How ruthless gang attacked dad & son in blood-soaked cocaine heist & unleashed wave of carnage ‘like a Guy Ritchie film’
GANGSTERS who attacked a dad and son in a blood-drenched cocaine heist unleashed a wave of carnage resembling a Guy Ritchie movie.
The fallout from the raid of the stash house led to a revenge plot in which gangsters had planned to blow up homes with grenades.
But when police hacked an encrypted phone network it led detectives into a stunning layer cake of British crime with bosses, middle managers, bookkeepers and enforcers.
Thomas Cashman, now serving a life imprisonment for the murder of nine-year-old schoolgirl Olivia Pratt-Korbel, was connected to the crime gang.
The hierarchy
Manchester Crown Court heard how the Huyton firm gang was led by Vincent and Francis Coggins. Francis oversaw international strategy, while Vincent was the UK boss.
Under Vincent was an executive tier of criminals led by Edward Jarvis and Paul Fitzsimmons.
Paul “Woody” Woodford, a notorious individual from Aintree, was the enforcer.
The Coggins brothers replaced the void left after Curtis Warren, one of their associates, was jailed in the 1990s.
The brothers, who grew up in Knowsley, spent years living in Spain before a dramatic police raid forced them to split up.
Vinny headed back to the suburbs of Liverpool, while Francis moved to Holland.
In 2009, low level members of the crime gang left a grenade outside the Birkdale home of then Liverpool FC boss Kenny Dalglish.
The bomb was left in the shrubbery by accident – the intended target lived a few doors down.
There was no suggestion Mr Dalglish was involved in the underworld dispute which lay behind the incident.
WhatsApp for gangsters
The Coggins crime group used the encrypted Encrochat network to communicate with each other.
The devices offered the “world’s most secure handset”, with users paying around £3,000 per year for devices which sent and received encrypted messages.
The phones offered special features such as a panic button, which gave the administrator the power to wipe it.
And the messages came with a seven-day burn time, meaning each message would delete itself after a week.
However, when French cops managed to penetrate the network in April 2020, they gained access to the messages.
The sting
Richard Caswell, known in Liverpool as “Will Young” due to his resemblance to the pop singer, joined forces with the Cox crime family, who had carved out a sinister reputation on the streets of Salford.
Caswell and the Cox brothers decided to use “one of the oldest tricks in the book.”
Caswell approached Edward Jarvis about buying cocaine from the dreaded Huyton firm.
But what Jarvis did not realise that Caswell’s true intent was to locate the gang’s stash house – the hub where large amounts of drugs were stored. And then steal the haul.
Fake delivery driver
Chilling CCTV footage showed a white van pulling up outside Paul Glynn’s home on the morning of May 23, 2020.
Ben Monks-Gorton, dressed in a high vis vest, knocked on the front door appearing to be a delivery driver. Caswell, Craig and Jason Cox then burst in armed with an axe and knife.
The father and son were both attacked although Paul Glynn suffered the life-changing injury.
His son told police: “These lads just came into the house and started stabbing me dad and there’s blood everywhere.”
Revenge
Vinny Coggins wanted instant and bloody retribution on the streets of Liverpool.
However, Caswell managed to play one last trick on the gang, by feeding false information about who might have been responsible.
At this point Jarvis, who spent his days sunbathing and drinking lager, had no reason to suspect the Will Young double was the actual culprit.
One of the names Caswell passed over was Brian Maxwell, a well-known Liverpool drug dealer.
Vincent Coggins became convinced that Maxwell was the culprit.
When Maxwell’s dad found out about the threat to his son, he agreed to hand over £1.36m to Coggins to save his son’s life.
Coggins told associates that they would wait a few months and then kill his son anyway.
Some of the messages suggested Coggins and his crew lived in a parallel universe, sharing banter about booze, football and Boris Johnson before discussing which house they were going to blow up with grenades.
By the time Vincent Coggins, Edward Jarvis, 59, and Paul Woodford, 58, realised Caswell had outfoxed them, it was too late.
Oldest trick in the book
A Liverpool man who knows some of the individuals mentioned in this story said: “So Caswell pretended to want to buy drugs but really wanted to find out where the stash house was. This is literally the oldest trick in the book.
“You pretend to be a drug dealer but you just want to steal the drugs. And then he gave them the names of who he thought was responsible for the raid he carried out. You just could not make it up.
“The thing is Caswell has always been like this – you just can’t trust him. I don’t know what Jarvis was thinking in having anything to do with him.
“What makes me laugh is that Caswell got the lightest sentence – he will back out soon.
“It’s like something from Guy Ritchie – this will all end up on Netflix one day.”
When Caswell was jailed last year, the court heard he was under extreme duress from enemies within the prison system.
Sources have told The Sun there is a viable threat to his life from the Coggins gang.
One-eyed monster
After the Huyton godfathers were arrested, the Cox brothers agreed to sell a slice of the coke to Leon Atkinson, a close friend of Mancunian crime boss Dale Cregan.
Cregan is currently serving a whole life sentence for the murders of police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes.
When police raided Atkinson’s home they found letters from Cregan to him, suggesting the two men were still close friends.
It later emerged that Atkinson worked for Nasar Ahmed, who imported drugs into the UK with the Cassidy brothers.
Jamie Cassidy was a former Liverpool FC trainee who played alongside Jamie Carragher and Michael Owen in the 1990s.
After the Cox brothers were jailed, a veteran detective revealed they would be “looking over their shoulders” for the rest of their lives.
Torture
At one point, Vincent Coggins expressed growing anger with a Liverpool businessman, whom he blamed for losing some of his money over the years.
Coggins kept threatening to burst into his office and attack him. At one point he said to Paul Woodford: “Then we decide weather we slash him, chop his fingers off or whatever.”
