Gangland UK

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  His associate replied, ‘You are mad!’

  Adams laughed, adding, ‘I’ll do it in front of his kids. I’m gonna do them. I’m gonna fuckin’ do them. When I hit someone, I do them damage.’

  Other tapes recorded Terry Adams boasting about his history of violence to a man who owed him £100,000. ‘On my baby’s life Dan, his kneecap come right out there, all white Dan, all bone. If I have to fight, I cut them with my knuckles.’

  Adams also talked to his wife Ruth about collecting money from debtors in July 1998. ‘Tell ’em, they get hurt if they don’t pay. It’s like that, Ruth. They have that word by an Adams.’

  The tapes also document Adams’s anger with his own brother Tommy, jailed in 1998 for a cannabis smuggling plot. ‘When you have got your so-called brother having it off with a fuckin’ Paki… Informers getting us in the fuckin’ papers and with the fuckin’ Old Bill… When you have got a so-called brother who is trying to get us all done in so that he secures his freedom… he’s worse than a fuckin’ grass because he’s had it with a grass.’

  Terry Adams finally came undone after a specialist police team spent 21 months bugging his £2 million mansion. It was a joint enterprise between the National Crime Squad, MI5 and HM Revenue & Customs – the latter two agencies being among the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world. Stacked up against him, the odds were overwhelming, and the investigation would cost the taxpayer £50 million.

  In May 2003, his home was raided. Police found £50,000 worth of stolen antiques and £60,000 in cash was discovered hidden in the attic. And despite using his fortune to fly first-class around the world, stay at the best hotels, splash out on expensive jewellery and send his daughter to a private school, Adams claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that he was merely a marketing consultant earning £200 a week. He was granted legal aid and released on £1 million bail. He now claimed that his IQ was so low he didn’t even understand the charges, and demanded the surveillance tapes be transcribed before the trial.

  In February 2007, 52-year-old Terry Adams pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder £1.1 million. Of the defendant standing before him, His Honour Judge Timothy Pontius said, ‘Your [guilty] plea demonstrates that you have a fertile, cunning and imaginative mind capable of sophisticated, complex and dishonest financial manipulation.’

  On 9 March, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He was ordered to pay back all his defence costs and £750,000 compensation or face another four years behind bars. His Honour Judge Pontius remarked that Adams had delayed the case for four years and had changed his legal team three times. It was said that prosecution costs were about £4 million. Costs still have not been fully assessed and another hearing will decide if Adams would be forced to contribute. Further charges of mortgage and tax deception against Adams were allowed to lie on the file.

  Charges against his wife, Ruth, were not proceeded with. A third defendant, 38-year-old Johanna Barnes (formerly the wife of Solly Nahome), admitted one charge of forgery involving a £15,000 loan agreement. She was fined £5,000 and ordered to pay £2,500 in costs. The judge told her, ‘You foolishly but deliberately and I think callously decided to forge your late husband’s signature within weeks of his murder for the purposes of subterfuge for the benefit of Terry Adams.’

  Terry Adams was the British crime godfather who built up a £200 million empire because he was feared more than death itself. After more than a decade of investigation by police, the Revenue and MI5, Adams’s millions are still hidden. He is known to have a yacht, a house in Hendon Wood Lane, Mill Hill, London, worth at least £750,000, and an interest in a villa in Cyprus. The gang also owned clubs and discos in north London, were silent partners in clubs in the West End and Soho, ran protection rackets and reportedly commissioned armed robberies from which they took a cut. At one stage, the brothers tried to invest in the London Arena and Tottenham Hotspur, although they are said to be Arsenal fans. Indeed, such was the gang’s power and fearsome reputation, it even ran a franchise operation, allowing other gangs to use its name at a cost of £250,000 per operation. The condition – ‘pay within a week, or else’.

  Patrick, a married father of four, still has a home near the family’s traditional Islington base, but is now living in Spain. Sean – aka Tommy – was cleared of involvement in the laundering of gold bullion from the Brinks Mat job in 1985. He is suspected of establishing connections to other criminal organisations as well as gaining an $80 million credit line from Colombian drug cartels. In 2001, the Independent stated that Sean ‘was living in exile in Spain in a walled villa bristling with security cameras a few miles south of Torremolinos’.

