The World's Most Evil Gangs (13 page)

W
hen the crime empires of the Krays and the Richardsons began to crumble, a power vacuum existed – but not for long. South of the Thames, in old Richardson territory, the Arif family, of Turkish-Cypriot origin, came to prominence. Meanwhile, in North London, the Krays’ ‘manor’ became the stamping ground of the now notorious Adams family.

The Arifs were considered the leading crime family in the capital throughout the late 1980s. Although Dennis, Mehmet, and Dogan Arif – three of seven brothers – had been feared names in the London underworld since the Sixties, the clan first hit the headlines in 1983 when Dogan was acquitted of taking part in a bogus arms deal to swindle the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini out of £34 million. As author James Morton says in his book,
Gangland International
: ‘The British criminal had now seriously entered the international market.’

The Arifs are known to have been involved in racketeering, drug smuggling, armed robbery and murders. In the Nineties, they launched a decade-long gang war with the rival Brindle family, which resulted in at least eight deaths. In September 1990 a Brindle associate, Stephen Dalligan, was wounded after being shot seven times by Ahmet ‘Abbi’ Abdullah, a Turkish gunmen working for the Arifs. The following March, Abdullah was shot in a South London betting shop by two men. Brothers Anthony and Patrick Brindle were charged with the murder but later acquitted at the Old Bailey. In August 1991 David Brindle was shot in a Walworth pub by two men who burst in and sprayed the bar with bullets, yelling: ‘This is for Abbi.’ One of the assassins was said to have been hired hitman James Moody, a former Richardson minder who had been on the run since escaping from jail 12 years earlier. In revenge for David Brindle’s death, in June 1993 a gunman walked into a Hackney pub, coolly ordered a drink, then turned to Moody and shot him four times.

While they were waging their turf war with the Brindles, the police mounted a huge undercover operation against the Arifs, leading to the conviction and imprisonment of most of the leadership, including various family members.

In 1990 Dennis and Mehmet Arif tried to steal £1 million from a security van near Reigate, Surrey – but the Flying Squad had been tipped off and were waiting for them. The gang were armed with two revolvers, a 12-bore Browning shotgun, a
self-loading
Colt and a Browning pistol. In the gun battle that followed, Arif henchman Kenny Baker was shot dead as he tried to open fire on officers. Mehmet was shot by police but survived. The two brothers were jailed for a total of 40 years. In 1999 Bekir Arif, known as ‘The Duke’, was convicted of
conspiracy to supply 100 kilograms of heroin worth £12.5 million and was given a 23-year prison sentence.

The family’s ‘godfather’, Dogan Arif, was jailed for seven years in 1990 for conspiring to supply £8 million worth of marijuana. He continued to control the family’s operations from inside prison – and on his release, from his £2 million villa in Northern Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with Britain. Police are certain that, even from abroad or behind bars, it was business as usual for the family. A senior cop who has worked on the Arifs case was reported as saying: ‘They are one of the most awesome gangs of villains ever seen in London. You write them off at your peril.’

While the Arifs continued to exert a malign influence from their Southeast London power base, once the domain of the Richardsons, across the Thames in former Kray territory lurked the silently sinister Adams family. Unlike the violent twins, their modern-day successors in the London underworld never sought notoriety. But they got it anyway.

The story of their amazing power emerged when the gang’s leader Terence ‘Terry’ Adams was jailed for seven years in 2007 for the relatively minor offence of money laundering. It emerged then that the charge was the tip of a monstrous iceberg, for the gang was reportedly the most powerful criminal organisation in the UK. The Adams family, or the ‘A-Team’ as they liked to be known, have been linked to more than 25 murders as well as a string of rackets including armed robbery, fraud, drug trafficking and extortion – racking up estimated profits of £200 million.

The gang was formed around 1980 by Terry, with his brothers Sean ‘Tommy’ Adams as a brutal enforcer and Patrick ‘Patsy’ Adams as the finance expert. Of Irish parentage and
initially based in London’s Clerkenwell, the family (there were 11 siblings in all) expanded from petty extortion of market traders into a vast racketeering and drug trafficking empire throughout the capital and beyond, with links to Spain and South America. By 1990 they were so feared they could ‘franchise’ the Adams name so lesser criminals could say they were working for them.

