Huyton Firm: brutal organized crime group dismantled by its own text messages

More than 30 serious criminals have been jailed after police deciphered their encrypted text messages and discovered a violent row over drug theft.

Huyton crime bosses planned to murder the men they say took more than £1 million worth of cocaine from them.

After a successful challenge in court, BBC Panorama obtained 10,000 messages from the company.

They reveal plans for brutal violence, including a hand grenade attack.

The Huyton company – named after the part of Merseyside where it is based – has been run for 30 years by two secretive brothers. Following the conclusion of a series of trials at Manchester Crown Court, they can now be identified as Vincent and Francis Coggins.

The brothers and other members of the company spoke freely on the EncroChat messaging system, believing their encrypted conversations to be completely secure.

Their messages provide a unique insight into the inner workings of an organized crime group, revealing that:

Matt Horne, former deputy director of investigations at the National Crime Agency (NCA), told Panorama that the gang’s “industrial scale drug dealing” and willingness to resort to serious violence placed them “in the levels leaders of organized crime in the United Kingdom. .

In one message, Vincent Coggins threatened to torture a local businessman: “then we will decide to slice him up, cut off his fingers or whatever.” (All messages from the criminal group are reproduced here with their original spelling and punctuation.)

The next day, he bragged about how he had hit the man with a knife: “he hit his face and smashed his eyes and took half his ear with a tongue.”

The brutality of the Huyton company shocked even his rivals in Liverpool’s notoriously violent criminal world.

An anonymous source, who knows Vincent Coggins well, told Panorama that criminal gangs were “deeply hated” by many people because of the “level of depravity to which they go to spread fear and terror”.

The messages speak of help to the Huyton company from a corrupt police insider. The insider appears to have provided the crime group with printouts of the police national computer, which allowed the gangsters to see what detectives knew about them.

Merseyside Police say a thorough and thorough investigation was carried out by the Anti-Corruption Unit and no officers or staff have been identified in connection with the misuse of police systems.

Like thousands of criminals around the world, Huyton believed that EncroChat software would keep their messages completely secure and their identities secret.

But French police hacked the encryption app and shared messages about 7,000 British criminals with the NCA in 2020.

The messages covered the period when one of the Huyton company’s drug hideouts in Liverpool was robbed by rival gangsters.

In total, 32 major criminals linked to the raid have now been convicted.

Vincent Coggins, who used the EncroChat handle “Moonlitboat,” was sentenced to 28 years in prison for drug trafficking and blackmail.

Other members of the criminal group jailed include henchman Paul Woodford (24 years and six months), drug dealer Michael Earle (11 years) and moneyman Paul Fitzsimmons (12 years and six months) .

Their convictions could not be published until the end of the trial of Edward Robert Jarvis, another major player in the Huyton company.

He was found guilty of drug dealing and blackmail at Manchester Crown Court on Thursday.

Crime boss Francis Coggins is on the run and is believed to be overseas.

The Crown Prosecution Service initially refused to release the 10,000 messages from the Huyton company that were used in court.

But Panorama obtained the messages after making a request to the judge. They provide a vivid account of how the criminal group attempted to exact violent retaliation after the cocaine theft.

A young man makes a frantic 999 call from a semi-detached house on a residential street. He and his dad have just been attacked by masked men, armed with a machete and an axe.

When the police arrive, there is blood everywhere. The two men inside are silent. Nobody talks about the Huyton company. But this time, the police have a secret weapon.

They have access to the messages that members of the criminal group send to each other. They show 30kg of cocaine from the Huyton company was stolen, worth £1million.

The gangsters are shocked that someone dared to rob them. And they want revenge.

The user named Moonlitboat issues orders on EncroChat, demanding that the thieves be identified and killed.

When police later identified him as Vincent Coggins, one of the pieces of evidence was a photo he had sent on EncroChat of his new coffee machine – identical to the one found in Coggins’ house.

The day after the cocaine heist, Vincent Coggins gets his hands on the video surveillance of the robbery at a neighbor’s house.

The footage shows three masked men getting out of a van. A fourth man was carrying a package, posing as a delivery driver. Within four minutes, they made off with the cocaine from the Huyton Firm.

Posts from the group show the video was obtained by Thomas Cashman, a hit man for the Huyton Company.