  Family member Michael Adams, born in 1965, was convicted of possessing a firearm in the mid-1980s. And brother Robert (deceased), a relative, was imprisoned for his part in a huge attempted robbery at the Millennium Dome, London, on 7 November 2000.

  Among other associates of the Adamses’ were Billy Isaacs, who was convicted of passing secret files to the Adams family. Christopher McCormick, who was alleged at a 1999 trial to be an enforcer for the family. He was cleared of causing grievous bodily harm to a businessman who failed to repay £1.4 million to Terry Adams. Anthony Passmore, a conman jailed in 1999 for six years over a multi-million-pound fraud who escaped from Ford Open Prison two months after his trial and has not been seen since. Anthony Jones, 42, and David Tucker, 62, who were suspected, in 2005, by authorities in Florida, of trying to smuggle cocaine worth $8 million on behalf of the Adams family.

  Pat ‘Pat the Rat’ McCadden, millionaire Scottish gangster, is another of the Adamses’ associates. McCadden and his family lived in a stunning mansion in the upmarket Costa del Sol resort of Marbella, after fleeing a £1 million tax bill in Scotland.

  His shoe importation firm, Genoa Footwear, seemed to be a huge success and gave McCadden a life of luxury, including three Rolls-Royces. But despite slick TV advertisements, Genoa went bust amid claims it was selling counterfeits of expensive Italian shoes. Pat was bankrupted in 1985 and, in the same year was jailed for ten years over a £600,000 heroin haul.

  In 1998, the former playboy was back in the public eye. Now aged 44, the Mail on Sunday revealed that McCadden, then living in upmarket Bearsden, near Glasgow, was linked to a security firm, which was fronted by his second wife, Louise, and daughter, Jane, from his first marriage. Elite Security (Scotland) Ltd later went bust.

  In 2001, Inland Revenue investigators and police launched a probe into the tax affairs of Elite and McCadden. It was calculated that he owed £1 million and, just as the investigation was coming to a head, ‘Pat the Rat’ sold up and hot-footed it to Spain.

  On 1 December 2003, a Guardia Civil cop was hit following a robbery at a telephone shop in Marbella. The store’s British owner was shot in both legs. The police started chasing an Opel Astra, which matched the description of the two so-called thieves’ getaway car, when the police officer suffered serious gunshot wounds to his stomach, lungs and liver.

  Insisting that it was a case of mistaken identity, McCadden was picked out by the cop at an identity parade, and he was arrested by Spain’s national police, the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia on 8 February 2006.

  Terry Adams could be a free man in 2009.

  9

  The Wembley Mob

  ‘There is no doubt that “grasses” such as Bertie Smalls and other filth like him deserve to be shot like the sick dogs they are.’

  ‘MAD’ FRANKIE FRASER ON SUPERGRASS BERTIE SMALLS

  By 1972, the ‘Wembley Mob’ was one of the most prolific crews in London. They lived like lords in big houses and drove fast cars, although there seems to be some dispute as to who their leader was. Various accounts identify the boss to be the reclusive Mickey Green, described by an old friend as ‘a good old-fashioned London villain’. Other sources point a finger at Derek Creighton ‘Bertie’ Smalls, who is considered by many as Britain’s first supergrass, moving ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser to demand that people like him should be shot ‘like t
he sick dogs they are’.

  By all accounts, the two men couldn’t have been more different. One was a straight-up London gangster, the other a rotund, prematurely balding man with a drooping moustache… and a supergrass. But they shared one common aim – they loved robbing banks. And even by today’s standards, they were rich men. For his part in a robbery on a savings bank in Brighton, Smalls was paid £10,000 – about £200,000 in today’s money.

  Bertie Smalls was born in the East End of London. While still under police protection, he died in February 2008 at his Victorian semi in Croydon at the age of 72. There had once been a £1 million price on his head during the late 1970s, with signatories including the Kray twins.

