In 1984 he was arrested in London with a large consignment of heroin and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment. But after just three years behind bars he was transferred to Turkey and immediately released, prompting allegations of corruption at the highest levels of Turkish government.
Following his release he went on a media offensive. He admitted that his wealth came from heroin, but said he became head of one of the world’s biggest drugs syndicates only with the full support and approval of Turkish politicians, police officials and the Turkish security service. (Although the Emperor’s view that he was acting on behalf of the government is generally dismissed, there have long been concerns that Turkish drugs gangs are being protected by the Turkish state. In 1996 a car crash near Istanbul sparked scandal when it emerged that the passengers were a top crime boss, a senior police commander, a beauty queen and an MP.)
In 1998 the Turkish government, stung by Turkey’s international reputation as a haven for drugs barons, orchestrated a round-up of the Emperor’s family members across Europe. In January 2001, the Emperor stood trial and was jailed for twenty years.
Yet despite this, the Emperor and his criminal network continue to dominate the streets of north London. At least a dozen of his close relatives and extended family live in the area and their grip on the heroin trade and local protection rackets remains as firm as ever. Massive heroin seizures involving members of the Turkish community are now so common that they rarely make the news. In 2003 alone, more than £150 million pounds’ worth of the drug was seized in raids linked to Green Lanes.
The drug usually arrives in specially converted lorries and shipping containers direct from Turkey. The value of an Emperor load is rarely less than £10 million. Once safely inside the country the drug is stored in safe houses, watched over by specially hired couples. For a fee of around £300 per week, their job is to live as normal a life as possible while ensuring that at least one member of the family is always at home to guard the heroin.
Every few days or so members of the gang drop by to check the stock or pick up a few kilos for resale. They also employ couriers (often working for mini-cab companies) to ferry packets of heroin around the country as needed.
‘The fact that he is in prison has changed nothing,’ says Selahattin. ‘His soldiers are everywhere. There are three street gangs – the Bombacillars [Kurdish for bomb-makers], the Tottenham Boys and the Kurdish Bulldogs – all directly controlled by him. Some of them are just kids, even younger than me, but they have guns and everyone is terrified of them. The kids in the gangs consider themselves to be untouchable. They think they are above the law. They think they can do whatever they want because they know the Emperor’s family is behind them. It’s anarchy out there.’
The young gunmen are paid up to £200 to oversee a drug delivery, or ensure that protection money is paid. The guns and money are supplied directly by the Emperor’s relatives, and the members of the Bombers (Bombacillars) in particular are said to be supremely loyal to him. Clashes between the Bombers and other gangs fighting for control of the heroin trade have pushed the number of murders in the Turkish community to an all-time high.
In May 2001 twenty-six-year-old suspected dealer, Oguzhan Özdemir, from Enfield, was shot dead. Two months earlier Hasan Mamali, twenty-three, and his friend Sama Mustafa, twenty-six, were gunned down in Hoxton, east London. Mamali was shot in the head as he sat in the back of a convertible BMW car. Mustafa tried to run, but was brought down with a volley of shots. His killer then hovered over his body and finished him off with another shot to the head.
In July that same year gangs of gunmen fought outside Wood Green police station one afternoon, firing twenty shots in a busy street. Police arrived at the scene to find bullets in briefcases and three guns left smoking on the ground. One, a .45 magnum, had been loaded with ‘dum dum’ bullets, outlawed under the Geneva Convention because of the devastating damage they cause. Several of the gangsters are known to possess AK47 assault rifles and other military hardware.
In November 2002 Murat Over, a twenty-nine-year-old heroin dealer, was found guilty of the murder of Mehmet Adiguzel, who had been shot dead six times as he sat at the wheel of his car on Upper Clapton Road. Adiguzel used the cover of working as a property developer to mask his own drug-dealing activities but he was also a police informer and had many enemies. Although Over and Adiguzel had clashed in the past – Over has been stabbed by one of the dead man’s bodyguards – many believe he was paid a fee to carry out the killing so that a rival gang could take over Adiguzel’s patch.
