Part Two:
'I kill them with you, mate': The messages that brought down the Coggins firm
By Matt O’Donoghue
“The misery and harm caused by dealing and use of drugs in our communities is probably immeasurable and its corrosive effect is felt by all of us in our day-to-day lives. At the apex of this despicable and devastating trade are people like you, Vincent Coggins, without who none of it would be possible.”
— His Honour Judge Ian Dove at the sentencing of Vincent ‘Dickie’ Coggins
Among the ordinary-looking semi-detached houses of the sprawling Dovecot estate, Vincent and Francis Coggins — two brothers from nearby Cantril Farm — ran a series of stash houses: a warehouse and distribution hub for their drugs. It is here that fresh kilogram bricks of heroin and cocaine were sampled for quality. Each block was ‘stamped’ with a powder-pressed logo into bricks before it was wrapped and shipped. This embossed stamp told buyers where their drugs came from and served as a marketing tool along the supply chain, like a trademark. The logos were photographed and the snaps shared to suppliers lower down the chain on the messaging platform EncroChat, before making their way through a network of dealers across Merseyside, and then from Aberdeen to Cornwall.
The Coggins Firm’s control of a substantial part of the UK drugs trade went largely unchallenged until May 23rd, 2020: the day a team of machete-wielding gangsters upended their status quo when they stole their stash. Disguised as delivery men, complete with fake parcels, the gang tricked their way into the Dovecot drug store and hacked their way out with 30 kilograms of the Firm’s cocaine, leaving behind a blood-spattered crime scene. Video footage from the emergency services — shown to the jury but too graphic to release uncut after trial — captured one of the Firm’s warehouse watchmen holding onto his nearly-severed arm. Bodycam footage followed his blood trail, leading detectives to a drain cover in the back garden where the cocaine was once hidden. The mastermind of this audacious and vicious Saturday morning heist was Richard Caswell, a notorious Liverpool criminal and a trusted customer of the Coggins Firm.
News of the robbery travelled quickly on EncroChat. Within hours of their 9:30am wake-up call at the stash house, the Firm’s business associates exchanged messages of disbelief. Dealer Dean Borrows, under the username ‘OliveScooter’, told Paul Fitzsimmons, the Firm’s banker, his worst suspicion.
OliveScooter: “Mate think pie gone in”.
“Pie” is “pie and mash,” rhyming slang for “stash.” The EncroChat logs are full of this slang: “Tops” is cocaine; “Botts”, or “bottoms”, is heroin; “Grip” is the stash; “PC” is postcode; “The Flat” is Amsterdam; “Apples” is short for “pineapples”, or hand grenades; “Wash” is when lower grade powdered cocaine is cooked up with bicarbonate of soda and turned into the highly addictive and smokable crack.
It took ten hours for news to reach the vicious head of the Firm’s UK operations, Vincent ‘Dickie’ Coggins, that an out-of-town team had driven off with his drugs. While he was initially unsure how much product had gone, he knew that whoever took it had insider knowledge.
Under the EncroChat username MoonlitBoat, Coggins wrote: “It's gone lad, he said manks am not having manks no way”
Edward Robert ‘Bobbie’ Jarvis — senior member of the Coggins Firm and one-time international drug trafficker — simply replied: “Fuck”.
Vincent Coggins’ own cocaine-fuelled paranoia immediately led him to the wrong conclusion. He believed that Kenny Glynn, the son of the father-son criminal duo who ran the stash house, leaked its location. In Coggins’ sleep-deprived and drug-addled mind, he thought that the son’s horrific injuries were just not horrific enough. He messaged Bobbie Jarvis.
MoonlitBoat: “Got to be son. Fuck it I kill him”.
Meanwhile, in a supreme twist of double-dealing, the person tasked with spreading the word that Coggins was on the war path and after the return of his stolen gear was none other than Richard Caswell himself. By 2020, Caswell had become a trusted customer of the Coggins Firm who bought kilos of their product and always paid. Using the goodwill he’d banked, Caswell falsely suggested to the gang that a different father-son dealer duo — Brian Maxwell, Senior and Junior — were the men behind the Dovecot heist. This was not the first time Caswell’s handy work threatened innocent lives.
To close associates, Richard Caswell was known as “Will” because of his uncanny likeness to the pop star Will Young. Caswell built his reputation with a 17-year sentence in 2005 for a car bomb campaign. The ferocity of his explosives in 2003 and 2004 led to patrols of armed officers on the city’s streets in a bid to keep the peace. This was the first time for a decade authorities took such drastic measures. Not since the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland did senior officers believe innocent lives in the area were in such imminent danger.
