The boy grins at the camera. Jamie Cassidy is in a park, crouching on a football. He does not yet know it but this young member of the Liverpool FC academy is about to enjoy a meteoric rise through the junior ranks of club and country.
With his friend Jamie Carragher he won a place at the FA centre of excellence at Lilleshall, much to the envy of another young Liverpool hopeful who was initially rejected. His name was Steven Gerrard.
At 15, Cassidy was the leading scorer for the England under-16 team in the 1993-94 season with six goals, including three in the European under-16 championships.
A couple of years later, alongside Carragher and Michael Owen he was a key member of the Liverpool team that won the club’s first FA Youth Cup with a 4-1 win over two legs against a West Ham side featuring Rio Ferdinand and Frank Lampard.
Cassidy’s face was a beacon of joy after the final whistle, holding the trophy aloft on the club’s Anfield pitch. A first-team contract was swiftly offered and duly signed.
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Glenn Hoddle, then manager of the England senior team, was so impressed that he invited Cassidy to spend time with his squad before one match because, according to a Liverpool youth coach, “he was certain he was a future international”.
On Wednesday next week, now 46, Cassidy will stand in the dock at Manchester crown court to be sentenced for crimes that involved the industrial scale importation of cocaine from South America to Europe.
Next to him will be his elder brother Jonathan, 50, a former builder who headed an operation that for several years saw regular shipments of cocaine to Amsterdam from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia.
From the Netherlands, hundreds of kilograms of cocaine hidden in modified vehicles were routinely brought to Liverpool, where Jamie’s job was to oversee its distribution via a network of couriers to English and Scottish cities.
Before their multimillion-pound drugs business collapsed with their arrests in late 2020, the Cassidy brothers invested in land and property in Liverpool.
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From 2016 they were co-directors of property companies that bought several sites including a former cinema.
Jonathan’s personal portfolio included a large tract of land in the Knowsley area, near his younger brother’s home, including a stretch of water that he planned to turn into a fishing lake.
Sources have told The Times that he was a well-known figure in Liverpool property development and also had strong links with Dubai.
The brothers were central cogs in a lucrative criminal world far removed from the teenage Jamie’s dreams. Those hopes were nurtured from a young age by a family home close to the Anfield stadium.
He was 12 when he was selected to join the Liverpool academy, then under the much-admired leadership of the club’s star of the 1970s, Steve Heighway.
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Among those who played with him is universal admiration for the footballer Jamie was and the star he might have become, but for serious knee and leg injuries that robbed him of his pace.
Carragher, who became a rock at the heart of Liverpool’s defence with 508 Premier League appearances from 1996 to 2013 and is a Sky Sports pundit, was two months younger than Jamie.
In his 2008 autobiography he said Cassidy would have been a “certain Liverpool regular” but for the injuries.
Gerrard, two years younger than Cassidy and Carragher, became a Liverpool icon during his 504 league appearances from 1998 to 2015. He starred more than 100 times in the midfield for England from 2000 to 2014.
In his 2006 autobiography Gerrard recalled his excitement, shortly before leaving school, at being allowed to do a fortnight’s work experience with the club his heart was set on joining.
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“I was put in with the young pros, like Jamie Carragher, Jamie Cassidy [and] David Thompson. Their banter was just pure quality. So funny. So wicked.
“God, I was jealous of them. Carra and the rest were in at Melwood [the Liverpool training centre] every day, having the time of their lives, and I was heading back to a boring classroom after a fortnight.”
From the heights of starring for England under-16s and as a wide-left attacking midfielder with the Liverpool youth team, Cassidy’s post-injury decline was swift. Released by the Anfield club in 1999, he played a few games for Cambridge United before drifting into non-league football.
He is far from the only promising junior to have failed to succeed at the game’s top level. The same fate applies to the vast majority of football academy youngsters.
For Cassidy, though, the youthful promise was so huge, his early success so intoxicating, the hopes of his coaches so high. The sudden fall from grace was devastating.
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Watching from afar as many of his friends and contemporaries built successful professional careers, with accompanying adulation, fame and fortune for a select few, must have been brutal.
Thompson, who played alongside Cassidy in the team that won the 1996 FA Youth Cup, made 49 first-team appearances for Liverpool before continuing his career with clubs including Coventry City and Blackburn Rovers.
