A gangster led a £300,000-per-month cocaine and firearms trafficking ring with his twin brother before fleeing to Dubai.
Leon Cullen spent two years at large as Warrington's most wanted man before finally being detained by police in the United Arab Emirates in January 2020. A string of shootings and grenade attacks were linked to the 34-year-old following his absconding.
He was jailed for 22-and-a-half years in May 2021. This week, he was brought back before Liverpool Crown Court and ordered to repay a slice of his ill-gotten gains.
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Leon and his brother Anthony were born in the summer of 1987 and grew up in the Longford area of the Cheshire town. Anthony was described as being level-headed and popular, while Leon was known to be a volatile character.
By their early 20s, the twins were well-established in criminal circles. Leon "masterminded" an 18-man drugs cartel which shipped at least 5kg of cocaine worth around £300,000 across the North West over the course of six months.
Money was laundered through a business called Spot on Signs, with spreadsheets on a laptop which was later seized from the front company detailing debts of nearly £100,000 owed by other dealers. But the operation began to crumble in late 2010 after a series of arrests and raids.
Cheshire Police’s Operation Cortex ultimately saw members of the organised crime group imprisoned for nearly 100 years. Leon, then aged 24, was locked up for nine years and eight months.
Anthony took over the running of the gang, but he was swiftly caught by police. He received five-and-a-half years in 2012 after the force’s Operation Knock discovered a drugs factory in a caravan at a site in Rixton.
But it was not long before they were back in business, re-entering the drugs trade almost immediately upon their respective releases from prison. A fresh police investigation centring on the Cullens opened in 2016.
It found a professional, business-like gang completed with a monthly wage bill of £50,000, plus bonuses of up to £10,000 and accommodation incentives also offered for so-called employees. As a result, the 20-strong gang netted profits that peaked at £290,000 each month.
Leon splashed the cash on a Maserati as his outfit supplied more than 50kg of cocaine over the course of 18 months. But a series of dawn raids on January 10, 2018, saw 19 properties in Warrington searched and 18 men arrested.
He was not one of them though, having fled to the European mainland. Anthony had been plotting to escape for Portugal but was ultimately unsuccessful, detained in Dover hours after the strikes.
More than £200,000 in cash and 3kg of drugs were seized from the Cullen gang mark two, as was the largest cache of working firearms discovered in Cheshire Police’s history. Five guns and ammunition were recovered from the loft of an address on Rylands Drive in Carrington Park in July 2017, while another was discovered in a wicker basket at the foot of a bed.
This bounty included a AK47, a pump action shotgun, automatic pistols and revolvers as well as a silencer. Another deactivated revolver was discovered wrapped in cling film at a house on Oxford Street in Latchford.
These guns were made available for other gangs to hire for thousands of pounds, or to purchase for more. One was linked to a shooting on Rose Avenue in Bootle in 2015, when bullets were fired at a living room when the occupant was home.
Described as the gang's "controller and director", Anthony received 27 years behind bars in January 2019 after admitting conspiracy to supply cocaine and being convicted by a jury of conspiracy to supply firearms.
Conspirators were locked up for 185 years in total. Others including Jamie Oldroyd and the Cullens’ nephew Lewis Turner were also jailed over the coming years, having continued the operation.
Meanwhile, an absent Leon found himself namechecked in court during several high profile trials. He was also linked to several alarming incidents.
In February 2018, a grenade was planted underneath a car parked on the driveway of a family home on Cleveland Road in Orford late at night. The explosive device was allegedly placed outside the property, in which children were sleeping upstairs, as a warning on Cullen’s behalf following a string of tit-for-tat incidents with rivals.
First came an arson attack at Smithy’s Gym in Bewsey, with the windows of Leon’s home on Honister Avenue in Orford bricked following the fire and his BMW then torched outside.
Then, in September 2019, his associates fired shots at the windows and front door of a house in Bolton before attempting to frame a rival. The Luger pistol used in the shooting – as well as a quantity of cocaine – were planted in the car of a man who Cullen was in a dispute with after they had both been romantically involved with the same woman, and an anonymous tip-off was made to police.
On November 18, 2019, a 37-year-old man was shot in the stomach in Woolston Park before being dumped outside Warrington Hospital. This incident is also thought to have been related to the gang’s activities.
