The two cities battling for UK gang supremacy: How Liverpool and London’s criminal underworlds compare

One scene in Liverpool gang drama This City Is Ours shows kingpin Michael Kavanagh rejecting a plan to partner with Albanian drug traffickers because, in his words: ‘This isn’t London.’ 

The BBC series has been praised for its relatively realistic portrayal of organised crime on Merseyside. 

And this particular exchange, while fictional, is inspired by true events, with Liverpool widely known as one of the few English cities that mobsters from Albania – who now control much of the UK drug trade – have been unable to penetrate.

So what are some of the other ways the gangland scene in Liverpool differs from the capital?

Below, MailOnline draws on testimony from organised crime experts and former police officers to paint a picture of the situation in both cities – from the rates of gun and knife crime to the current key players.

GUNS AND KNIFE CRIME 

Stabbings and shootings are regularly used by gangs in both Liverpool and London to defend territory or settle scores. 

While it is not always possible to distinguish gang-related incidents from others, looking at overall statistics for knife and gun offences in both cities gives a general idea of how often these groups resort to violence. 

London’s knife crime crisis has been widely publicised, with 11 teenagers killed last year – all but one of them with a blade.

And figures show the city’s knife problem is worse than Liverpool’s, with an annual average of 138 offences per 100,000 people in the Met Police area over the last 10 years compared to 76 for the region covered by Merseyside Police, according to ONS data analysed by MailOnline. 

Britain’s tight gun laws mean firearms are often smuggled from abroad in the cargoes of container ships. 

Gangs from Liverpool play a major role, with nearly three-quarters of messages about guns on EncroChat – an encrypted platform busted by police in 2020 – linked to groups with links to the city and the wider north west of England. 

Gun crime has fallen in Liverpool and London over the last ten years, from 11 offences per 100,000 people in Liverpool in the year beginning April 2014 to 9 in the year beginning January 2024. This compares with 18 and 13 in London. 

But knife crime is up, rising from 100 per 100,000 people in London ten years ago to 187 in the latest reporting period. On Merseyside, the rate has nearly doubled from 45 to 80. 

KEY PLAYERS 

LIVERPOOL 

One of the many ways organised crime on Merseyside differs from London is through the continuing domination of local criminals over the upper echelons of drug trafficking. 

This phenomenon, widely observed by experts, contrasts not only with the capital but other major cities in England, where foreign kingpins have largely taken over from ‘old-school’ gangsters born in the same cities they prey on. 

Influential groups currently operating in Liverpool include –  

‘Car bomb gang’

The miles of dockland, scrap yards and backstreet boozers to the north of Liverpool city centre have long been frequented by organised criminals. 

However, one particular gang which formed in the early 2000s appears to still wield significant influence.

The group, which has no particular name, was responsible for a wave of car bombings between 2003 and 2004 that targeted police stations, nightclubs and homes. 

The crew, a loose association of young drug dealers who had grown up in Everton, Kirkdale and Vauxhall, fell out with a family who ran a string of bars and nightclubs.

Richard Caswell, who once worked as a glass collector in a city centre nightclub, was later jailed for 17 years in 2005 for his role in the bombing campaign. 

On his release from prison Caswell, known in Liverpool as ‘Will Young’ due to his resemblance to the singer, quickly restarted his involvement in serious criminality.

This includes joining forces with the Cox crime family from Salford to organise a raid on a Liverpool stash house belonging to the feared Huyton Firm. 

This saw foot soldier Ben Monks-Gorton approach the house posing as a delivery man before his associates burst in with machetes and stole 66lb of cocaine worth more than £1million. 

Caswell fled to London after the stash raid and was arrested in a luxury home not far from the Thames. He appeared to be trying to flee the country but is now in prison after receiving a seven-year sentence in 2023. 

Caswell had been a fairly influential figure in north Liverpool over recent years and was said to control a security company that was registered in another man’s name. 

He was also said to be close to James ‘Pancake’ Taylor, another colourful character from the north end of the city. 

