Sean’s violent nature was soon spiralling out of control. ‘One particular night we were in a pub and a man rumoured to be a rapist came in. A few of us took him outside, gave him a few punches and kicks, and left it at that. But Sean wasn’t satisfied. He took a half-pint glass, smashed it, then rammed it into the man’s face about thirty times. I had never seen so much blood. We tried to stop him but he turned on us. He’d become an absolute animal.
‘A few nights after that he tried to shoot two police officers with a gun that I had bought and given to him. He’d just done a job with this bloke, Andy, and a couple of uniformed coppers happened to be passing by. They gave chase and Sean got out this 9mm automatic, held it up a few inches from the head of one of the coppers and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It jammed.
‘If Sean had just gone to the getaway car right away then he and Andy would have been fine, but because of Sean pissing about, Andy ended up getting caught while Sean got away free. I went to visit Andy in the nick and he was so pissed off. He said if only Sean had done what he was supposed to do, it would never have gone wrong. But Sean’s only concern was the gun. He was really pissed off at me that it didn’t work. He had really wanted to kill the copper. Andy ended up getting twenty-one years.
‘Sean was going crazy, it was like he was addicted. There were times when he’d get a gun and go out on his own, riding a mountain bike, looking for somewhere to rob, looking for trouble. I couldn’t help thinking that he was just itching to kill someone and I didn’t want any part of that.
‘One time soon after the incident with the gun I was watching Britain’s Most Wanted and a bit of CCTV footage came up of a recent robbery in some building society. The men in the film were wearing masks but I could tell straight away that it was Sean and Vincent, I could just tell. They grabbed the money, and Sean let a shot off at a guard as he was lying on the floor. It was totally unnecessary, there was no need for it at all.’
Tensions within the gang grew but it was only after a bungled attempt to raid Barclays Bank in Greenford, west London that Roberts realised the time had come to go straight: ‘We had just got inside when I saw two men in suits jump out of a car and go to the boot. They were CID, who just happened to be in the area for a shoplifter, but my first thought was that they were Flying Squad and they were going to the back of the car to get their guns out. I screamed at Sean and we legged it out of there and round the corner to the alleyway where our motorbike was parked. I didn’t want them to see the registration of the bike.
‘He threw me the shotgun and as they came around the corner I told them to get their hands up and get against the wall. Then Sean came up on the bike, I hopped on the back and we sped away.
‘Afterwards our nerves were shattered. We parked the bike, booked into a Holiday Inn in Croydon and went out on a major drink-and-drugs bender. Although we had only been in the bank a few seconds, we still managed to get four thousand pounds. We didn’t have time to empty the tills but one customer had just been given an envelope and we took that. But I knew it had to stop. I knew that if Sean had been holding the shotgun instead of me, he would have let one go.’
During the escape, however, Roberts had lost his hat. It was later found, and he was identified from DNA in a hair found inside. Roberts was now firmly in the sights of the Flying Squad, who launched Operation Odie in a bid to put him and the rest of the gang out of business. But although the squad had masses of evidence, they decided to wait and catch the gang red-handed to ensure they had little chance of escaping conviction.
In the meantime, all too aware of just how close the police were getting, Roberts decided to retire and leave the Bradish brothers to their own devices. ‘I had lost a lot of friends, either murdered or ending up in prison for the rest of their lives. I could see myself going the same way. I was also fed up with being followed by the police all the time, day and night, so I went back to being a bricklayer.
‘Once I gave up on the robberies, it wasn’t like I decided to go straight or anything. I thought I’d try my hand at buying and selling drugs, but that turned out to be the worst idea in the world because I would just end up taking all the drugs myself or sharing them with friends. One weekend, just before my birthday, I bought five hundred ecstasy tablets. I thought I’d have a few but mostly sell them and make a bit of extra money. But I ended up having a bit of a party and a bunch of friends came over to the house and we started taking them all. We just stayed inside, ordered takeaway food and necked the tablets the whole time. We were at it for days and days. There was so much rubbish in the house that in the end we brought the wheelie-bin from outside into the living room and just chucked stuff in that. It took a week to recover but the next weekend we did it all over again. I never made a penny out of those tablets.
