Back in the mid-1990s, the US Drugs Enforcement Agency and the British government set up Operation Dinero. Authorities created a fake offshore bank in the British dependency of Anguilla and the cash soon started rolling in – from Gibraltar, no less. Offshore investors in the Rock had included such luminaries as pension-sapping newspaper baron Robert Maxwell and fraudster Peter Clowes of Barlow Clowes – a big player on the Rock – who was convicted of diddling investors out of £150 million. Recently, Spanish authorities were horrified when they established links between the Basque separatist group ETA and money-laundering operations based in Gibraltar. They have no doubt that the British-run colony is inadvertently helping fund ETA bombings and killings in Spain.
One of the few Gibraltar-based villains to be actually nicked in recent years was Pasquale Locatelli, who used shipping companies based on the Rock to launder the proceeds of crime. Locatelli had connections with Rome mafia boss Roberto Severa as well as Sicilian mafia moneyman Pippo Calo. Even Roberto Calvi, ‘God’s Banker’, who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge after his bank slid into fraudulent bankruptcy in 1982, was linked to Locatelli and other Gibraltar-based individuals.
And then there is the latest money-obsessed boom to hit the Rock: gambling. While there is no suggestion that the spate of new betting enterprises are connected to criminals, gambling has made Gibraltar an even more attractive proposition to any Costa del Sol-based villain who fancies a flutter. In the past couple of years, Victor Chandler, Ladbrokes, Coral and Stan James have all set up betting operations from the Rock. They all insist that Gibraltar is ideal for them because of its favourable tax breaks, the English-speaking workforce and decent weather. ‘Gibraltar is booming financially and a lot of it has to be down to the drug barons, money launderers and corrupt businesses,’ says one former Gibraltar resident, Chris Coombes. ‘If the UK tries to clean it up then it will rapidly slide into complete and utter financial collapse and that’s when the Spanish will move in and make their strongest claim yet to rescue the colony.’
In other words, the criminals are good news for Gibraltar. It’s a sad irony.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY
Kenneth Noye hoped to evade justice in Spain
THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY
In the Costa del Sol underworld, certain names resonate for the sheer, stunning audacity of their crimes. They are admired by new and old gangsters, they have the police in their pockets and they live on the very edge. Meet Kenny Noye.
Noye was – and still is – one of the most powerful and richest criminals in Britain. A genius of the underworld, handling the proceeds of huge drug deals and legendary robberies have helped make him tens of millions of pounds. He had a string of women scattered around the globe and he enjoyed a five-star lifestyle. He is also another member of that exclusive gentlemen gangsters’ club, the Brinks Mat team. It is a legendary job that links so many of the criminals who have settled on the Costa del Sol. Noye’s emergence as a major player is an integral part of recent criminal history – but how did he end up in Spain?
Kenneth John Noye was born in Bexleyheath, Kent, on 24 May 1947. His father Jim was a telecommunications expert at the GPO; his mum Edith was a strong, plain-speaking lady who took her young son under her wing from an early age. She worked three nights a week as manageress of the nearby Crayford dog track. Schoolboy Noye was a charming, troublesome kid. These days they’d call him hyperactive. ‘He got away with a lot because he was very cheeky,’ his cousin Michael Noye told me a few years back. ‘But he couldn’t keep out of trouble for a minute. A right handful.’ Young Noye was already boasting about what he’d do when he grew up. ‘Earn lots of money,’ he pledged to anyone who would listen.
Teenage Noye kicked off his criminal career at Bexleyheath secondary modern when he leaned on other school kids for protection money. A brief spell at printing college followed, but that soon gave way to stealing cars and scooters and selling them on to other villains in south-east London and Kent. Then Noye started a lorry haulage business and was soon making a fortune handling stolen property.
