columbian Cali cartel, direct links with the Turkish heroin Maffya, and unlimited credit with the cannabis dealers of Europe and Africa. He organised shipments worth hundreds of millions of pounds and had a small army of violent soldiers prepared to do his bidding. His power was such that he was able to control the price of drugs on Britain’s streets. And he did it all with a mobile phone, a photographic memory and an extraordinary criminal mind. COCKY has been extensively revised and updated to tell the amazing story of the rise and fall of Curtis Warren. To catch him, police and Customs officials throughout Europe set up Operation Crayfish, a unique operation, putting together a hand-picked team working from a secret location. In doing so they stumbled across police corruption at the highest level, walked smack into a bloody gang war, and uncovered an organised crime network linking the whole of the British Isles. Finally, Warren was caught in an SAS-style raid by Dutch police. Today, he is serving a twelve year jail sentence under maximum security. One of his gang has already escaped, and he has murdered one of the inmates..

“Mr Nasty” charts the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of a wannabe player in the global narcotics business. From humble beginnings on the streets of London’s East End, Cameron White rapidly ascended the drug ladder of London’s club scene before notorious local criminals forced him to move to the US. There, he soon found himself aboard a cocaine-fuelled rollercoaster ride, leading him from encounters with psychotic, crack-dealing Jamaicans in New York to luncheons with Hollywood’s glitterati. The American adventure was to reach its inevitable conclusion in a drive-by shooting in the barrios of LA. Back in London, a dull nine-to-five existence did nothing to quell White’s inclinations. Cue a chemical vacation in Thailand and an effortless metamorphosis from recreational drug user to fully fledged smack addict in Berlin. White’s eventual wake-up call came one morning via his ravaged reflection in the mirror. Stunned to realise how low he had sunk, White was determined to get clean and his gold-star efforts at rehabilitation were rewarded with an opportunity to start again in Australia. Faced with temptation again, his good intentions were to prove short-lived and he slid into the murky world of substance abuse in Sydney. But this time things were different and a gradual but life-defining epiphany rescued White from the edge. “Mr Nasty” is a thrilling yet cautionary tale of a decade lived within the narcotics underworld. Illuminating both the exciting and destructive sides of such an existence, it is ultimately a testament to how a strong will can sometimes overcome the lure of vice and break the chains of addiction.

“Three fishermen from the Scottish Highlands received a total of 55 years in prison after being found guilty of smuggling into Britain cocaine worth more than 100 million - the biggest drugs seizure by customs officials in the country’s history” - The Times. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Highland fishing village of Ullapool was a tough place to make a living. With huge Eastern bloc factory ships buying up the local catch, however, there was money to be made for those who had the stomach for it. Renowned for its lawlessness - drinking and fighting offered the Fridaynight entertainment - it was no place for the squeamish. One man was gaining quite a reputation for himself locally - Chris Howarth, known to everyone as ‘Crazy Chris’. In the summer of ‘89, he met an expatriate Scot living in Malaga (referred to as ‘Mr X’ in the subsequent trial) who offered him some work of a dubious nature and set in motion a chain of events that would lead to what would be the UK’s largest ever drugs haul. Around the same time, working on a tip-off from a local informant and intelligence from their Spanish counterparts,

‘Protected Witness Unit (PWU): Designed to hold prisoners who are giving evidence or assistance to the police in cases of serious crime. All inmates are known to staff simply as ‘Bloggs’ followed by a number...’ In December 1995, the bodies of three men were discovered in a Range Rover in a quiet country lane in the Essex village of Rettendon. All three were well-known villains, and had each been blasted in the head with a shotgun at point-blank range. One member of the gang decided to break ranks and tell all. The story Darren Nicholls told, at first, seemed too incredible to be believed. But as the evidence to support his version of events began to mount up, the motives behind the brutal murder became increasingly clear. The plot Nicholls eventually uncovered involved everything from Irish terror groups and European smuggling rings to prostitution and police corruption. Bloggs 19 chronicles the rise of some of Britain’s most powerful and notorious villains and of the man whose betrayal led to their downfall - arguably the most important supergrass since the time of the Kray Twins.

The first gangster to fall foul of Grimes’s change of heart was Curtis Warren, aka ‘Cocky’, the wealthiest and most successful criminal in British history. Grimes infiltrated his cocaine cartel and led Customs to the largest narcotics seizure on record, putting Warren in the dock in the drugs trial of the twentieth century. After turning his attention to heroin baron John Haase, Grimes rose to become the boss of the villain’s notoriously bloodthirsty ‘security firm’ - a professional gang of rapid-fire, round-the-clock racketeers addicted to cocaine, explosive violence and non-stop criminality. His crew would fight gun-slinging turf wars with rival door teams, kidnap drug dealers and broker the sale of swag - lorry loads of stolen whisky and designer sportswear worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Finally, as his net began to tighten, Grimes was confronted with the ultimate dilemma. He discovered his second son was now a rising star in the drugs business. Should he shop him or not, was the life-or-death question. “Powder Wars” also reveals the secrets behind one of the most controversial episodes in British judicial history - how former Home Secretary Michael Howard was duped into granting John Haase a Royal Pardon, a decision that has come back to haunt the Tory leader.

Customs and Excise became aware of a major plot to smuggle huge amounts of drugs into the UK around Ullapool. As a result of this information, Operation Klondyke was born. For the next 18 months, Howarth and Mr X would be under constant surveillance. The trail would lead from Ullapool and the east coast of Scotland to the Costa del Sol, Gibraltar and Venezuela. It would uncover distribution channels from Colombia’s notorious Cali cartel to Europe and North America, operated by ruthless Spanish smuggling outfits. And it would finally lead to the UK’s most valuable seizure of drugs on a Scottish road as it was being transported down to the lucrative London market - half a tonne of virtually pure Colombian cocaine.

“White Gold” at last tells the inside story of Operation Klondyke - seen through the eyes of both the hunters and the hunted.