Some way, in some shape or form, if you don't get arrested, karma plays a role in it. Let me tell you. You can go through that life without setting the mount of bad luck, bad juju or bad karma coming and just dialling your door. Let me take you back to where we started this series.
They banged on me, told me, and got me up out of bed. And they opened the door, so me sure. And you just said it was Ellie. I mean, it's going to be Gospel.
The brutal murder of a 26-year-old woman called Ellie Edwards, who was just standing outside a pub on Christmas Eve. Ellie was wholly innocent, caught in the crossfire of a conflict between two local gangs. She was shot dead by Connor Chapman, a 22-year-old low-level cocaine dealer. The very first day of the trial, he walked into the courtroom within 20 minutes.
He never looked at me again because he's just a coward. Now my colleague David Collins is retracing Chapman's steps. So I'm just driving past an Asda about to turn onto Woodchurch Estate and cross into what feels like a bit of an invisible line.
into an estate which is the central kind of hob for one of the most dangerous gangs operating right now in Britain, which is the wood church estate gang.
The wood church estate is where Chapman grew up. It's a few kilometres from Liverpool City Centre on the Whirl Peninsula. Around 11,000 people call the wood church home. The majority, they're honest, hardworking, many of them families. I can see kind of small masonettes, small terraced houses.
It feels to me at the moment quite typical of a lot of housing estates in towns and cities across England slightly run down. This estate is also a retail hub for the cocaine business. It's strange to think as I'm driving through this estate which feels quite peaceful at the moment that it is the epicenter of one of Britain's most brutal and bloody gang wars.
In some of these houses, may well be the weapons, the guns, the scorpion guns that are used have been used by the Woodchurch estate gang. Ellie's killing took place in December 2022. A few months earlier, another innocent young woman, Ashley Dale, was at home in Liverpool when her front door was forced open.
The intruders were looking for a man from a rival gang, her boyfriend. He wasn't home, so instead, they murdered Ashley with a scorpion submachine gun, the same kind of high-powered weapon as the one Chapman used to kill Ellie.
she ran for her life into the dining room in a desperate attempt to reach the back door, bullet markings left embedded in the walls and on the floor.
The next day, again in Liverpool, a man pushed his way into the home of a stranger to escape another man shooting at him. The gunman shot at the front door. The bullet missed the man, passed through the wrist of the woman blocking the door, and straight into the chest of her daughter, Olivia Pratt-Cobell, killing her. She was just nine years old. The murder of Olivia has rocked our communities who are quite rightly
upset and outraged that such an abhorrent crime has occurred here on the streets of Merseyside. These three deaths, they were unrelated, but they did have something in common. The victims were all collateral damage in the conflict between gangs who between them have divided up and fight over the local drug market.
Because it's here, on Merseyside, thousands of kilometres from the Koka Fields of Columbia, and 600 kilometres from the huge port of Rotterdam, where tons of cocaine are shipped into Europe, that the next stage of the global business plays out.
the retail operation where cocaine is bought and sold by street dealers who live in the same parts of town as Ellie, Ashley, Olivia and other innocent people like me or you.
I'm Fiona Hamilton and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. This is Cocaine Inc. Episode 5, The Woodchurch Estate. Okay, it's worth looking at where we've got to in our investigation.
Working in a team with three reporters, myself, David Collins from the Sunday Times in the UK, and Stephen Drill from News Corp Australia. We're exploring how the cocaine trade works as a business. Stephen's been in Colombia and Mexico, looking at the production and supply routes of the drug. Yesterday, they seized 800 kilograms in the ceiling of two containers.
as well as how the first cartels grew from small-scale smuggling outfits into a multinational billion-dollar operation. The Medellin cars hell changed everything in a cocaine business. They were the first to industrialise the process, shipping and flying cocaine in vast quantities out of the country. According to American officials, controlling as much as 80% of the world's supply
I went to Europe's largest port, Rotterdam, which functions as a logistics hub in which shipping containers filled with cocaine moved through a global distribution network. They need somebody from inside for half information. You see corruption everywhere. Now David is back where we started, in the north of England, where cocaine is sold on the streets and near where Ellie Edwards was murdered.
