These Liverpool criminals kept their illegal exploits in the family and built underworld empires that made their names feared across the city.
Some of our region's most notorious criminal cases have involved families who flooded the streets with drugs and ruled their neighbourhoods through violence and intimidation.
Their crimes not only landed them behind bars, but also impacted law-abiding members of their own families who were not associated with their illegal activities in any way.
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Back in back April 2020, we revisited some of the most feared crime families to have terrorised Merseyside.
They included a pair of criminal brothers who ran international drugs operations, as well as mafia matriarchs who watched over their kids' criminal empires.
In the end, they all fell foul of the law.
Keeping things in the family didn't stop the authorities from catching up to them, and one crime group who were dubbed 'the Whitney gang' saw members jailed for a total of 82 years.
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From smuggling drugs across international borders to ruling the city's streets with violence and intimidation, their crimes shocked Merseyside.
These are some of the city's most prolific crime families, many of whom lived lavish lifestyles off the back of their ill gotten gains.
Many of them remain behind bars, while others have been released following lengthy prison sentences for their crimes.
The Fitzgibbon family
Jason and Ian Fitzgibbon were both jailed in 2013 after it emerged they were plotting to flood the UK with Turkish heroin.
When Turkish police smashed an Istanbul based drug gang, the trail began to lead back to South Liverpool.
Manchester Crown Court heard that the 60%-pure heroin would have cost around 300,000 euros to buy wholesale from Turkey.
The drugs would have made around £7m when sold on the streets of Liverpool.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency(SOCA), then mounted a sophisticated surveillance operation to take down the Fitzgibbons.
A bug was planted in their mum's south Liverpool home, which recorded the brothers talking about crime and drugs.
Jason, then 40, and Ian, then 39, were jailed for a total of more than 30 years .
Their mum Christine, who admitted laundering £180,000 drug cash found hidden beneath floorboards in her Mossley Hill home, was jailed for two years.
Ian also admitted an £800k plot to flood Merseyside with 168,000 ecstasy tablets.
A bug, which was planted by SOCA in their family home on Edale Road, recorded the brothers bickering in front of their mum about who was the better drug dealer.
Detectives were astounded when they listened back to the tape of Jason and Ian rowing over who was the more adept criminal.
The same device also recorded the brothers singing a pop song called 'It's all about the money.'
The Mulhare brothers
Joseph and Gregory Mulhare lived the high life, flying to Ibiza, Tenerife, France and America, thanks to massive drug plots.
The jet-setting brothers were arrested by armed police in Thailand for leading a huge cocaine and ecstasy ring based in Wirral.
The brothers were finally cornered by gun-wielding officers, who swooped as they slept in hotel beds in November 2018.
Having spent more than a year at large, they voluntarily chose to return to the UK rather than remain in a squalid Thai prison.
The pair were jailed in December 2019 for a total of 28 years at Liverpool Crown Court over plots said to have been worth "millions of pounds".
Ian Unsworth, QC, prosecuting, described dad-of-two Joseph, then 44, as the hands-off "principal" of a ultra secretive organisation.
Rather than get his hands dirty, he directed others to produce, store, collect and distribute drugs to gangs across England and Scotland.
Gregory Mulhare, then 40, another dad with two young children, also had a "leading role" - beneath Joseph - but was more 'hands on'.
He had his own drivers and issued instructions, with phone records revealing significant contact between him and drug dealers.
Twenty one men were locked up for a total of 189 years in December 2018 in connection with police seizures yielding around £66,000 of cocaine, £208,000 of MDMA, £336,000 of amphetamine, £420,000 of cannabis and £80,000 in cash.
However, detectives believe they recovered only a fraction of the drugs trafficked and some 200,000 ecstasy tablets alone were manufactured, many of them from a machine hidden in the cellar of a property in Clifton Road, Birkenhead.
The brothers left the UK shortly before the others were arrested, Joseph in July and Gregory in September 2017, and met in Morocco.
Operation Manhattan was the police investigation into the racket spearheaded by Joseph, between December 2015 and September 2017.
The gang's vast shipments were ferried north to Scotland and south to Bristol, Milton Keynes, Swindon, Oxford and Weston-Super-Mare.
Its members operated with staggering professionalism and organisation, using encrypted PGP phones to protect "clandestine communications".
