FOR two years, it seemed as though everyone in Warrington had a theory on where Leon Cullen was hiding.
Hypotheses ranged from the plausible to the outright ridiculous.
One rumour feasibly placed the town’s most wanted man in Spain, the classic bolthole for British criminals on the run.
Others said that he had been smuggled all the way to Thailand in a tumble dryer.
Whispers that Cullen was living out in the United Arab Emirates did prove to be partially correct however.
Indeed, he was eventually arrested in Dubai – but he had not had a face transplant as per the bizarre tale that had been doing the rounds.
What all of this talk did show was that Leon Cullen had become an almost mythical figure back in his hometown, his near legendary status growing with each passing day he evaded capture.
In January 2020 the manhunt finally ended, bringing to a close one of the most captivating and notorious criminal cases in Warrington’s history.
This is his story – from his previous downfall 10 years ago to the resurrection of a £300,000 per month cocaine empire and its ultimate demise in a hail of bullets and grenades after he fled the country.
The first downfall
Leon Cullen and his twin brother Anthony were born in the summer of 1987.
Growing up in the Longford area of the town, Anthony was the more level-headed and popular of the two while Leon could prove to be a volatile character on occasion.
It was not unknown for the pair to fall out from time to time, as brothers do.
By the early 2010s, Leon and Anthony were beginning to gain notoriety in the criminal underworld.
Leon soon rose to become the ‘mastermind’ of an 18-man drugs cartel which shipped at least 5kg of cocaine worth around £300,000 across the north west during a six-month period from August 2010 onwards, as well as supplying other gangs in Warrington.
Money was laundered through a business called Spots on Signs, with spreadsheets on a laptop which was later seized from the front company’s premises on Longshaw Street in Bewsey detailing debts of nearly £100,000 owed by other dealers.
But the ring began to crumble either side of Christmas that year after a series of arrests and raids.
Drugs seized from the gang
Cheshire Police’s Operation Cortex ultimately saw members of the organised crime group jailed for nearly 100 years.
Leon, then aged 24 and of Westbridge Mews in Paddington, was caged for nine years and eight months.
Conspirators were later ordered to pay back nearly £1.5milliion of their ill-gotten gains under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
After his brother was locked up, Anthony took over the running of the gang – but he too was swiftly caught.
He was one of eight men handed a combined 31 years in prison in 2012 after the force’s Operation Knock discovered a drugs factory in a caravan at a site in Rixton, receiving a stretch of five-and-a-half years himself.
But it was not long before the Cullen brothers returned to their criminality with an even bigger and more violent enterprise.
Back in business
Leon and Anthony Cullen re-entered the drugs trade almost immediately upon their respective releases from prison.
Cheshire Police began investigating the pair again in 2016 after discovering that they had been supplying drugs to another organised crime group which was led by Lee Stoba from behind bars, but which had eventually been brought down by the force.
Lee Stoba
And the Cullen gang mark two was every bit as professional an outfit as many a legitimate business.
Day-to-day planning of the operation was so intricate that there was a monthly wage bill of £50,000, with bonuses of up to £10,000 and accommodation incentives also offered for ‘employees’.
As a result, the 20-strong gang netted profits which peaked at £290,000 each month – vast stacks of cash which allowed Leon to swan around town in a Maserati.
Paperwork detailing the gang's expenses
He was not afraid of intimidating anyone who need to fall in line, and was often all too keen to brag about his exploits.
Such actions do not go unnoticed though, as was documented by detectives as Operation Samurai unfolded over the course of 18 months.
This covert probe revealed that more than 50kg of cocaine was supplied by the organised crime group during this period of a year-and-a-half.
Investigations led to a series of dawn raids being executed early on January 10 2018, during which 19 properties in Warrington were targeted with 18 men arrested.
A raid on Peasley Close in Padgate
Leon Cullen was not one of them.
When it became abundantly clear that there were ongoing efforts to bring the gang down, Anthony had begun putting together plans to flee the UK for Portugal – but was ultimately unsuccessful.
He was detained in Dover hours after the strikes, midway through an apparent bid to escape to the continent.
His brother did manage to make it to Europe though, and would avoid having his collar felt for nearly two years.
Back in Warrington, more than £200,000 in cash and 3kg of drugs had been seized.
So too had the largest bounty 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 when officers executed search warrants, while another was discovered in a wicker basket at the foot a bed along with bullets – easily accessible for immediate use, if required.
This cache included a AK47, a pump action shotgun, automatic pistols and revolvers as well as a silencer – weapons used to threaten rivals and enforce debts, keeping the Cullen gang in the upper echelons of the drug dealing chain with a reach across the north of England.
At the time, it was the biggest seizure of firearms by police in the UK other than at the country’s borders.
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 at a price of thousands of pounds per throw, or to purchase for even higher sums.
Detective inspector Rob Balfour has worked on the case since its inception five years ago, and was appointed as its senior investigating officer during 2020.
He told the Warrington Guardian: “Leon and Anthony had two choices after being released from prison – they either became law-abiding people, or they continued to commit criminality but learned from their mistakes and became more sophisticated and more organised.
“They learned from the mistakes that got them prosecuted in 2012 for two purposes, to get as much money as they could and to make it hard for law enforcement to catch them.
“The intelligence we received from the community started pretty much straight away upon their release.
“There were all sorts of incidents of violence, criminal damage, threats and intimidation.
“This is all part of a bigger picture, and our job is to put that all together and find out who is doing it and who is controlling it.
“Criminals don’t have morals, it’s all about them making money – whether they’re dealing cocaine for profit or selling and renting out guns.
“The damage that drugs do to people is well documented, and it’s clearly obvious the damage that guns can do to people.
“They were fully prepared to hire them out and sell them, and to hell with the consequences.
