As 2020 began, Mark Cavanagh had much of the West Cheshire heroin and crack-cocaine trade in his control and was making dirty money hand over fist.
With a reputation for selling "high-quality" product to users, more than a decade of experience and a knack for avoiding damaging underworld conflicts, the 30-year-old seemed untouchable. In his own words, Cavanagh boasted to another crook that he "never stops grafting and has been at it for 15 years".
The Wallasey native, sporting a distinctive mop of brown hair, controlled a network of safe-houses across Merseyside and Cheshire, had a crew of street dealers and couriers at his beck and call and enjoyed the sense of confidence afforded by the supposedly impenetrable EncroChat handsets he and his associates used to source huge quantities of drugs from suppliers in Merseyside, Manchester and Bradford.
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Although not notorious for resorting to violence or using firearms to protect his business, Cavanagh showed his ruthless streak on one occasion when he realised he was being watched, and tried to run a car containing two undercover police officers off the road in his Jaguar.
According to police and prosecutors, Cavanagh and his associates had the heroin and cocaine trade across Ellesmere Port and Chester "sewn up", earning around £2.3million over a matter of months.
This is the inside story of how a sophisticated and successful crime network plotted, in their own words, to "take the UK by storm" and flood the UK with Colombian cocaine - and how they were taken down.
A new assignment
Cavanagh's success at raking in cash from addiction and misery on the streets had not gone unnoticed. Over time, an intelligence picture on a prolific group of heroin and crack-cocaine dealers in Chester and Ellesmere Port had been building at Cheshire Police, and Cavanagh's name came up regularly.
In 2019, a new assignment crossed the desks of detectives at the force's Serious and Organised Crime Unit (SOCU). This was not only about arresting street dealers, SOCU detectives were tasked with building a case against the highest ranks of a major organised crime group believed to be headed by Cavanagh.
Things began with traditional covert tactics. Undercover officers posed as heroin or crack cocaine addicts and made a series of 19 test purchases on two drugs "lines", one in Ellesmere Port known as the 'Dark' line and one in the Lache area of Chester known as the 'Dell line'.
Both operations were controlled through graft phones. Addicts would ring the phone to place orders with Cavanagh's inner circle, who would then organise a drop off between the customer and a dealer they controlled.
As prosecutors said in court, those undercover officers "became acquainted" with street dealers and gathered further intelligence on the players higher up the food chain, enabling surveillance to be arranged. Detectives plotted a network of "trusted lieutenants" including Karl Evans, Joshua Burns, Hakeem Stockton and Liam Roberts, who all had access to graft phones and cash, and had access to safe-houses across Wallasey and Cheshire.
What would become known as Operation Olympia was underway.
An unexpected twist
The Cheshire SOCU were already gathering enough evidence to put Cavanagh and his crew behind bars for years, using tried and trusted methods, when a treasure trove of intelligence opened up in early 2020. Unknown to Cavanagh or the detectives in Cheshire Police secretly tracking him, the remarkable trust high-level criminals placed in their EncroChat devices had been shattered.
In what is now a well-known story, the network's servers were hacked by French and Dutch authorities, who shared what they found with the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA). The NCA in turn began disseminating that information to local forces under the ongoing Operation Venetic, enabling police to track often completely unguarded conversations between organised crime group members in real time.
After the news broke, detectives on Operation Olympia reached out to see if any of their targets featured in the vast quantities of data gleaned from EncroChat servers.
After a couple of fruitless enquiries, SOCU officers found answer they were looking for - Cavanagh was on the EncroChat network and the investigation was about to take on a whole new dimension.
The full picture
Detectives working on Cavanagh's crew knew he was a big player in the local underworld, but a few eyebrows were raised when the full extent of his drugs trafficking and his greed and ambition were revealed in his EncroChat conversations.
Chats on Cavanagh's EncroChat device included haggling over the prices of kilogram blocks of high-purity cocaine, bought for in the region of £36,000 each, discussions about installing specially adapted "stashes" in vehicles to hide heroin and cocaine, as well as photographs of bulk quantities of Class A drugs and stacks of cash.
In the words of barrister Simon Parry, who later prosecuted the case in Chester Crown Court: "The prosecution says that the encrypted chat is the best demonstration that Mark Cavanagh was an individual who had the means and the wherewithal to source multi-kilos of heroin and cocaine.
"His organisation, equipped with those stocks, were able to adulterate the product and, in the case of the cocaine, convert it into crack before distributing to the network of dealers in Chester and Ellesmere Port."
The Pact
Venetic also introduced a new cast of characters to Operation Olympia, wholesale suppliers who provided Cavanagh with vast quantities of heroin and cocaine - and who boasted a network of international underworld contacts.
It soon became clear that one name in particular was intimately involved with Cavanagh's Cheshire conspiracy. Huyton native Michael Hailwood, then 51, had only emerged from prison in 2019 after serving half of a 22 year sentence for overseeing cocaine smuggling plots from a base in Amsterdam.
