When the double murder case came to trial, Nathan Martin admitted playing a part in buying the Mondeo but he said he didn’t know what the car was intended for. He also denied being a member of the Burger Bar Gang and having anything to do with the shooting, claiming that old favourite alibi, ‘I was at home in bed with my girlfriend when it happened.’
When asked why he had failed to mention this ‘alibi’ beforehand, he said, ‘It’s bad what happened to them girls, but I didn’t want to get involved. My brother had been murdered, my mum was having a very bad time, I was the only thing my family had left. I lied to protect myself and my family.’
None of this, of course, washed with prosecuting counsel, Timothy Ragget QC, who snapped, ‘Your brother was a gangster and you are a gangster. You committed crimes together… you were inseparable.’
Martin, who made every effort to look like butter wouldn’t melt, replied meekly, ‘No. We were close, he was my only brother but he was trying to reform… to put behind him, to make something of his life.’
During the trial, another man, Tafarwa Beckford – half-brother of pop star Jamelia – was acquitted of murder on the judge’s directions because the only evidence against him came from a witness, a jailbird known by the secret name of ‘Mark Brown’, whom the judge had concluded had been lying in an effort to have a current prison sentence reduced. Another sibling, Kairo Beckford, 21, was later convicted of shooting Daniel Bogle three times in the head. Beckford and his codefendants – Josiah Faure, 23, David Perry, 27, and Anslow, 22 – will each serve a minimum of 18 years.
DS David Mirfield, who led the double murder inquiry, admitted that the gang still saw themselves as ‘untouchables’, but today hopes the murders of the young girls – and the convictions of the killers – will lead to change. ‘Four young, innocent girls were shot and two were killed,’ he has said. ‘If that does not wake up a community and a nation, then nothing can.’
Another large gang rivalling the Burger Bar Boys in the Midlands is the Muslim Birmingham Panthers, which was formed in the early 1990s. The members are mostly Pakistani Pashtuns and Mirpuri/Kashmiris, and there are also other Muslims of other ethnic groups such as black Africans, Bangladeshis, Indians, black Caribbeans and Afghans. The Panthers operate in Lozells, Handsworth, Alum Rock, Sparkhill, Sparkbrook, Aston and Small Heath. It was formed to protect the Muslim community of Birmingham from white power skinheads and black gangs such as the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Gang. Membership of the Panthers is around 1,000, and they also have many members from Niazi and Durrani clans.
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London, being the nation’s capital, is today the centre of street warfare. Ladbroke Grove is run by a variety of Jamaican and black British drug gangs, none of which has overall control.
Harlesdon is mainly run by the Jamaican Lock City Crew, who see themselves as the real Yardies, while the Much Love Crew are mostly local homeboys. Three deaths and 45 other attempted murders or non-fatal shootings took place on this patch in the first half of 2003 and the numbers are rising.
Southall is the home turf for Asian gangs with such names as Holy Smokes and Tooti Nung, and the up-and-coming rivals, the Bhatts and Kanaks.
Camden is crewed by the Drummond Street Boys, who are a much smaller set-up than their rivals but very keen to recruit and expand their territory.
Not surprisingly, Soho and Chinatown are run by the Triads who specialise in gambling, drugs, extortion and people trafficking.
King’s Cross is where the Albanian gangs rule and traffic girls to feed prostitution rings in all of Britain’s major sex districts, and they are running an increasing number of ‘saunas’. The Metropolitan Police estimates they control up to 80 per cent of off-street prostitution in London, as well as smuggling immigrants from the Balkans. Well armed, they are challenged by the Turks for control of heroin supplies.
Islington is the home turf of the white, ‘working-class’ A-team which still holds sway in this part of inner-city north London, despite intense police operations over the past 15 years.
Finsbury Park is dominated by Turkish gangs who run heroin rackets, despite frequent armed police raids and arrests among many of the main families. Politicised Kurdish gangs also run drugs through a network of clubs like the Turks, and with them control an estimated 70 per cent of the 30 tonnes of heroin imported into Britain every year.
Tottenham hosts two major black gangs – the Spanglers and the Fireblades – who take their name from the Honda Fireblade 2 motorcycles ridden by gang members.
