OPM - England's organized underworld

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

There are nearly 5,000 organized crime groups operating in the United Kingdom. But old family firms are a thing of the past - today large multidisciplinary international organizations with new technologies are on the scene. London has become the money laundering capital of the world and the heart of European organized crime. Crime is an integral part of the British economy.

Who runs the criminal underground today, and where do they run their business? There was a time when everyone knew the sketches of those who were wanted by the police, their nicknames in the style of Runyon characters (Damon Runyon is an American writer who wrote about the life of the streets of New York - editorial note of InoSMI), clubs and pubs where suspicious individuals gathered and pondered their dark deeds. Now crime is organized like any other business, and its protagonists look like ordinary brokers or tycoons. We live in a world in which, in the words of Rob Wainwright, until recently the chief police officer in Europe, crime "has become anonymous." The underground has become an elite.

According to estimates by the National Crime Agency (hereinafter - NABP), 90 billion pounds sterling of criminal money is laundered in the UK every year, which is 4% of the country's GDP. London has become the money laundering capital of the world and the heart of European organized crime. English has become the language of the international criminal community. Crime is an integral part of the British economy, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs, not only for professional criminals - the NABP estimates there are 4,629 organized crime groups currently operating - but also for police and prison officers, lawyers and judicial officials, as well as for the security business, which now employs over half a million people.

Just as the local store signs left the main streets, the old family businesses of criminals disappear, whether in London, Glasgow, Newcastle or Manchester. And just as British football fans had to learn the names of many new foreign players, detectives had to do the same as more criminals emerged. Britain once imported drugs from half a dozen countries, now there are more than 30. A young man who in the past would have looked for a job in trade or industry may now find that the drug business offers better career prospects. And in addition to drugs and weapons, British trade channels now facilitate the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe and Africa for prostitution and children from Vietnam who work for drug dealers in the lowest positions.

Over the past quarter of a century, the very face of world crime has changed. “The international nature of crime and technology are probably the two main factors that have changed,” says Steve Rodhouse, deputy director of NABP. Speaking at NABP's unassuming headquarters in Vauxhall, south London, Rodhouse reveals how quickly the agency's work has evolved. “Almost all of the most significant and large-scale operations of the NABP are currently associated with the movement of people, goods or money across international borders. The days when we dealt with drug gangs, firearms gangs or human trafficking gangs changed with the concept of multidisciplinary “polycrime.” Groups that serve the needs of the criminal markets, whatever that may be, are much more common now. This is a business and people are eager to exploit the markets, so why limit yourself to one?"

Wainwright, who served as head of Europol for nine years, also noted this globalization of crime. Speaking at a Police Foundation meeting just after his retirement last year, he said that Europol, the European equivalent of Interpol, has expanded since its founding in 1998, when “it was literally two men and a dog,” it seems bloodhounds, - in Luxembourg , currently deals with 65 thousand cases a year. According to his calculations, by 2018 there were 5,000 organized crime groups operating in Europe, and the mafia model was replaced by a “more flexible” model, in which 180 different countries and about 400-500 major money laundering specialists are involved. It is an international business with specialists in recruitment, relocation, money laundering and document fraud.

One of the main factors is, of course, the Internet. Wainwright likened its impact on crime to the impact of the car in the 1920s and 30s, when criminals were suddenly able to quickly hide and take advantage of new markets. He also mentioned the darknet, where he estimated that 350,000 different types of illegal goods were sold - 60% of them were drugs - but apart from them there was literally everything, from weapons to pornography, and even a rating system was working to assess the speed of delivery. and quality. New faces that the British police - and often Interpol and Europol - were unaware of, along with a growing number of tech-savvy criminals capable of hiding their identities, mingled into a toxic cocktail, a new species - Villains Anonymous.

One group that is not too worried about anonymity is the Hellbanianz (literally "hellish Albanians" - editorial note of InoSMI), a gang of daring young Albanians based in east London, in Barking. In 2017, they blew up the network when they appeared on Instagram and began posting rap songs on YouTube, bragging about their dishonest wealth and the power of their weapons.

