From Huyton to High Security: How the Coggins brothers came to ruin

‘They believed they were untouchable. Thankfully, they were wrong’

By Matt O’Donoghue

October 4th, 2024. With a gentle nod to the judge and a quiet 'thank you' for his 25-year sentence, career criminal Edward Robert ‘Bobbie’ Jarvis shuffles slowly from the dock and is led down the stairs to an underground holding cell. An armed escort awaits to chauffeur the Category A prisoner back to his quarters at HMP Manchester, where he has spent much of the last four-and-a-half years postponing today's almost inevitable conclusion. His mounting health issues mean the prison formerly known as ‘Strangeways’ — or some other high-security wing elsewhere in the prison estate — is where Jarvis may very well see out the last of his days. His life as an international drug trafficker is over.

His trial and subsequent sentencing was a result of Operation SubZero, the UK's first and — to date — longest-running investigation and prosecution that followed the hack of an encrypted communications platform known as ‘EncroChat.’ 

The conviction of Jarvis for his part in a blackmail plot and the supply of millions of pounds’ worth of cocaine and heroin — and of his bosses, the brothers Vincent and Francis Coggins, and their co-conspirators — were sealed by messages and photographs they exchanged on EncroChat in the mistaken belief they would lay hidden behind an unbreakable code. They were damned by their own words when that code was cracked. 

The 72,000 messages uncovered from Operation SubZero provided a chilling view into a dangerous world where a close group of childhood friends from a small town in Merseyside gained a stranglehold on Britain's consumption of Class A drugs. Over three decades, two brothers climbed unchecked to secure their seat at the top table of Europe's cocaine cartel. Theirs is a world where loyalty means everything, where betrayal leads to swift acts of retribution, and where extreme violence is casually celebrated. 

Photo illustration by Jake Greenhalgh

Throughout the four years I’ve been covering these court hearings — the trials, the interviews and the mountains of evidence — questions continue to gnaw at me. In this two-part series, we explore how the Coggins brothers rose from the streets of Knowsley to become the heads of a drug cartel with connections across continents, and how exactly they were so successful and yet almost invisible, flying under the radar for over 30 years. 

Roots

Our story begins 40 years ago in the Knowsley town of Huyton, on a small estate called Cantril Farm. This mid-60s housing development of tower blocks and maisonettes rehoused some of the 200,000 people displaced by the inner-city slum clearances of Liverpool. The area soon slipped into decline, with high levels of unemployment and a ceaseless spate of burglaries, car crime and vandalism. 

In a piece published in UnHerd Magazine, Dr Robert Hesketh — a criminologist who lectures at John Moores University — says that, like many other communities on Merseyside, life on Cantril Farm was insular. Few residents would connect with other areas or the people and organisations outside of their immediate frame of reference. If there is one thing Hesketh has learned in his time as a criminologist, it’s that when a community collapses, organised crime fills the void.

By 1982, almost half of all the men who lived on Cantril Farm were out of work — four times the national average. It is out of this perfect storm of social and urban inequality that the organised crime group who would become known in the press as ‘The Huyton Firm’ rose to dominance. 

For the last three decades, the firm had been run by two men born and bred in Merseyside: 58-year-old Vincent Coggins and his brother, Francis, who evaded arrest and remains on the run in Europe. Both were career criminals who rose to prominence during the drug boom of the 1990s. Francis later moved to Costa Del Sol to direct the smuggling of cocaine from South America, across Europe and into the UK.

They didn’t work alone. Assisting them was their “enforcer”, 49-year-old Paul Woodford, a man previously convicted for attempting to scalp a woman and alleged to have been the “guiding hand” in the shooting of pilot Jason Osu in 2012. Then, there was local drug dealer Michael Earle, 48, and moneyman Paul Fitzsimmons, 60. Rounding out the major players in the crew was Edward ‘Bobbie’ Jarvis.

Jarvis first appeared in the news more than two decades ago at Preston Crown Court. Dressed in a lime green Lacoste t-shirt alongside notorious Liverpool gangster Philly Glennon, back in 2002 Jarvis stood accused of laundering the proceeds of activities linked with the Merseyside drug lord, Curtis Warren. This trial followed a five-year probe into Warren’s affairs after his guilty verdict for drug smuggling in 1997. Dutch phone taps revealed the gang had stayed ahead of the law by paying off a senior Merseyside Police detective, Elmore “Elly” Davies. 

