Drug kingpin who ran £26m empire brought down by encrypted messages

Times

11 hours ago

Standing in the bathroom of his upmarket Barcelona apartment, Jamie Rothwell put two fingers up to the camera and took a photo. He was feeling confident.
So convinced was he of the security of the encrypted phone network EncroChat that he shared selfies and pictures of the panoramic view from his Catalonian balcony.
From here — more than a thousand miles from his hometown of Salford — he directed a £7 million cocaine conspiracy, alongside trading in heroin, ketamine, firearms and vast sums of cash. What he did not know was that police had hacked the network.
'The LinkedIn of organised crime'
For 74 days in 2020, detectives in the UK and Europe had a front-row seat to the inner workings of organised crime. They watched messages fly between top-tier gangsters as they shared everything from pictures of their breakfasts to tips on how to carry out acid attacks, unaware their every word was being read.
The operation exposed a criminal subculture where 'sweets' meant bullets, 'pineapples' were more likely to be grenades than pizza toppings, and drugs, guns, violence and intelligence were traded with cold efficiency.
'It was the LinkedIn of organised crime,' Matt Horne, a former gold commander at the National Crime Agency, said. In a recent Channel 4 documentary, he described how his team monitored drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnap and murder — all while trying to decide when to intervene without blowing their cover.
Rothwell, 38, using the handle Livelong, was one of the first they identified — thanks to that selfie he sent to a criminal associate — and among the most dangerous to be brought down.
He was a familiar name to Greater Manchester police (GMP) from his role in Salford gang wars years earlier and had 16 previous convictions, including for robbery with a firearm in 2003.
In between ordering shootings and drug deals, he had paused for reflection.
He messaged a fellow gangster, writing:
Assistant Chief Constable Rick Jackson, whose GMP team was at the forefront of the national investigation into EncroChat and helping to monitor Rothwell's messages, said he was sceptical that the gangster was truly wearying of his criminal lifestyle.
'It's absolutely clear he [Rothwell] revelled in the notoriety, the violence, the proceeds of his criminal activity,' he said. 'The amount of harm that was emanating from it was phenomenal.'
'Maybe he's tiring of the consequences now he's been brought to justice,' Jackson added.
Orders from abroad
This week, Rothwell was sentenced at Manchester crown court to 43 years in prison after pleading guilty to a series of firearms and drug offences. Judge John Potter described how the defendant was a feared boss who expected underlings to carry out his orders, and a grave risk to the public.
He was one of several offshore crime bosses exposed by EncroChat, after they orchestrated violence and criminal transactions back in the UK from the safety of hotel rooms and gated apartment complexes overseas.
Another was Philip Waugh, who paid a member of a violent street gang to carry out acid attacks on individuals who owed money to him. In one message sent from his Malaga villa he told an accomplice to use a 'double dose' of acid on their target. 'Just need him blind and face melted,' he wrote under the username Aceprospect.
Rothwell was also a firearms dealer, boasting of his access to an anti-tank gun, machine guns and hundreds of other weapons.
In April 2020, he ordered an attack from Barcelona. Rothwell had become involved in a dispute with a fellow drug boss from Warrington called Leon Cullen, who operated at a lower level in the criminal hierarchy.
Cullen had fled to Dubai after police targeted the gang he ran with his brother Anthony — but Rothwell was determined to pursue his associates. When he heard that Liam Byrne Sr and his son Liam Jr were working with Cullen, he organised punishment shootings.
Byrne's stepfather David Barnes was home on Poplars Avenue in Orford, a suburb of Warrington, when a gunman posing as a pizza delivery driver turned up on their doorstep. Barnes was shot in the leg as he tried to close the front door and had to undergo several subsequent operations, having become collateral damage to the feud.
Rothwell had sought information on the Byrnes from another dealer, saying: 'I'm gonna do all them soon … Get me details i fix these muppets.'
He later admitted conspiring to inflict GBH with intent on the father and son, conspiring to possess firearms and ammunition with intent to endanger life, and conspiracy to supply cocaine and ketamine.
Gang warfare
Rothwell — described by Judge John Potter as a 'professional criminal' who had spent most of his life involved in serious organised crime — had been involved in a Salford gang dispute which broke out in the mid 2010s.
Judge John Potter
AVALON
Officers believe a series of petty rows and a fight in a backstreet café split the leadership of the 'A Team' gang. Stephen Britton, loyal to Paul Massey, led the A Team faction while Michael Carroll and Jamie Rothwell formed a splinter group known as the 'Anti-A Team'.
The rival sides soon began targeting each other with machetes, guns and grenades. During the dispute, in March 2015, Rothwell was shot three times while at a car wash in Manchester.
Massey, who launched an abortive attempt to be mayor of Salford, was murdered in a machine gun attack outside his home a few months later.
Rothwell was charged in 2020 with serious offences in relation to the A Team gang war but was acquitted following a trial later that year and left the UK.
'Remorse and regret'
When police closed in on him in Spain, Rothwell's drug empire was estimated to have a street value of around £26 million. He was arrested and deported back to the UK in 2021 to face trial.
Earlier this week Chris Henley KC, in mitigation, told the court how Rothwell was now consumed by 'remorse and regret'. He said the offending took place when Rothwell was in his early thirties, and that he was now a very different man.
Henley described the harsh conditions in prison and how his client was stabbed at HMP Manchester last year.
Wayne Johns, a senior investigating officer at the National Crime Agency, described Rothwell as 'one of the most dangerous' of the 2,200 criminals to have been convicted under Operation Venetic, the UK branch of the investigation into EncroChat users.
The gangster was jailed on Thursday along with nine associates, who were handed a combined total 163 years and 11 months in prison.
'Throughout the operation, the NCA and UK police have stopped 200 threats to life, seized over £84 million in criminal funds and more than eight tonnes of class A drugs, recovered 175 firearms and more than 3,500 rounds of ammunition,' Johns said.
'UK law enforcement will continue doing everything possible to protect the public from serious and organised crime.'
Police sources said the EncroChat hack was possibly the biggest breakthrough in British policing since DNA evidence in the mid-1980s.
Criminals, however, had found new ways to communicate and the picture, Jackson said, was 'constantly evolving'.
'We do have to play our cards close to our chest in order to stay on the front foot,' he said. 'They've had to move forward, we've moved forward in parallel.'
In a separate case also involving Encrochat, 11 members of a drugs gang were jailed in the Netherlands in 2022 for running an 'underworld prison' in shipping containers where they tortured their enemies and rivals. One of the containers was fitted with a dentist's chair, shears, a saw, scalpels and pliers. The criminals communicated via Encrochat, and their messages were discovered in 2020.