“It was a massive haul of guns, and it shows you the level of their criminality – this was heavy weaponry.
“In my view, they don’t care – but we do, and that’s why we go after them.”
‘Controller and director’ Anthony, of Colemere Close in Padgate, received a whopping 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 on this occasion.
DI Balfour added: “Leon and Anthony both controlled it together.
“Leon was the main man to get hold of if you wanted the guns and then arranged his team to move them, and he also had a controlling stake in the drugs side of it.
“When things started to go wrong and people weren’t paying or drugs were seized, Leon and Anthony got their heads together and dealt with it.
“On one occasion, both of them travelled down to Winsford to deal with someone who wasn’t paying and there was also an incident in Sankey Valley Park where a member of the OCG was assaulted.
“They clearly worked well together as a pair.”
Others including Jamie Oldroyd and the Cullens’ nephew Lewis Turner were also jailed over the coming years, having continued operations under their orders.
Lewis Turner
Although the brothers were off the streets of Warrington, their presence was still keenly felt in the town thanks to a series of high-profile incidents.
Shootings and grenades
In his absence, Leon Cullen has been linked to several shootings and has been namechecked in court during numerous major trials.
One such attack came only a month after the gang was decimated by the police raids of early 2018.
In February that year, 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 Road, with the windows of Leon’s home on Honister Avenue in Orford bricked following the fire and his BMW then being torched outside.
A controlled explosion carried out after the discovery
Then, in September 2019, his accomplices are said to have 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 the evening of November 18 2019, a 37-year-old man was shot in the stomach in Woolston Park before being dumped outside Warrington Hospital.
A black Volkswagen Golf which is believed to have been used to drop the victim – who suffered serious injuries – at the main entrance of the hospital was later found burnt out in Peel Hall Park.
This incident is also thought to have been related to the gang’s activities.
But the tables were soon turned, with those close to Leon Cullen becoming 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 supposed trusted member of his inner circle was shot at in the street near to the children’s playground on Monks Place in Carrington Park.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing him running in a zig-zag pattern in order to avoid being struck by the bullets as he carried a young child in his arms, hours after having apparently flown back into the UK from abroad.
He was accosted by two men wearing hi-vis jackets in a grey Audi, a vehicle which was later set ablaze on Back Forshaw Street in Orford.
The following month, a car was torched twice in the same night on Bewsey Road.
And there was no let-up in the violence as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, with another explosive being planted in the front garden of a house on Birtles Avenue in Orford in April 2020.
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.
One of the gunmen travelled from Liverpool 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 blasted instead in a case of mistaken identity.
Liam Byrne Jnr
A second gangland shooting that same 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 any firearm having been discharged.
DI Balfour said: “All these things affect the law-abiding people of Warrington.
“Nobody wants to live in a house next-door to someone who has been shot, living in fear of that violence.
“We don’t want people in the community to have to suffer and live like that, so that is our drive.
“It’s important that communities know that we will fight this battle on their behalf – we will never stand by while people get shot, and we’ll do what we can to stop it.”
Meanwhile, some 3,500 miles away, Leon Cullen had taken up residence in a UAE prison cell.
The manhunt
Sparked in January 2018 after the raids had been executed without the detention of one of the gang’s key figureheads, the manhunt would become one of the biggest in Cheshire Police’s history.
A £5,000 reward for information leading to Leon Cullen’s capture was offered by Crimestoppers, while a van bearing his mugshot was driven around the streets of the town and parked outside the Halliwell Jones Stadium on a Warrington Wolves matchday.
The whole thing became something of a circus, with memes of his custody picture photoshopped onto the likes of Where’s Wally? and Leonardo Di Caprio’s lead character in the film Catch Me If You Can being posted on social media.
Following his successful escape from the UK, Cullen had spent a considerable period of time in Spain before moving to Dubai under a false identity around early 2019.
By all accounts, he was living a life of luxury in a swanky apartment in one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
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 in the aforementioned mugshot which had been circulated far and wide by the police.
But, as the two-year anniversary of his escape approached, detectives finally got their man.
On January 3 2020, Leon Cullen was belatedly held on an international arrest warrant after a joint operation involving the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, the National Crime Agency and authorities in Dubai.
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.
But extradition proceedings were not straightforward, and 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.
Throughout all of this, he was regularly assaulted by the guards.
Prisoners were not even allowed access to basics such as toothpaste, and Cullen was forced to brush his teeth with soap.
It was only in February this year that he was returned to the UK and charged with 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 in custody after being returned to the UK
The following month, faced with overwhelming evidence, he admitted all four charges – and the long-standing mission to convict Leon Cullen was finally complete.
“Leon Cullen was living what we believe was a lavish lifestyle until he got caught, the intelligence certainly suggested he was living the high life,” DI Balfour adds.
“He was doing everything he could to keep under the radar, but there was unfinished business with one of the top two and we were never going to let that go.
“Our mantra is, it doesn’t matter where you go – we’re going to find you and bring you back.
READ MORE: Leon Cullen's sentencing as it happened in court
“I think we’ve proved that recently with a number of extraditions we’ve been involved with.
“Just because it’s difficult, that won’t stop us – and this was difficult, but we were successful.
“It wasn’t easy, but the drive and determination of our people to catch him and bring him back was pivotal.
“He had to be caught, he had to be brought back and he had to be prosecuted.
“The evidence against him was very strong, and he’s clearly recognised that with his guilty plea.
“We want to make Cheshire a difficult place to function as an organised criminal, and our team will go to huge lengths to find and prosecute people if they try to evade capture.
“These investigations have taken a long time and we’ve taken out the top men.
“My message to anyone out there who is thinking of taking over or being involved in the same sort of criminality is that we will catch them, and the courts will punish them heavily.”
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