Sharing the South London patch with larger families like the Arifs are the crack-dealing gangs. On the other side of the Thames, in Adams’ territory, are the North London forgery gangs. Newcastle upon Tyne is traditionally the home of protection racketeers. In the 1920s Sheffield was known as ‘Little Chicago’. More recently its gang warfare has been dictated by postcodes, the S3 and S4 gangs becoming locked in a vendetta that resulted in bloodshed on the streets. In Birmingham, the recent threats to law and order have been from juvenile gangland, where guns are a fashion accessory and shootings take place in broad daylight. A drive-by shooting with a machine-gun that killed innocent bystanders at a New Year’s Eve party in 2013 shocked the nation. In Glasgow, savage blade attacks typify the street violence. In 2005 the World Health Organisation designated the city the murder capital of Europe. Overall, Scotland has the second highest murder rate in Western Europe (after Finland), the main cause being overuse of alcohol and drugs. Glasgow suffers about 70 killings each year, much of the violence blamed on gangs vying to control the city’s drugs trade. The WHO added that ‘a culture of young men carrying knives’ also played a part.
In Liverpool, the city’s fortunes were determined by the docks, which allowed local criminals to play a part on the international stage. Merseyside is one centre where, unlike other provincial towns mentioned above, a criminal ‘Mr Big’ did emerge in recent years – the infamous Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, whose drugs gang saw millions of pounds passing through the city in the Nineties. Warren is the only known criminal to make it into The Sunday Times Rich List through his very public role as a mastermind of Britain’s £2 billion-a-year cocaine business.
Warren, a mugger and robber from the age of 11 and a drug dealer while still in his teens, became by the 1980s a trusted client of Colombian cocaine cartels, Turkish heroin traders and Spanish marijuana suppliers, a reputation that enabled him to get vast quantities of drugs on credit. After a 1993 trial for smuggling £250 million of cocaine, at which he was acquitted on a technicality, he is said to have told Customs officers: ‘I’m off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can’t fucking touch me.’
As Merseyside turf wars worsened in the mid-Nineties, Warren switched his gang’s operations to Sassenheim in Holland. But when Dutch police intercepted £125 million worth of drugs he was smuggling into the country in 1996, he was jailed for 12 years. Three years later, while in Holland’s Hoorn prison, he kicked another inmate to death and earned himself an extra four years for manslaughter. In 2005 Dutch authorities charged him with continuing to run his smuggling business from his jail cell but the case was dropped because of insufficient evidence.
Meanwhile, in Warren’s absence, gang rivalry was causing chaos in Liverpool. In 2004 the biggest explosions in mainland Britain since the IRA ceasefire were the result of a drugs cartel faction planting car bombs outside two Liverpool police stations in a bid to stop a major investigation. It was a power struggle that resulted in the death of another drugs boss, former Warren associate Colin ‘King Cocaine’ Smith, who was gunned down as he left a Merseyside gym in 2007.
On his release from prison in Holland, Warren returned to his Merseyside ‘manor’ to resume his role as ‘King of Coke’. He did not stay free for long. In 2009 the 46-year-old faced a Jersey court and was jailed for 13 years for trying to smuggle £1 million of cannabis into the Channel Islands – for him, a minor consignment which he had described as ‘just a little starter’ to get himself re-established. But even from prison, Warren’s tentacles still stretched around the globe, according to police. One officer on the case said: ‘Cocky needs only a mobile phone to communicate with his gang on the outside for him to operate a £300 million-a-year smuggling business from his cell.’ The retribution that looked as if it would have most effect on the cocky crime lord, however, was a more subtle attack on his empire – using court orders seeking to confiscate all his ill-gotten assets.