Coggins later seemed to brag about the fact he had attacked the businessman, saying “slash across face an smashed his eyes in an took half an ear an tonge”.
When Woodford heard about the attack he agreed that the victim deserved to be punished.
Woody
Paul Woodford, who was very close to the Coggins brothers, was their trusted enforcer.
He grew up near Aintree racecourse in Merseyside and became a notorious figure in the 1990s after he broke into a house and tried to scalp a woman while shouting “Apache Apache.”
In 2010, Woodford was arrested in Holland after police suspected he was about to murder a gangland rival.
Police recovered an arsenal of weapons in Amsterdam, including assault rifles fitted with silencers.
A former prison officer recently told The Sun that staff within the service dreaded dealing with Woodford due to the level of fear and dread surrounding him.
The retired guard said: “You can’t even look at him.”
The Piggy
Some of the Encrochat messages strongly suggested Paul Woodford was paying money to a “corrupt individual” who had access to police intelligence.
At times the revelations about the role of “computer man” read like a scene from a movie, with the corrupt individual trying to capture sensitive police information about the Coggins brothers without attracting the suspicion of colleagues.
Prosecutors did not reveal where the “corrupt individual” was based or which police force he worked for. The criminals referred to the mole as “piggy.”
At one point, Vincent told Francis there was fresh information on his police file.
Vincent then told Francis the mole was having to take extra care at work while accessing the intelligence.
He said his main concern was that police may have planted a listening device in his home.
Vincent also said he was convinced the latest report could contain information about the brother’s activities in Barcelona and Francis believed the NCA had officers watching the brothers when they were in Spain.
At one point, Francis told his brother he suspected there was police surveillance at a family funeral they attended.
Woodford told Vincent the computer man was unable to access the information due to the presence of other people in the office, and was waiting for a night shift.
Merseyside Police has since said a full investigation was launched but no evidence of corruption was found.
The messages also revealed the gang appeared to be using corrupt workers at the Port of Liverpool in Seaforth to film shipments of drugs as they arrived.
A spokesperson for Peel Ports Group said: “Peel Ports Group and The Port of Liverpool take all matters of criminality extremely seriously and we continue to work in close co-operation with Border Force, the NCA and other relevant UK agencies.”
Sentences handed down after coke heist drama
Vincent Coggins, 58, of Woodpecker Close, Liverpool was jailed for 28 years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and blackmail.
Paul Woodford, 58, of Marl Road, Liverpool was jailed for 24 years and six months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and blackmail.
Michael Earle, 48 of Wallace Drive, Huyton was jailed for 11 years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and blackmail.
Darren Tierney, 46, of Chatham Street, Stockport was jailed for 12 years and nine months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs (cocaine and heroin).
Paul Fitzsimmons, 60, of Birch Tree Court, Liverpool was jailed for 12 years and six months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs (cocaine and heroin).
Kevin Rimmer, 57, of Blackbrow Brow, Huyton was jailed for 16 years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs (heroin).
Dean Borrows, 39, of Ledson Grove, Liverpool was jailed for 14 years and three months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs (cocaine and heroin).
Paul Glynn, 59, of Croxdale Road West, Liverpool was jailed for 11 years and two months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs (cocaine).
The Cox brothers, Richard Caswell, and Ben Monks-Gorton were jailed for more than 40 years as part of ‘Operation Geladi’, an investigation led by officers from Greater Manchester Police into the stash house robbery and machete attacks.
Robert Jarvis, 59, of Breckside Park, Liverpool was found guilty following a trial for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and blackmail. He is set to be sentenced later this year
Property developers
Vincent Coggins discussed one well known property developer , suggesting he had invested cash in some of the businessman’s schemes.
Coggins warned Woodford to try and pull out any money he had with the businessman before it was too late.
He said there was a threat to the developer’s life from another Liverpool criminal.
An Encrochat user sent a photograph message to Vincent Coggins from the penthouse of a luxury apartment owned by another Liverpool property developer.
A source said: “Coggins had a lot of friends. Some in high places.”
Thomas Cashman
Earlier this year Manchester Crown Court heard how the Coggins brothers discussed Thomas Cashman on the Encrochat network, who was referred to as Tom Cash.
The Huyton mafia used Cashman as an enforcer to make enquiries after the drugs were stolen from the Glyn’s home on Croxdale Road West. And Vincent told Francis how much he “liked” Cashman.
The messages were sent in May 2020, two years before Cashman was involved in the fatal shooting of little Olivia.
That incident, on Kingsheath Avenue, took place around the corner from Croxdale Road West where the drugs were stolen.
A police spokesperson said: “No criminal activity connected to Thomas Cashman was identified as part of Operation Subzero.”
Police statement on EncroChat messages
In 2020 Merseyside Police Anti-Corruption Unit began an investigation in relation to the individual identified through Op Venetic.
He became a person of interest in the NWROCU investigation after been identified through Operation Venetic as the person using the Encrochat handle of Milliondolla, who had indicated in chats within the organised crime group that he had a police contact, believed to be within Merseyside Police, who could provide information.
The Anti-Corruption Unit referred their investigation to the Independent Office of Police Complaints (IOPC) due to potential corruption of a police employee and the investigation became an IOPC Directed Investigation.
The Anti-Corruption team thoroughly reviewed chats between Milliondolla (Michael Burn); Softherb (Edward Jarvis) Kingwasp (Paul Woodford) and Moonlitboat (Vincent Coggins) to develop their investigation and identify any corruption.
An extensive search of force systems in relation to those individuals was carried out to identify if there was any unauthorised access to information in relation to them and to identify any potential suspect.
A number of individuals were identified as having had access for a legitimate policing purpose, including staff from other forces, and no corruption was identified