A bit of background, the wood church estate is the largest housing estate on the whirl, but many here feel like they've just been left behind. Local news reports say economic cuts and a lack of opportunities mean children and teenagers in the area are simply left with little to do, and that creates a vacuum, and it certainly creates a problem.
Now, you might be thinking that because Liverpool is a port city, this is where the coat comes in, but actually, surprisingly little does. When the coat leaves Rotterdam, for example, in shipping containers, it makes a short journey across the English Channel to the UK's southern coast.
Usually, it gets loaded onto lorries and distributed to the major cities like Manchester, London and Liverpool, where gangs receive the drugs. They sell it on the streets of Merseyside, or distribute it to nearby smaller towns and rural areas. What David wants to find out is how does this part of the cocaine business run? How do the gangs involved turn a profit? And what happens to that money?
It's a wet windy autumn day. At the centre of the estate is the main road that runs through the wood church. It's called the Hall Road and known by everyone in the area. On it, there's a small supermarket, a pharmacy, a betting shop and a chippy. In recent years, the police have put in what they call a public spaces protection order.
What this means is that anyone who is in a group of two or more around these shops between 3pm and 10pm must leave when asked to do so by the police.
There's a list of other things you can't do, such as racing bikes, scooters, wearing anything to disguise your face or drinking alcohol. It sounds pretty repressive, and it's designed specifically to tackle gangs. And it's because in 2022, the wood church suffered a year of extreme violence. There were four separate shootings in or around the estate. All young men caught in gang-related crossfire,
More broadly on the Whirl, in the last six months of 2023, police launched a coordinated operation to clear out gang activity. They made 722 arrests, seizing crossbows, knives, drugs, and more than £38,000 in cash. I want to know what it's like to live in an area with this going on. I go to one of the roads on the estate where there was a shooting in 2022.
Oh yeah, so it's obvious. I'm from the Times newspaper, I'm doing a podcast. Did you know there was a shoot in here last year? Yeah, I don't. It was more down that side of the road than the other end. Was it? Thank you, alright. Have a journalist for the Times, would you mind a quick word or not? I don't mind going at the moment. It's okay, have a nice day.
I can't work out what's less appealing, an investigative reporter or the weather. But eventually, I meet someone who's willing to talk.
We talk a lot about the gangs, don't we? Well, that's what it's all over, isn't it? It's just a feud between here, over on the other states, and the two states. It's been like that for years. How long? Well, I'd say about 50 years. So even when you were... Even when I moved up here, because without the bad name, man, you're not going under what you're trying to hear.
What are these rows about, do you think? You know what it's about? I don't have to say the word. You know the word. Drugs. I'm getting out the rain. Okay. Was that you? Okay. Thank you. Right. So let's have a look at this so-called gang rivalry.
The wood church estate is less than two miles from a place called the Beachwood Estate. It's separated by the M53 motorway. The Beachwood was particularly notorious back in the day. In the early 80s, it was estimated that 1 in 10, 16 to 24 year olds were heroin addicts. At that time, it was known as the Ford Estate, but it essentially rebranded to try and distance itself from its troubled past.
Now on the beachward and wood church, it's well known that the two gangs deal in cocaine and other drugs. And competition for control of that retail market has led to years of tip for tap crime. Savage beatings, burglaries, and in a violent year on the wood church estate in 2022, shootings, including a 23 year old man shot multiple times in broad daylight on the whole road in front of children.
This is former detective Superintendent Richard Carr. These days Richard is a lecturer at Liverpool John Morels University. We're sitting in a small white wall room. It feels like the calendar room where he might start interrogating me. What made you want to be a police officer?
something I always wanted to do. So I started in industry, I still have school at 16, went into industry for a few years doing an apprenticeship and then she won the police at 21 in Merseyside in 1987. There's no policing in my family. I was going out with a girl at the time. Her dad was a police officer, he was a detective. So this is early 80s and things were very different then.
Richard's a tall gangly chap with short hair and looks every bit of a retired copper. He spent 30 years investigating guns, gangs and murders in Liverpool and across wider Merseyside. In the mid-norties, he remembers a change. For fast forward to 2006 or 2007, that's where it became really apparent to me around the gang culture. What we were seeing was an escalation in firearms criminality.