But those close to Leon Cullen soon became the targets as a result of a reported £200,000 drug debt owed to a Salford-based gang. Shortly after 9am on a Saturday morning in January 2020, a trusted member of his inner circle was shot at in the street near a children’s playground on Monks Place in Carrington Park.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing him running in a zig-zag pattern to avoid being struck by the bullets as he carried a young child in his arms, hours after flying back into the UK from abroad. He was accosted by two men wearing hi-vis jackets in a grey Audi, a car which was later set on fire in a backalley in Orford.
Another explosive was planted in the front garden of a house on Birtles Avenue in Orford in April 2020 and, just over a week later, Cullen’s rivals plotted to gun down not one but two of his associates – including his and Anthony’s dad – in one night. Serving soldier Aaron Bretherton travelled from Liverpool in convoy with accomplices before shooting an innocent man in the leg on his own doorstep while posing as a pizza delivery driver, causing him life-changing injuries.
The intended target had been convicted heroin dealer Liam Byrne Jnr after a £10,000 bounty was placed on his head, but he was not home at the time and his stepdad David Barnes was shot instead in a case of mistaken identity. A second attack that evening was foiled as another fake pizza man attempted to shoot the twins’ father, but unwittingly attended his former home address on Sinclair Avenue in Longford and left without incident.
Meanwhile, efforts to detain Leon - including a £5,000 reward offered by Crimestoppers and a van bearing his mugshot being parked outside the Halliwell Jones Stadium on a Warrington Wolves matchday - had finally borne fruit. Cullen had spent a considerable period of time in Spain before moving to Dubai under a false identity and with a fake passport around early 2019.
Only a handful of images of Cullen emerged during his time on the run, one showing him posing for a selfie in the mirror of a lift while clutching a Louis Vuitton man bag and wearing a flashy watch. His appearance was vastly different to that on his wanted poster.
As the two-year anniversary of his escape approached, detectives finally got their man. On January 3, 2020, Leon Cullen was held on an international arrest warrant wearing a £23,000 Rolex watch and with nearly £5,000 in cash.
He was detained at gunpoint and brutally beaten before being taken into custody and battered again. His capture came only days before the Carrington Park shooting.
Cullen spent 13 months in custody in the UAE, where conditions for prisoners are notoriously harsh. For the first four days, he was left alone with a hood on his head in a darkened room before being transferred to a cell where 50 other inmates were residing.
His head was shaved, and he was forced to wear robes and sandals. He was regularly assaulted by the guards and was not even allowed access to basics such as toothpaste, leaving Cullen forced to brush his teeth with soap.
In February last year, he was returned to the UK and admitted conspiracy to supply firearms, conspiracy to possess firearms and ammunition and conspiracy to supply cocaine. This came after he was zip-tied and bundled into the back of a car to be handed over to the British authorities.
Cullen appeared in court again on Monday under the Proceeds of Crime Act. The court heard that he personally benefited to the tune of £350,000 from the OCG.
A judge ordered a total of £22,830.38 to be repaid by him during the hearing, although further funds up to the total benefit figure can be taken from him in the future. A five-year serious crime prevention order was also imposed, ensuring he will be required to stick to strict conditions upon his eventual release.
These include a ban from associating with two other members of the gang and informing the police of where he is living and working, bank accounts he is using and any vehicles and communication devices he owns or uses. The SCPO allows him to own a maximum of two computers and two mobile phones at any one time.
Detective Inspector Rob Balfour, of Cheshire Police's serious and organised crime unit, said: “The criminal activity run by the Cullens has earned them and others at the top end of the organised crime group a considerable amount of money, from which they have lived a lavish lifestyle for a short time. We will keep utilising this legislation so not only do criminals have to complete lengthy sentences, their earned assets are removed and their lives post-sentence are effected by further financial restrictions until they have literally paid their debt to society.
“I think the public expect us to recover ill-gotten gains, and rightly so. They don’t want to see drug dealers profiting from their criminality and it is only right that we recover what we can.
“It’s important to highlight the powers of the POCA and SCPOs to help deter and prevent criminals from returning to organised crime, but also to young men who look up to and are influenced by people like Leon.”
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