Curtis Warren, 61, arrives at Liverpool Crown Court on August 27, 2024. (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

The jury in Lancashire heard that Jarvis was charged with four counts of money laundering and one of hiding his income from the taxman. Reports from 2002 describe how he waved and smiled to his family as he left the dock to begin a four-and-a-half year sentence. But Bobbie Jarvis had already been a busy man, using Warren’s South American contacts in the Cartel before this fond farewell. Jarvis faced accusations that he’d masterminded a conspiracy to supply more than half a tonne of cocaine smuggled on a boat called The Pulse that he had helped sail to Venezuela. Jarvis convinced two men to crew The Pulse and sail him from Rhodes across the Atlantic to the small island of Marguerite, off the coast of South America. Officers from the UK followed their every move and tipped off the Venezuelan National Guard.

Back home, police described his haul in Venezuela as “a significant world seizure” and gave it a street value of £48 million. His crew were arrested, busted with a boat loaded with 300 kilograms of Colombian cocaine marked with the ace of clubs and with another 293 kilograms on their way down to the harbour. Jarvis got lucky and slipped the Venezuelan police with his German girlfriend, fleeing to Europe to enjoy a few more years of freedom.

Finally, in November 2005, Bobbie Jarvis was brought to justice and sent down for 28 years. At the time, he was just 35 years old. Despite an order to pay £800,000 in criminal proceeds, the authorities recovered only £5,045. But his international connections and experience developed through associations with Warren while Cocky was at the top of the world made Jarvis a core member of the gang from Huyton. Peter Walsh, the author of Drug War: The Secret History, a book on Liverpool’s underworld, says investigators believe others involved in the South American plot were key figures in the gang the media calls ‘The Huyton Firm’ — but they were never charged. “For the people involved in that lifestyle, it’s chaotic, but it must be quite addictive,” Walsh told me. “They’ve got money to burn and they have to spend it. It must be an exciting time, albeit a very dangerous job.”

Released halfway through his 28-year sentence over The Pulse plot, Jarvis breathed fresh air for less than 18 months before he was back inside for his part in Operation SubZero.

Operation SubZero

Bobbie Jarvis was the last of nine men sentenced to a total of 155 years for blackmail and drugs as part of the operation. Their arrests followed an investigation led by Detective Inspector Dave Worthington and masterminded by officers with the Northwest Regional Organised Crime Unit (NWROCU). 

At the core of the NWROCU investigation sits the cache of 72,000 explicit messages — chats that unfolded over six weeks between March 29^th and June 16^th, 2020. As the gang exchanged messages and photographs over the encrypted communications platform EncroChat, they had no idea that the authorities in France and the Netherlands had infiltrated the platform. “They believed they were untouchable and that those messages were untraceable. They genuinely thought their phones were secure,” Detective Worthington said outside court in October, 2024. “Thankfully, they were wrong.”

Since 2015, the EncroChat app has allowed users to securely swap their messages wrapped with encryption, like a digital handshake shared only between two phones. Without knowing the handshake, the encrypted message is unreadable. At least that was the relentless marketing pitch by EncroChat’s administrators when it launched in 2015.

Because of this, the EncroChat platform spread rapidly among the top tier of Europe’s criminal elite. This preloaded app came installed and hidden on an ordinary-looking Android phone and sold to users who then paid a subscription. The home screen looks exactly like any other, but entering a passcode on the phone reveals a hidden layer of applications only the owner can access. 

The phones were only available on the black market from resellers who acted like agents and dealt only in cash. You had to own an EncroChat phone to talk to another EncroChat handle. Buying a device instantly gave one access to a wider network of other users also engaged in criminality. Ownership opened a marketplace outside your local region. 

The Encrochat logo is seen on a mobile device. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

EncroChat wired you into a web of international connections who could help orchestrate the transit of drugs and firearms from South America and through nexus points like the Netherlands, all organised from the comfort of your armchair in Huyton or a sunlounger on the Costa Del Sol. But EncroChat was more than an enabler or a tool — it was a status symbol.

When risk management means you only want to deal with people you can trust, EncroChat gave you a clean bill of health with other organised criminals. To get hold of a handset you had to know the right people. The handle became your entry point. Once inside the EncroChat circle, you entered a space where hidden identities and counter-surveillance techniques cut the chances of getting arrested.

But it was the gang’s casual, non-business banter that left them exposed and paved the path toward their downfall. Overconfidence in the encryption leads to stupid mistakes that link handles with real-world identities.