Noye married his teenage sweetheart Brenda and soon had two sons, Brett and Kevin. They moved to the peace and quiet of a village called West Kingsdown; situated in the Kent countryside, it was still within shotgun range of his old south-east London haunts. That’s when Noye began fronting the cash for some daring robberies. One former associate explained, ‘Noye was soon handling half a dozen jobs at a time. The money was rolling in.’ The beauty of Noye’s criminal career was that he rarely got his own hands dirty. He’d simply put up the finance for a job and then leave it up to his team.
By the time Noye had turned 30, he was driving a Rolls Royce and juggling a handful of fancy women; he even had time to become a Mason in a cheeky bid to get closer to the other members who included policemen, judges and politicians. As one Kent policeman later explained, ‘Noye cynically manoeuvred himself into the Masons as if it was the right pub for him to be seen at.’
On 10 October 1981, Noye appeared in Canterbury Crown Court for charges including importation of a firearm, evasion of VAT, providing a counterfeit document after his arrest and breaking the conditions of an earlier suspended sentence. He was very lucky to get a suspended prison sentence plus a £2,500 fine. Many believe to this day that Noye’s ‘friends’ in the Kent constabulary helped him avoid a spell inside.
Noye was then put under regular police surveillance. A crime intelligence report at the time stated that Noye was running a stolen motor-vehicle-parts ring, which also involved exporting lorry equipment to Syria. He was even rumoured to have supplied some of the heavy-lifting vehicles used to construct the Thames Barrier. Noye had a finger in a hell of lot of pies.
Using the alias of Kenneth James, he also kept a luxury flat in Broomfield Road, Bexleyheath, where neighbours spotted him in the company of numerous men and women. Police soon linked Noye to more than a dozen companies, and his list of ‘associates’ read like a who’s who of the south-east London and Kent underworld. Besides his Rolls Royce, Noye drove a Jeep and various Fords, which he had bought directly from Fords in Dagenham through a contact. Noye sold them on later for a fat profit.
One of Noye’s former employees at his lorry yard in West Kingsdown told the police he was terrified of the criminal and stated that he had ‘suffered violence at the hands of Noye in the past’. Even back in the early-1980s, the police reckoned Kenny was dabbling in the drugs trade. On one occasion they watched him pass over £10,000 in cash to an unnamed man in the Black Swan pub on Mile End Road in the East End. They believed it was drug money. The police report at the time stated, ‘Noye allegedly puts up the money for organised crime, he is an associate of prominent London criminals. Noye travels to and from America and the Continent to allegedly change money.’
Noye also provided hundreds of thousands of stolen bricks for the construction of a housing estate called The Hollies in Gravesend, Kent. And the secret police report even named an MP with whom Noye ‘had a business association’. Noye and a few other local criminals even occasionally collected ‘reward money’ for pointing the police in the right direction, which enabled him to keep all his own illegal activities going unhindered.
But it was the Brinks Mat robbery that really put Kenny Noye on the map and gave him respect throughout the London underworld. He handled much of the £27 million worth of gold bullion stolen from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport in November 1983. Later, Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman carrying out a surveillance operation in Noye’s garden. Noye was acquitted of murdering the officer but got 14 years for VAT fraud in connection with the stolen gold.
In 1987, during a spell inside the relatively easygoing HMP Swaleside on Noye’s manor of Kent, he met a drugs peddler with a deadly reputation called Pat Tate who told him all about a new designer drug called ecstasy, which was just starting to take off in Britain. Tate convinced Noye to invest £30,000 in one of his ec
stasy deals. Many villains reckon that it was the start of millions of pounds of Brinks Mat cash that helped flood Britain with ecstasy in the late-1980s and early-1990s. (Tate, his partner Tony Tucker and another drug dealer called Craig Rolfe were later shot to death at point-blank range as they sat in their Range Rover in an Essex field.) Legend has it that Noye made £200,000 back from that original £30,000 investment. From inside prison, he invested vast sums of his considerable fortune – estimated in the late 1980s at £10 million – in the drugs explosion.