That was really as a sergeant, my first exposure to gang criminality. Around this time, a unit called the Matrix was being set up. Richard was part of it. The Matrix is famous on Jersey side. It employs some of the toughest and hardest coppers about. The go in, knock doors down, slap handcuffs on, that kind of stuff.
Richard retired from the police in March 2017, five years before Ellie's murder.
Then there is a clear drive to respond to that in a quick and robust way because you want to provide some reassurance to the public that the police are doing something about it. You want to put those that are responsible on the back foot. In my experience with crimes of this nature, it wouldn't be unusual that you may be doing search violence at midnight.
So traditionally, you might wait until the early hours, but if you're trying to keep the pace of things going, you may do search warrants through the night to just try and keep the pace of the investigation going. So you're looking to try and manage your intelligence. You're looking to manage your staff. You're looking to try and deploy your resources. And you're looking
Gang violence and drug running in the UK is not unique to Liverpool and Merseyside. Cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow all have their problems. Liverpool's police force is regarded as one of the national leaders in tackling gang crime, being consistently praised by the UK's police watchdog. So yeah, Merseyside are an outstanding force, certainly around dealing with this area and they've just been categorised as the same again for 2023, which is nice to see.
and in terms of how the cocaine trade works with those gangs and the violence between them in mind. How do you see the cocaine trade operating? If you look at a triangle, at the top of the triangle you've got the head of the organised crime group, at the bottom of the triangle you've got the street dealers and such. And I'm not sure how organised some of these groups are. If you think about it in terms of the issues, the urban street gangs which are the street level
dealers and the ones that are fighting over territory and maybe scratching around for sales and aspiring to be crime groups in their own right. They're protecting their empire and it generally involves violence. So really dealing with cocaine or drugs more generally, you're just trying to tackle that structure. Gangs like the wood church estate, what sort of money in cocaine terms are they making?
I'm not so sure they're making as much as you might think, because if they could elevate themselves, they would. My assessment is that the street level levels just blow that cash. Hey lads, how you doing? Back on a wood church estate, I meet a couple of young lads hanging around on a bench near the boarded up leisure centre. I get chatting to one of them.
You get used to it, like the stuff that happened around here. It's always the same stuff that, like all the shootings and all, like the activity and everything with the police about being about. It's just regular occurrence to be fair.
We've only been talking for barely a minute, but straight away he's brought up shootings and the police presence. He goes on to tell me he thinks the violence is mainly related to reputation, rather than business disputes. Thank you. More about this respect than on the money side as well. Would you like to go on to Beachwood? I'd never go on there because you know we're from the wood church. What would happen if you went on?
That might sound extreme, paranoid even, but it gives you a sense of how deep the fault lines go and the impact it has on everyone.
Young boys and men feel scared to leave their estate. I have no reason to believe this teenager is connected to the cocaine trade, all the gangs in any way. In fact, because he's openly chatting to me and using his real voice means he almost certainly isn't. But I'm struck by this idea that he won't go on to the beach with estate. It's crazy. Everything's just a play. You know, one day someone's windows don't.
or you may get arrested, the certain difference every single day. This is Johnny. That's not his real name. His words are being spoken by an actor to protect his identity and also for his safety. He was until recently part of a gang, but his circumstances have now changed. Someone's windows got done on it before the state last night. I hear the barre and straight away. I knew exactly it would be.
And here it was. Our mother was over. This is stuff that's been going on for years. Johnny's from the beach with estate, which he still calls the Ford. It's always remembered. If it's a big thing, it gets remembered. Um, some of these names got mentioned the other day. And straight away, I remembered from when I was a kid. He went to jail when he was 13 for stabbing someone. And he's like 25 now.
So these sorts of things last forever. The rivalry between these gangs has been around for decades, but technology has created even more problems. Social media is the worst. It runs the entire world. A lot of people that I was friends with would have an argument on social media.
People getting embarrassed on social media, you know, these days, if there's a fight, gets records, or if five kids are going to go and jump on a lad, what are they going to film me? We've got the hand against the hand. And then plaster it all over Snapchat to embarrass the person. And then, in response to the windows might get done.
