Liverpool’s Most DANGEROUS Enforcer, the Deli Mob: The Full Story

On the evening of 14 April 2019, Lee Deakin stepped outside his house in St Helens to get a phone charger from his car. Two minutes later, acid had been thrown directly into his face. His skin, he would later tell a court, felt like jelly. That attack wasn't a moment of rage. It was a transaction. Six thousand pounds for a corrosive attack. Ten thousand pounds for permanent blindness. Agreed in advance, in writing, on an encrypted messaging platform that the people using it believed was completely invisible to law enforcement. They were wrong. This is the full story of Jonathan Gordon — Kirkdale enforcer, EncroChat handle ValuedBridge — and the Deli Mob contracts that a French and Dutch intelligence operation would eventually hand directly to the National Crime Agency. Operation Venetic cracked open over a billion messages from the platform European organised crime had built its entire infrastructure around. Inside those messages: price lists, instructions, a single word that meant something irreversible, and a photograph that a man trained in operational distance sent to his own employer. Gordon was convicted on six counts at Liverpool Crown Court and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum tariff of twenty-four years and eight months. He was thirty-four years old. But the sentence didn't answer the question this case actually raises. Gordon received the price list. Someone else wrote it. Covered in this video: The attack on Lee Deakin — St Helens, April 2019 | The Deli Mob and Kirkdale's organised crime landscape | EncroChat: what it was, who used it, and why they trusted it | Operation Venetic and the NCA's billion-message haul | The Warrington contracts and the DNA evidence left at the scene | The firearms incidents — including a bullet through an elderly couple's bedroom window | R v Afolabi and the legal challenge to EncroChat admissibility | Six convictions, three sentences, one open question | The Offensive Weapons Act 2019 | AceProspect — and what the trial left unresolved 📌 SOURCES & FURTHER READING Liverpool Crown Court sentencing remarks — Judge David Aubrey QC NCA Operation Venetic press release — June 2020 Offensive Weapons Act 2019 — legislation.gov.uk R v Afolabi and Others [2021] — EncroChat admissibility ruling 🔔 Subscribe for in-depth coverage of UK organised crime, serious case reviews, and the cases that never quite made the front page — but probably should have. #TrueCrime #EncroChat #OperationVenetic #UKCrime #JonathanGordon #DeliMob #AcidAttack #NCA #OrganisedCrime #LiverpoolCrime #ContractViolence #TrueCrimeUK