Taylor, known as ‘Pancake’ because of his supposed tendency to ‘flip’, was jailed several years ago for a machete attack in a Middle Eastern restaurant near the city’s university.

Since his release from prison he has become a fitness fanatic and is said to be linked to a property company.

The Huyton Firm

Vincent and Francis Coggins grew up around half an hour from Liverpool city centre in the Cantril Farm area.

The brothers would go on to form the Huyton Firm, which has become one of Britain’s most notorious drug gangs. 

The Coggins spent years living in Spain, where they developed relationships with major international crime groups including the Kinahan cartel.

After Spanish police targeted him, Vincent Coggins returned to Merseyside while Francis moved around Europe.

The brothers were backed up by Paul Woodford, a violent enforcer who grew up near Aintree Racecourse. Known as Woody, he once attempted to scalp a young woman in her own home and was jailed last year for drugs and firearms offences. 

A recent proceeds of crime hearing heard he made nearly £500,000 from his criminal career, but only had £1 available to pay back.

Thomas Cashman, who grew up in Dovecot near Huyton, was also being used as an enforcer by the gang in recent years and was linked to a number of fatal shootings in the neighbourhoods controlled by Vincent Coggins.

Known as Tom Cash, the 36-year-old is now serving 42 years in jail for the murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt Korbel. 

Both Woodford and the Coggins brothers appeared to be beyond the reach of the law until French police penetrated Encrochat, an encrypted phone network used by criminals. 

UK police quickly arrested the leaders of the Huyton Firm after it emerged they were planning a number of revenge attacks on Richard Caswell after his robbery on their stash house. 

During a linked trial, Manchester Crown Court heard that the Coggins brothers discussed paying for printouts from the Police National Computer and appeared to employ corrupt workers at the Port of Liverpool who audited drugs as they arrived from overseas.

Francis Coggins, who was said to be responsible for the gang’s ‘international strategy’, is currently one of the UK’s most wanted men and his whereabouts are unknown. 

Sources told MailOnline the Huyton Firm is still active in importing drugs into the UK. 

One man said: ‘It’s all still going on mate. 

‘The tier below Dicky (Vincent Coggins) and Woody has now taken over. And they don’t use Encro phones.’

Curtis Warren and the Banker  

Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren is arguably one of the world’s best known drug dealers thanks to the publicity that has surrounded his life since the 90s. 

Like the Coggins brothers, he made the transition from being a low-level street crook to setting up as major importer. 

The former bouncer appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List in 1997 when he was listed as a property developer worth £40m but was removed the following year after he was jailed for drug dealing in the Netherlands. 

Warren was later jailed in the UK for drug dealing offences before being released in November 2022 after a 13-year spell. 

Two years later, he avoided jail despite pleading guilty to breaching a Serious Crime Prevention Order, including by using an undeclared mobile phone. 

While Warren now claims to be poor, prosecutors have told the courts that he is linked to a network of criminal assets and is worth in the region of £200m.

He is said to own countless shops and apartments in Liverpool city centre that are not in his name.

According to insiders, Warren’s rise from obscurity to the upper echelons of organised crime is down to his friendship with a man known as The Banker. 

The Liverpool businessman, now in his 80s, is said to have spotted Warren’s rare qualities years ago and opened up his contact book to the aspiring gangster.

The Banker is said by some to be the UK’s most powerful crime boss. Allegedly friends with some of the biggest names in British football, he is now a reclusive figure whose real name is only whispered.

The Bird of Prey  

The sprawling housing estates that surround John Lennon Airport have also witnessed serious gang crime. 

The streets on the city’s south side were once controlled by Curtis Warren and his enforcers, including Stephen Lawlor. 

However, Lawlor was shot dead at the age of 34 while leaving a party in 2001. 

This sparked a feud that saw Ian Clarke, 32, who was linked to a security firm in the city, also being shot dead at a junction not far from Anfield.