Bangladeshi and other Asian gangs proliferate around Brick Lane, and are widening their power base beyond local drugs sales and petty crime. Second-generation teenagers give themselves names such as the Brick Lane Massive and the Stepney Posse. Lesser groups include the Bengal Tigers, Cannon Street Posse, the Shadwell Crew, and the East Boys of Bethnal Green.
In the late 1970s, vigilante gangs of second-generation Asians took to the streets to help protect the Asian communities from white racist groups such as the National Front in east London. The Asian Gangs formed to protect their community and local businesses and they mark their territorial boundaries with graffiti. They are predominantly Bangladeshi, while those of the West End are Indian and Pakistani.
Gang violence between groups such as the Holy Smokes and Tooti Nungs back in the 1980s was organised by the Asian mafia to take police attention away from its organised activities. Newer Asian gangs, such as the Bhatts, are more ‘street gang’ orientated, fighting violent battles over the heroin distribution in their area. However, many of the Asian gangs are still influenced by Asian families owning reputable businesses within London.
Good old Hackney is where the black gang, the Kingsland Crew, battle the Hackney Posse for dominance, while in Bow and Canning Town, the Hunts – a white, working-class crime family – have gained ascendancy in drugs, extortion and, until relatively recently, the theft of upmarket cars. They have also moved into Soho and are thought to ‘go very big’ very soon.
Bermondsey and Rotherhithe is traditionally the base for largely white crime gangs with big interests in drugs. The Brindle family and the Arifs have fought turf wars here for over a decade.
To some, the name ‘Arif’ might conjure up a string of kebab outlets, those of the type that teem with late-night boozers and produce vomit-stained pavements, but nothing could be further from reality. Indeed, the Arifs are a south London-based Cypriot-Turkish criminal organisation heavily into armed robbery, contract killing, drug trafficking and just about any other racketeering-related activity one can think of. They have been part of London’s seedy underworld since the late 1960s, and they command respect among their underworld colleagues.
To begin with, following the downfall of the Kray empire, the Arifs were one of several criminal organisations who took control of the London underworld, including the Clerkenwell crime syndicate and the Brindle family, with whom they were engaged in a highly publicised gangland war during the 1990s.
The Arifs themselves were considered the leading crime family in the London area throughout the late 1980s, before the arrest and conviction of its leadership, including most of the Arif family members, for armed robbery and drug-related offences in the early 1990s. In 2004, the Irish Daily Mirror called the Arifs ‘Britain’s number-one crime family’. Considering that the newspaper had the IRA on its doorstep, this was praise indeed!
Led by brothers Dennis, Mehmet and Dogan Arif, the organisation had been involved in a decade-long gang war between the Daley and Brindle gangs which has resulted in eight deaths since 1990. In November 1990, Dennis and Mehmet, wearing Ronald Reagan masks and wielding shotguns, were arrested in Reigate Street as they attempted to rob a Securicor van. By the new millennium, Dogan Arif was ranked seventh in the Sunday Times ‘Criminal Rich List’. Clearly, these guys were seriously big players, with considerable staying power, while they saw others rise and fall around them.
Bekir Arif, now into his fifties, is known as ‘The Duke�
�. He is one of the seven brothers in the family and was convicted in 1999 of conspiracy to supply 100kg of heroin worth £12.5 million. He received a 23-year term in jail. For his part, Dogan was also jailed for drug smuggling, and it is said that he controls the family fortune from behind bars. Their family is said to maintain ties with relations in Turkey who oversee shipments in mainland Europe.
Today, the Arif brothers are still a common and feared name on the streets of London as they have been suppliers to many of London’s street gangs, some of which include SUK and PDC.
The case against the Arif brothers came about with the arrival of Michael Boyle, an Irishman with Republican terrorist links, as a hitman on the streets of south London. His appearance would mark an alarming development in a murderous underworld vendetta. Over the next seven years, the ensuing feud was responsible for at least eight killings – three of innocent bystanders – and further shooting incidents. It was a tale, as writer John Steele noted, ‘punctuated by brawls and bravado in pubs and bars, fights with baseball bats and glass ashtrays and, in its later stages, a series of gun attacks.’
