The World's Most Evil Gangs (14 page)

Like Liverpool, Manchester has long had a deep-rooted gang culture, often creating national headlines in recent years. The so-called Quality Street Gang ruled the city for three decades from the Sixties through to the Eighties. The QSG, as it became known, tended to get the unjustifiable blame for every crime in the city, although the members of this loose-knit organisation were certainly behind a number of well-executed robberies and major drug importation. The thriving
Manchester club scene was entirely dominated by the QSG. However, the gang’s influence began to fade in the
mid-Eighties
after two violent robbers turned supergrass, leading to a special police squad conducting a string of raids across the region that netted a healthy haul of crooks and booty.

The QSG’s successors have certainly not faded from view, for there is nothing secretive about Manchester’s scary Noonan family. They court celebrity status and have become reality television stars by openly boasting about their lives of crime. Led by brothers Domenyk and Desmond, the family starred in fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries that revealed their gloating roles in one of the UK’s most notorious crime families. (The series
At Home With The Noonans
, presented by investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre, was screened on TV’s Crime and Investigation Network.)

There are 14 Noonan siblings who all have names beginning with the letter D. Raised in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill area, it is claimed their mother once burned their home down in a bid to move up the council housing list. The Noonans worked as bouncers at the city’s notorious Hacienda nightclub. When they had trouble with another gang, they raided the rivals’ pub. Wielding shotguns and machetes, they chopped the head off their guard dog off and placed it on the pool table, warning them: ‘Next time it will be human.’

The family’s burly boss, Domenyk Noonan, has more than 40 convictions for armed robbery, assaulting police, attacks on prison officers, deception, firearms and fraud. While in Manchester’s Strangeways jail, he changed his name to Dominic Lattlay Fottfoy – in homage to one of his father’s sayings: ‘Look After Those That Look After You, Fuck Off Those That Fuck Off You.’ When he last appeared gloatingly
on television in 2012, the 48-year-old had spent 22 years in prison – and, for that particular ‘starring role’, he was interviewed behind bars.

Older brother ‘Dessie’, an enforcer linked to dozens of armed robberies and several murders, was knifed to death in 2005. He was found slumped in the street close to his home in the Chorlton district, having made a last phone call to tell his wife he was dying. Shortly before his murder, aged 46, he appeared in a TV documentary,
A Very British Gangster
, and at first denied police reports that he had carried out 25 murders. But when asked how many people he had actually killed, his brother Domenyk butted in to say it was 24 – before ‘Dessie’ held up seven fingers indicating that the true figure was 27. ‘Dessie’ Noonan then boasted ominously: ‘No one would dare touch us. If they did there would be serious fireworks. I’ve got a bigger army than the police. We have got more guns than the police, silly buggers. We’re strong and we’ve got strong people around us. People know that. If they think they can take one of us out and that’s the end of it, then they’re silly people, fucking silly people.’

However, in September 2012, the violent Noonans were warned they would never again be untouchable after one of the family, Domenyk’s nephew 25-year-old Damien, was jailed for abduction, torture and plotting to flood the streets of Manchester with a banned dance drug. He and two accomplices were each jailed for six years and nine months at Preston Crown Court. The court heard that the gang dragged a rival off the street and, in front of bystanders and children, beat, kicked and stamped on their victim. During his
hour-long
ordeal, their target was threatened with a blowtorch and told he would have his kneecaps shot off. Police found him still alive in the boot of Damien Noonan’s car.

It has long been assumed that the sort of violence in which the Noonans and their ilk gloried would have faded from fashion as criminals enter the electronic age, in which money can be made and moved without a crook getting his hands dirty. That theory ignores the surge of foreign-influenced criminals in the UK. Since the late Seventies, as ethnic communities established themselves in Britain, a new type of organised criminal has emerged, the most obvious being the Chinese Triads and the Jamaican Yardies, each of which operates within its own communities, at times extremely violently.

Four separate Triad societies – 14K, Wo Shing Wo, Wo On Lock, San Yee On – are known to operate throughout the UK, with bases in every city where there is a large Chinese community. They make their money from drug trafficking, prostitution, credit card fraud, protection, extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, copyright piracy, money laundering and immigration. Police find it almost impossible to persuade witnesses to come forward because of brutal reprisals and intimidation. But in the Nineties, the problem of extortion, or ‘tea money’, became so severe within London’s Chinatown that restaurant owners called on the government and police for help.

The influence of the Yardies has grown with the boom in crack cocaine, Jamaican gangs now controlling most of the supply in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds and Bristol. Yardies use brutal tactics against rivals and a string of casual shootings, in which innocent bystanders were also killed, has brought their activities shockingly to public notice.