Lawlor’s brother Tony, 45, was also killed in a shooting that left an 11-year-old boy injured. 

While Curtis Warren served out his prison sentence in Holland, his associate Colin Smith presided over Warren’s firm back in Liverpool before he was murdered while leaving a gym in 2007. 

The gangland murder remains unsolved but sources have suggested Smith was betrayed by those close to him.

Smith’s death led to a fracturing of the old criminal order that once ruled the estates of Netherley and Speke. 

Through time a former boxer known as the Bird of Prey began to emerge as the new titular figure to control the south of Liverpool.

The Bird of Prey – who cannot be named for legal reasons because he does not have a criminal record – had established his own reputation as a gangland enforcer, and was feared by many.

In 2010, the authorities revealed that the Huyton Firm had sent Paul Woodford to Amsterdam to assassinate him.

Woodford and his associates were armed with automatic weapons, but were arrested before a shot was fired. 

Sources in Liverpool suggested the fall out related to the Bird of Prey being slow in paying off a large debt.

The Kinahans  

The notorious Dublin drug mafia are currently hiding out in Dubai but have many connections to Liverpool. 

They include Liam Byrne, 44, a senior figure in the group who was sentenced to five years in jail in 2024 for a plot to stockpile a stash of machine guns. 

Liam’s brother David was shot dead during a boxing event at a hotel in Dublin in February 2016.

Meanwhile, his son, Lee, is engaged to Gerrard Gerrard’s daughter, Lilly.  

Byrne was released on licence several months ago and is now a familiar figure in Formby, where he lives in a gated community not far from the stunning local beach. 

Trusted sources told MailOnline that the Kinahans have become the main supplier to Liverpool’s drug gangs over the last decade. 

The deal allowed Liverpool’s crews to take a lion’s share of the profit, but with the proviso that they have to cover any losses if the drugs are intercepted by the police or customs. 

LONDON 

In contrast to Liverpool where Scouse-born gangsters still control large-scale drug trafficking, gangs from abroad hold far more sway in the capital. 

While the ‘soldiers’ and lower level deals still tend to be London natives, the kingpins that supply them are frequently based in other countries. 

The most powerful are the Albanians, who are now said by the National Crime Agency (NCA) to dominate the UK’s £5bn a year cocaine trade, which has London at its centre. 

Rob Hickinbottom, said in 2020 while head of the NCA’s National Firearms Threat Centre (NFTC) that gangs from Liverpool and the wider north west ‘pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK’.

Yet with London boasting its own organised crime ecosystem, it is difficult to say conclusively which city’s underworld is more powerful overall. 

Here are the groups that are currently some of the most influential – 

The Albanian mafia

In the words of one drug expert, Gary Carroll, ‘just as all roads once led to Rome everything now seems to lead to Albanian crime networks’. 

They have achieved this position by negotiating directly with Colombian cartels and then dramatically undercutting criminal rivals.

Around Europe, the Albanians are also said to work closely with branches of the Italian mafia, which has controlled the continental cocaine trade.

Yet unlike the flashy mob bosses of old, the most powerful Albanian crime bosses prefer operating in the shadows and rarely identify by a particular gang name. 

One exception are the Hellbanianz, who operate in East London and flaunt their illicit wealth by sharing videos of expensive sports cars, jewellery and wads of money.

Arrogant and unafraid of the police, masked Hellbanianz gangsters have even shared music videos showing armoured vehicles fitted with heavy machine guns parading around a housing estate in London. 

One London-based Albanian drug lord, Selamet Mehmetaj, was locked up for four and a half years in 2023 for running cannabis factories staffed by illegal immigrants that distributed drugs worth millions of pounds a year across the UK. 

Calling himself ‘The Devil’, Mehmetaj was known for bragging on social media about kidnapping and cutting off the fingers of a rival who got in his way.

His downfall began after Mail reporters posing as dealers wanting to buy drugs wholesale contacted him via his Instagram page titled ‘Albanian Blood’.