The most recent murder took place in November 2003 when a twenty-three-year-old Turkish man was found in a canal in east London. He had been shot in the head at point-blank range. Since the dawn of the new millennium, at least ten murders have been attributed to the activities of the heroin gangs, and if this trend continues, they will soon be responsible for more gang-related deaths than any other criminal faction.
And all the signs point to the situation getting far worse. Detectives are also alarmed at signs that the heroin market is expanding rapidly. The key indication of a growing drug market is falling price and rising purity, both of which have been witnessed since 2000. The street price of a kilo of heroin has fallen by more than £2000 to an all-time low of £13,000. The purity of street-level heroin is also at an all-time high – around 40 per cent, compared with 15 per cent during the 1980s.
But the trade in heroin is not the only cause of violence within the Turkish community. In 2003 a survey of 200 Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers in the area found that 65 per cent of them said they were paying protection money, some up to £10,000 per year.
Historically, the protection money went to fund the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a paramilitary group, which was fighting for a recognised homeland for the Kurdish people. But in April 2002 the PKK abandoned the military struggle and restyled itself as the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). The Emperor, a long-time supporter of the PKK, decided to move in on its business. Shop-owners were happy to pay the PKK or KADEK but not the Emperor who, they realised, simply wanted to line his own pockets with the money.
The fighting at a café on Green Lanes, owned by a close relative of the Emperor’s, was in response to an attack earlier that day on the same greengrocer’s that had been the scene of fighting during the World Cup celebrations. At about four p.m. a group of men armed with baseball bats and snooker cues attacked a member of staff at a grocery store run by men loyal to KADEK. Two hours later a mob of around 150 turned up at the café and blocked all the exits. They were armed with a variety of knives, sticks, baseball bats and poles. A few members of the Bombers were initially trapped inside but, because they had their guns on them, were quickly able to fight their way out. Alisar Dogan was not so lucky. The forty-three-year-old father of two was desperately short of money and had taken a weekend job in the café scrubbing carpets. When the mob attacked he was caught in the middle of the battle and brutally beaten before being stabbed in the heart. He was rushed to hospital but died the next day.
Soon after the murder, eager to find out more about the influence of the Emperor’s family in the area, I worked up the courage and called at the £1 million house in the beautiful tree-lined avenue in Edgware where some fourteen members of his extended family live. The door was eventually answered by a demure woman, who listened to my request for information and possibly a brief chat, then told me in perfect English that she did not speak English. She promptly shut the door.
In January 2003 police launched their biggest ever action against the Emperor’s organisation. More than 550 police officers, some of them armed, raided a series of homes and businesses in north London. Over the course of three weeks, more than three hundred people were arrested, including those thought to be responsible for Dogan’s death.
But while the raids went some way towards easing tension in the area, they had little effect on the Turkish Mafia’s core business. Seven months later, Customs office
rs seized the second largest consignment of heroin ever recovered in Britain. Hidden among 160 tonnes of cat litter they found 368 kilos of Turkish heroin worth more than £50 million.
More raids followed in December 2003 and this time police discovered a makeshift torture chamber inside a scruffy bed-sit just off Green Lanes. Two large metal hooks, hung from the ceiling by lengths of cable, had been used to suspend victims as they were beaten until they agreed to pay protection money.
In the twelve weeks before the December raid there had been three murders, five kidnappings and twenty-seven reported cases of extortion, eight of which involved firearms. Police concede that dozens more incidents would have gone unreported because the victims were fearful of retaliation.
