Michael Showers imported huge quantities of cannabis in the 1960s and 1970s before working for Liverpool Council
Michael Showers pictured at home in Liverpool(Image: Iain Watts)
A man who rose to become one of the first drug lords by importing cannabis through Liverpool’s docks has opened up on what turned him towards a life of crime. Michael Showers, dubbed “The Godfather”, imported huge quantities of cannabis into Liverpool in the late 1960s and early 1970s, earning profits of up to £700,000 a haul.
But after just six years in the drugs trade, he claims he retired to become a community leader working with Liverpool Council’s immigration advice unit. However, he later served two significant prison sentences for heroin trafficking – convictions that Mr Showers, now 79, has repeatedly disputed.
Mr Showers sat down with the ECHO this week to talk about his life ahead of the release of his first biography. Now of Allerton, Mr Showers told the ECHO how growing up in Toxteth and experiencing extreme racism from a young age had a significant effect on him and his family.
He said: “It was just diabolical. We would have to go out as a gang to protect ourselves. We would go to Sefton Park and people would say, ‘what are you doing here’? Even the police would question why we were where we were.
“We just got used to it. Our community was full of love. But there was also hate. Not from the people inside the ghetto, but from outside it. The police used to say ‘get back to your own area’.”
He first came to the attention of police when he was 15 when a friend of his stabbed a member of a gang who had racially abused them at a dance in Norris Green. He pleaded guilty to the offence and was sentenced to borstal for two years. He was released when he was 18 and returned to his community.
Michael Showers pictured at home in Liverpool(Image: Iain Watts)
However, he claimed the racial prejudice he and his friends faced in society prevented them from finding honest work. He told the ECHO: “I came out and couldn’t get a job. One of my friends went for a job as a milkman and was told ‘look, let’s have it right. How would you like your mother opening the door to someone like yourself every morning?’
“That was the way it was. I started grafting and that was that.” Mr Showers began carrying out “snatches” from banks and robbing vans carrying money and cigarettes. This again brought him into repeated contact with the law and he spent periods of the 1960s in-and-out of prison.
However, after visiting Nigeria, he broadened his horizons when he realised more money could be made. He said: “When I was out there I bumped into this guy and he said ‘listen, you from Liverpool?’
“I told him I was and he said ‘my ship is going to Liverpool and I’m taking some weed. Do you know anybody who wants to buy it? I said no problem and made a few phone calls. People met him, bought the weed, but I thought why be the third man when I could do it myself. I started shipping it.”
Over the next six years Mr Showers and his gang bought huge shipments of cannabis into Merseyside through the docks. He told the ECHO: “I didn’t want to go back to prison, so I just got more organised. We had a good firm, they were very loyal and we did some good work.
“We had strict jobs. We had people who worked at the docks. We had people whose families were quite high up so they knew if customs were onto something.
“We had the dealers and I was the overseas man. We compressed the weed into a tin. The first one was 500lbs in weight and it got through, no problem. That was that. We sold it for £300 a lb.”
Michael Showers pictured with his white Rolls-Royce
After that the gang was importing a tonne of cannabis at a time, with profits reaching around £700,000 a shipment. Mr Showers enjoyed the profits and was recognisable in his community for his immaculate dress sense and pristine white Rolls-Royce.
But in 1973 he called it quits because he “had enough money and didn’t want to travel anymore”. He told the ECHO he had no regrets from his involvement in the drugs trade as it “was just a job”.
In the full interview with the ECHO which can be read here, Mr Showers said he later became involved in the politics of the city which culminated in the 1981 Toxteth riots, which he said made him “so happy because [of] the unity of the people of Liverpool 8 during that time”.
However, he was later sentenced to 20 years in prison after he was arrested as part of a cross-border police operation codenamed Rain Main. He has repeatedly maintained he had no involvement and was only tied to the plot because he helped someone involved with his wife’s entry clearance into the UK.
Michael Showers pictured at home in Liverpool(Image: Iain Watts)
Mr Showers was released from prison in 2000, but wasn’t allowed to return to Liverpool until the following year. He eventually resettled with his wife Sharon, but was back before the courts in 2010, this time in Turkey, after he was arrested and charged on suspicion of attempting to supply heroin – allegedly as part of an international crime syndicate.
He again denied his involvement, claiming he was visiting a friend’s house and was not aware he was “grafting on the brown”. He was released again in 2016 and has since enjoyed his time out of spotlight with his wife and son Khalil – a classics graduate. He told the ECHO he has now decided to release his biography on his own terms.
You can read the ECHO’s full interview with Mr Showers here.
You can pre-order Michael Showers’ biography ‘Members Only’, written by Jamie Boyle, on the Warcry Press website here.