Originally from Kirkdale, ex-doorman Caswell had been asked to help resolve a feud between rival club owners. His solution was to pack cars with fireworks and fuel and detonate them at sites around the city. Judge John Richards described his crimes at a sentencing hearing in 2005 as “truly wicked”, and remarked that it was a miracle that “innocent bystanders were not killed or mutilated by these bombs.”
Caswell secured his status as a dangerous man with a short fuse within weeks of going down. Transferred to the maximum-security wing at Full Sutton in Yorkshire, he served barely a month before an argument in the kitchen broke out. As inmates cooked ribs for lunch and guards stood by, a petty dispute boiled over when Wayne Walters, a prisoner from Brixton doing life for a shooting, moved Caswell’s pans from a hot plate. In response, the Liverpool bomber set fire to Walters and sparked him out with one punch.
“I think he saw me as some white kid he could bully,” Caswell told the Court. “It was a good punch that landed. It knocked him out.”
Unlike Walters, Vincent ‘Dickie’ Coggins was not a man who stayed down. Dickie Coggins’ criminal history is a long one, going back to his childhood. Officially, the man described in EncroChat as “The Gaffer,” “The Teacher,” and “The Headmaster” has 14 convictions for petty offences like criminal damage, shoplifting and drink driving going back to the late 70s. Court reports from 1985 show Dickie’s links to a series of Post Office robberies, and aged 18 he was sentenced to two years for a fraud that used stolen building society books. He popped up North of the border four years later, arrested over a Post Office safe job in Edinburgh involving £69,000 of stolen stock. The following year, in 1990, he was back in the Scots Courts, this time in Glasgow, accused of shooting a man in the legs before he was kidnapped, stripped, tortured with a chainsaw, and offered a choice: “Settle the debt or lose your penis.”
Unsurprisingly, these charges never made it to trial. It is likely Dickie’s victim refused to give evidence against him.
By the age of 24, Coggins’ violent graft appeared to stretch over 200 miles, from his Huyton home turf to the city streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow. For the next 20 years, newspaper reports referred to “the brothers we cannot name” who are at the top of one Merseyside Mafia with an international operation.
When Dickie Coggins wanted a “proper firm” assembled so that he could “go to war” after the stash house was hit, the first person he turned to was Paul “Woody” Woodford.
“Woody” Woodford (Encrochat username: “KingWasp”) had built up a formidable reputation for violence during the 1990s across the estates of south Sefton, and is known to have also operated in both Amsterdam and Spain. In April 1995, Woodford walked free after after a jury failed to reach a verdict on his involvement in the kidnapping and torture of a man he had known for ten years. The man told the court that Woody attacked him with a knife while another man tortured him with a machete. A third man came out of the kitchen with a hot iron and pressed it to his face as he demanded, “Give us a name.”
On the same day he was acquitted of torture, Woody was sentenced to seven years for a separate and unprovoked attack on a 23-year-old woman using a kitchen knife and a machete. Woody attacked her whilst out on bail for Ruddin’s torture when he broke into the woman’s home; she was left needing more than 50 stitches and was so terrified that she moved away from the city for good.
Two years later, he was brought back to the UK from Amsterdam for a trial where he was acquitted of the murder of Jason Osu and the attempted murder of Darren Allcock. It was Woody who offered to source the guns for the Coggins Firm revenge attack. Dickie messaged him after he was given the false intelligence that Brian Maxwell and his son were behind the heist: “Fuck me, you up? My stash went on Saturday. Thirty fucking tops been robbed. Took me three days to find out who it was. Got them now … we go to war. A few kids here, but wankers.”
Woodford replied that he will “get his shit together and ready anything”. He offered up hand grenades, or “apples”, to be used in the first assault. “I’ve still got two apples in the Kirkby … Shaky is best with apples, he’s done it seven times when we were in Holland and then two for you in smoke,” he wrote. “I kill them with you, mate.”
Woody appeared excited at the prospect, keen to play his part in the retribution: “Let’s get it on. Get a lift to your end, saves you coming down here. I’ve got my gloves and knife, ready to fuck these cunts, mate.” He emphasised his position of enforcer with the message: “Let’s deal with this problem, then no one can fuck with you again, mate.”
Inside man
Encryption and intimidation were not the only ways that The Firm stayed ahead of the law. They also had a man on the inside. In court, Alexander Leach KC for the prosecution laid out the extent of the Firm’s connections, including access to the Police National Computer. The PNC is a secure database for officers and law enforcement staff, with updates on running investigations and intelligence gathered on known criminals. This valuable resource kept Dickie Coggins and his brother Francis abreast of everything the police had on them.