Despite fighting what appears to be a losing battle, the police are determined to smash the Turkish Mafia’s hold over the British heroin market. But the truth is that, for some time, that hold has been slipping. In the past few years a new, equally brutal Mafia has emerged and those behind it are now bringing in so much high-quality heroin that the price looks set to drop even further.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The heavily bearded man standing beside me straightens his turban before passing a small wad of rupees to the barman. Like me he has come inside to escape from the stifling heat and we both lick our lips in anticipation as his frosted bottle of Cobra beer is placed on a mat before him. I shift along the bar so that I’m standing directly beneath the large fan and wait for the barman, who looks serene in his pale blue dhoti, to take my order. On the wall behind me, on either side of a giant map of the Punjab, pictures of popular Sikh singers smile down while peering over the tops of their sunglasses. A dozen or so men – there are no women to be seen – are scattered at the various tables. Some are drinking pints or bottles of beer, others soft drinks or fruit juice. A few are tucking into huge platefuls of rice and curry, courtesy of a small counter adjacent to the bar.
Every time the doors to the main road open the air becomes thick with the scent of exotic spices, and the warbling beat of Bhangra music can be heard. It’s all such a feast for the senses and so powerfully evocative that, as my beer arrives, I can almost believe that I’m in the heart of Delhi or Bombay rather than a shabby side-street in west London.
Welcome to Southall Broadway, the heart of Britain’s Sikh community and an area where around 90 per cent of the residents are of Indian origin, mostly from the Punjab.
With its numerous temples and colourful bazaars, its bustling streets, specialist Indian shops and lively atmosphere, Southall is a prime example of the benefits of multi-cultural society – a chance for everyone to experience life in another country without ever stepping on to a plane. Take the Glassy Junction public house, for example – it’s the only pub in Britain that accepts rupees as well as sterling.
But there is also a dark side. Southall is the centre of the fastest-growing branch of the heroin trade and its associated gangland culture. Sporadic violence has been exploding off and on for the past few years and many believe it is only a matter of time before the area explodes into full-scale urban warfare.
Traditionally the perception of Asian culture was that the strong family links and rigid parental control – particularly among Sikhs – helped isolate the youth from drugs and the associated crime. Historically, Asian crime was mostly low-level and non-violent. But criminal intelligence reports from detectives based in Southall have revealed that two Asian-led gangs have grown into powerful criminal organisations by deluging the area with heroin. They control a network of dealers spread all over west London and have amassed wealth and weapons. And now they are at each other’s throats.
The current battles are a chilling fulfilment of a prophecy first made in 1995 in a highly controversial Home Office research paper: it warned of a demographic time bomb of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian youths that threatened to shatter the long-held belief that Asians were the most law-abiding community in the United Kingdom. Citing a notable increase in the number of Asians being jailed in young offenders’ institutions, the report predicted that many of the groups that started out aiming to protect the community from racist attacks would soon evolve into full-blown criminal syndicates.
And so they did. The gangs started out dabbling in credit-card fraud and low-level protection rackets but have since moved into drug-trafficking. In so doing, they have vastly increased the number of addicts within the Asian community. In 2002 a study in the south of England estimated that more than half of new heroin smokers in the area were from the Asian community, and experts say the figures are echoed across the country. A few months after the study was released the MP Oona King described the East End as the ‘heroin capital’ of the country after seeing young Bangladeshi boys passed out on the stairs of tower blocks as a result of injecting the drug.
Asian community leaders from Bradford and Tower Hamlets in east London have spoken publicly in recent years about their concerns over the spread of drugs and youth gangs. Tower Hamlets has long been the centre for drug abuse and is also linked to petty street crime led by Bangladeshi gangs of youths with names like the Brick Lane Massive and the Stepney Posse.
More recently it has been associated with large-scale drug-smuggling and distribution. In 2002 a gang of five Bangladeshi men who generated £12 million in six years were jailed after operating a heroin ring in east London. The operation was highly sophisticated. Members of the street teams had their own expense accounts and were reimbursed for meals, mobile phones, hire cars and petrol by people higher up the hierarchy.