The feud was between the Daleys, the Brindles and others. It started around August 1990, when a group of men entered the Queen Elizabeth pub at 42 Merrow Street, Walworth, and threatened the landlord, John Daley, the brother of Peter. One of the group – in true Kray style – put a gun into the mouth of Peter Daley when he arrived.
The following month, a man called Ahmet Abdullah entered a drinking club and pumped seven bullets into one Stephen Galligan, a friend of the Brindles. Amazingly, he survived. ‘Abbi’ Abdullah was a violent criminal with a long list of his own enemies. He was also close to the Arif family. In March 1991, Abdullah was found shot dead in a William Hill bookies in Walworth. Anthony Brindle and his brother, Patrick, were charged with his murder and later acquitted at the Old Bailey.
The news of Abdullah’s death was broken by two of the Arif brothers to their father, Yusef. He had regarded Abdullah as his son and, even today, his grief is held by the Arif clan to have contributed to his fatal heart-attack. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Arifs were related to the Brindles by marriage, they are believed to have held a grudge against Anthony and Patrick thereafter.
In May 1991, Dennis Arif and his brother Mehmet were arrested following an abortive £1 million robbery of a Securicor van in Reigate, in which one raider was shot by police. It was this robbery that marked the demise of the family’s dominance in south London. Then, in August of that year, another Brindle brother, David, entered the Queen Elizabeth pub frequented by the Daleys, and became abusive.
As it turned out, David Brindle was severely beaten with a glass ashtray wielded by James Moody, a friend of the Daleys and a south London hard man, who achieved a degree of notoriety when he escaped from a prison with Gerard Tuite, then on remand as an IRA suspect. Now David Brindle began making threats to kill Daley and Moody, but he himself was murdered before August was out. Two men, armed with revolvers, entered the Bell pub in East Street, Walworth. An innocent Stanley Silk was also shot dead. Witnesses heard the gunmen shout, ‘This one’s for Abbi…’ – though this may have been mischief-making to link the shooting to the Arifs. Moody was among those suspected and, in March 1993, he too was shot dead in the Royal Hotel, Hackney.
Further incidents followed until, in August 1994, two other innocent men, Peter McCormack and John Ogden, were shot dead in Cavendish Road, Balham. One of the deceased bore a striking resemblance to Peter Daley. At this stage, Boyle, an armed kidnapper with lengthy prison terms behind him in Ireland, entered the equation.
Boyle had been recruited in the Daley cause by George Mitchell, a well-known Dublin criminal and friend of Peter Daley’s, a London property dealer. Boyle said that Daley had been described to him as a criminal who was having financial difficulties and ‘problems’ with the Brindles.
Some of south London’s most violent criminals, with their own scores to settle and drug-related turf to protect, became embroiled in the feud. For Scotland Yard and the South East regional Crime Squad, which would handle the Boyle case, the indiscriminate violence was deeply worrying.
Boyle’s first involvement in the Daley–Brindle feud is in dispute. It is known that, within days of the McCormack/Ogden shooting, another Brindle sibling, George, was shot and injured while visiting his parents. After his arrest for the Anthony Brindle shooting, Boyle called DI Steve Farley to his cell in Belmarsh High-Security Prison in south-east London and, among other things, claimed to have been responsible for the George Brindle shooting. Ballistic tests showed that a second gun, a Magnum found in Boyle’s ‘surveillance van’ at the time of the shooting of Anthony Brindle, had also been used on George. However, though Boyle has agreed at various stages that most of what he is said to have told Farley is true, he now claims the George Brindle admission is false.
For Farley and other crime squad officers, Boyle represented an unexpected disruption to Operation Partake, launched in May 1995 to investigate Peter Daley and others. Within days, Daley was arrested in a park in Luton with Mitchell and others. Nearby, police found more than £500,000 in cash. Enquiries into the facts behind the haul continued and no one was charged.
