Powder Wars, page 1
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Epub ISBN: 9781845968939
Version 1.0
www.mainstreampublishing.com
Copyright © Graham Johnson, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD
7 Albany Street
Edinburgh EH1 3UG
ISBN 1 84018 793 X
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
* * *
Contents
1. The Early Days
2. The Oslo
3. The Hole In The Wall Gang
4. Expansion
5. Den for Meets
6. The Scrapman’s Gang
7. Caesar’s Palace
8. Cortina Crew
9. John Haase
10. Straight-goer
11. The Informant
12. Curtis Warren
13. The First Consignment
14. The Key
15. The Bust
16. The Trial
17. The Intervening Years
18. Haase Backgrounder
19. Freed
20. The Great Escape
21. Big Brother Security
22. The In
23. Round-the-Clock Rackets
24. Protection and Extortion
25. Drugs
26. Gun Deal
27. The Case
28. The Deal
29. The End
1
* * *
The Early Days
Paul Grimes was born on 26 May 1950 in a post-war prefab on a Liverpool street that had been flattened by Hitler’s bombers ten years earlier. At the age of ten, he was introduced to organised crime by his grandmother, Harriet Mellor. Fresh faced but streetwise, Paul was recruited as a decoy into a notorious firm of professional shoplifters run by his grandma.
Foul-mouthed Harriet was a 16-stone gang boss who drank Scotch neat and was known on the street as ‘The Fagin’. She sat at the head of three prominent Liverpool crime families: the Grimes, the Mellors and the Moorcrofts. Amongst their inter-married members were some of the most notorious and prolific gangsters in Britain.
Billy Grimwood was a rising star on the national crime scene and a close associate of the London-based Kray twins and their clubland enforcer Johnny Nash. He was a criminal all-rounder: armed robber, hijacker, protection racketeer, killer, warehouse raider and safe-cracker.
Grimwood had married into Harriet’s clan after falling for her daughter Joan, an expert ‘carrier outer’ in the family’s shoplifting crew. Ambitious and smart, Grimwood soon became Harriet’s underboss. The fearlessly violent six-footer had graduated from petty crime (in 1954 he was jailed for stealing a £90 tape-recorder from an office) to hard-core safe-blower and nightclub impresario.
In June 1960, the same month in which his nephew, Paul Grimes, was being introduced to the family business on a shoplifting spree, the 29-year-old Grimwood was sentenced to three years for hiding three ounces of gelignite in the coal-bunker of his two-up, two-down terrace. The sticks of explosive were leftovers from the gang’s most recent safe-blowing operations. But for Grimwood, doing time was not particularly bad news. Being sent to jail was a holiday, especially from his wife, who regularly laced his evening meals with rat poison in the hope that he would die. Long-suffering Joan rightly suspected her husband was a serial adulterer.
In Liverpool’s Walton Prison, Grimwood was already a living legend. Amongst the cons it was widely believed that he was more powerful than the governor. Grimwood controlled the allocation of the best cells and privileged jobs. During his sentence he smuggled in a television set (stolen from Liverpool docks) and opened up a gangsters’ cocktail bar in a basement cell. He fixed it for cons like armed robber and contract killer Charlie Seiga to join him in his exclusively luxurious I wing. In his book Killer, Charlie Seiga recalled:
I had only been there a few days when a con swaggered into my cell as though he owned the place: ‘Get your gear packed, you’re coming with me.’
He then introduced himself as Billy Grimwood. I was taken over to I wing. I could see at once that Billy Grimwood had everything under control; all the cream of the top villains were there. I was introduced to a lot of the cons and offered a drink of anything I wanted. I couldn’t believe how it was on I wing – it was like a little nightclub. Most of the cons were selected by Billy. Our cells were left mostly unlocked and we had a big TV. Remember this was 1963.
