Three masked men jump out of a white van while a fourth, disguised as a delivery driver, approaches a house carrying a parcel. Seconds later, they burst inside before making off with £1million of cocaine.
But the robbers hadn’t targeted any ordinary gang – the drugs belonged to the Huyton Firm, which since its founding in the late 1990s had risen to become one of Merseyside’s most feared and powerful criminal outfits.
Their leaders, including infamous crime boss Vincent Coggins, quickly began plotting bloody revenge in a flurry of texts on the underworld messaging platform EncroChat.
Needless to say, they were unaware that these messages were being monitored by police following a hack of the network.
These exchanges – revealed in court – would ultimately lead to the Huyton Firm’s downfall and Coggins’ arrest and conviction.
They also provide a unique insight into the inner workings of the gang and how it used the threat of extreme violence to cow their enemies and silence any potential informers.
And hidden among them is a reference to another fact that may have helped them maintain their dominance – the alleged assistance of a corrupt police insider.
The beginning of the end for Huyton Firm was a frantic 999 call on the morning of Saturday, May 23, 2020.
On the line was a young man describing how he and his father had just been attacked by a group of men armed with a machete and an axe.
When police arrived at a semi-detached house on a quiet street in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby, they found the sitting room covered with blood and the two men inside refusing to speak.
But over on EncroChat the messages quickly began piling up, with Vincent Coggins declaring his intention to kill those responsible and ordering his enforcer, Paul Woodford, and two associates, Robert Jarvis and Michael Earle, to track them down.
Coggins – who uses the handle ‘moonlitboat’ – spoke freely in the belief his messages were protected by an impenetrable layer of encryption.
This proved to be naïve given French police had cracked the app in the summer of 2020.
Many of the Encro exchanges following the stash house raid focus on the gang’s efforts to identify those responsible.
One associate shares a video obtained by Thomas Cashman, who worked as a hitman for the Huyton Firm, showing the men in balaclavas coming out of the van.
Cashman, known as ‘Tom Cash’, would go on to be jailed for murdering nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in 2022.
After seeing the video, Coggins responds – in the broken English that MailOnline has reproduced in this article: ‘Tom will no them if local, even if they masked up.’
He then orders his subordinates to send the footage to all their contacts.
Hours later, they have identified the three men they think are among the robbers – Brian Maxwell Jr, Michael Eves and Iyobosa Igbanovia.
At this point, the Encro exchanges take an even darker turn, as the gangsters plot ways to kill them.
Coggins messages his enforcer Woodford to say he is planning to use a ‘pineapple’ (hand grenade), to which he replies: ‘I kill him with u m8’.
Messages show the gang going into more detail about their plans to wreak revenge on Maxwell Jr, Eves and Igbanovia, even though – as it later emerges – they had nothing to do with the robbery.
At one point, Coggins orders his men to threaten and blackmail Maxwell and his father Brian Jr.
Later, Woodford texts Coggins: ‘Heads gone. I’ve got the c**t bang to rights. Give *** chance today to give back, f**k the doe m going to kill him an his firm.’
Woodford asks Coggins if he should buy a ‘belter’, meaning a gun. Coggins replies with, ‘M8 just bought load more, we cool for tools’.
Brian Maxwell Snr quickly became aware of the threats against his son.
Despite having no role in the robbery, he negotiated with Coggins, signing over his home and some land worth more than £1million pounds, the value of the stolen drugs, in exchange for his son’s safety.
But Encro messages revealed Coggins was still intent on revenge.
He writes to Woodford: ‘I’ll kill them in few months wen its all calm down. Very stressful week. Need a little brake, then I come back.’
Woodford agrees to help, texting: ‘So wen the dusk settles how many people do u want killed?’
Coggins replies: ‘4 dead me walking.’
EncroChat’s servers were shut down on June 13, 2020 when its administrators realised the platform had been hacked, and Merseyside Police arrested Coggins, Woodford, Earl and Jarvis three days later.
Officers had warned Maxwell Jr, Michael Eves and Iyobosa Igbanovia that their lives were at risk as soon as they became aware of the threats against them.
Following a trial, Coggins was jailed for 28 years for drug trafficking and blackmail. Woodford received 24 years and six months, Earle 11 years and Paul Fitzsimmons – a money man for the gang – 12 years and six months.
A Liverpool man who had dealings with Vincent Coggins and Woodford in the past told MailOnline today: ‘They ran this city for years, and helped destroy it. Vincent Coggins and Woody had an army of rats around them, doing their bidding on the streets while they were at home in bed.
‘Coggo had firms across Croxteth and Norris Green who would all jump on things for him. And Woody had links to street gangs across the city, who would do all kinds for him.
‘Shootings, arson, intimidation, tax jobs, tie-ups. It might look cool on the telly but for all the people who live in these post codes, its been pure hell. How this lot got away with it for so long is astounding.’
Speaking after the Huyton Firm were sentenced, police described the Encro exchanges as proof of the extreme methods the gang were willing to use.
Matt Horne, former deputy director of investigations at the NCA, said this willingness to resort to severe violence put them ‘in the upper tiers of organised crime in the UK’.
But alongside a reputation for violence, the Huyton Firm may have had another asset in the form of a corrupt police insider.
The messages talk about a source, who they called ‘piggy’, who allegedly provided printouts from the Police National Computer to help the gangsters keep track of what the police knew about them
Merseyside Police said that an investigation had been carried out by its anti-corruption unit and no officers or staff were identified in relation to misuse of police systems.
Several members of the Huyton Firm lived in Spain, where they developed relationships with major international crime groups including the Kinahan cartel.
Despite Coggins and his senior associates now being in jail, sources have told MailOnline the Huyton Firm is still active in importing drugs into the UK but they ‘don’t use Encro phones’.
Last week, it emerged Vincent’s brother Francis had been arrested by police in the Netherlands after a five-year manhunt by the NCA.
He was wanted by the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit on a warrant for allegedly smuggling heroin and cocaine.