The most prominent member of the gang, Tristen Asllani, who lived in Hampstead, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2016 for drug dealing and firearms crimes, including illegal possession of a Czech Škorpion assault rifle. He was caught in north London when, after a police chase, his car crashed into a computer repair shop in Crouch End. A photo of Aslani appeared on a social media page titled "My Albanian in Prison", showing him naked to the waist and apparently spending many hours in the prison gym. The photo is signed like this: "Even in prison we have all the conditions, only whores are missing."

The luxury cars and bundles of banknotes that appear in the Halbanians' videos were the fruit of the import of cocaine and marijuana, but the gang was also involved in the arms trade. The photos showed £ 50 bills wrapped around the cake and the HB logo lined with marijuana. After other members of the gang were arrested and imprisoned, they posted photographs taken with smuggled cell phones inside the prison, in which they happily ink the name of their gang on the walls.

Muhamed Veliu, an Albanian investigative journalist who knows London well, said the Helbanians have played a prominent role in the East London underworld for many years. “They are setting a bad example for young Albanians. At the sight of such photographs, they think that the English streets are paved with gold … Oddly enough, despite the fact that they are in prison, they show the rest of the world photographs of their lives behind bars. He spoke of his fears that the British media stereotyped Albanians as criminals, but added that the 2006 Securitas robbery, when two Albanians played a key role in stealing £ 53 million from a depository office in Kent, had become a kind of reason for national pride. "It was the 'crime of the century', a completely different matter than, for example, prostitution - the most base form of crime. Of course, this is not good, but you had to be a daredevil to decide on this, and, in any case, they went to- bank, - so reasoned in the Albanian community. "There are currently about 700 Albanians in British prisons.

“Albania is Europe’s largest cannabis producer,” said Tony Saggers, former head of drug control and intelligence at NABP. “It’s important not to create stereotypes, but the Kosovo war led the Albanians to pretend to be Kosovars in order to get asylum in the UK. Many of those who came just wanted a better life, but among them there were criminals who could create illegal networks … British criminals seek to get rich quickly and the Albanians' strategy was to get rich gradually, so they lowered the price of cocaine in the UK. They knew that if they expanded, they could conquer the market.” In addition, a reputation worked for them. “Albanian criminals can be ruthless and even bloodthirsty when they control organized crime at home,” Saggers said. that's their approach. So in the United Kingdom, old Albanian criminals don't use violence very often because they know that violence gets more attention."

Albanians have made their mark in the darkest ways when 26-year-old Luan Plackici was jailed in 2003 and confessed to having made over a million pounds from trafficking in "poor, naive and gullible" young women who thought they were waiting for the work of waitresses or barmaids. Some had to serve up to 20 men a day to pay for a £ 8,000 “ticket” from Romania and Moldova.

The international nature of human trafficking was fully exposed in 2014 following a lawsuit against a gang that brought over a hundred women into Britain. Then the leader of the gang, Vishal Chaudhary, was imprisoned for 12 years. Chodhary, who led a lavish life in London's elite Canary Wharf residential complex, met young women from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland through social media, offering jobs as nannies, cleaners or administrators in England. But when women reached the UK, they were forced to work in brothels. The Chodhary gang, which ended up in jail, consisted of his brother Kunal, who worked in the Manchester office of Deloitte, a Hungarian soldier named Krisztian Abel, and the latter's sister, Sylvia, who helped recruit women. …

Many young people are involved in what the legal system calls “forced crime”. Attorney Philippa Southwell specializes in cases involving young Vietnamese who are smuggled into the UK by traffickers and forced to work on cannabis farms to pay off debts of up to £ 30,000 that their parents took on yourself, so that children have the opportunity to start a new life in Europe.

© AP Photo, Richard Vogel

Growing cannabis in a greenhouse

“The way these criminal organizations work is to process children or young people and send them on a worldwide journey that can take months,” says Southwell. - They are taken out of Vietnam, often in transit through Russia, Germany and France by boats, trucks and even on foot. Upon arrival at their destination, they are locked in a room and forced to tend the cannabis plants by watering them and controlling the lighting. Cannabis cultivation is a complex multi-million-pound narcotic production, with electricity often being obtained illegally and using expensive equipment. Building windows can be boarded up. Farms are usually located in rural areas where the chance of being seen is lower."