He retired aged 29 due to a knee injury and spoke frankly about his post-retirement struggles in Simon Hughes’ 2015 book Men in White Suits: Liverpool FC in the 1990s — The Players’ Stories.
“Me in the football world and me in the real world are two different animals. It’s in terms of having confidence and decisiveness. You lose what you had before. When you play football it masks a multitude of problems. You get up every day, you’ve got that drive and happiness, a routine.
“You swipe that away and you’re left with frustration. You’re left with a lot of unused energy because your body is used to blood running through it. It can be very destructive. It feels like you’re floating or drifting along with no purpose.”
Thompson recalled that two players were the stars of that 1996 youth team: “Their names were Michael Owen and Jamie Cassidy.”
How to fill the gap? How to replace that weekly adrenaline rush? Manchester crown court will hear on Wednesday that Cassidy found his outlet in the world of serious organised crime.
The evidence that led to the brothers’ downfall came via a means that in recent years has helped police to ensnare a multitude of high-level criminals: the penetration of EncroChat.
An encrypted, end-to-end phone network that became the accessory of choice for crime gangs across Europe, who thought it made their communications impossible to intercept, it in effect became a WhatsApp for criminals.
The code was cracked by the French intelligence services in the summer of 2020. The data they obtained was shared with the National Crime Agency in Britain. It proved a goldmine for prosecutors.
The EncroChat evidence that led to the arrest of the Cassidy gang came from six weeks of messages between April and May 2020.
Prosecutors believe this was a mere snapshot of an operation that had been operating undetected “for a number of years”, led by Jonathan Cassidy and his business partner, Nasar Ahmed.
Jonathan, they say, was an “established top tier importer of vast amounts of cocaine into the UK”. His EncroChat handle or username was WhiskyWasp.
In those six weeks alone he organised deals that led to the purchase of 356kg of South American cocaine in Amsterdam and its importation to the UK.
Those drugs had a street value of more than £28 million. After the cocaine reached Merseyside it was his younger brother’s job to oversee its distribution to clients in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Glasgow.
Jamie, whose handle was NuclearDog, was also the bookkeeper, recording the quantities of cocaine sourced and delivered along with the multimillion-pound payments received.
Jonathan’s cocaine operation was run from his home in the middle-class Merseyside coastal town of Crosby.
It relied on a network of close associates and relationships built over several years with international brokers in the Netherlands who regularly shipped large consignments of the drug to Amsterdam, courtesy of cartels in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador.
Cassidy’s most trusted lieutenant in Amsterdam would inform him when a new shipment was available. Millions of pounds moved between the two countries on a monthly basis with astonishing ease.
The transfers were made via illegal money service businesses (MSBs), usually at private addresses, that operated like banks. With a deal agreed, cash was deposited at a British MSB in exchange for a “token”, typically a single bank note with its unique serial number.
An image of the bank note would be sent via Jonathan’s EncroChat phone to his contact in Amsterdam, who by presenting it at a Dutch MSB would instantly receive the money to pay for the cocaine.
With payment duly made to the broker and the drugs in the gang’s possession, a small quantity, typically one gram, would be “cooked” — turned into crack cocaine — to test its purity. If all was well, the consignment was hidden in hollowed-out compartments in specially adapted vehicles — the Cassidys called them “taxis” — and brought to the UK on ferries.
In one such transaction in April 2020, Jonathan bought 162kg of cocaine. The gang’s per-kilo profit margin was sizeable. They would typically pay £28,000 a kilogram for the wholesale purchase, then sell it for £37,000 to regional customers in Britain.
Later in April Jonathan was offered a consignment of 1,200 kg, a deal that would have had a street value of £95 million. The Cassidys’ huge profits were laundered on a monthly basis.
In July 2020, with the gang suspecting that the EncroChat network had been infiltrated, Jonathan flew to Dubai where the father of five asked property agents to find him a villa to buy. His budget, he told them, was £2.3 million.
He flew back to England in October, apparently believing that he was “one of the lucky ones” whose phones had not been penetrated, but was arrested on arrival at the airport.
Jamie was arrested at his home a month later. When police searched the house they found a black machete, an encrypted telephone and a Greater Manchester police case summary of the operation that would lead to the gang members’ arrest.
Jonathan Cassidy and Ahmed, 51, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to import and supply class A drugs and to launder drug money.
Jamie, the brilliant young footballer whose future once seemed so golden, has admitted conspiracy to supply class A drugs and to launder drug money. All three face lengthy jail sentences.
