How drunken error saw drug boss brought to justice

Francis Coggins (l) was on the run for five years before he was jailed for his part in the drugs gang he ran with his brother Vincent (r)

When police arrived to deal with an inebriated middle-aged man found collapsed on the floor this June they initially had no idea who they were dealing with.

That incident, in the Dutch coastal town of Zandvoort, 16 miles (26km) from the capital Amsterdam, was no ordinary case of drunk and disorderly behaviour.

That man was Francis Coggins, 60, who had evaded the authorities for five years after notorious Merseyside drug trafficking group the Huyton Firm, which he ran with his younger brother Vincent, was dismantled by police.

For Det Ch Insp Dave Worthington, who led the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit probe into the gang, the slip-up was a surprise after months of investigation into a highly-disciplined and secretive organisation.

"You don't fall into drug dealing at the level they're at overnight so it's very clear to us that they were very organised, very disciplined in what they're doing," he said.

"The amount of drugs that they had access to and were bringing in and flooding the UK with was quite eye-watering."

'Drunken state'

Coggins, originally from Stockbridge Village in Knowsley, was jailed for 18 years at Liverpool Crown Court on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to conspiracies to import and supply cocaine and heroin - having been extradited from Holland.

Det Ch Insp Worthington said the reports from the Netherlands suggested a member of the public had called the police to report a man being found "in a drunken state on the floor".

He added: "It's quite coincidental really or fortuitous for us that the police attended there and were able to identify him."

The real beginning of the end of the Huyton Firm, like thousands of other organised criminals, came thanks to the hack of the Encrochat encrypted phone network by the French authorities in 2019.

When UK police were granted access to the information gathered in the hack, they began monitoring the group's messages in real time.

Police became aware of a dangerous situation unfolding after one of the firm's stash houses was raided by rival criminals in May 2020, when cocaine valued at £1m was stolen and the occupant was slashed with a machete.

The occupant of a stash house controlled by the Huyton firm was slashed with machetes by a rival gang who robbed £1m of cocaine

Vincent Coggins, messages revealed, was incandescent with rage and demanded blood - even as he struggled to identify who was responsible.

Liverpool Crown Court heard Francis, who was running the international arm of the operation in Holland, was not involved in any of the threats, blackmail or violent plots that followed, although he was kept informed.

But Vincent, supported by his close friend and associate Paul Woodford, was discussing unleashing a wave of murders across Merseyside.

One potential target, drug-dealer Brian Maxwell snr, found out Coggins wrongly blamed his son, Brian Maxwell junior, for the raid and was so terrified he offered to hand over property and cash worth more than £1m to spare his son's life.

Coggins appeared to accept the deal but in messages to other Huyton Firm members said he would still: "Kill them in few months wen [sic] its all calm down".

With the threat of a wave of violence becoming increasingly risky, police stepped in and arrested key members of the Huyton Firm.

It later emerged that the cocaine had in fact been robbed by a crime family based in Salford, Greater Manchester, run by brothers Jason and Craig Cox working with a former customer of the Coggins brothers - Liverpool drug dealer Richard Caswell.

Olivia Pratt-Korbel link

Vincent Coggins was jailed for 28 years in 2020 after admitting conspiracy to blackmail and drugs trafficking.

On Thursday, his older brother Francis saw his own fate sealed.

The court heard the drug-trafficking operation controlled by the brothers was disciplined, sophisticated and highly lucrative.

Between October 2019 and May 2020, Francis Coggins had been linked to the importation of £16m of cocaine and heroin into the UK, weighing a combined one tonne.

Messages sent over the EncroChat encrypted phone network, used almost exclusively by criminals at the time, included instructions for their underlings to collect or move hundreds of thousands of pounds of criminal cash at a time.

The Cox brothers organised a raid on a house used for storing drugs in Liverpool, captured on CCTV

While Vincent Coggins ran the UK arm of the operation, Francis was responsible for the international pipeline of Class A drugs.

Their smuggling route, devised by fellow Liverpool drug trafficker Christopher Gibney, involved a corrupt team leader at international shipping firm UPS.

The UPS worker, Daniel Taylor, would send out waybills - shipping labels containing bar codes linking to the accounts of genuine businesses.

The labels were marked as "paid by customer", meaning the businesses would not be charged for shipping the drug consignments and raise questions.

Coggins, using waybills linking to the account of clothing brand G-Star Raw, arranged for packages of drugs to be sent to a UPS depot in Deeside, Wales, where Taylor would intercept them and hand them over to the Huyton Firm's couriers.

The court heard the gang discussed doing business with Thomas Cashman, a Liverpool drug dealer who was jailed for life over the murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in August 2022.

Olivia was killed by a stray bullet as Cashman tried to assassinate a rival.

Thomas Cashman shot Olivia Pratt-Korbel in a botched assassination attempt

In messages from Vincent to Francis, he said Cashman had been asking to help him import "botts" from mainland Europe - a reference to 'bottoms', slang for blocks of heroin.

He said Cashman had learned about their operation from Gibney, nicknamed Rubber, and complained he "shouldn't be talking".

Vincent said to Francis: "I like Tom but he shouldn't know what we're doing.

"Have a word with Rubber."

Passing sentence, Judge Robert Trevor-Jones concluded the brothers were both "at the pinnacle" of the Huyton Firm.

He said Francis Coggins was involved in arranging "almost daily" shipments of Class A drugs and regularly arranging the transfer of hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash.

Judge Trevor-Jones told Coggins, who appeared over video-link from HMP Manchester: "You were directing or organising the buying and/or selling of these drugs on a commercial scale.

"You had substantial links to, and influence on, others in a chain and you had an expectation of a substantial financial advantage."