‘I was getting myself into a right state. When you’re living that kind of life, spending so much time off your face, the paranoia builds up and the violence gets to you. It’s in the air and, no matter how hard you try, sooner or later it gets into your blood.
‘I’d bought some cocaine off this team of white guys, big nasty bastards who were friends of Sean. It was only a couple of thousand pounds’ worth and the deal went smoothly, but a couple of weeks later they started hassling me, saying I hadn’t paid them enough and that they wanted more. I couldn’t fucking believe the cheek of it so I decided to go after them, teach them a lesson.
‘I was a total wreck by then. I’d gone from using twenty-five pounds’ worth of cocaine a night to more than a thousand pounds’ worth every single day. All in all, I must have put the equivalent of a three-bedroom detached house up my nose in the space of a year. I was totally wired.’
Sitting with Roberts, who for the most part is softly spoken and, despite the rigours of gang life, retains his youthful, boyish looks, it is hard to imagine that he is capable of great violence. It isn’t long before the illusion is shattered. ‘I caught up with them one night and went crazy. I chopped a couple of them up with a machete, shot one of them in the eye and chopped them over their heads and legs.
‘I knew that after that I was in an awful lot of trouble. The drugs were too much, they were killing me. It was hard to give it up but it was a choice of live a normal life or die.’
With Roberts gone, Bradish struggled to find a suitable replacement for a raid and, a few weeks later, begged his old blagging partner to rejoin him. Roberts refused and Bradish took on a couple of last-minute replacements. During the raid he was caught red-handed by the Flying Squad. True to form, Bradish was carrying a loaded sawn-off shotgun and had a dozen spare cartridges in his pocket.
‘The only reason Sean got caught was because he had gone out on a job with two guys who had never been involved in a robbery before. They were total amateurs, didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They did way too much planning. The car they stole for the getaway had been taken a week earlier and had just been sitting around. The police knew what it was going to be used for so they kept an eye on it. When the police pounced, the getaway driver was actually asleep. He was sitting outside the bank in the car waiting, which is the wrong way to do it – you’re supposed to be driving around, otherwise you just draw attention to yourself. Sean should never have been working with them. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing and that was his downfall. But he didn’t see it like that, he didn’t see it like that at all.’
Instead, as he languished in his prison cell awaiting trial and watching the evidence mounting up against him, Sean became increasingly convinced that Roberts had somehow tipped off the police. His response was a predictable one: using his contacts on the outside, he made plans to have Roberts killed.
In the meantime the same Flying Squad team that arrested Bradish had tired of waiting for Roberts to commit another robbery and decided to arrest him at home, using the DNA evidence they had recovered from the raid. At first Roberts was resigned to the idea of a fifteen-year stretch and kept his mouth shut, but then he found out about what Bradish
had been planning and began to see things differently. And that was when he decided to become a grass.
‘People talk about honour among thieves, but there isn’t any these days. Sean had no hesitation in taking a contract out on me. If I had done the “right” thing and kept my mouth shut, he’d have got someone to put a bullet in my head. No amount of explanation would have convinced him that I wasn’t responsible for him getting nicked so, as far as I’m concerned, he left me with no choice.
‘It meant I had to face Sean in court. At first I was really shaky and felt sick: I just didn’t want to do it. But after an hour in the box I started to focus. I knew I had to get the conviction. It wasn’t a nice thing to do but, fuck me, it had to be done.
‘It was hard. I was very close to Sean, very close. As mad as he was, I always knew where I stood with him, and at the end of the day, I thought he was a nice guy. I didn’t feel that way about Vince, he was very sly and slimy. Right from the start I never trusted him. Each and every time I have done a robbery with Vince he has either fucked up or not been there to back you up. Sean was solid. If you went to do a robbery with him, he was there one hundred per cent. Vince only ever cared about himself.’