Another area of London in which significant gangs operate is Lewisham, where the Ghetto Boys are arch rivals to the neighbouring Peckham Boys and the Younger Peckham Boys, all black gangs. Most members of the once-competing African Crew have now been jailed.
The Ghetto Boys are based in New Cross and Deptford. The gang was formed on the Woodpecker and Pepys Estates and is primarily of Afro-Caribbean origin. Most of the members hail from the London borough of Lewisham, and some members of the gang are known to carry firearms such as the Mac-10 submachine-gun. A member of the Ghetto Boys fired a shot at the 2004 Urban Music Awards, injuring accountant Hellen Kelly. Fortunately, the lady was wearing a sturdy bra; the bullet hit the underwire, preventing fatal injury.
The Peckham Boys was formed in the North Peckham estate, and its members are primarily of black origin. The gang is split into ‘tinies’, ‘youngers’ and ‘olders’, according to age group, and membership runs into the hundreds. The teenagers convicted of the high-profile murder of Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor on 27 November 2002 were members of the Young Peckham Boys.
Born in Lagos, Damilola had travelled to the UK in August 2000 with his family to allow his sister to seek treatment for epilepsy. He moved on to the North Peckham Estate and began to attend the local school.
On Monday, 27 November 2000, the lad set off from Peckham Library at 4.50pm on his way home; he was captured on CCTV as he made his way along the route. On approaching the North Peckham Estate, he was cut in the left thigh. Running to a stairwell, he collapsed and bled to death in the space of 30 minutes. He was, however, still alive in an ambulance en route to the hospital.
There were two conflicting accounts of how he sustained his injury. The theory accepted by the Metropolitan Police is that Damilola was attacked and stabbed with a broken bottle. The alternative theory is that he fell on broken glass in an accident.
Subsequently, in 2002, four youths, including two 16-year-old brothers, went on trial at the Old Bailey. They were all acquitted of murder. Despite this setback, the police vowed to keep the investigation open and new DNA evidence techniques led to a re-examination of the evidence obtained at the time of the murder. In 2005, fresh arrests were made. Hassan Jihad, 19, and two brothers aged 17 and 16, were brought in.
The second trial in 2006 again ended without any convictions. On 3 April, the jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict on Jihad for the charges of murder, manslaughter and assault with intent to rob. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges of manslaughter against the other two brothers, so they were found not guilty, but with the possibility of a re-trial on those charges. On 6 April, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the two would, indeed, be re-tried.
On 9 August 2006, Ricky and Danny Preddie, after a 33-day re-trial, were
convicted of the manslaughter of Damilola Taylor. When the verdict was given, Ricky Preddie was dragged down to the cells by prison officers after swearing at the court and saying, ‘You’re all going to pay for this…’
Mr Justice Goldring said, ‘Take him down.’ After a brief pause, when shouting could still be heard in court, he added sternly and loudly, ‘Take him RIGHT down.’
On 9 October 2006, the judge sentenced the Preddie brothers to eight years’ youth custody. They will be eligible for release after serving four years. However, since neither brother has shown even a trace of remorse for the crime, it is hard to say when either may actually be freed on parole. In the unlikely event that they are released before their four-year tariff expires, it will be on licence, any breach of which will see them packed off back to prison to serve the remainder of their sentence.
Should they commit another serious act of violence, they face the possibility of a very long sentence indeed. With the normally tight-lipped Probation Service anxious to not comment on such offenders, this time they have made an exception, stating, ‘They [both brothers] pose a high risk of harm to others.’
In 2006, the Peckham Boys were involved in a widely reported gang war against the Ghetto Boys street gang based at the Pepys and Woodpecker Estates in Deptford and New Cross respectively. In the conflict, one innocent man was shot dead in New Cross, having been mistaken for a Ghetto Boys member by the Peckham Boys. He was shot at by a group of around 50 youths on mountain bikes, who had cycled from Peckham to Deptford.
Shortly after this murder, another man was shot and stabbed in Deptford by the same group, but survived. In a revenge attack, several members of the Ghetto Boys shot at youths in Peckham several days later. During the conflict, police seized handguns and submachine-guns. The dispute between these rival gangs has been ongoing for over 20 years.
Gangland UK Page 21