On the page, he showed off his cannabis factories and posted videos to highlight what strains were available for customers.

He agreed to meet by his home in Palmers Green, North London, where he told how he splurged the cash from his illicit business on a flashy lifestyle including a £50,000 Mercedes-Benz CLA AMG, an Audi RS7 – which he drives at over 200mph on motorways using fake plates – and a Formula 3 car for off-road racing.

Russians

While Russian involvement in serious hacking and state-level offending has been widely documented, their role in directing more conventional street-level crime is less well known. 

But according to one expert on UK organised crime groups, who spoke to MailOnline on the condition he was not named, they are now a ‘major force’ in the capital, including the provision of security for night time venues and the supply of party drugs.

These Russian-run outfits are likely to benefit from broader trans-national criminal networks based in the rogue state and operating with the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin. 

One of these was a giant money laundering scheme busted in an international law enforcement operation last year. 

This involved glamorous Siberian businesswoman called Ekaterina Zhdanova, who ran Smart, a Moscow-based cryptocurrency network, which, along with another called TGR, laundered billions for everyone from London street gangs to the Kinahans, Russian oligarchs and even the Kremlin.

Zhdanova was sanctioned by the US last year and is currently in custody in France. The whereabouts of the boss of TGR, Russian businessman Georgy Rossi, are currently unknown.

Both Zhdanova and Rossi are thought to have made millions from laundering money around the world, taking a commission of roughly three per cent for transactions totalling billions.

Turkish mob

A recent North London gang war has thrown a light on one of modern London’s most violent criminal groups.

Turkish groups are said to ‘do very well’ out of the drug trade in the capital, but rarely operate further north. 

However, their feuds have not only caused chaos on the streets of the capital – but have spread to other European cities too.  

The three Baybasin brothers, Huseyin, Abdullah and Mehmet, founded the Hackney-based Bombacilar gang and used to control much of Britain’s heroin and cocaine trade before serving long prison sentences for drug trafficking.

A fallout between the Bombacilars and a rival group, the Tottenham Turks, is believed to have led to the shooting of a nine-year-old girl at a restaurant in Hackney on 29 May last year.

The girl, who has been left permanently disabled, was shot in the head by bullets fired from a motorcycle-riding hitman that were reportedly intended for members of the Bombacilars.

There have been more than 35 major flare-ups between the two groups – including 20 shootings and numerous murders in past two decades.

An international manhunt is currently underway for the killer of a senior member of the Tottenham Turks, Izzet Eren, who was shot and killed sitting outside a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova last summer.

Rival crime boss Kemal Armagan, of the Hackney Bombers, is thought to be connected to his death and is already wanted for two other murders.

The Hunt gang

One of London’s most notorious criminal outfits is the Adams family. 

Also known as the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate, it was formed by brothers Terry, Tommy and Patsy in the 1980s and is still operating today. 

But according to the expert on UK organised crime groups consulted by MailOnline, the group has waned in power over recent decades. 

He identified another outfit, the Hunt family, as remaining influential. 

‘The Adams family are no longer the force they were due to their age,’ the source said.  

‘The brothers are in the late 60s and early 70s now. However the Hunt family , who were enforcers for the Adams in the past, are still players. However the Hunts are a very tight knit crew who don’t trust outsiders.’

A landmark High Court ruling in 2013 saw a judge rule that family member David Hunt – who posed as a respectable ‘businessman’ – was actually a crime lord who had evaded justice for years despite brutal attacks on his enemies. 

Mr Justice Simon found that a newspaper article accusing him of being a dangerous crime boss was true, and so in no way libellous.

Hunt, now aged 64, was friends with the boxer Mike Tyson, with whom he shares a love of pigeons. 

Police intelligence in the Eighties put him at the centre of a criminal network involved in protection rackets at nightclubs and pubs. 

Despite claiming to be a humble scaffolder, he was able to buy a £600,000 seven-bedroom house, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, gym and guard dog pen in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.