Home-grown young Asian gangs tend towards ‘protection’, car theft and credit-card fraud. Hell’s Angels, who have about a
dozen chapters in the UK, have been accused of firearms sales, drug trafficking and extortion. In Northern Ireland, despite the peace process, both Republican and Loyalist terrorist groups still raise funds through robbery, extortion, smuggling, gun running and ownership of drinking clubs.

An investigation by the BBC’s prestigious
Panorama
programme in 2013 found a ‘ghost community’ of 600,000 illegal immigrants, many of whom operate in criminal gangs. It pointed out that whereas once most serious crime was down to indigenous ‘firms’ like the Krays or the Richardsons, now drug smuggling, people trafficking, prostitution, robbery and fraud are all being carried out under the auspices of gangs whose homelands are overseas. Gangsters from abroad now operating in Britain include, of course, the Italian Mafia, principally involved in financial crime. There are also elements of the Japanese Yakuza, of Vietnamese, Kurdish and Turkish drugs gangs and West African fraudsters.

But it is crimes committed by EU nationals that have more than trebled in just five years, according to
Panorama
. The TV report estimated that more than 1,000 gangs of Eastern Bloc nationals were operating in Britain, netting £30 million a year. The specialities of these migrants are street begging and cashpoint scams, with Romanians responsible for 92 per cent of all ATM fraud in Britain, according to police figures. One of the most notorious examples was Gheorge Banu, who in 2005 was ringleader of a gang who used fake ATM machines to record financial details in order to steal £643,000 from customers’ accounts. A judge had already asked for his deportation after a previous conviction. Another Romanian fraudster, Adu Bunu, was jailed for five years in 2008 after he was convicted of cloning more than 2,000 cards, which allowed
him to steal more than £1 million. Instead of giving his baby son toys to play with, Bunu presented him with a mountain of stolen banknotes. The cost of accommodating Eastern European crooks like him in British prisons was reckoned in 2013 to be almost £100 million a year – and rising.

In March 2013, authorities in Europe arrested 44 members of a global fraud network in a joint operation against a gang targeting victims in Britain and 15 other countries. Operation Pandora Storm successfully shut down illegal workshops producing card machine theft devices and involved 82 house searches in Romania and the UK.

A 2013 report by Financial Fraud Action, an organisation formed to fight plastic-card crime, reported that ATM thefts had trebled in a year, and that police intelligence suggested 90 per cent of such thefts had been linked to Romanian criminals.

An even greater threat, according to both police and NCIS, is the influx of criminals and vast sums of money from the former Soviet Union. The break-up of the USSR resulted in a sudden decline in law and order. The profits of organised crime there have been fed through the weakly-regulated banking system in the gangs’ own countries. And here the once highly respected British financial services sector plays its part. It is conservatively estimated that £5 billion of criminally generated money enters the UK financial system each year. This enables foreign criminals to gain a foothold without stepping onto British soil.

As a senior legal academic, Dr Barry Rider of Cambridge University, warned: ‘Official investigations have continued grossly to underestimate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the British criminal classes. This is particularly so in regard to financial frauds and money-laundering.’ And as a Home Affairs
Select Committee report concluded: ‘Organised crime raises images of the Mafia or the Krays. But to confine concern to such relatively tightly organised groups would be to miss most of today’s criminal activity – which, if more loosely organised, is nevertheless actually more threatening.’

C
arl Anthony Williams, Australia’s most notorious mobster, was about to name names. Fellow inmates at maximum-security Barwon prison learned that he was cooperating with police, detailing gangland killings of which he had intimate knowledge.

On the night of 19 April 2010, Williams phoned his lawyer to claim that he was being taunted by prisoners howling like dogs, a sign that his life was in danger. As the howling echoed throughout the prison, the drugs kingpin put the phone down in terror – and minutes later his skull was crushed with the metal stem of an exercise bike wielded by a fellow inmate.

Thus ended the career of Carl Williams, aged 39, the central character of a spate of rival gang murders that had terrorised the state of Victoria. The mobster had been serving a life sentence, with a minimum 35 years before parole, for ordering a string of contract killings.

Williams, born in Melbourne in October 1970, grew up in a culture of drug abuse. His elder brother Shane died of a heroin overdose. He married Roberta Mercieca, a convicted drug trafficker, with whom he had one daughter. Williams worked as a labourer and his wife ran a children’s clothes shop.