Billy Grimwood was a real hard-case. He never trained like most cons do; he was just a naturally fit person. When fighting, he was so fast no one stood a chance with him, but he was dead fair in his ways. I have seen men who have tried to take him out, but they never could. He was the hardest fella I had ever come across at the time.
When he wasn’t in jail, the sharp-suited Grimwood acted as a mentor to Paul, grooming his nephew for life as a one-man crimewave. In later life, Paul would repay the honour by acting as his minder and bodyguard.
Grimwood’s safe-cracking team consisted of Paul Grimes’ father, Harold, and his uncles, Ronnie and Ritchie Mellor. Harold Grimes had married Harriet’s second daughter Doreen and, by default, into a life of villainy. He regularly escaped the clutches of the police investigating the growing trend of high-value safe burglaries by jumping ship onto a whaler bound for the North Atlantic, sometimes for two years at a time. Clad in rain-lashed oilskins and a sou’wester, he laid low, safe in the knowledge that the long arm of the law did not stretch as far as the fog-saturated ice caps of the Arctic.
Billy Grimwood and Harold Grimes made criminal history in 1969 when they stole £140,000 by tunnelling inside a Liverpool city-centre bank. Grimwood and Grimes were the first British criminals to use thermal lances to burrow through a strong-room door. The infamous ‘Water Street Job’ was masterminded by Grimwood and underworld hombre, Tommy ‘Tacker’ Comerford, who would later go on, according to Customs and Excise, to become Britain’s first ever large-scale drugs baron.
Though the gang spent two days over the August bank holiday tunnelling into the bank from a nearby bakery, Grimwood and Grimes insisted that they only be brought in for the pièce de résistance. They were probably the only criminals in Britain able to operate the burners effectively and their bargaining power paid off. Grimwood and Grimes were the only two members of the gang to evade capture.
Although Grimwood was pulled in for a grilling, he did not fold under questioning. Comerford received ten years in jail for his part in the heist, which sparked a wave of copycat raids in the capital and elsewhere. The judge commented: ‘This was top-level, professional organised crime, carried out with the most modern sophisticated equipment and with all the planning and precision of a commando raid.’ Scores as lucrative as the Water Street Job did not happen everyday.
On routine safe-cracking raids, the backbone of the gang was Ritchie and Ronnie Mellor, who, despite being Harriet’s beloved sons, ceded day-to-day operational control to Grimwood. Former boxer Ritchie Mellor was known in the underworld as ‘Dick the Stick’ on account of his dexterity at opening doors and windows with a short crowbar he concealed up his sleeve.
Dick the Stick would later perfect his breaking-and-entering skills as leader of the ‘Hole in the Wall’ gang – a fast-moving gang of warehouse raiders he set up with nephew Paul Grimes. Again, on the instructions of Grandma Harriet, Dick mentored Paul and recruited him regularly into his criminal enterprises.
His brother Ronnie Mellor was a psychotic shooter-merchant and compulsive commercial burglar. He was thoroughly untrustworthy and was held in contempt, though not to his face, by many of his underworld peers. One former safe-cracker partner recalled: ‘If honour and trust were the measure of a man, there would be difficulty finding Ronnie Mellor under a microscope.’ Utterly faithless, Ronnie was caught burgling his best pal’s house after he had suggested the man go out for a drink.
Despite his shortcomings, Ronnie’s wanton brutality had allowed him to gain control and run his own ‘team’ independently of the family for a while. He appointed his son, also named Ronnie, as his right-hand man. ‘Young’ Ronnie Mellor – dubbed ‘Johnny One Eye’ by gang members because of a debilitating cataract in his left eye – grew up with Paul Grimes and was able to pass on his extensive knowledge of crime. He taught him the value of savage violence as a tool for doing business and later invited Paul to be an accomplice on an underworld hit.
In 1990, Ronnie was jailed for ten years after masterminding a £135,000 cocaine importation from Amsterdam. On his release, he moved into kidnapping and ‘taxing’ drug dealers. He was later jailed for three years.