Like Liverpool, Manchester has long had a deep-rooted gang culture, often creating national headlines in recent years. The so-called Quality Street Gang ruled the city for three decades from the Sixties through to the Eighties. The QSG, as it became known, tended to get the unjustifiable blame for every crime in the city, although the members of this loose-knit organisation were certainly behind a number of well-executed robberies and major drug importation. The thriving Manchester club scene was entirely dominated by the QSG. However, the gang’s influence began to fade in the mid-Eighties after two violent robbers turned supergrass, leading to a special police squad conducting a string of raids across the region that netted a healthy haul of crooks and booty.
The QSG’s successors have certainly not faded from view, for there is nothing secretive about Manchester’s scary Noonan family. They court celebrity status and have become reality television stars by openly boasting about their lives of crime. Led by brothers Domenyk and Desmond, the family starred in fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries that revealed their gloating roles in one of the UK’s most notorious crime families. (The series At Home With The Noonans, presented by investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre, was screened on TV’s Crime and Investigation Network.)
There are 14 Noonan siblings who all have names beginning with the letter D. Raised in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill area, it is claimed their mother once burned their home down in a bid to move up the council housing list. The Noonans worked as bouncers at the city’s notorious Hacienda nightclub. When they had trouble with another gang, they raided the rivals’ pub. Wielding shotguns and machetes, they chopped the head off their guard dog off and placed it on the pool table, warning them: ‘Next time it will be human.’
The family’s burly boss, Domenyk Noonan, has more than 40 convictions for armed robbery, assaulting police, attacks on prison officers, deception, firearms and fraud. While in Manchester’s Strangeways jail, he changed his name to Dominic Lattlay Fottfoy – in homage to one of his father’s sayings: ‘Look After Those That Look After You, Fuck Off Those That Fuck Off You.’ When he last appeared gloatingly on television in 2012, the 48-year-old had spent 22 years in prison – and, for that particular ‘starring role’, he was interviewed behind bars.
Older brother ‘Dessie’, an enforcer linked to dozens of armed robberies and several murders, was knifed to death in 2005. He was found slumped in the street close to his home in the Chorlton district, having made a last phone call to tell his wife he was dying. Shortly before his murder, aged 46, he appeared in a TV documentary, A Very British Gangster, and at first denied police reports that he had carried out 25 murders. But when asked how many people he had actually killed, his brother Domenyk butted in to say it was 24 – before ‘Dessie’ held up seven fingers indicating that the true figure was 27. ‘Dessie’ Noonan then boasted ominously: ‘No one would dare touch us. If they did there would be serious fireworks. I’ve got a bigger army than the police. We have got more guns than the police, silly buggers. We’re strong and we’ve got strong people around us. People know that. If they think they can take one of us out and that’s the end of it, then they’re silly people, fucking silly people.’
However, in September 2012, the violent Noonans were warned they would never again be untouchable after one of the family, Domenyk’s nephew 25-year-old Damien, was jailed for abduction, torture and plotting to flood the streets of Manchester with a banned dance drug. He and two accomplices were each jailed for six years and nine months at Preston Crown Court. The court heard that the gang dragged a rival off the street and, in front of bystanders and children, beat, kicked and stamped on their victim. During his hour-long ordeal, their target was threatened with a blowtorch and told he would have his kneecaps shot off. Police found him still alive in the boot of Damien Noonan’s car.
It has long been assumed that the sort of violence in which the Noonans and their ilk gloried would have faded from fashion as criminals enter the electronic age, in which money can be made and moved without a crook getting his hands dirty. That theory ignore
s the surge of foreign-influenced criminals in the UK. Since the late Seventies, as ethnic communities established themselves in Britain, a new type of organised criminal has emerged, the most obvious being the Chinese Triads and the Jamaican Yardies, each of which operates within its own communities, at times extremely violently.
Four separate Triad societies – 14K, Wo Shing Wo, Wo On Lock, San Yee On – are known to operate throughout the UK, with bases in every city where there is a large Chinese community. They make their money from drug trafficking, prostitution, credit card fraud, protection, extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, copyright piracy, money laundering and immigration. Police find it almost impossible to persuade witnesses to come forward because of brutal reprisals and intimidation. But in the Nineties, the problem of extortion, or ‘tea money’, became so severe within London’s Chinatown that restaurant owners called on the government and police for help.