When police raided Terry Adams’ home near Barnet, North London, in 2003, they found antiques worth £500,000 and tens of thousands of pounds hidden in a shoebox. More money was salted away in secret bank accounts to go with the cars, yachts and a home in Cyprus. Bugs later placed in the house in a unique MI5 operation caught the gangster sounding like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather
.

In one tape, recorded in 1997, Adams was heard discussing a dispute over a missing £50,000. He told a ‘financial adviser’, jeweller Saul ‘Solly’ Nahome: ‘Let Simon give the geezer a good hiding … tell him to use the family name.’ In another conversation, Adams said: ‘When I hit someone with something I do them damage.’ In a third, he told how he dealt with a row over cash. He said: ‘A hundred grand it was, Dan, or 80 grand, and I went “crack”. On my baby’s life, Dan, his kneecap came right out there – all white, Dan, all bone and white.’

He wasn’t boasting. The Adams family made it to the top of the criminal hierarchy by ruthless brutality against anyone who stood in their way, and although the brothers were never charged with any killings, the culture of violence that developed on the periphery of the gang was frightening, with numerous associates and rivals said to have met brutal ends. At the height of their power in the early Nineties, the Adams
family were in charge of most of the cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine coming into the capital. They recruited
Afro-Caribbean
members to add manpower and used them to murder rivals and informants. They also built up links with Jamaican crack cocaine Yardie groups and with the Colombian cocaine cartels. The money made was laundered through various corrupt financiers, accountants, lawyers and other professionals, and subsequently invested in property and other legitimate businesses.

Terry’s favoured laundering method was to set up sham companies, for which he claimed to work as a ‘business consultant’. Some of his illicit income was spent on his £2 million home, furnished with antiques and paintings. He spent £78,000 remodelling the garden. He and his wife Ruth bought a series of top-of the-range cars. Their daughter, Skye, was privately educated and they also bought her a Mercedes sports car. Adams himself had a luxury yacht.

But it was not all plain sailing. Patrick Adams had been jailed for seven years for armed robbery in the 1970s. And in 1998 brother Tommy, who had previously been acquitted of handling the proceeds of a bullion robbery, was jailed for
seven-and
-a-half years for masterminding an £8 million hashish smuggling operation. When a judge ordered that he surrender some of his profits or face a further five years, his wife turned up twice to the court, carrying £500,000 in cash inside a briefcase on each occasion.

Terry Adams himself was finally caged in 2007. He had been arrested four years earlier and charged with money laundering, tax evasion and handling stolen goods but was released on £1 million bail. At the Old Bailey in February 2007 he pleaded guilty to a sample charge of conspiracy to launder £1.1 million
– an offence reminiscent of Al Capone’s arrest for tax evasion in the 1930s. Prosecuting barrister Andrew Mitchell QC described him as ‘one of the country’s most feared and revered organised criminals’ and added: ‘He comes with a pedigree, as one of a family whose name had a currency all of its own in the underworld. A hallmark of his career was his ability to keep his evidential distance from any of the violence and other crimes from which he undoubtedly profited.’ Sentencing Adams to seven years’ imprisonment, Judge Timothy Pontius told him: ‘Your plea demonstrates that you have a fertile, cunning and imaginative mind capable of sophisticated, complex and dishonest financial manipulation.’

His wife Ruth was also subject to the money-laundering charges but these were ‘left on the file’. Ordered to repay £750,000 of legal fees from the trial, the marital home was sold but Ruth was allowed to keep part of the value. When Terry, then aged 56, was released from prison on parole halfway through his sentence in June 2010, he went on a spending spree – in defiance of a court order (known as a Financial Reporting Order) aimed at preventing criminals profiting from hidden riches.

In August 2011 City of Westminster Magistrates heard that Adams had enjoyed, among other treats, a £2,200 gold Cartier watch, a £2,000 gym membership, £7,000 cosmetic dentistry and a £7,500 Harley Street facelift. A scowling Terry was sent straight back to jail to serve the rest of his sentence, completed in 2013.

Despite the frightening reputations of the Arif family and the Adams brothers, Britain today has no single crime czar, godfather, or ‘Mr Big’. There is, for instance, no single national organisation that controls the distribution of
narcotics, which nowadays are key to the funding of almost every major crime.