His life of crime started with petty thefts. In 1990 he was fined AU$400 for handling stolen goods and failing to answer bail. Then in 1993 he was sentenced to 150 hours community service for criminal damage. But the drugs trade would become his main occupation.

In the 1990s the local manufacture of illegal pills had become a boom industry, to the extent that police described Melbourne as the ‘amphetamine capital of Australia’. The gangs that ran this trade were also involved in protection rackets, nightclubs, prostitution, illegal gambling and armed robbery.

A special police unit, the Purana Task Force, was established to curb the inter-gang violence that exploded across the state of Victoria. And they soon established that Carl Williams was becoming the central figure among Melbourne’s mobsters as he vied for power with rival crime families. These included: The Honoured Society, an Italian gang who controlled the city’s vegetable markets; the Carlton Crew of Cosa Nostra expatriates; The Dockers, a group of Irish waterfront workers led by the Moran family; the Radev Gang, led by career criminal Nikolai ‘the Russian’ Radev; The Sunshine Crew led by Paul Kallipolitis, and of course the Williams family led by Carl and his father George.

The period that became known as ‘the Melbourne Gangland Killings’ began with the 1998 murder of a Carlton Crew chief by hitmen from The Dockers. Drive-by murders, suburban
ambushes, workplace executions and even car bombings followed over the next few years. In October 1999 Carl Williams was shot in the stomach in the city’s Gladstone Park but survived. Two members of the Moran family were present at the time but Williams told police he had blacked out and could not identify his assailants.

In June 2000 Williams ambushed Mark Moran outside his Aberfeldie home and shot him dead. Between 20 and 30 other shootings followed – putting paid to Nicolai Radev, Paul Kallipolitis and three more of the Moran family – but by now the net was tightening on Williams. In November 1999 Williams, his father and another associate were arrested and charged with the illegal possession of 250,000 amphetamine tablets after a raid on a Broadmeadows drug factory. The pills had a street value of $20 million.

The case never went to court, however, because of corruption allegations against detectives involved in the raid. Williams was re-arrested a year later but again granted bail while a corruption investigation ensued.

So it was not until 2004 that the crime kingpin received his first major jail sentence: seven years for drug trafficking. Two years later he was sentenced to 27 years for the murder of a drug dealer shot outside his home in front of his five-year-old son. The following year he received two 25-year sentences for the slayings of Mark Moran’s stepfather Lewis and an associate. He also got a life term for the murder of Lewis Moran’s son Jason and a money launderer named Mark Mallia.

Jason Moran’s execution took place while in the driving seat of his van, with five young children watching from the back seat. Williams and seven henchmen who took him to a warehouse and tortured him into confessing where some
laundered money was buried, kidnapped Mallia. His charred body was found by the Fire Brigade in a wheelie bin.

When in 2010 Carl Williams’ skull was smashed with a metal bar, it was seen by many Australians as no more than fitting punishment for the man who had brought so much murderous mayhem to the streets of Melbourne.

The modern-day mobsters who terrorised Melbourne were merely the latest in the city’s criminal history. Gangs like The Dockers, led by the Moran family in the Nineties, inherited their violent methods from the thugs who ran Melbourne’s waterfront after World War Two. The notorious Painters and Dockers Union operated a Mafia-like system of control over goods that passed through the port. Major earners for the union bosses were hidden shipments of heroin and more recently cocaine. Once safely out of the docks, these illicit substances were passed across the road to the adjacent Melbourne Markets, whose fruit and vegetable vans provided a handy distribution system.

The history of criminal gangs goes furthest back in Sydney, the first urban settlement of the fledgling colony. Groups of dangerous vagabonds flourished in the waterfront Rocks district in the nineteenth century. The most notorious of these was a Mob called the ‘Rocks Push’ that dominated this area of Sydney from the 1870s to the 1890s. The gang was engaged in running warfare with other larrikin gangs of the time, such as the Straw Hat Push, the Glebe Push, the Argyle Cut Push, the Forty Thieves from Surry Hills and the Gibb Street Mob.

The gang names are evocative titles from an age that was hardly glamorous. And it was hardly surprising that a gang culture existed at that time in Australia’s short history, for the country had been a penal colony within living memory, with
some convicts still being transported (to Western Australia) until 1868.

Law-abiding Australians in the twenty-first century could be forgiven for thinking that criminals were still among the nation’s less welcome imports.

Asian and Middle-Eastern gangs are now active in major cities. Following the fall of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975, refugees arrived in Australia and settled in Sydney’s Cabramatta area, forming the 5T gang in the mid-Eighties. One of them was Tri Minh Tran, who rose to become leader of the 5T at the age of 14 in 1989. He was already well known to police. At the tender age of 11, he had been arrested for carrying a sawn-off shotgun, and during the next couple of years had been prime suspect in the murder of two rival gang members.

