A selfie and a holiday snap helped lead to his downfall
Jamie Rothwell laughing and joking with police after he was caught in Barcelona(Image: GMP)
It was a holiday snap, the type of picture thousands of people upload to Instagram every day. Taken from a plush Spanish apartment, it showed a blue sky and a sea view.
But the sending of the image marked the start of a remarkable chain of events, which ultimately ended in its photographer being jailed after being hunted down across Europe.
Jamie Rothwell had been well known to law enforcement in Greater Manchester since his younger years. His profile increased when he became one of the leading protagonists in a gang war which plagued Salford, with the murder of ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey representing its deadly crescendo.
Rothwell had a modest list of previous convictions to his name, the most serious being a robbery committed with others when he was just 15. But the unveiling of a treasure trove of evidence, manna from heaven for prosecutors, revealed the true, staggering level which the 38-year-old was operating at.
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Described by police as being at the ‘very top of his game’ in the dog-eat-dog world of organised crime, Rothwell was feared by his peers. He was found to have dealt 200 kilos of cocaine worth £7 million. He had links to other gangsters around the world.
With a message from hundreds of miles away, sent from his apartment in Barcelona, Rothwell could order a hit, organise huge drug deals, or trade deadly firearms. But he was ultimately undone by the misplaced faith he held in a sophisticated communications system which he used to carry out his underworld deeds, which he believed was uncrackable.
‘Live-long’ was the anonymous, discreet username he was known by within EncroChat. But now, contrary to his username, Rothwell’s lives have finally run out.
The image which Jamie Rothwell took from his apartment in Barcelona which helped police track his location(Image: Channel 4)
Miraculously surviving after being shot in the street, acquitted of a murder conspiracy, stabbed in prison and twice extradited back to the UK, this time Rothwell could not avoid the inevitable. He has now received a huge 43 year sentence.
But the Salfordian gangster was not the only one to place complete trust in EncroChat. Using anonymous usernames, gangsters across Europe ordered murders, bought and sold guns and arranged huge drug importations, all under the noses of the police. Or so they thought.
In 2020, French law enforcement devised an ingenious way of infiltrating the system, by sending out what appeared to be an update to EncroChat phones. In fact, when Encro phones accepted the update, it allowed their messages to be shared with police in real time.
Criminals had become so confident that the system was unhackable that they even began sending selfies of themselves on EncroChat. That was how police identified Rothwell as being the operator of the ‘live-long’ username.
But it was the holiday snap which closed the net on Rothwell, who was living and conducting his business from a plush Barcelona apartment after going into hiding following the receipt of threat to life warnings. While police were provided with live messages, their priority was to protect lives.
A selfie which Jamie Rothwell took and sent on EncroChat which helped police discover he was the man behind the username ‘live-long'(Image: GMP)
Through those intercepted exchanges, it became clear that Rothwell was on the warpath. He had fellow drug dealer Leon Cullen in his sights. It’s not clear why the feud began.
In April 2020, Rothwell said on EncroChat: “I’ve give Leon a way out….he a grass…he turned on me for nothing….tried kill me….while my daughter there…he my only enemy….when he lands in UK that’s when it starts.”
Rothwell said he also had a list of ‘all those that work for’ Cullen, who was then in Dubai and in 2021 back in the UK and jailed for 22-and-a-half years. Among those believed to be linked to Cullen was Liam Byrne Jnr, who became a target for Rothwell. “I’m gonna do them all soon,” Rothwell said on EncroChat.
From his apartment, Rothwell arranged a team to head to Warrington to send a message. Knocking on Byrne’s front door, the gunman posed as a pizza delivery driver. But inside the pizza box there was a gun.
Leon Cullen(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Byrne Jnr was not home and it was his stepfather who actually answered. He was shot to the leg but survived. A planned hit at another house failed after the attackers arrived at the wrong address.
“I done two same time,” Rothwell boasted shortly after on EncroChat. It was this shocking episode of gun crime which prompted the National Crime Agency to hunt down Rothwell.
It proved that Rothwell meant business. For Mick Pope, the senior investigating officer on the case for the NCA, Rothwell’s whereabouts became his raison d’etre. “For a number of weeks, I didn’t think about much else,” he told the Channel 4 documentary, Operation Dark Phone, Murder by Text. He feared Rothwell may strike again.
But Pope described Rothwell’s posting of the holiday snap as a ‘fatal error’. He said: “When you go on holiday you take pictures, you take pictures of the city. That’s exactly what he’d done.
“I’m thinking, ‘this is gold dust’. We can find out where that is. That’s where the breadcrumb trail started.”
Within hours, officers, comparing with Google Earth images, had worked out he was in the Diagonal Mar area of the city, and pinpointed the specific apartment block he had taken the picture from. Pope then reached out to Spanish police, who had the power to arrest Rothwell on their home soil.
“The NCA sent us the picture,” an officer named Carlos, from the force’s special fugitives team based in Barcelona, told the programme. “We don’t know where it came from nor are we interested in finding out.
Police outside Manchester Crown Court when Jamie Rothwell was produced from HMP Wakefield under armed guard(Image: Manchester Evening News)
“What interests us is that he might be here. The British police told us that he was in a higher floor. I’m not sure how they knew that but this was our starting point. So we set off and started working on this building complex.