Boys and young men find themselves in a kind of debt slavery, but no matter how hard they work, their debt is never paid off.“There is a misconception in the criminal justice system that they can leave when they want to because the doors are not always locked,” Southwell says. debt slavery, threats of violence - all these methods, taken together, are constantly used by traffickers."

From the Chinese opium traders in the 1920s, Italian gangsters in the 30s, Maltese pimps in the 50s, West Indian yards in the 60s, Turkish heroin traffickers in the 70s - all the way to East European gangsters and Nigerian crooks today, there has been an unfair tendency to regard foreigners as the main figures in the criminal world. While all of them could really play a role, homegrown British delinquents - whether they be clever crooks or ruthless crime bosses - have always been the backbone of the underworld.

“Everyone wants to be a gangster,” says BX, a young ex-mob from northwest London. - Everyone saw them on TV and wants to be like them. They watch music videos, and it seems to them that such people earn hundreds of thousands of pounds, and in real life they still live with their mother. Most of them hail from poor areas and see their parents plowing, struggling to make ends meet. They come home, mom is not at home, and all places where the children could play are closed. In nine cases out of ten, they drop out of school, dropping out. So if you have no money, you cannot get a job, you will use this opportunity. My parents had no idea what I was doing - it wasn’t written on my face.”

The recent spike in stabbing has drawn attention to the gangs. At one point last year, the Old Bailey had six separate knife murder trials, all of which were gang-related and each had more than one accused under 22 years of age. “It's not about blacks or whites, everyone does it,” says Bee Ex. “There’s no such thing:“I’m black, he’s white, we will definitely quarrel.”Small dealers still had ample opportunities:“You can earn a mower per week.”

The hierarchy within the gangs remained a key factor. “If you're a drug dealer, you need to find people to do the dirty work for you. Here's how it works: More experienced business people, say, 24 or 25 years old, see that you are doing well and can take you under their wing. Young guys looking ahead think, “I'm part of this guy’s enterprise. In a few years, I can become like him, get a promotion. "As the saying goes, loyalty pays off."

Territory is important from a business point of view. “If you are selling five kilos a week, and then suddenly only three kilos a week, you don’t need to think long to realize that someone is taking your customers. So you have to eliminate your opponent. How to do it? Destroy them or alert the police. Knocking, of course, is not acceptable, but I know a guy from Southall, he is now a millionaire; he was competing with a guy from the same area, so he reported him to the police."

There is a suspicion, however, not supported by anything, that some informants continued to commit crimes while under the protection of the police. “All the old rules don't work anymore. I know people who work with the police to make themselves immune. I know a man who, as everyone knows, cooperates with the police, he even shot at people, but if you type his name into Google, you will not find anything about him, and, believe me, he did so much that I have fingers are not enough to count."

The risks are high. “Of the people I grew up with, only the three of us have not been in prison, although I have been arrested many times. My older brother roamed free from prison all the time - nine months here, six weeks there. But the police are less in control now than ever, so that gives you an incentive, and even if you are arrested, you will not be there for a long time."

Young gangs gradually replaced old family brigades, and young robbers on scooters and in helmets, making their way into jewelry and mobile phone shops, replaced old bank robbers with sawn-off shotguns in their hands.

While these petty homegrown criminals may still be thriving, an increasing number of British underworlds are following old imperial traditions and heading overseas to work without intermediaries, entrenched not only in traditional havens in Spain, but also in the Netherlands., Thailand and South Africa.

The man destined to rewrite the rules of the drug trade is street-bred Liverpool named Koki Curtis Warren, or Cocky Watchman. He was born in 1963, and at the age of 12, when he was convicted of stealing a car, he took the path of crime. At 16, he nearly ended up in juvenile jail for assaulting the police. This was followed by other crimes, but it was only when he switched to the drug business, working from Amsterdam, that he gained a reputation as one of the fastest growing drug dealers of our time - Interpol's number one object and the main goal of the joint special operation of the British-Dutch special services, codenamed “Cancer (Operation Crayfish).