Careless communications

RustyPalace: “Made scones today an KFC”

RustyPalace: “Made that lad”

OliveScooter: “Shut up. Looks nice that lad”

OliveScooter: “Should of seen the flapjack I made the other day” 

RustyPalace: “Look me scones. Didn’t have a cutter so they look like buns”

OliveScooter: “Clotted cream mmmmm”

RustyPalace: “There tidy la … eating them now with jam an cream” 

In scenes akin to The Sopranos, in mid-2020 the gang and their associates posted photos of their cooking achievements in the kitchen. Ashley Moorcroft, who used the EncroHandle “RustyPalace”, was jailed in 2022 for 19 years for drug offences, while Dean Borrows, “OliveScooter,” received 14 years for his role as an integral part of the Coggins Firm distribution network. Between discussions on the price of their drugs, the pair swapped pictures of food and chatted about their love of scones. 

The brazen nature of their communications didn’t stop there. In another set of messages, Huyton player Jarvis sends a photograph of himself in a deckchair, enjoying the sunshine, while kingpin Vincent Voggins coldly brags about how business was booming during the pandemic.

MoonlitBoat: “Virus fuck everyone, except us ha”

MixedJet: “Ha ye”

As with any successful multi-million-pound global corporation, most updates ran up the EncroChat chain of command to the UK boss, Vincent Coggins, and the Firm’s Head of European operations, his brother Francis.

While they gave the orders and signed off on the big stuff, the anonymity of EncroChat kept the brothers’ hands clean, two rungs removed from those lower down the ladder who took the everyday risks and who earned the smallest rewards. In an exchange with the unidentified handle, DiorPup, Vincent Coggins discusses getting far away from it all.

MoonlitBoat: “Fucking dogs … supposed to be boss of Huyton Firm aren't I, haha. Think bill deffo sorted now m8” 

DiorPup: “I'm legging it next week and I can't see me coming back to soon, its a city of fckn snakes.”

Reputation and respect

Sources from Merseyside’s underworld talk of how hated Vincent Coggins is. A volatile man with a hair-trigger temper prone to violence and who cherishes a grudge, he fought his way up the ranks from robber to riches. In his world, you do not get to the top and stay there unless others get hurt. 

Only someone with a death wish would openly challenge Vincent Coggins. So, when the notorious Liverpool gangster Richard ‘Will’ Caswell put an out-of-town crew together to steal Coggins’ cocaine, this was a declaration of war that Coggins took personally.

Using the handle MoonlitBoat, Vincent Coggins exploded in fury at finding his stash had been taxed with a terrifying order to recover the drugs.

MoonlitBoat: “Am so fucking furious. I want to meet the cunt an rip him apart with me hands head legs teeth. Bastards wot they done to us m8. Am not having any of it. Get the bits back.”

“You’d either have to be desperate or incredibly reckless to do something like that,” muses author Peter Walsh. “It’s got to be one of the most dangerous occupations on earth, taxing the drug stash of an international trafficker. There’s only likely to be one outcome if they discover who you are.”

Vincent Coggins. Photo: Merseyside Police

It wasn’t long before the Huyton Firm set about their revenge plot. Vincent Coggins instructed members of his gang to identify just who was responsible for the robbery, even asking for a supply of hand grenades — or “pineapples” — to be used as retribution. 

Within hours CCTV of the robbery was obtained by the Firm, given to them by Thomas Cashman — the hitman convicted of shooting and killing nine-year-old Olivia Pratt Korbel in 2022. During the course of my reporting, a senior Merseyside detective confirmed to me off-the-record that the 9-year-old was almost certainly not Cashman’s first killing, with other sources suggesting he was hired by the Coggins firm. “They have hitmen paid monthly salaries and on retainers to get an extra bonus whenever they go out and do a job,” an off-the-record source told me at the time. “That's just the way it operates the bigger they get.”

Using the video footage a total of four suspects were identified by the Firm, including local drug dealers Brian Maxwell and his son, Brian Maxwell Junior. Yet according to EncroChat messages sent by Brian Maxwell, they had got the wrong men. Despite this, out of fear Maxwell offered to pay £1.36 million to cover the lost drugs to save his family. 

This wasn’t enough for Vincent Coggins. “I'll kill them in few months wen its all calm down. Very stressful week. Need a little brake, then I come back,” he writes to the members of his own gang. Ultimately it was this murderous promise that led to his — and the rest of the Huyton Firm’s — demise. 

In Part Two of “From Huyton to High Security” we will explore what happened next, and the legal dilemmas the secretive hacking of EncroChat creates. And we will stare deep into the dark and unsettling past of Vincent Coggins and his enforcer, Paul “Woody” Woodford as we investigate how their chats reveal how they stayed one step ahead for so many years.