He appeared in the dock at Manchester Crown Court like a familiar-looking stranger, a vivid memory from a distant past.
Jamie Cassidy had once been one of the most promising young footballers at Liverpool, England’s most successful club, a player deemed good enough to train with his national team ahead of the 1996 European Championship.
Today, Cassidy was jailed for 13 years and three months for his part in a conspiracy involving South American drug cartels that saw 356kg (784lb) of cocaine with an estimated street value of ÂŁ28million ($35.8m) flood cities across northern England.
Cassidy, now 46, did not have a “pivotal” role like his 50-year-old brother, Jonathan, who received 21 years and nine months, but it was nevertheless “significant”, according to the judge, Nicholas Dean KC.
Jamie’s job was to “ensure things ran smoothly” once the drugs arrived in Liverpool from the Netherlands, hidden in modified vehicles. He acted upon instruction, being paid a wage for his “managerial” input, which involved taking care of collections and deliveries that amounted to around 150kg of the drug.
Huge profits were laundered every month but the Cassidys’ operation was stopped after the EncroChat messaging service, once the preferred tool of communication in the criminal community, was intercepted by French authorities.
Jonathan Cassidy and Nasar Ahmed, 51, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to import and supply class A drugs and to launder money, while Jamie admitted to supply and laundering. Like Jonathan, Ahmed received 21 years and nine months.
Having been held on remand since November 2020, former footballer Cassidy had more than three years to consider his future.
It might explain why on Wednesday, as he emerged from the steps that led from the cells in Manchester Crown Court, he seemed relaxed and focused, as the scale of the charges against him were laid bare in a legal setting for the first time.
In his closing notes, the judge suggested “it seemed likely” that Jamie had been drawn by his brother into a “business” that was also described as “sophisticated”.
Each of the offenders will serve half of their sentence before being released on licence.
Across a hearing that stretched over two days, there was only a brief mention of Cassidy’s life as a footballer whose talent was so vast that his name sometimes appears in the same sentences as true Liverpool greats.
In 1994, two summers before Cassidy lined up with future internationals Michael Owen and Jamie Carragher in the Liverpool Under-18s team that won the FA Youth Cup by beating a West Ham United side that featured Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand, he played for England as they reached the quarter-finals of Under-16 European Championship in the Republic of Ireland.
Liverpool, featuring Michael Owen (far right), won the 1996 FA Youth Cup final against Rio Ferdinand’s West Ham (Aubrey Washington/EMPICS via Getty Images)
As a centre-forward, the regard in which he was held was reflected by the fact he was given the No 10 shirt in that England squad while Emile Heskey, who six years later would join Liverpool from Leicester City for a record ÂŁ11million fee, had to make do with No 12.
Carragher became a legendary figure at Liverpool, making 737 appearances, second on the club’s all-time list behind Ian Callaghan’s 857. Yet when it came to England junior selection, Cassidy was called up ahead of him and David Thompson, who later featured in 56 Liverpool first-team games before fruitful spells in the midfields of Coventry City and Blackburn Rovers.
Thompson came from Birkenhead, which is separated from Liverpool by the River Mersey. In the early 1990s, Cassidy and Carragher, born in the same school year, were regarded as the best two young players in the city for their age group.
While Carragher came from Bootle and went to Savio Salesian College, representing Sefton Boys, Cassidy played for Liverpool Boys having attended the Alsop comprehensive where future Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier taught when he lived in the city in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Cassidy’s home turf was Walton and the warren of streets near City Road, close to Everton’s Goodison Park stadium, which became infamous in 1993 because of its proximity to the old railway line where two-year-old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-old boys.
Much of the reporting that followed painted an unremittingly bleak picture of the area and an “urchin” culture where children roamed freely after dark, causing havoc. There was little attention or sympathy given to a district that had been compared, in a paper published by the European Union, to some of the poorest parts of southern Italy and the old East Germany.
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