The crooks used vehicles featuring specially constructed 'hides' to conceal drugs and cash, so a casual observer wouldn't spot any illicit cargo.
But the pair and their gang were brought crashing down to earth thanks to a 'supergrass' - police informer Ronnie Bateman.
The Whitney gang
The Whitney family sat at the head of a massive criminal network in Liverpool.
This notorious family gang came from the Anfield area - but their ill-gotten gains bought them plush pads in some of the city's most sought-after post codes.
In November 2011, the family and their associates were sentenced to a total of 82 years in jail for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs, with individual sentences ranging from two to nine years.
The Whitneys had been in Merseyside Police's sights for years - with Operation Malton launched in 2008 to try and take them down.
They ran a 24-hour business flooding the streets of Liverpool with heroin and crack cocaine, which saw 13 members of the Whitney drug gang jailed.
The family raked in profits, targeting the citys desperate addicts in what Merseyside Police described as a drugs cash-and-carry business.
The gang was kept under surveillance by detectives from the forces Matrix gun and gang crime unit, who recorded hours of damning evidence.
On one occasion, a young mum in the family even stooped so low as to stash cocaine in her baby's nappy bag to hide the drugs from cops.
So the net to snare them began by taking out the levels below, stripping each rung before eventually reaching the top.
Ringleader Paul Whitney, then 32, of Fazakerley, was jailed for nine years and four months while his associate Matthew Mayor, from Haydock, received eight years and four months.
Mayor, then 37, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid arrest, even hurling 2kg of heroin out of his Mercedes car window while being chased by police.
Carol Whitney, from Walton, dubbed the banker of the drugs ring, was locked up for eight years while gang member Michael O'Toole got eight years.
Leslie Whitney, Carol's estranged husband who was described as 'the head of the family' was jailed for seven-and-a-half years.
Leslie Whitney's new partner Emma Mackenzie was sentenced to 834 days in prison – a "significantly shorter and more lenient sentence" than she could have expected if not for her two-year-old daughter.
She was subsequently released from court, having already served half her sentence on remand.
Emma Mackenzie's mum Mary McCabe, from Walton, was sentenced to eight years for her part in the conspiracy and for possessing a prohibited firearm.
During one raid, the then 53-year-old took her grandchild from daughter Emma McKenzie while the pair hid cocaine in the tot's changing bag.
Family member Lisa Whitney and gang associate Gary Edwards were each given four years while co-conspirator Michael Waters was sentences to five years and four months.
Other jailed gang members included Neil Brady, who was jailed for six years and nine months, Lisa Whitney's boyfriend Wayne Hincks for six years and eight months and co-conspirator Thomas Dowd who received four years and four months.
One of the last remaining members of the Whitney drugs gang was extradited from Spain in 2011.
Anthony Whitney fled Liverpool after police raided a “safe house” in City Road, home of co-conspirator Thomas Dowd.
He fled to Spain where he lay low while his relatives were gradually rounded up by Merseyside police.
But while abroad, he got mixed up in another smuggling plot, and was apprehended for smuggling 50,000 tablets of an ecstasy-type substance which had been loaded into a vehicle at his home address in Denia.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and was jailed for seven years.
Speaking at the conclusion of the Whitney gang sentencing, Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Doherty from Merseyside Police said: “This family is so dangerous that guns and drugs are part of their daily business.”
He added: “The Whitneys are an unpleasant family, significant in the Anfield area, their reputation was well-known.
“They were an organised crime group that needed taking apart.”
The Showers brothers
Notorious Toxteth drugs barons Michael and Delroy Showers each spent much of the past decade behind bars after being accused of separate high-profile international drugs plots.
Infamous crime lord Delroy Showers was jailed in 2009 over a plot to smuggle just over £1m worth of amphetamines into Denmark from the Netherlands.
His 14 year sentence was thought to have begun in Randers, Denmark, but in 2014 the Foreign Office confirmed he was moved back to the UK to finish his jail term.
Older brother Michael - known for driving a white Rolls Royce through the streets of Toxteth - spent years locked up in a Turkish jail over his alleged role in an international smuggling plot.
Showers always denied the allegations and wrote of the squalid conditions of the Istanbul prison and his lack of faith in the Turkish justice system.
