COPS want to extradite a Brummie criminal mastermind from Panama, where he has been running an international drugs ring by mobile phone from his prison cell.
Officers from SOCA, the Government’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, are probing the role of 52 year-old Birmingham gangster Leo Francis Morgan in the plot.
Morgan is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for drugs offences in El Renacer prison – the hellhole which inspired the nightmarish Sona jail in TV show Prison Break.
From his cell, by the banks of the Panama Ship canal, he is said to be involved in a cocaine conspiracy which stretches all the way back to the UK.
Details of the gangster’s involvement only came to light when undercover SOCA officers smashed a conspiracy to flood Britain’s streets with drugs by notorious Liverpool villain George Moon.
It was Moon, 62, who orchestrated the UK end of the cocaine ring from his own prison cell at HMP Lindholme in Doncaster, using a mobile phone to contact Morgan in Panama.
Together, they plotted to smuggle cocaine with a street value of £300,000 into the UK.
Moon was sentenced to a further 18 years in prison at Liverpool Crown Court earlier this month for his part in the case.
Also jailed were Anthony Parry, 39, of Liverpool – said to be Moon’s right-hand man – Bilaal Khan, 27 of Bradford; Abid Hussain, 22, of Bradford; Lee Standeven, 24 of Widnes, and Harminder Singh, 25 of West Yorkshire.
Now, investigators are now turning their sights on Brummie Morgan.
Details of his life are scant but inquiries by the Sunday Mercury have revealed a violent past of armed robbery and drug dealing across Britain.
Originally from Frankley, Birmingham, Morgan fell in with what one former undercover cop described as “the number one armed robbery gang in England” during the 1980s.
Retired detective Ronnie Howard was part of a covert surveillance team which observed Morgan and the rest of his gang ‘casing’ a Harborne bank in 1986.
They watched in secret as Morgan, alongside ringleader Hubert Lloyd Forbes, and henchmen Wesley Augustus Stewart, John Bullivant and Lionel Alfonso Webb, staked out a security van’s movements for three weeks.
Cops pounced before the gang could strike and found a kilo of cocaine and a suitcase full of £13,000 worth of burned banknotes at Forbes’s palatial Edgbaston home.
But although Forbes was convicted on drugs offences, the rest of the gang was acquitted at a trial later that year, claiming that they were only meeting to discuss a drug deal.
“Make no mistake,” said ex-cop Howard. “This lot were as savage as they came, and they would not have thought twice about shooting anyone who got in their way.
“I know they were implicated in a number of jobs across the north of England back in the day but I only ever ran into them in this case.
“But they were in the Premier League of their criminal world and lived a champagne lifestyle of fast cars and glamorous women.”
The gang split up soon after their acquittal – but did not prosper.
John Bullivant was sent to prison for 25 years in the late 1980s for a botched armed robbery in Redditch, Worcestershire in which he shot at a policeman.
Lionel Alfonso Webb became an estate agent in London but was murdered in 1989 when he was shot in the face by an unknown killer.
The murder has never been solved but one theory is that it was a revenge attack for undercutting some rivals in overseas property transactions, although ex-cop Howard firmly believes a drug connection is more likely.
“This gang was no different to a lot of other hardened criminals in the late 80s.
“They realised it was safer and easier to make money in drugs then armed robbery, which was run by public schoolboys and hippies back then, so they easily took over that world.
“So for Leo Morgan to turn up running a drugs empire from his prison cell in Latin America is no surprise to me at all. He will be running that place with all the money I’m sure he’ll have.”
Swooped
According to sources in Panama Morgan fled the UK in 1992 to escape charges of importing cannabis and set himself up on a farm in the countryside.
But he was soon back to his old ways.
Panamanian police swooped on his farm and found 110 kilos of cocaine with a street value of half a million pounds.
He was sentenced to 10 years in the country’s tough El Rencaser prison which was considered so dangerous in the 1980s that the famous 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army assaulted and secured it during the invasion of Panama in 1989.
A rambling, ramshackle assortment of barbed wired buildings and cramped, unhygienic conditions in which prisoners are crammed into rat-infested cells, it is considered a law unto itself by many in Panama.
Tuberculosis, AIDS, and other diseases are common among the prison population. Gang tension is also rife and life is cheap, with money being the only guarantee of safety. Drugs are dealt freely in full view of prison guards.
The prison has housed some of South America’s most feared criminals and terrorists and its location close to the Panama Canal means it is ideally situated for drug traffickers moving their product from Colombia by sea.
One ex-pat journalist who works in Panama City confided that El Rencaser is considered a “country club for hardened criminals”.
Incredibly, it was from here that Morgan would receive phone calls from George Moon on a smuggled mobile and then use his extensive contacts in the Latin American underworld to arrange the consignments.
The parcels, made to look like engineering parts, were sent to Cork, Ireland, and then brought into Britain by fellow gang members.
The plot was finally exposed in May 2008 when prison guards became suspicious and seized a notebook from Moon’s prison cell containing phone numbers and details about the gang, helping police crack the case.