While Warren's move to Amsterdam, where other British dealerships were also based, seemed like a healthy idea in the sense that he was away from the British police, there were also downsides, since the Dutch authorities could intercept his phone without restriction and collect the necessary evidence. (Although they could not do without the help of the British to understand the Liverpool dialect.) In October 1996, Dutch police seized 400 kilograms of cocaine, 60 kilograms of heroin, 1,500 kilograms of cannabis, pistols and fake passports. Nine Britons and a Colombian were arrested and it soon became clear that Warren was the biggest fish. He was sentenced to 12 years for conspiracy to import drugs into Britain for an estimated £ 125 million. According to The Observer, he was “the richest and most successful British criminals ever caught,” and the only drug dealer to make the Sunday Times rich list. Even 20 years after Operation Cancer, T-shirts with Warren's old photographs were on sale in Liverpool.

After being released from a Dutch prison in June 2007, Warren was released for five weeks. He went to Jersey, but was under constant surveillance and was soon arrested. In 2009, he was convicted of conspiracy to bring £ 1 million worth of cannabis into Jersey and jailed for 13 years. Warren is believed to have invested his fortune in businesses ranging from gas stations to vineyards, football clubs and hotels. A Jersey court ordered him to pay £ 198 million after he failed to prove that his business empire was not based on the proceeds of the cocaine trade. Detectives secretly recorded his conversation with a visitor at the prison, to whom he bragged in 2004 that he had been able to launder huge amounts of money. “Damn it buddy, sometimes we made about £ 10 or 15 million a week,” he told some of his visitors. “I was bragging like an idiot and just showing off in front of them,” Warren later defended. Jersey Attorney General, QC Timothy Le Cocq called him "one of the most visible representatives of organized crime in Europe." He sat down for another 10 years, because he could not pay the required amount of money.

He told The Guardian journalist Helen Pidd when she interviewed him in a jail in Jersey that he did not approve of drugs: “I have not smoked a single cigarette or drank a glass. I have never tasted alcohol or anything else in my life. Not interested". Most of all, after his release, he strove to leave England - "and never return." He added, "I also wouldn't want to upset my mom this way."

Few have a better understanding of the Warren case than former NABP officer Tony Saggers, who was and continues to be an expert on the Warren trial. “Curtis Warren was just the first sign,” he said. - You can understand people like him who live in difficult conditions and situations, in municipal houses, and he was in his own way brave in some respects, since he managed to establish himself in places like Venezuela and Colombia, which were probably even more dangerous then, than now. He took a place at the other end of the supply chain and somehow defined a similar model of behavior for an elite drug dealer. But nowadays high-level criminals are less and less involved in their own affairs, calmly using others who are under them."

Over the past two decades, other British criminals have also spread their networks widely. One of the most famous was Brian Wright, once one of Britain's most active cocaine smugglers, nicknamed The Milkman because he always delivered. He worked from Turkey-controlled Northern Cyprus and from Spain. In 1998, he allegedly imported nearly two tons of the drug, resulting in, according to one customs investigator, "the cocaine was coming in faster than people could sniff it." Wright, a Dublin native, owned a villa near Cadiz, which he called "El Lechero" - Spanish for "milkman" - and also a house in Ascot and an apartment on the Royal Quay in Chelsea, and used some of his income to bribe race organizers, which he then bet on, laundering drug profits. He was eventually detained in Spain, brought back to England, and in 2007, at the age of 60, he was convicted of drug trafficking by the Woolwich Royal Court and jailed for 30 years.

Some criminals have worked out very successful fraudulent schemes on older Britons. John Palmer, who took part in the heist of bars from the Brinks-Mat vault (after which he received the nickname "Goldfinger", that is, "Golden Finger"), became rich in a dishonest business of joint rental housing in Tenerife. A ruthless manipulator, he took advantage of thousands of gullible souls, many of whom were elderly vacationers, to believe his tales of the wealth they could earn by investing in timesharing apartments that no one had ever thought to build. It seemed that he had everything: a yacht, cars with personal numbers, dozens of objects in his property. He even made it to No. 105 on the Sunday Times Rich List. “Remember the golden rule,” was his motto. "Who owns the gold sets the rules." But in 2001, he was convicted of a timeshare fraud that left 16,000 victims with an estimated £ 33 million loss and eight years in prison.