In May 1996 Noye, released from prison just 18 months earlier, made the biggest mistake of his life when he knifed to death motorist Stephen Cameron in a road-rage attack on the M25, just a few miles from his Kent home. Within hours of fleeing the scene, Noye was in a chopper rising above the countryside just outside Bristol to begin a two-and-a-half-year spell on the run from the police. Back on the ground, Noye’s brand-new Land Rover Discovery containing the knife he’d used to kill Stephen Cameron was being driven in a bizarre three-car convoy to Dartford, Kent, where it was scrapped by being crushed into a compressed box of jagged steel.
In 1997, Noye sneaked into southern Spain and turned up in an isolated village north-west of Marbella. He continued popping back and forth to south-east London for important meetings. He even financed a daring plot to spring a drug baron from inside HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire. It involved smuggling in quantities of Semtex explosive, blasting a hole in the jail wall and then flying their man to freedom in a chopper. But the escape plan was foiled just days before it was due to go ahead.
Meanwhile, his costs for staying on the run at his Spanish hideaway were rocketing. He was shelling out £30,000 a month to keep one step ahead of the police. ‘He was greasing palms, paying for birds, his missus, you name it. And he was having to only deal in cash otherwise the cozzers might get wind of his movements,’ explained one of his old Costa del Sol mates who saw him occasionally while he was on the run.
But Noye’s life on the run in the Costa del Sol didn’t stop him from earning tens of millions of pounds in drug deals from his Spanish hideaway. He even boasted that he was still paying off crooked cops back in the UK. Noye was so heavily involved in cannabis smuggling that he visited Yardies in Jamaica while he was on the run. He was monitored by British police in Gibraltar with a local drug baron, but no one recognised him. Noye travelled in and out of Gibraltar on a false UK passport without even having to show his photo ID and was photographed by the Spanish police with a local girlfriend called Mina because she was under surveillance. But again, no one recognised him.
On the Spanish mainland, Noye bought a luxury yacht for £200,000 and chartered it out to drugs smugglers. And he so terrified the owner of the house he had bought in the tiny village of Atlanterra, 75 miles north-west of Marbella, that the man went into hiding in Germany after accepting Noye’s offer of cash, no questions asked.
He also pulled a knife on a middle-aged neighbour in Atlanterra when the man climbed over his gate to talk to his gardener. Frequently he secretly smuggled his father, wife Brenda and other relatives and mates to his home in Spain even though the police back in Kent were supposed to be shadowing their every move. And Noye wasn’t even spotted when 20 Spanish policemen patrolled the next-door house because one of Spain’s most senior politicians spent the summer at the property. Throughout his stay in Spain, Noye flew various mistresses out to Portugal then smuggled them across the border and rented them isolated houses at least ten miles from his own home.
In mid-June 1998, police back in Kent had a lucky break when they got a call from a long-time informant who gave them the mobile phone number of another villain who was in regular contact with Noye. When the grass demanded a £100,000 tip-off fee if it led detectives to Noye, the police started to take him very seriously.
Kent police immediately requested assistance from MI5, who sanctioned round-the-clock surveillance of the target’s phone from their headquarters overlooking Vauxhall Bridge in London. MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, has some sophisticated surveillance equipment and had been helping the police across the country with their enquiries since the mid-1990s. By the end of August 1998, Noye had been traced to his house in Atlanterra. Days later, he was arrested in a nearby restaurant by Spanish and Kent police and taken to jail in nearby Cadiz. His beautiful brunette girlfriend disappeared into thin air as the cops swooped.
Noye’s team of highly paid Spanish lawyers reckoned he stood a good chance of avoiding extradition back to the UK. In the spring of 1999, Madrid judges threw out all of Noye’s appeals and, after a couple of last-ditch appeals by his briefs had failed, Noye was handcuffed and ordered out of his cell at Madrid’s Valdemoro jail. He was bundled into an anonymous white van escorted by two plain saloons out towards the city suburbs. Less than 30 minutes later, Noye was handed over to three Kent policemen at Madrid Airport and secretly flown to London’s Gatwick Airport.