“We put a team together and set up surveillance to wait for him to come out. We had been monitoring for a long time. We expected him to come out but he didn’t leave.”
Officers believed that Rothwell had others to carry out day-to-day errands on his behalf. But on May 6, 2020, Spanish police had a breakthrough. Carlos added: “May 6 was an important day for us, because it was the day Jamie came out of the flat.
“A police woman who was on duty sees him leaving through the hall wearing a cap and sunglasses. He was clearly in disguise.
“When he left, he talked with someone who arrived on a scooter. The officer followed him as much as she could without getting noticed. But unfortunately we couldn’t arrest him immediately because she was on her own and we didn’t know if he was armed.
“But we just thought he had left to meet someone and that he would come back. The problem was he never returned to his flat.” The straight-talking Pope was not amused. “I was p***** off, because I thought ‘well he’s gone now’.”
But they would get their man. Weeks later, police identified an associate of Rothwell, who was not cooped up in the apartment all the time. Carlos added: “The other guy continued with his life, he went shopping. He gets a taxi, we follow him and he leads us to a building in a different area. That building has cameras.
“So we went to check all the recordings from the previous days.” Rothwell was seen on footage entering the building with the other man. According to police, Rothwell had complained about being on a low level within the building, and wanted to move.
Having learnt this, Spanish police sent in an undercover officer, posing as a potential tenant for the apartment, to scope out the property. Within the flat, the officer saw the clothes which Rothwell had been seen to wear on CCTV footage as he left the previous building where he’d been holed up.
Knowing he was there, Spanish police raided the apartment in the early hours of May 24, 2020.
A new mugshot of Rothwell was released by Cheshire Police after he learned his fate(Image: Cheshire Police)
Smiling as he realised he was being filmed, Rothwell joked with two officers leading him away. He said: “Are you getting a photo? Big celebration?” It was not yet public knowledge that EncroChat had been infiltrated by police. As Rothwell was brought back to the UK, officers continued to pour over thousands and thousands of messages.
In the meantime, Rothwell had more pressing concerns. He was facing a trial in Manchester, over his involvement in the Salford gang war which had plagued the city between 2014 and 2019.
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He had been a leading light in the feud which erupted between rival outfits the A Team and the Anti A-Team. Rothwell was said to be the right-hand-man of Michael Carroll, the alleged leader of the Anti A-Team, in opposition to the A-Team, said to be led by Stephen Britton. Gangster Paul Massey was said to be Britton’s mentor.
Rothwell was shot at a car wash in Ashton-in-Makerfield, Wigan, in March 2015 as part of the feud. A gun man sprayed bullets at him but Rothwell miraculously survived. In July that year, Massey was shot dead outside his home in Salford by Mark Fellows, an Anti A-Team associate nicknamed The Iceman.
Months later, in October, seven-year-old Christian Hickey was shot at his doorstep as the A Team sought revenge in a botched hit, thought to have been targeting the schoolboy’s father, a close associate of Carroll. It was a crime which shocked the country, an innocent schoolboy caught in the crossfire.
A still of CCTV footage showing the moment Jamie Rothwell was shot at a car wash(Image: Manchester Evening News.)
In October 2020, after being brought back from Barcelona, Rothwell went on trial at Manchester Crown Court alongside four other men, including Mark Fellows, accused of conspiring to murder two A Team associates, after Abdul Rahman Khan was shot in February 2015 and the other, Aaron Williams, was attacked with a machete in March that year. Rothwell was found not guilty of all charges.
Due to the short period between the EncroChat hack in May and June 2020 and the October 2020 trial in Manchester, the criminality revealed by Rothwell’s EncroChat messaging had to be brought in another future case.
At some point following his acquittals in November 2020, Rothwell left the country again. Weeks later, Rothwell was extradited back to the UK for a second time, after being arrested in a taxi in Amsterdam by Dutch police.
He has remained in prison on remand ever since, mainly at HMP Wakefield, often dubbed Monster Mansion for the notorious prisoners who have been housed there, including serial rapist Reynhard Sinaga and Soham murderer Ian Huntley. During a spell at HMP Manchester, Rothwell was stabbed in what his lawyer described as a ‘ferocious, almost fatal assault’.
He was attacked while he was on trial last summer. The incident caused the case to be adjourned. But Rothwell ultimately changed his plea to guilty.
Jamie Rothwell
In February this year, Rothwell pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess firearms with intent to endanger life; one count of conspiracy to possess ammunition with intent to endanger life; conspiracy to supply a controlled drug of Class A, namely cocaine; two counts of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent and a single count of conspiracy to supply a controlled drug of Class B, namely ketamine. Reporting restrictions were imposed to prevent his pleas being publicised, to protect the fairness of linked cases.
His pleas could only be reported for the first time last month following a successful legal application by the M.E.N. Reflecting on his situation, Rothwell is well aware that his life will not involve European travel for many years to come.
Instead, he faces imprisonment in a high security setting, with ‘mind numbing routine’. He now claims to want to change his ways, and to help stop others from following his path.
But there is no hurry for Rothwell to commit to this Damascene conversion. It will be many years before he is released, when he can actually prove if he is true to his word.
On Thursday at Manchester Crown Court, Rothwell received an overall 43 year sentence. His sentence was comprised of a total of 18 years in prison for drugs offences, and a consecutive 25 year extended sentence for firearms offences, including 21 years in prison and an extra four years on licence.