The influence of the Yardies has grown with the boom in crack cocaine, Jamaican gangs now controlling most of the supply in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds and Bristol. Yardies use brutal tactics against rivals and a string of casual shootings, in which innocent bystanders were also killed, has brought their activities shockingly to public notice.
Home-grown young Asian gangs tend towards ‘protection’, car theft and credit-card fraud. Hell’s Angels, who have about a dozen chapters in the UK, have been accused of firearms sales, drug trafficking and extortion. In Northern Ireland, despite the peace process, both Republican and Loyalist terrorist groups still raise funds through robbery, extortion, smuggling, gun running and ownership of drinking clubs.
An investigation by the BBC’s prestigious Panorama programme in 2013 found a ‘ghost community’ of 600,000 illegal immigrants, many of whom operate in criminal gangs. It pointed out that whereas once most serious crime was down to indigenous ‘firms’ like the Krays or the Richardsons, now drug smuggling, people trafficking, prostitution, robbery and fraud are all being carried out under the auspices of gangs whose homelands are overseas. Gangsters from abroad now operating in Britain include, of course, the Italian Mafia, principally involved in financial crime. There are also elements of the Japanese Yakuza, of Vietnamese, Kurdish and Turkish drugs gangs and West African fraudsters.
But it is crimes committed by EU nationals that have more than trebled in just five years, according to Panorama. The TV report estimated that more than 1,000 gangs of Eastern Bloc nationals were operating in Britain, netting £30 million a year. The specialities of these migrants are street begging and cashpoint scams, with Romanians responsible for 92 per cent of all ATM fraud in Britain, according to police figures. One of the most notorious examples was Gheorge Banu, who in 2005 was ringleader of a gang who used fake ATM machines to record financial details in order to steal £643,000 from customers’ accounts. A judge had already asked for his deportation after a previous conviction. Another Romanian fraudster, Adu Bunu, was jailed for five years in 2008 after he was convicted of cloning more than 2,000 cards, which allowed him to steal more than £1 million. Instead of giving his baby son toys to play with, Bunu presented him with a mountain of stolen banknotes. The cost of accommodating Eastern European crooks like him in British prisons was reckoned in 2013 to be almost £100 million a year – and rising.
In March 2013, authorities in Europe arrested 44 members of a global fraud network in a joint operation against a gang targeting victims in Britain and 15 other countries. Operation Pandora Storm successfully shut down illegal workshops producing card machine theft devices and involved 82 house searches in Romania and the UK.
A 2013 report by Financial Fraud Action, an organisation formed to fight plastic-card crime, reported that ATM thefts had trebled in a year, and that police intelligence suggested 90 per cent of such thefts had been linked to Romanian criminals.
An even greater threat, according to both police and NCIS, is the influx of criminals and vast sums of money from the former Soviet Union. The break-up of the USSR resulted in a sudden decline in law and order. The profits of organised crime there have been fed through the weakly-regulated banking system in the gangs’ own countries. And here the once highly respected British financial services sector plays its part. It is conservatively estimated that £5 billion of criminally generated money enters the UK financial system each year. This enables foreign criminals to gain a foothold without stepping onto British soil.
As a senior legal academic, Dr Barry Rider of Cambridge University, warned: ‘Official investigations have continued grossly to underestimate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the British criminal classes. This is particularly so in regard to financial frauds and money-laundering.’ And as a Home Affairs Select Committee report concluded: ‘Organised crime raises images of the Mafia or the Krays. But to confine concern to such relatively tightly organised groups would be to miss most of today’s criminal activity – which, if more loosely organised, is nevertheless actually more threatening.’
CHAPTER 14
A CHUBBY MOBSTER’S MURDEROUS MAYHEM
Carl Anthony Williams, Australia’s most notorious mobster, was about to name names. Fellow inmates at maximum-security Barwon prison learned that he was cooperating with police, detailing gangland killings of which he had intimate knowledge.