Back in 2014, in a letter penned to his solicitors, he vowed to prove his innocence and launch an appeal against a 15 year jail sentence.
Showers was jailed for 20 years in 1991 after plotting to flood the UK with £2m of high-grade heroin.
Darren, Daniel and Stephen Gee
In the mid-2000s, Everton's Grizedale estate was turned into an open-air drugs market by violent criminals.
Ordinary families had to look the other way as local gangsters tried to turn a residential estate into an enclave exempt from the rule of law.
The Grizedale was home to Gee brothers Darren and Daniel, who dominated the backstreets and alleyways on the north Liverpool estate.
During a trial over the 2009 murder of Tony Bromley, Liverpool Crown Court heard the men were 'kingpins' in the area, who led a violent gang that controlled the streets of Grizedale.
At the time Andrew Edis QC said: "The Gees are associated with very serious violence and drug dealing. There are criminal convictions against them which amply support what I have just said.”
Police set up a community task force based at Walton Lane police station to try and target the Darren and Daniel's crime group.
When the two brothers fell out with a rival crime group gang it resulted in a spate of shootings. Craig Barker, a friend of the Gees, was shot dead on the estate.
In retaliation Darren Gee organised the cold blooded murder of David Regan, who owned a car wash in Old Swan.
In the same year criminal associates of the brothers let off a wave of massive car bombs outside nightclubs, family homes and police stations.
Daniel 'Danny' Gee was jailed indefinitely in 2010 for conspiring to buy guns and threatening to kill teenager Jamie Starkey.
Darren Gee was handed 18 years behind bars in 2006 for planning the revenge shooting murder of dad-of-five David Regan.
Darren recently told the ECHO he realised he 'wasted his life' and bitterly regrets the decisions he made when he was involved in serious crime.
In 2017, Darren and Daniel's brother Stephen Gee was jailed for brutally robbing an OAP while high on cocaine and his dead brother’s anti-psychotic medication.
Stephen Gee pretended to be a Liverpool City Council officer to con a 77-year-old widower after he caught him kerb-crawling.
He made the pensioner drive home to show him ID, where he demanded the elderly victim hand over a £1,000 ‘fine’, or £100 deposit.
When the OAP said he didn’t have any cash, the thug punched him in the face, before repeatedly kicking and stamping on him.
Gee then stole the victim’s car, but left a can of Coke on the sideboard, revealing his DNA.
The then 36-year-old told Liverpool Crown Court he went off the rails after his brother Billy Gee, 38, was tragically found hanged in 2016.
Gee, of Maryport Close, Everton, admitted robbery and at the time of his 2017 Liverpool Crown Court appearance had 22 previous convictions for 44 offences, including robbery and violent disorder.
He was jailed for six years and eight months, with an extended four years on licence.
The Clarke brothers
Army corporal turned drugs baron Peter Clarke worked with security firm boss Stephen Clarke to orchestrate shipments of cocaine and cannabis from Merseyside to Northern Ireland.
The feared criminals, whose gang had access to a cache of guns, samurai swords and machetes, were jailed for more than 26 years combined in November 2013.
Peter Clarke, a former weapon’s instructor in the King’s Regiment, admitted organising the cocaine conspiracy, while Stephen Clarke admitted managing a network of cannabis farms.
Prosecutors launched Proceeds Of Crime Applications against the men - together with their respective wives Maria and Rachel - at Preston Crown Court.
In 2016, they were ordered to pay back only £600,000 of their estimated £3.8m fortune.
The brothers behind 'the real Liverpool mafia'
Two brothers built Liverpool's most powerful drug gang - close to being seen as a bona fide cartel to rival Europe's significant criminal factions from Ireland, Russia and North Africa.
Unlike household names such as Stephen French, John Haase and Curtis Warren, the brothers had little notoriety.
Their names only have currency within the upper tiers of the drugs economy.
The two men have escaped justice for decades which is why the ECHO cannot name them.
They operated at a level that was light years ahead of their contemporaries in Liverpool.
Despite their genial manner the men were prepared to send gun and grenade toting thugs to the front door of anyone who compromised their interests.
In May 2017 Spanish police launched a raid on the brothers' compound in the Costa Del Sol - the footage was like a scene from Netflix series Narcos, as heavily armed men stormed a villa while a helicopter roared overhead.