The Moorcroft family married into Harriet’s firm following t he union of a capacious thief and home-breaker called ‘Big’ Christy Moorcroft and her third daughter Roseline, a shoplifter. Their son, ‘Young’ Christy Moorcroft, followed in their footsteps and was a criminal associate of his cousin Paul Grimes.
Finally, there was Snowball, a younger member of the family, less equipped to deal with violence, but who nevertheless grew up to be a professional thief, armed robber and drug-dealer. Of them all, Snowball was closest to Paul Grimes and predictably the pair enjoyed a long-lasting partnership-in-crime.
As for brothers, sisters, in-laws, cousins – all were mixed up in the rackets in some way: whether it was fencing stolen jewellery, card-marking a safe full of cash ready for the taking or stashing a lorry load of swag ‘zapped’ from Liverpool’s booming docks. They may not have been an Italian crime family but Harriet’s crew was nevertheless a self-contained, highly organised crime gang turning over tens of thousands of pounds a year at a time when the average wage was £10 a week and the average post-war worker relied on hire purchase to buy a Hoover.
It was an ideal breeding ground for a wannabe gangster. By the age of 12, Paul Grimes was a veteran of some 20 organised shoplifting sprees, meticulously masterminded by his grandmother Harriet. Paul was learning fast that crime paid if the criminal committing it paid special attention to the planning, preparation and execution of the crime in hand.
* * *
PAUL: She was not like a normal grandmother, Harriet, in all fairness. She ran her shoplifting routine like a professional team, as ruthlessly as any of the safe-cracking and armed robbery gangs that were all the go at the time. She had a bit of a dig on her and all, too. So no one stepped out of line. If you did, you got whacked. No back answers.
She took me out grafting when I was ten. She made me wear short pants. I wasn’t on my own. It was a family outing: Harriet, her three daughters Joan, Roseline and my mam Doreen came along and their friend called Carli. Was a pure firm, nonetheless. They were dressed up to the nines: hats, fox furs, the pure works. Each of them had a specific role on the team. It wasn’t like the smackheads and that out grafting these days. It was more like a military operation. For instance, Roseline was just there to memorise the faces of the floorwalkers – they were the store detectives. She took it pretty seriously. Remembered what they wore, so if the floorwalkers appeared in the aisles, Harriet’s mob were straight onto them – was Game Over for them, in all fairness, all the time.
I noticed that Harriet even found out when the floorwalkers sloped off for a sly ciggie. As they smoked, she went to work clearing the shop out. If they went to the toilet, they’d come back to major crime scene.
My grandma was a ‘wrapper’. That just meant being able to compress several items of clothing into a ball very quickly. But there was a bit of an art to it, in all fairness.
We went into a department store called T.J. Hughes. I paid close attention to what was going on.
She swiped four woollen suits off’ve a rail and wrapped them into a tight ball. Roseline bagged them into a big, glossy paper bag and left it on the floor by a rail. Later, when we were off the scene, my Auntie Joan, who was Billy Grimwood’s wife, picked it up and carried it out. That was her job – a carrier-outer. To her, it was no different than working in a factory.
Right over to the kiddies’ clothes section then. To ordinary folks and that we just looked like a respectable family out shopping, in all fairness. Harriet made me try on school uniforms while they cleaned it out. That was my introduction into organised crime.
* * *
Following his apprenticeship as a shoplifter, Paul was taught how the men of the family went about their business as blaggers, safe-crackers and commercial burglars. He was given a ringside seat at their monthly planning meetings around a flimsy Formica table in the prefab’s cramped kitchen.
Jostling for space and hunched over the crude drawings laid out before them, the chain-smoking gangsters sat awkwardly on spindly dining-chairs and discussed getaway routes, the amount of gelignite to be deployed and the drop-off point for the fences on completion of the job, if there was anything aside cash involved.