Although the majority of Britain’s heroin trade remains in the hands of Turkish gangs, customs investigators have of late noticed an increasing number of Asian couriers bringing the drug into the country, often on direct flights from India and Pakistan.
The syndicates often make use of family members to assist in their enterprise. This is partly for added security and partly because relatives can be more easily ‘got at’ in the event of a betrayal. In April 2002 a thirteen-year-old Asian girl from Bradford was stopped at Heathrow and found to be carrying heroin worth more than £1 million. In another case, heroin was found sewn into a quilt that was wrapped around a six-month-old baby coming off a flight from Lahore.
In Derbyshire a study of the local drugs scene found not only increasing numbers of Asian gangs and dealers but that they were rapidly expanding their operations to the point of competing with other gangs.
‘We have found that a growing number of young Asian men are becoming involved in the heroin business,’ says Drugs Squad officer Steve Holmes, who is in charge of the study. ‘While once any Asian dealers tended to stick to a limited customer base in their own communities, they are now becoming bolder and are prepared to compete in the wider market. These are mainly British Asians who have lived here all their lives. They have seen white and black dealers and the lifestyle they lead and have thought, Why shouldn’t I have some of that?’
Around 75 per cent of heroin supplies on the British market come from the opium-poppy fields of Afghanistan, within easy reach of Asian dealers’ Pakistani contacts. Cities like Bradford and Birmingham have major links with Pakistan and Afghanistan, a factor that has promoted them to the top of the Asian drug-dealing division.
For the traffickers, importing direct from Pakistan rather than via Turkey means the potential profits are huge. Refined opium, bought in the lawless tribal lands of Pakistan, costs as little as £150 a kilo. On the streets of Southall it will sell for up to £80,000.
But the days of stopping at Southall are long gone. Rather than confining themselves to a limited customer base, the Asian gangs are taking advantage of their ability to undercut the price of heroin yet still make a profit to rake in thousands of new customers. Such is their power that many Asian gangs now employ black and white youngsters to work on their behalf.
In the back room of the Glassy Junction I meet up with Jas, a twenty-four-year-old Sikh who uses heroin on a regular basis (he insists he is not
an addict) but recently retired from dealing to support his habit.
It was here in his very room, Jas explains, that he decided enough was enough and that he had to get out of the gang business. ‘I was having a drink with a couple of friends and there was a big group of Sikh men in that corner over there. All of a sudden they started arguing, standing up and pushing one another around, and then I just remember hearing shots. One of them had pulled out a gun and started firing. The whole place just erupted. Everyone got up and ran the hell out of there. I thought I was going to die.’ Three men were left injured, one shot in the arm, another in the hip and a third in the back. The argument was later linked to a dispute between rival drugs gangs, and for Jas it was the final straw.
According to Jas, the two gangs behind the heroin trade in Southall are known as the Bhatts and the Kanaks. The Bhatts are controlled by the members of a leading Asian family who have a number of business interests including a hugely popular restaurant in west London. The Kanaks, also based in west London, have strong links with Yardies and other black gangsters, whom they have been known to hire to carry out acts of violence on their behalf.
Both the Bhatts and the Kanaks had been active for some time but the full extent of their operations only emerged in early 2002 following the arrest of a gang who were part of the Bhatt organisation. Nicknamed the ‘Fiat Bravo Boys’ after the nondescript cars they drove to avoid drawing attention to themselves, the gang, headed up by brothers Sukhdev and Rajinder Bassi, had become one of the most successful and ruthless drug syndicates in British history. While on the surface they deliberately adopted low-key, modest lifestyles, they regularly enjoyed breaks at luxury hotels in west London and on the south coast, including the five-star Grand Hotel in Brighton.
They booked the best suites, lavishing girlfriends with champagne and gifts as well as hiring top-of-the-range BMW convertibles instead of the more humble Fiats they used in London. They also took regular luxury holidays in Europe and America, and while in the latter made a point of visiting dozens of firing ranges to hone their shooting skills.
Gangs Page 28