During the trial a former girlfriend of Roberts took the stand and accused him of lying. She said that he was only betraying the Bradish brothers because she had had an affair with one of them and that he was being driven insane by jealousy. ‘The jury saw right through her lies. I think she’d been got at. It shows just how much power these people have. That was why I had no choice but to go down this path.
‘But at the end of the day it’s also a new start. It’s a chance to get away from the lifestyle, the people I was hanging out with and all the things that were killing me. I’m fitter and healthier than I’ve ever been. I’m drug-free for the first time since the age of thirteen. If this hadn’t happened, I’d be dead now. I have no doubt that being arrested by the Flying Squad saved my life.’
At the end of the trial, Sean Bradish was given four life sentences for his part in the robberies while Vincent received a sentence of twenty-two years. As he was led away Sean seemed resigned to his fate. He shrugged his shoulders, looked up at his friends in the public gallery and shouted, ‘Have a Guinness on me.’
In return for his co-operation Roberts was sentenced to just eight years and will serve his time in a special part of the prison system known as the ‘Bloggs’ unit. Designed as a ‘prison within a prison’ and used to hold those who are giving evidence or assistance to the police in cases of serious crime, all inmates in the unit are known to staff simply as ‘Bloggs’ followed by a number. Their true identity and reasons for being in the unit are known only to senior management.
The Bloggs prisoners are kept separate from all other inmates and have to cook their own meals – as every Bloggs has a price on their head, the risk of them being poisoned is simply too high.
Once released from the unit Roberts will be given a brand new identity and provided with a modest home somewhere in the United Kingdom. That’s when his real problems will begin. Having lived a life with tens of thousands of pounds at his disposal, he will have to get used to living on a weekly wage. Many of the Bloggses find they simply can’t handle it.
Henry Hill, the real-life inspiration for the Ray Liotta character in the film Goodfellas who joined the federal witness protection programme, summed up the difficulties: ‘The hardest thing was leaving the life. Even at the end, with all the threats I was getting, I still loved the life. Now I have to wait around like everyone else. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.’
It was only a few years before Hill returned to his old ways, getting himself arrested for a drugs conspiracy. He was not the only leopard who found it impossible to change his spots – at least one in three Bloggses go on to commit crimes under their new identities.
The Bradish brothers may be behind bars and set to remain there for the foreseeable future, but men who worked on the fringes of their gang continue to operate, sticking to the tried and tested pattern of targeting small, soft targets.
Yet despite the clear advantages of working in this way, there will always be blaggers who continue to dream of pulling off the one big job, regardless of the odds.
CHAPTER THREE
Mark Bryant stubbed out the remains of his third cigarette and poured the dregs of his coffee on to the grass. It was just after seven a.m. on 7 July 2000 and Bryant, along with two hundred of his colleagues from the giant supermarket warehouse at the Beddow Way industrial estate in the market town of Aylesford, Kent, had come to the end of morning break. On days when the weather was fine the staff would go outside and stand by the perimeter fence, even though the bleak, prison-like landscape of the estate generally offered little in the way of stimulation. But as Bryant filed back into the main building, all hell broke loose.
An armoured payroll truck driving down the road alongside the perimeter fence skidded to a halt as an eighteen-wheeler juggernaut jack-knifed directly in front of it, the two vehicles coming to a halt just a few feet apart. A split second later a pale blue Cargo van left a trail of burning rubber as it slid into position behind the payroll truck, cutting off the only escape route.
The raiders poured out of the vehicles. They wore overalls, body armour, full-face Balaclavas, rock-climbing helmets and heavy boots. Some wielded shotguns while others had pistols tucked into their waistbands. Gasoline-driven chainsaws were produced from the back of the van and two of the robbers ducked under the payroll truck and began cutting the hydraulic cables.