On 19th April 2020, Dickie Coggins was anxious to arrange for a contact of Woody’s to get updated reports on himself and Bobbie Jarvis from the PNC. This would become a recurring theme over the subsequent weeks. According to the EncroChat logs, the source — known as “Computer Man” — was only able to access the PNC on nights. By 15th May, Woody passed on the news from Computer Man that Dickie’s file was packed with new information. Dickie discussed how different agencies gather their intelligence and how much it has cost for previous searches of the PNC by other inside sources.
In order for Computer Man to carry out the PNC check, Jarvis, Dickie and Woody had to share their dates of birth. When Europe’s law enforcement finally accessed the EncroChat logs as part of Operation Subzero, this would prove to be crucial evidence in linking the EncroChat handsets and handles to the men behind them.
The breakthrough came with the discovery that the hardware through which all the encrypted messages pass sat on servers outside the pretty French town of Lille. A warrant was issued by a French judge at the end of January 2020 that authorised the infiltration of EncroChat’s servers, clearing crime fighters to compromise them with their own custom-made malware. First, the malware copied the servers to rip all of the stored data, including the Coggins Firm’s chatter. Next, it spoofed the criminal’s handsets into installing a software update that copied all the incriminating messages they held.
With the server and handset data downloaded, the third stage of the malware activated: as users typed out each new message, a duplicate was made and bounced on to the French team. The malicious code and bogus updates let European investigators download more than 120 million messages.
“It was momentous. It was a once in a generation, once in a career moment for the people involved,” ex-NCA investigator Matt Horne explains. “Pretty much straight away we saw detailed information about what these criminals were up to. Not just serious violence like shootings but also just the huge industrial scale of the drug trafficking the Coggins Firm and others were organising using this platform.”
Exactly how the French authorities carried out the final stage of their hack is still unclear. In fact, it’s this uncertainty that has led to significant delays in getting many EncroChat cases into court and successfully tried. It would be more than four years from Jarvis’ arrest until his sentence was handed down in October 2024, for example. Despite many requests on the part of defence teams to find out how the hack was done, the French have refused to share their code, insisting it’s a state secret. Legal arguments over whether or not this refusal is lawful rage on in the courts while heavy sentences are handed down.
The EncroChat logs delivered priceless information for the prosecution. But for defence teams in courtrooms across the land, the trial of Edward Jarvis and the rest of the Coggins Firm revealed a disturbing legal dilemma. One eminent King’s Counsel barrister drew parallels between the EncroChat evidence and the Horizon scandal: irrefutable evidence had uncovered the wrongdoing of postmasters, only to find that years later, the evidence was false and many innocent people were wrongfully convicted. The scandal underscored the importance that anyone accused of a crime should have the ability to independently test the prosecution evidence presented against them. Shouldn’t this same standard apply to the Coggins brothers and their Firm? But French law enforcement has consistently refused all requests that could help defence barristers with their EncroChat cases.
“Have I fallen asleep and woken up in Russia?”one defence barrister said to me outside court during an adjournment. “What’s happened with these cases is akin to being arrested for murder and told your bloody prints are on the weapon. But when you ask, ‘Can our expert test that DNA and see that the fingerprints match mine?’ the answer is, ‘No. Trust us. They are yours.’”
Another legally nuanced question also continues to cast shade. Did stage three of the hack allow crime fighters on the continent to listen live to criminal conversations? In the HBO series The Wire, McNulty and the Baltimore drug squad tap crack cocaine dealers’ phones to eavesdrop, and the damning recordings are known as “intercept evidence.” But Britain is not Baltimore, and investigators here have to work around laws that ban the use of wiretap evidence in court. What if it turns out the Gendarmerie were “up” on the 60,000 EncroChat users and listening “live” as opposed to stealing that digital treasure trove while it was stored on the phones? Barristers have batted this point backwards and forwards for years and continue to do so in courtrooms across the continent.
Listening live and catching the messages as they fly between phones would make Operation SubZero’s evidence the result of a live intercept. Those ever so damning chat logs should therefore be considered inadmissible – but once again, repeated requests by Operation SubZero defence teams for clarity delivers the same response: “This is a state secret and an issue of French national security and defence. We are not telling.”
When the EncroChat logs landed, the National Crime Agency mounted a national response. They had to prioritise and coordinate with regional forces like Merseyside and the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit (NWROCU).
“10,000 devices worth of intelligence was about to suddenly hit us like a tsunami,” says ex-NCA man Matt Horne, who led the whole strategy. “Our priority was to deal with all the threat and risk and harm buried away in there. We had to try and protect the intelligence, not give away what we've done.”
The trick for detectives was to tiptoe the tightrope of knowing when and how to act without blowing their cover. Go in too late and someone dies, too soon and they rumble the EncroChat hack.