On the night of 19 April 2010, Williams phoned his lawyer to claim that he was being taunted by prisoners howling like dogs, a sign that his life was in danger. As the howling echoed throughout the prison, the drugs kingpin put the phone down in terror – and minutes later his skull was crushed with the metal stem of an exercise bike wielded by a fellow inmate.
Thus ended the career of Carl Williams, aged 39, the central character of a spate of rival gang murders that had terrorised the state of Victoria. The mobster had been serving a life sentence, with a minimum 35 years before parole, for ordering a string of contract killings.
Williams, born in Melbourne in October 1970, grew up in a culture of drug abuse. His elder brother Shane died of a heroin overdose. He married Roberta Mercieca, a convicted drug trafficker, with whom he had one daughter. Williams worked as a labourer and his wife ran a children’s clothes shop.
His life of crime started with petty thefts. In 1990 he was fined AU$400 for handling stolen goods and failing to answer bail. Then in 1993 he was sentenced to 150 hours community service for criminal damage. But the drugs trade would become his main occupation.
In the 1990s the local manufacture of illegal pills had become a boom industry, to the extent that police described Melbourne as the ‘amphetamine capital of Australia’. The gangs that ran this trade were also involved in protection rackets, nightclubs, prostitution, illegal gambling and armed robbery.
A special police unit, the Purana Task Force, was established to curb the inter-gang violence that exploded across the state of Victoria. And they soon established that Carl Williams was becoming the central figure among Melbourne’s mobsters as he vied for power with rival crime families. These included: The Honoured Society, an Italian gang who controlled the city’s vegetable markets; the Carlton Crew of Cosa Nostra expatriates; The Dockers, a group of Irish waterfront workers led by the Moran family; the Radev Gang, led by career criminal Nikolai ‘the Russian’ Radev; The Sunshine Crew led by Paul Kallipolitis, and of course the Williams family led by Carl and his father George.
The period that became known as ‘the Melbourne Gangland Killings’ began with the 1998 murder of a Carlton Crew chief by hitmen from The Dockers. Drive-by murders, suburban ambushes, workplace executions and even car bombings followed over the next few years. In October 1999 Carl Williams was shot in the stomach in the city’s Gladstone Park but survived. Two members of the Moran family were present at the time but Williams told police he had blacked out and could not identify his assailants.
In June 2000 Williams ambushed Mark Moran outside his Aberfeldie home and shot him dead. Between 20 and 30 other shootings followed – putting paid to Nicolai Radev, Paul Kallipolitis and thr
ee more of the Moran family – but by now the net was tightening on Williams. In November 1999 Williams, his father and another associate were arrested and charged with the illegal possession of 250,000 amphetamine tablets after a raid on a Broadmeadows drug factory. The pills had a street value of $20 million.
The case never went to court, however, because of corruption allegations against detectives involved in the raid. Williams was re-arrested a year later but again granted bail while a corruption investigation ensued.
So it was not until 2004 that the crime kingpin received his first major jail sentence: seven years for drug trafficking. Two years later he was sentenced to 27 years for the murder of a drug dealer shot outside his home in front of his five-year-old son. The following year he received two 25-year sentences for the slayings of Mark Moran’s stepfather Lewis and an associate. He also got a life term for the murder of Lewis Moran’s son Jason and a money launderer named Mark Mallia.
Jason Moran’s execution took place while in the driving seat of his van, with five young children watching from the back seat. Williams and seven henchmen who took him to a warehouse and tortured him into confessing where some laundered money was buried, kidnapped Mallia. His charred body was found by the Fire Brigade in a wheelie bin.
When in 2010 Carl Williams’ skull was smashed with a metal bar, it was seen by many Australians as no more than fitting punishment for the man who had brought so much murderous mayhem to the streets of Melbourne.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 14