One of the van’s security guards snatched his radio, ready to signal that the vehicle and its precious cargo of £8 million in untraceable bills were under attack. He stopped in his tracks when his partner pointed at the man now standing in front of their vehicle and shouting at them. He was holding up three army green magnetic limpet mines. Making sure the guards could see clearly, he armed the first by pressing a small button, causing a tiny red light to begin flashing. He then began fixing the devices to the bonnet. His words were unclear but the guards had no difficulty understanding the meaning: touch that radio and you’re dead.
Traffic was building up behind the van blocking the road as commuters tried to get to work. When one furious motorist left his car to find out what was going on there was no hesitation: the nearest member of the gang levelled his heavy silver handgun, aiming just above the man’s head, and fired two shots in quick succession. Once again the message not to interfere was received loud and clear.
Bryant and the other warehouse workers heard a muffled cry, ‘Two minutes,’ then watched as one of the men who had been cutting cables emerged from under the truck and attacked the hinges of the tailgate. The other ran across to a third juggernaut parked on the opposite kerb. He tore away a red plastic traffic cone from the rear, revealing a fearsome metal spike, hopped into the cab and reversed at high speed.
Through their side mirrors, the terrified guards in the payroll truck realised what was about to happen and braced themselves for the impact. The spike smashed into the centre of the rear doors, throwing the truck forward ten feet and making a small hole in the thick metal skin. Another muffled cry, ‘Again,’ and the spiked juggernaut drew back. The second impact was even harder, throwing the guards up against the windscreen like a pair of rag dolls. Two of the raiders inspected the hole: it was getting bigger; the cash was almost within reach. A series of hand signals were given and the spike was lined up for a third time.
By now Bryant and several other eyewitnesses had flooded the police emergency line with calls about a robbery in progress. Before the van could be rammed again, one of the gang who had been monitoring police frequencies on a scanner screamed the order to abort.
An unarmed traffic-patrol vehicle, staffed by officers Claire Jones and Steven Elliott, had been despatched to the scene, but as soon as the pair turned the corner into the estate, they realised the robbers were expecting them. Jones and Elli
ott found themselves staring down the barrels of several shotguns. There was nothing they could do. Elliott slammed his Range Rover into reverse and pulled back to safety while Jones called in armed back-up.
But the gang had already started their getaway. They piled into the back of the blue Cargo van and tore off towards the main town. In less than a minute they had reached a sharp turn in the narrow road close to a historic bridge over the river Medway, only barely slowing down. Shocked pedestrians watched as the van appeared to lose control, skidded off the road, through a fence and over a grass verge.
By the time the police caught up, the van had been abandoned and the gang had vanished. It would be an hour before a man walking his dog along the river would call in to complain about a group of young tearaways in a speedboat racing down the river at 40 m.p.h., and the mystery of just how the robbers had got away was solved.
Although they had failed to get any money, the raiders had displayed such military precision and expert planning that suspicion initially fell on soldiers from a nearby army barracks, until the bomb-disposal experts discovered that the limpet mines were nothing more than tinned meat pies that had been painted green, then fitted with magnets and flashing lights.
Detective Superintendent Andy Dolden, the tall, bespectacled head of the Kent County Constabulary Serious Crimes Unit, arrived at Beddow Way a little after eight a.m. Within thirty seconds, he knew exactly who was behind the raid.
Since April his unit had been running a covert surveillance operation against Lee Wenham, a thirty-three-year-old mechanic and scrap-metal merchant suspected of involvement in large-scale auto theft. Wenham was part of an extensive family of wealthy gypsies, and earlier in the year had paid £220,000 in cash for Tong Farm, a sprawling complex that included an apple orchard and several large warehouses. Wenham had quickly made the farm the base of his operations and had been seen driving a variety of stolen vehicles in and out of the premises. He had long been rumoured to be a main supplier of getaway vehicles for armed robberies and now, for the first time, police had hard evidence of his involvement.
Gangs Page 4