After a decade out of the game, Hailwood was keen to get himself a piece of the action, and he had something that Cavanagh wanted. Messages recovered from Hailwood's EncroChat handle, 'CardinalTrunk', showed him bragging about his "little black book" of underworld contacts across Europe and South America.
It is not clear how they were first acquainted, but it Hailwood convinced Cavanagh to team up and became, in the words of Mr Parry, "Cavanagh's right-hand man". The pair had travelled to Scotland together and Hailwood was involved in supplying drugs cross-country, advising Cavanagh that after Covid, which he called "this killer flu", they could be "ready to work overseas".
Colombian connection
The self-assured Cavanagh indeed appeared ready to take things to the next level. Messages captured him in conversation with Ellesmere Port based wholesale drug supplier Dean Smith, 27, aka 'SwampMaster' and 46-year-old Dean Anderson, aka 'TenDayer' and 'FamousSquid'. Neither man had been on the radar of Operation Olympia before Venetic.
Higher Bebington based Anderson posed as a seemingly legitimate businessman, running a company called Bromborough Skip Hire. But he was already a well established wholesale supplier, albeit with a reputation for erratic behaviour. Messages revealed the 'TenDayer' handle was chosen in honour of Anderson's apparent habit of disappearing on "ten day benders".
In messages later shared in court, an excited Smith tells Cavanagh about connections in South America, seemingly attempting to persuade his business partner to join what would have been a huge conspiracy to flood the UK with Colombian cocaine. In Smith's words, he said: "Let's wrap the UK up mate I can take the UK by storm and my other mate got major connection to Europe but me u and him need to get our figures right on how much we paying for tops [Kilos of cocaine]".
Laying on the hard sell, Smith also refers to potential "profit in the mils [millions] mate".
Smith and Anderson also discuss sourcing 100kgs of cocaine from South America. In one exchange, Smith tells Anderson about a contact in Colombia who "said he will show me the labs in the forest and that, we can [have] endless supply mate".
The evidence showed that these conversations were more than just empty bravado. An examination of financial transactions linked to Cavanagh showed he had been wiring relatively small amounts of money to Bogota, Colombia, from early 2020. Detectives believe he was possibly ordering samples of drugs, but it seems clear Cavanagh and his business partners were making contacts with major South American suppliers.
Takedown
The decision on when to strike is always a balancing act for senior officers in charge of long-running surveillance operations. While more surveillance results in more evidence and more suspects, the harm caused by allowing heroin and crack cocaine to flow into local communities, not to mention the strain on budgets, means they cannot run indefinitely.
By June, 2020, after 10 months of painstaking surveillance, the Cheshire SOCU had built an overwhelming case against the men running the Dell and Dark lines as well as wholesalers Smith and Anderson. The strike day came on June 15, 2020, when co-ordinated raids hit addresses in Ellesmere Port, Wirral, Chester and Warrington.
Cavanagh's then home in Foxdene, Ellesmere Port, as well as Hailwood's address in Wellington Road, Wallasey, were included in the raids.
While infiltrating organised crime groups is not unusual for experienced detectives, the SOCU were particularly satisfied with how all levels of the Cavanagh OCG were taken out at the same time. Street dealers, middle men, crime bosses and wholesale suppliers all found themselves behind bars.
Within days of the gang being taken out, Cheshire Police arrested five suspected drug dealers that had moved in, hoping to fill the vacuum of power left after Cavanagh's arrest.
The arrests came so soon after the raids that addicts in Ellesmere Port started travelling outside the town to buy drugs because they feared police had infiltrated every level of a local market that was hit with severe shortages.
Cavanagh and his lieutenants on the Dell and Dark lines were sentenced at Chester Crown Court in September, 2020. Cavanagh was locked up for 14 years and six months for conspiracy to supply heroin and crack cocaine and dangerous driving, relating to his attempt to run the undercover officers off the road in April that year.
In March, 2022, Hailwood was also locked up, receiving 16 years after admitting conspiracy to supply cocaine. Anderson and Smith followed later that year, in relation to drugs they supplied in cahoots with each other and also independently.
Smith was found to have distributed 8kg of heroin, 19kg of cocaine and 30kg of cannabis nationally and into Scotland, and received 13 years in prison after admitting conspiracy to supply Class A and B drugs.
Anderson was found to have sourced, purchased and sold approximately 30kg of cannabis, 20kg of heroin and 20kg of high purity cocaine between April 3, 2020 to June 2, 2020. Anderson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply heroin, cocaine and cannabis. He was sentenced to 14 years and four months.
Detective Sergeant Ian Watson, then of Cheshire Police but now of the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, said after Hailwood's sentencing: “This started at street level, focusing on Cavanagh, but ultimately it has taken down the whole chain. I am very proud of the hard work the team has put into this operation, including the flexibility and tenacity they have shown throughout.
“Our objective as a Serious Organised Crime Unit is to target organised criminal gangs and criminals. They prey on the vulnerable within our communities. Innocent people who go about their daily business may see dealing in the streets and it is our job to remove them and those above them, which is what we have done in this case.
“I am hoping this shows our communities exactly what we are doing and that the capability of Cheshire’s Serious Organised Crime Unit is equal to that of many bigger forces.”
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