Getting your windows done is slang for deliberately smashed or broken. Everything's just about how do I embarrass them. It's not about do I hate them. Because, you know, the point of doing someone's windows isn't to say, you need to pay for that damage. It's to say, you're weak. We've got to do your windows. What are you gonna do about it?
Talking to Johnny confirms what Richard Cardiac's copper told me. The street gangs that make up the retail arm of the cocaine business. Not really that professional. Actually, they're pretty disorganized with volatile. And if you're running a business and looking to make money, that's a problem. One of the keys to Apple is Apple's an incredibly collaborative company. You not many committees we have at Apple? No. Zero.
Take Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, somebody who knew a little bit about running a business and making money. We have no committees. This is Jobs being interviewed at Business Conference back in 2010. We're organized like a startup and we all meet for three hours once a week and we talk about everything we're doing, the whole business.
And there's tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. So that's the secret teamwork. But that depends on having a team who works together. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time. And we're great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have.
The challenge then is finding those great people, which has made much harder if you're in the cocaine business because it's illegal.
In some parts of Latin America, drug gangs were putting out job ads, written on blankets, which were then hung on bridges so the locals could see them. On those blankets it said things like, we offer you a good salary and food, or we offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children, a new car or truck, your choice.
That might work in Mexico, but in Merseyside, the police are much more likely to notice something quite so obvious and do something about it. What we're talking about here is HR, Human Resources, which is a challenge for any modern business, let alone a cocaine business.
Get it right, employing people you can trust without you having to watch them, and you can make a fortune. Get it wrong, and you end up with the crucial part of the cocaine business, the moment when it's sold to the customer, relying on some violent, unruly street gang like those on the wood church estate, who are likely to lash out over some embarrassment on Snapchat.
and at worst the likes of Connor Chapman who shoot up pubs, killing innocent people, bringing your business to the attention of the police.
Can you remember where you were when you found out about Ellie Edwards? Yeah, I can. I found out of Ellie's auntie. I remember when she phoned me to tell me what had happened. I was like, wow. And can you remember what she said to you?
I could just remember the tone and you know when someone's in shock because you're just getting that monotone and there's no, there's no emotion in it because you're just stuck in that moment. I just offered support. I'm talking with Paul Warmzley. I used to be a career criminal and was Britain's most wanted, but now I help those who are struggling to get out of these estates.
Paul is short and stocky. He's warm and friendly, but also has an intense stare in the air of someone who you might not want to cross. It's probably because I know a bit about Paul's past that I feel this way. In the 90s, he was a successful drug dealer and by the notice was making a lot of money. But in 2011, Paul, who'd been on the run, hiding out in Costa del Sol in southern Spain, handed himself into the police.
dubbed the Costa Croc, Paul left prison in 2016 on license. These days, he's a researcher at Liverpool University, as well as participating in various projects to help young people. I was a state A student at school, you know, everyone thought I was going to go and play for a football club or maybe even go to university, but I just had none of them thought I was just young, very naive, obviously stupid.
And yet never thought I was clever, never thought I was intelligent, was just living life. What made you first get involved in the drugs trade? I think identity wasn't a fitting.
Want them to be one of the lads? Be farther down at an early age. So you got some attachment issues going on there. And then it wasn't until I was 40 that I was realised that I was groomed. I just thought these older lads liked me and he thought I was cool. Then it just spiraled out of control. And just on the wood church estate, there's obviously the wood church estate gang, which we know about day dealing drugs.
How do you think they work as a business? So, there's a hierarchy, there's a chain, where there's a hierarchy and a chain, everyone wants to climb. In my experience, it's very chaotic.
and it's in little pockets of where you'll get four or five lads who are just on it and working together. They might have older lads who are controlling them and feeding them and then older lads might have other older lads who maybe don't even live in the country who are organising all that.
Do the kids, from these estates, trust the police? Some of them do. But don't forget, you know, we're talking, it's a minority of these young people who are involved in gun and gun and violence. And they don't. But they don't trust anyone. They don't even trust the lads to work and with. Never mind, trust the police.