  Mickey Green was born in 1942. A convicted armed robber, he has allegedly been one of Britain’s leading drug-dealers for many years. His worth is estimated at £75 million, and he currently lives on the Costa del Sol.

  The gang had been at large throughout the ‘Swinging Sixties’, and during the summer of 1972, the Metropolitan Police were feeling the heat more than usual. The armed robbers were tearing apart the banks and building societies of the capital with daylight smash-and-grab raids that had netted an estimated £1.3 million (some £8 million at today’s rate). The law seemed powerless. Newspapers published a photograph of a police officer removing a baby’s pram from the firing line in one raid on Barclays Bank in Harlesden, north-west London, and looking on powerlessly while the Wembley Mob completed the job.

  It was a PR disaster. The crooks were making monkeys out of the Met. The spree culminated on Thursday, 10 August 1972, when the audacious and slick gang took just 90 seconds to raid a branch of Barclays Bank in Wembley, north London. Known as The Ilford Job, it carried all the trademarks of the gang’s meticulous methods. Through inside information, they learned that the bank received large deposits consisting of the takings of a Tesco supermarket and that, when these large amounts arrived, the security van was preceded by a red Mini, presumed to be sent to inform the manager. This enabled the robbers to pick the appropriate day to secure the largest amount of cash.

  After ‘recruiting’ two employees of the security van company, Smalls sent one of the robbers into the bank dressed as a City worker, complete with pin-stripe suit and an umbrella, to write a cheque to distract bank staff while the van approached. The raid went as smooth as silk, with the corrupt security guards handing over the money and the robbers escaped.

  The haul was over £237,000 – a record at the time and, by 15 August, the entire crew had fled England via various routes with the police soon to be hot on their tails. For his part, Smalls travelled by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, by train to Paris, and then flew to Torremolinos, for the Costa del Sol – aka the Costa del Crime –where the gang met up and read the British newspapers for updates on the hunt for them.

  Indeed, they were certainly audacious, this Wembley Mob; apart from terrorising bank staff and members of the public, and scaring them out of their wits, no one was ever shot, although a few hairs turned grey in the process.

  The 1970s was also a record decade for armed robberies in the capital. This was partly because the culture was rife with bribe-taking. Cops were sharing in the proceeds of crime and ‘verballing’, or fabricating evidence against suspects. In fact, Sir Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, went on TV at one point, claiming that many of his own officers were ‘so bent they couldn’t lay straight in bed’, and he was anxious to remind his detectives which side of the law they were supposed to be on. ‘A good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs.’

  Not since the 1920s had a British police force faced such criticism. During those early years, most of the Liverpool City Police were committing robberies by night and investigating their own handiwork the following day. And at the centre of Sir Robert’s focus was the CID, and its élite Flying Squad. Chief Superintendent Ken Drury, commander of the Flying Squad, and one of his inspectors, Alistair Ingram, later went to prison for corruption.

  Indeed, the 1970s was a dark period for the Flying Squad. An internal police investigation, Operation Countryman, revealed an extensive and tangled web of corruption. Bribery was endemic, especially between officers and Soho pornographers. In a scandal which still resonates today, Ken Drury was jailed along with 12 other Scotland Yard detectives for accepting bribes and, if the truth were known, the Wembley Mob must have had a few bent cops on its own payroll.

  An early break in the investigation was made, when luck unearthed a nark who provided the names of every member of the gang. The police case then cooled until the robbers returned to Britain.

  Bertie Smalls was tracked down and then arrested in a suburb of Northampton in late November 1972. He sweated Christmas out in jail, then, on 2 January 1973, he started to cough. In exchange for a 25-year prison term, he offered to name and incriminate the entire gang, not only those in the Barclays Bank heist, but to spill the details on every single piece of criminal activity he had ever been involved in. ‘I can give you every robber in London,’ Smalls was reputed to have said; to the police at the time, this was gold dust.

  A deal was struck between Smalls and Sir Norman Skelhorn, then Director of Public Prosecutions. Between February 1974 and April 1975, his ‘assistance’ secured the imprisonment of 28 of his former colleagues for a total of 414 years, with sentences ranging from 5–18 years.