Horne believes over 200 lives were saved by the actions of police forces across the UK who responded to those conspiracies to kill. The chat logs put the NCA in the room with the Coggins brothers and Britain’s top tier of gangsters as they planned and plotted.
“The infiltration of EncroChat gave the NCA and all of UK law enforcement unparalleled access to the inner workings of organised crime,” Horne says. “This was completely unprecedented. Nothing like this had never happened before.”
When it came to the Coggins Firm, access to the nuggets buried in the EncroChat logs presented detectives on Operation SubZero with a golden opportunity. This was their chance to seal a deal that was years in the making.
In court, Bobbie Jarvis faced a mountain of damning messages with no way to challenge how the authorities came by it. Many of his co-conspirators — including Dickie Coggins and ‘Woody’ Woodford — pleaded guilty. The rewards for “pleading out” and avoiding a trial can be up to one-third off your sentence for avoiding an expensive prosecution.
Jarvis chose the riskier path: to deny guilt and enter a fight to swing a jury into the belief that the EncroChat handset was someone else’s. His battle was uphill with a defence counsel that was blind as to how the hack was handled. And so it fell to Alexander Leach KC and the prosecution to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt that the EncroChat phone was indeed his. Proof that Edward Robert Jarvis sent the ‘SoftHerb’ messages was the key that locked his cell door and delivered a 25-year sentence.
EncroChat had at least 60,000 subscribers as of June 2020. According to the French Gendarmarie, nine out of ten EncroChat handsets were in the hands of criminals like Jarvis and the Coggins Firm. Britain’s National Crime Agency back up this narrative, saying they found no evidence of non-criminals using the service.
Open-source intelligence suggested Merseyside had the highest concentration of handsets outside London. Using geolocation points from the phones and other undisclosed techniques, they built up a heat map of where the handsets were active.
“We got some really good technology which analysed all the contacts and networked the devices into a cluster,” Matt Horne tells me. “If you can imagine all the phones that are talking to each other are in an organised crime group. You cluster those devices because of their level of common contacts.”
Once the network was mapped, it was back to old-school detective work. The complex task of analysing the messages for clues to an individual’s real-life identity is called “attribution”. Sometimes the Coggins brothers and their Firm would use nicknames or refer to birthdays and relatives. Photographs of the drugs held clues hidden in the backgrounds that helped tie the EncroChat handsets and handles to members of the organisation.
“One scouse dealer got more than 13 years because of his love for cheese,” says Matt Horne. He’s referring to Carl Stewart from Vauxhall. In 2021, Stewart pleaded guilty to a plot to peddle cocaine, heroin, MDMA and ketamine, busted after he shared a snap of a block of Stilton in his hand via EncroChat. “His palm and prints were analysed from the picture,” Detective Inspector Lee Wilkinson from Merseyside Police explained at the time. Stewart was identified and arrested because his biometrics were already on their database.
In a space where hidden identities and counter surveillance techniques reduce the risk of getting nicked, Dickie Coggins and the gang’s casual, non-business banter is what left them all exposed and led to their ultimate downfall. For Dickie, it was a photo he sent Jarvis of his coffee machine on the kitchen counter that would help police link the MoonlitBoat handle and handset to him. That black granite worktop and the Nespresso machine, an exchange of happy birthday wishes, and a candid sunshine selfie of him lounging in a deckchair all became attribution evidence to lead to a guilty outcome.
With one last throw of the dice, Edward Jarvis appealed to the European Court of Human Rights that his conviction was unsafe on the grounds his privacy had been infringed. In October this year, the ECHR concluded his application was inadmissible as he had failed to exhaust legal procedures in France before taking the case to an international court. Jarvis complained under Article Eight (respect for private life) about the remote retrieval and transfer of his messages. Relying also on Article Six (right to a fair trial) and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy), he also submitted there had been no remedy available to him.
Judge Ian Dove told Dickie Coggins he would have faced 36 years in prison had it not been for his guilty plea. After he threw his hand and admitted he was MoonlitBoat, his sentence was parlayed down to 28 years. Likewise, Woodford’s 31 years became 24 years and six months. Both will serve half their time inside before becoming eligible for release on license. Meanwhile, Francis Coggins remains at large, believed to be on the run, bouncing between bases in The Netherlands and Spain; he is still wanted for his part in this huge conspiracy.
The months I’ve spent thumbing through thousands of pages that document the deals and double deals of the Coggins Firm have been both enlightening and frightening. But it was the juxtaposition of messages, rather than their content, that was perhaps the most unsettling in the end. Orders to arrange for hand grenades to be thrown, for hitmen to be hired, for multi-kilo deliveries to be made — next to a photo of tonight’s tea or home-baked scones, fresh from the oven. The murderous and the mundane, taking place behind the closed doors of unremarkable semi-detached houses.