Paul soaked it up. He was impressed. Grimwood was a striking figure. When the conversation got heavy, like when his father Harold revealed how Grimwood had killed a rival gangster and buried him on a nearby wasteground, his uncles would tell him to ‘fuck off’ for a while. But mostly it was routine business, like the systematic robbing of Liverpool docks.
To Grimwood’s crew, having Liverpool docks on their doorstep was like having a free cash machine at the end of the street. It was a constant source of plunder. A wide-open, eight-mile-long warehouse stuffed with treasures beyond their wildest dreams. Lorry loads of whisky, mountains of coffee, transporters piled high with new cars, holds full of fresh produce, clothes, televisions, leather shoes, canned foods, fertiliser, electrical goods – you name it, Britain’s ration-starved, consumer-hungry black market couldn’t get enough of it.
The icing on the cake was that waterfront robberies were largely risk free. The docks, in the local parlance, were totally ‘boxed off’ – the workers who ran them were on the take and ‘onside’. Dockers, lorry drivers and security guards were mostly friends and family into making a few quid by putting up tasty work, turning a blind eye and ‘rolling over’ on put-up raids.
Grimwood robbed the docks blind. And when the money ran out he robbed them some more. As fast as he could clean them out, ships from the four corners of the Empire and the factories of Northern England filled them up again. Seemingly, the warehouses never ran dry. It was a dream enterprise and it was big business.
In the oak-panelled cabin boardrooms of the marine insurers, from the Liver Building to Lloyds of London, eyebrows were being raised at the horrific attrition rate; not that the plunder was a new phenomenon. The large-scale organised ransacking of stores had started ten to fifteen years before during the Second World War, when the US Army had been forced to create special cadres to stop the raiders stealing army cigarettes and looting bombed warehouses. But by the 1950s the problem was putting the economic viability of Liverpool’s port at risk.
To beat the raiders, exporters like Timpson’s shoes began splitting up their cargoes – left feet in one ship, right on another, so that the hijackers were left with lorryloads of stolen but unsellable single-foot shoes. In a desperate bid to stop the haemorrhaging, the electrical goods company Remington removed the magnetic motors from their top-of-the range razors and stored them in separate warehouses, miles apart from their plastic cases. But the raiders simply slipped the cargo handlers bigger bribes to pinpoint the exact locations of the various components, so that they could be robbed piecemeal and reassembled later.
Finally, in the mid-’60s, faced with huge losses from theft, the Port Authority of Liverpool invested millions of pounds into containerisation – the transport of cargo in relatively secure steel containers. But the mobs simply switched from robbing the fenced-in dock areas to the hundreds of less-secure holding warehouses that funnelled unpackaged goods into them, scattered all over the northwest. It was no surprise that the Grimes family prefab became an Aladdin’s Cave of stolen goods.
* * *
PAUL: There were racks of new American suits in the wardrobes and crates of single malt Scotch off’ve the docks, three-deep up the walls. When televisions came out there were blocks of them up to the roof. You had to climb over them to get out the door. Bowls full of jewellery had off from the safes and that spilled over under the bed. It got so chocca that we were forced to move into our grandma’s house. There was no room for us to sleep; the place was so rammed tight with swag.
Grimwood was the top boy. He was a blagger. Ronnie was a grafter, into warehouses and factories and that. Grimwood wore a tuxedo, even if he was going down to the local boozer and that. He was that rough, in all fairness. He used to stand over his wife while she ironed his white shirts. If it wasn’t done right, he’d throw it back in her face and call her a piece of shit.
It was a bit thingio, in all fairness. But it’s one of them, isn’t it? What can you do, when you’re just a kiddie? But on the street everyone loved him. The dockers loved him because he always boxed them off if he had a good touch off’ve one of their tips. The card-markers loved him; if he blew up a safe it was get paid for them. And the crews loved him because he put dough in their backbins and stopped other villains from robbing it off them.