  The trial relating to the Barclays job commenced in Court 2, The Old Bailey, on 11 February 1974. As Smalls concluded his evidence during one of the committal hearings, the ad hoc choir in the dock sang a rendition of the blues ballad ‘Whispering Grass’, then pointing their fingers into the shape of guns, they sang the Vera Lynn song, ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…’

  The trial finished on 20 May. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all defendants on 22 May. In total, the judge handed down sentences totalling 106 years for the Barclays job alone. Smalls’ old partner, Mickey Green, got 18 years. During the following months, a further 21 associates of Smalls were convicted with sentences totalling 308 years. But all was not bad news for his fellow cons, particularly one who was already being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure – Jimmy Saunders.

  Saunders had been arrested by the incorruptible DCI Albert ‘Bert’ Wickstead for his part in the 1970 Ilford Barclays robbery. It was claimed that Wickstead, known as ‘The Old Grey Fox’ and ‘Gangbuster Wickstead’, had verballed Saunders up. Smalls gave evidence that Saunders had not been on that particular crew, and was cleared.

  As part of his never-to-be-repeated deal, which the Law Lords later described as ‘unholy’, Smalls received a new identity. Within a few years, though, he had returned to his old London haunts, drinking openly in the pubs around Hornsey and often boasting that he was paid £25 per week by police for his betrayal. Bobby King, one of the robbers his evidence convicted, once spotted Smalls in Crouch End. He saw it as a test of his own rehabilitation that he didn’t ‘whack’ Smalls.

  But the trials and convictions of the Wembley Mob didn’t see the end of a grim period in police history, in which the authorities were compromised and often outwitted by what many misguidedly considered to be the swashbuckling and daring masterminds of eye-catching, set-piece bank robberies. The Flying Squad saw the number of raids in London rocket from 380 in 1972 to 734 by 1978. The total reached 1,772 by 1982. Nevertheless, the testimony of Smalls showed how much damage could be inflicted by a high-level informer, ‘snout’ or ‘stoolie’. The number of robberies in the area of London where the Wembley Mob had been active plummeted from 65 to 26 in the year after their arrest and subsequent imprisonment.

  After his release from prison, Mickey Green – at one time the main suspect in the murders of Gilbert Wynter and Solly Nahome – has been wanted by police in several countries for suspected drug smuggling. His ability to evade arrest has led to him being nicknamed ‘The Pimpernel’. He is said to have first become involved with drugs during the early 1980s. It is alle
ged that he has a number of bent cops on his payroll, and he is well acquainted with the Adams brothers. He was named Europe’s most wanted drugs baron and his other nickname is ‘The Octopus’ for the tentacles of his ever-expanding criminal network wrap themselves around the globe.

  He owns pubs and other property in Wembley, West Hampstead, Dublin (he holds Irish nationality), and for than 20 years he has operated in Morocco, France and the United States, where he co-operated with organised crime figures running cocaine in from Colombia until his arrest by the FBI. He was caught while lounging by a pool, drink in hand, living in a Beverly Hills mansion formerly owned by Rod Stewart. He was later released without charge.

  Apart from his prison sentence for the Ilford job – and it is fair to say he wouldn’t have been caught for that if Smalls had kept his mouth shut – Green has always stayed one step ahead of the law, leaving behind speedboats, yachts, Rolls-Royces, a Porsche, a Ferrari, gold bullion, cash and cocaine in his haste to get away.

  More recently he was implicated in a £150 million cocaine-smuggling ring based in Britain and was seized by Spanish police while staying at the Ritz in Barcelona. Following the arrest of British drug-trafficker Michael Michael during Operation Draft, Green was one of 60 others implicated in the £150 million enterprise.

  He spent months in custody before Customs decided to drop the charges. He is now free again and it is alleged that he is back in his Spanish villa on the Costa del Sol. However, his options for travel are severely limited. He is wanted in France, where he was sentenced to 17 years in his absence; he is wanted in Holland; he also faces arrest if he returns to Ireland, over allegations that he ‘fixed witnesses’ at an inquest. In the UK, he is wanted for questioning about alleged links to corrupt allegations involving a Scotland Yard élite unit.