Paul went to jail after he was found guilty for being part of a £3.5 million heroin plot. But how much are similar drug dealing groups making today?
It depends what age, what echelon you're on, who runs you, who doesn't run you, have you got your own little crew, you know, have you got your own little thing going, do your ship tight, you know, you run and all this. And it, you know, it can go from anything from 50 grand to a, I don't know, maybe it's a couple of mil, maybe 20 mil, who knows.
So, if you've got two businesses, illegal businesses side by side, the wood church estate is a gang making, say, a million, and the beachwood estate is another drugs gang next door making a million. Is this about a hostile takeover situation where one of those wants to earn two million? It could be. More than likely it won't be. More than likely it'd be something stupid.
Anything can trigger a spout of violence and some beef with these young people. To make him more money is an afterthought. It's saving face, which is the first thought. It's saving face and reputation. It's all about the reputation. Because if he's from a deprived area, that's the only thing that's going to make him any money.
But despite this perceived need by a lot of these young men to save face, if they weren't working in drugs gangs, could they succeed in a more legitimate line of work? It sounds a little bit ridiculous and a little bit far-fetched, but all them skills are also transferable into business. Load of these young people are astute. You know, if you can go and set up a business at the age of 12, 13, 14 and have the goal to do it,
Then they've got something about them, but no one's ever told them that they've got a business sense about them. The young ones that get involved in the drug strike. Yeah. Out of 100 drug dealers, how many would you say in the end get away with it? None. Really? None. Some way in some shape or form, if the junk get arrested, karma plays a role in it, let me tell you.
You can go through that life without setting the mount of bad luck, bad juju or bad karma coming and just dialling your door. Because to operate a business like that, I guess you have to inflict violence. It's what it brings. It's what it brings. If you dish it out, it will come back in some way, shape or form.
So I'm a midpoint drug dealer and I'm trying to think of ways that I can make my criminal money into legitimate money. Richard Carr, the ex-copter again. As well as the violence, another issue for those involved in the cocaine business at the retail level is how to turn their dirty money into something cleaner. How did they launder their profits?
One way of doing that is through businesses that generally dealing cash, you know, so your tanning salons, your fast food outlets, your taxi ranks, so on and so forth, there will be an element of legitimacy to the business. Much like the dealing, it starts at street level. So, if I give an example around the tanning salon,
So I would put someone in that and they'd get away, perhaps, or they may be part of the group. But what I want to do is make sure or give the appearance that money coming into that salon is legitimate. And one way of doing that would be, too,
manipulate the accounts, the books will say that there are 100 customers coming through the tanning salon per day, all paying £3 for a tan, when the reality is that there might be one or two. So there's very small legitimate turnover. Those are a semi-legitimate
but maybe funding criminality and the purchase of drugs through a semi-legitimate business, so the turning the money out of it. And then after the money has gone into the tanning salon and it's part of the books and the profits and the earnings of that business, how did then criminals access that money? Well, it's clean then. It can then go into the banking system so it becomes legitimate.
and it becomes very difficult then for law enforcement to take action against that unless they can prove it. So let's take that tanning salon example. Is it possible for police to keep on top of this? So for me to prove a money laundering operation against ours, one way of doing it would be to have a couple of police officers sat out and counting people coming in and coming out. Does that go on? Do you do that? Sat outside the addresses very early.
Apart from using tanning salons, fast food outlets, taxi ranks, how else can you make the money clean? How do the guys at the top of organisations get the big bucks? Well, one way of doing it is by filling a few suitcases full of millions of pounds in hard cash and simply carrying it onto a plane to a country where money laundering rules are very lax.
Following the next step in the cocaine business, I meet a woman who did just that. She was part of one of the most audacious cash smuggling operations in UK history. I can't believe how much it was. I didn't really think it was going to be into the millions. And I thought, what the fuck have I got myself into? That's next time on cocaine ink,
Cocaine Ink is a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chantarasak. The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Burchill.
Johnny was voiced by Alex Whittle. Special thanks to Matt Gibbs at the Car Bridge Centre on the Woodchurch State for his assistance with this episode. And if you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email cocaineinc at thetimes.co.uk