Back in England, the London underworld was buzzing with rumours about who’d grassed up Kenny Noye. Stories were circulating that the informant had qualified for £100,000 reward money; but would he live long enough to enjoy it? As one criminal source at the time said, ‘I can tell you there will be an even bigger price on that bastard’s head for turning in Kenny Noye.’
Noye even let it be known that he was so confident he’d be acquitted of the murder of Stephen Cameron that he’d authorised his sidekick in Spain, James Stewart, to get his house ready for his return. He even bunged thousands of pounds to his builder back in Spain from his prison cell. ‘He was that confident he’d get off. His cronies were spreading the gospel according to Noye around the entire prison. It’s a game that Noye is very good at,’ explained another inmate.
When Noye walked into the number two court of the Old Bailey on Thursday, 30 March 2000, he was grey haired and dressed in a grey cardigan. He sat hunched almost like an old man in the dock between three prison officers. His eyes panned the jury of eight women and four men from the moment he was led in by three prison screws. Noye claimed he was simply defending himself when he pulled a knife out from under the front seat of his car and knifed Cameron to death on the M25 roundabout. But the jury didn’t believe him and found him guilty of murder by a verdict of 11–1.
In the hours following the verdict, it emerged that Noye’s defence, estimated to have cost between £500,000 and £1million, had been funded by the taxpayer. He’d been granted legal aid because on paper he was not worth a penny.
Noye still currently owns a share in a hotel in Spain, a timeshare holiday complex in Northern Cyprus and two penthouse apartments in a nearby town in Cyprus. His wife lives in a detached bungalow in Looe, Cornwall. His parents live in a recently built detached five-bedroom house on his old manor of West Kingsdown, Kent. Then there is the semi in Bexleyheath, which he has in the past used to ‘entertain’ his women friends.
Noye, the master manipulator, remains locked up in top-security HMP Whitemoor plotting his next move. Underworld sources initially believed Noye would name some top faces to the police in exchange for a reduced sentence. But then the key witness against Noye during the Cameron murder trial was gunned down by a hitman outside a shopping centre in Kent in the late summer of 2000. The murdered witness’s wife told a newspaper that she did not believe her husband had told the truth during Noye’s Old Bailey trial. Shortly afterwards, Noye’s legal team announced that they were putting together a serious appeal against his murder conviction. His lawyers were eventually granted a full appeal against his conviction and he is currently pursuing the case through the European Court of Human Rights. His lawyers have already had his minimum sentence reduced to 16 years, and the building work at his home in Spain has been completed at a cost of many tens of thousands of pounds because Noye believes he will one day be released. He plans to spend his remaining years on his beloved Costa del Crime.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
UNDERCOVER COP
Melting into anonymity – ‘Micky’ keeps it un
dercover
UNDERCOVER COP
The Costa del Crime is, as you’ve no doubt already worked out, a hotbed of lawbreakers and vice. For the past 20 years, the Spanish police have allowed teams of British detectives to operate in the area. In January 2004, Detective Sergeant Paul Finnigan, 41, was knifed outside a restaurant in Fuengirola after he had been transferred by Northamptonshire police to the National Crime Squad to investigate a drugs ring based in the area.
Spanish police say they are happy to allow the British cops to operate on their territory because it can be a useful deterrent to these UK criminals. As one Spanish detective told me recently, ‘We know very little about these people when they show up from Britain, so we need the British police to help us arrest them. Also, many of their criminal enterprises are linked between Spain and the UK, so offences have been committed in both countries.’
Micky from east London is a classic example of the type of hardened police detective who works on the Costa del Crime. He had one major world player in the cocaine business under observation for many months. Micky explains, ‘It’s a much riskier business being out here watching villains because there’s none of the backup we get back home. If any of these characters suss out they’re being watched, they can become very dangerous. Two of my colleagues were beaten to a pulp by one drug baron’s henchmen when he found out we were spying on him. Back in the UK he would never have dared attack the police in that way, but out here anything goes.’
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