In the Northwest and Northeast of England, the supply of drugs is often through bouncers who operate in pubs and clubs. The doormen allow only their own dealers into the premises or are paid a percentage from freelance traffickers. In Newcastle the fierce rivalry between different groups of bouncers has led to a number of shootings. Every city has its own gangs, although none has occupied such a powerful position as, for instance, the legendary Krays. Instead there is a proliferation of outfits across the country controlling small patches of the UK with specialist interests.

Sharing the South London patch with larger families like the Arifs are the crack-dealing gangs. On the other side of the Thames, in Adams’ territory, are the North London forgery gangs. Newcastle upon Tyne is traditionally the home of protection racketeers. In the 1920s Sheffield was known as ‘Little Chicago’. More recently its gang warfare has been dictated by postcodes, the S3 and S4 gangs becoming locked in a vendetta that resulted in bloodshed on the streets. In Birmingham, the recent threats to law and order have been from juvenile gangland, where guns are a fashion accessory and shootings take place in broad daylight. A drive-by shooting with a machine-gun that killed innocent bystanders at a New Year’s Eve party in 2013 shocked the nation. In Glasgow, savage blade attacks typify the street violence. In 2005 the World Health Organisation designated the city the murder capital of Europe. Overall, Scotland has the second highest murder rate in Western Europe (after Finland), the main cause being
overuse
of alcohol and drugs. Glasgow suffers about 70 killings each year, much of the violence blamed on gangs vying to
control the city’s drugs trade. The WHO added that ‘a culture of young men carrying knives’ also played a part.

In Liverpool, the city’s fortunes were determined by the docks, which allowed local criminals to play a part on the international stage. Merseyside is one centre where, unlike other provincial towns mentioned above, a criminal ‘Mr Big’ did emerge in recent years – the infamous Curtis ‘Cocky’ Warren, whose drugs gang saw millions of pounds passing through the city in the Nineties. Warren is the only known criminal to make it into The Sunday Times Rich List through his very public role as a mastermind of Britain’s £2 billion-
a-year
cocaine business.

Warren, a mugger and robber from the age of 11 and a drug dealer while still in his teens, became by the 1980s a trusted client of Colombian cocaine cartels, Turkish heroin traders and Spanish marijuana suppliers, a reputation that enabled him to get vast quantities of drugs on credit. After a 1993 trial for smuggling £250 million of cocaine, at which he was acquitted on a technicality, he is said to have told Customs officers: ‘I’m off to spend my £87 million from the first shipment and you can’t fucking touch me.’

As Merseyside turf wars worsened in the mid-Nineties, Warren switched his gang’s operations to Sassenheim in Holland. But when Dutch police intercepted £125 million worth of drugs he was smuggling into the country in 1996, he was jailed for 12 years. Three years later, while in Holland’s Hoorn prison, he kicked another inmate to death and earned himself an extra four years for manslaughter. In 2005 Dutch authorities charged him with continuing to run his smuggling business from his jail cell but the case was dropped because of insufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, in Warren’s absence, gang rivalry was causing chaos in Liverpool. In 2004 the biggest explosions in mainland Britain since the IRA ceasefire were the result of a drugs cartel faction planting car bombs outside two Liverpool police stations in a bid to stop a major investigation. It was a power struggle that resulted in the death of another drugs boss, former Warren associate Colin ‘King Cocaine’ Smith, who was gunned down as he left a Merseyside gym in 2007.

On his release from prison in Holland, Warren returned to his Merseyside ‘manor’ to resume his role as ‘King of Coke’. He did not stay free for long. In 2009 the 46-year-old faced a Jersey court and was jailed for 13 years for trying to smuggle £1 million of cannabis into the Channel Islands – for him, a minor consignment which he had described as ‘just a little starter’ to get himself re-established. But even from prison, Warren’s tentacles still stretched around the globe, according to police. One officer on the case said: ‘Cocky needs only a mobile phone to communicate with his gang on the outside for him to operate a £300 million-a-year smuggling business from his cell.’ The retribution that looked as if it would have most effect on the cocky crime lord, however, was a more subtle attack on his empire – using court orders seeking to confiscate all his ill-gotten assets.