Then, in 2015, Palmer was shot and killed by a hitman in his garden in Essex. It was rumored that he was killed because he might have collaborated with the Spanish police in another fraud case. The defendant in that case was convicted in Spain in May this year, and the UK police have just issued a new appeal for help in finding Palmer's killer, recalling that a reward of £ 100,000 is being offered, in case older informers fall for it. from the criminal world.

The illusion that Spain could still be a safe haven for fugitive criminals was finally dispelled in 2018 when Brian Charrington - Curtis Warren's partner and considered one of the largest international drug dealers of his generation - sat down for 15 years. drug trafficking and money laundering in Alicante. The Spanish press christened him el narco que escribía en Wikipedia ("the drug lord who wrote on Wikipedia" - editorial note of InoSMI) for the fact that he kept updating and supplementing his page. This former Middlesbrough car dealership owner was arrested in 2013 at his villa in Calpe, on the Costa Blanca, where some real estate agents are offering bulletproof glass as an added service along with a hot tub and barbecue area. There were crazy rumors about crocodiles in his pool, but, unfortunately, the police did not find a single one.

Charrington was accused of supplying huge quantities of drugs to Spain through a marina in the city of Altea, north of Benidorm. He claimed that his money was earned legally. “I buy and sell villas and pay taxes,” he told the court, but was still fined nearly £ 30 million. After a lengthy investigation involving Spanish, British, Venezuelan, Colombian and French police, his assets, including a dozen houses, as well as cars and boats, were confiscated. After the verdict, the Wikipedia article on him was quickly updated.

The titles of the crime memoirs published over the past ten years alone speak for themselves. 2015 saw The Last Real Gangster by Freddie Foreman; The Last Gangster: My Final Confession by Charlie Richardson was published immediately after his death in 2012; The Last Godfather, the Life and Crimes of Arthur Thompson was published in Glasgow in 2007. Requiem for the old British criminal world.

In many ways, it is already shrouded in a haze of nostalgia. The television series Peaky Blinders spawned its own fashion accessories industry. Now you can buy razor-shaped "peaky" cufflinks or wear a cap and vest from David Beckham's new clothing line of the same name - perhaps the members of this ruthless and greedy gang from Birmingham in the 1920s, the history of which the series is based, grinned grimly would. The website henorstag.com even recommends using the Peaky Blinders style as ideal for a bachelor party: “For a theme that will appeal to the ladies, you need to replicate the early 20th century style with black caps, stylish gray or black three-piece suits, and Complement this look with charcoal coats and pumps. (Throw in a club and a straight razor and you can actually take them down.)

While the Kray twins brand is still something of the underworld Marks & Spencer store - a framed letter from Ronnie Cray of Broadmoor Hospital is being sold on eBay for £ 650, - changes in legislation give criminals less chances to brag about past feats. In the old days, under the “double responsibility” rule, if you were found not guilty of murder, you could not be tried again for that. This rule was overturned by the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, so the days when a villain could recount in his memoir how he managed to commit a crime are over. The Coroners and Justice Act of 2009 made it illegal for criminals to profit from their crimes, so they could no longer sell their stories, at least not officially. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and its growing application to hardened criminals means that illegal proceeds can be confiscated.

Unsurprisingly, the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary - the very last job the elderly diamond wheezes were doing - received so much attention. Even one “last of the last”, Fred Foreman, hoped to be invited to participate in this. “I heard that Terry [Perkins, one of the instigators] was looking for me shortly before this burglary happened, so I guess that's the way it was,” he says.

Perkins died in his cell at Belmarsh Prison last year. Foreman, who made a name for himself with the Cray brothers in the 1960s, now lives in a nursing home in west London. He doubts that the current generation of gangsters will ever write a memoir: "I don't think someone who turns to crime these days will live long enough to build a reputation for themselves, do they?"

But underworld recruiters - poverty, greed, boredom, envy, peer pressure, glamorous values - will never lack volunteers, whether they live long enough to make a name for themselves or not.