The 5T became dominant players in the heroin trade in Sydney’s western suburbs, especially at street level, and were believed to be involved in the murder of John Newman, the Member for Cabramatta in the NSW State Parliament. Newman had been the target of numerous death threats from Asian gangs but did not seek police protection. In September 1994 he was shot and killed while outside his home with his fiancée, Lucy Wang. A local club owner, Phuong Ngo, who had run against Newman as a rival candidate, was convicted of the killing in 2001.

The murder of Tri Minh Tran in 1995 sparked a power struggle within 5T and by the turn of the century the organisation had broken up, replaced by rival mobs the Four Aces and Madonna’s Boys. Although publicly not as violent as their predecessor, the new gangs managed a diverse criminal portfolio, profiting from drug importation and distribution,
money laundering, human trafficking, and coercion of women into prostitution.

The scale of the drug trade in Australia was exposed in 2010 with the arrest of 14 members of a Vietnamese Syndicate in Victoria’s biggest drugs bust, with the seizure of merchandise and assets worth $30 million. Police had swooped on 14 properties in Melbourne’s inner northern and western suburbs following a ten-month Australian Crime Commission investigation dubbed Operation Sethra. In one Carlton apartment, allegedly used as a safehouse, they found a stash of heroin, almost $600,000 in cash and $50,000 in casino chips. A Keilor Downs house yielded 350g of heroin, $345,970 in cash and $54,500 in casino chips. The Syndicate had been using casinos’ high-roller tables to launder drugs money. In court, prosecutors claimed that proceeds of the illicit trade had been used to buy property in Australia and Vietnam, including the purchase of a hotel for $2.8 million.

The Vietnamese have no monopoly on organised crime, of course, and since the 1990s it is Middle Eastern gangs that have caused crime-fighters most headaches. They are most prominent in Sydney, where police have been accused of going soft on gangs for fear of being accused of targeting ethnic minorities. But a string of drive-by shootings shocked authorities into action.

The most serious was an attack on Lakemba police station, in Sydney’s south-west district, in November 1998. In the early hours of the morning, 17 shots were fired, bullets shattering the plate glass doors, with one punching a hole in a computer screen at head height. The attack was designed to deter cops from investigating a Lebanese gang named DK’s Boys, after its founder Danny Karam. Formed only in the late 1990s, this brutal Mob
was responsible for one of the bloodiest periods in NSW criminal history – a drugs gang that killed its own boss and set out to rule Sydney’s nightlife district, Kings Cross.

Between July and December of 1998, the gang terrorised the inner city, committing four murders, at least 16 shootings and several knee-cappings. Their violence was for monopoly over the cocaine trade that raked in a fortune for Karam but much less for the young runners he used to distribute the drugs. In December 1998 his minions rebelled. As Karam sat in his car outside a Surry Hills safehouse, he was sprayed with bullets by gang members led by Michael Kanaan, a thug with a criminal history that includes three murders and four charges of GBH.

Kaanan was an immediate suspect in the drive-by shooting at Lakemba police station but he and fellow gang member Wassim El-Assaad were found not guilty by a court. A third man, Saleh Jamal, was later convicted. He had jumped bail when first accused of the shooting but was extradited from Lebanon in 2007 and jailed for nine years for another act of violence, the kneecapping of a rival in 1998. It was not until May 2010 that Jamal was found guilty of the police station attack and jailed for an additional 12 years. It was revealed that Jamal was so feared that police had to promise that four witnesses who testified against him would be given new identities. Although fellow gang member Michael Kanaan had been found not guilty of the Lakemba shooting, he won’t be coming out of prison. For his other offences, he has three life terms to serve plus an additional 50 years at maximum security Goulburn Correctional Centre.

The final clampdown on DK’s Boys and similar thugs came after New South Wales Police set up a special squad to tackle organised crime by Middle-Eastern gangs. The move was prompted by an extraordinary event in Sydney’s recent history
– a huge public backlash against Arab gangsters who had been allowed to gain ground as police seemingly overlooked the crime wave, fearful of Internal Affairs investigations for targeting ethnic minorities.

Apparently unaware of growing public fury, the police were taken by surprise when, on Sunday 11 December 2005, a vast crowd gathered at Cronulla, singing and waving the national flag as they ‘reclaimed’ the beach. The so-called Cronulla Riots grew into a series of sectarian clashes and Mob violence that spread, over the next few nights, to other Sydney suburbs.

The fuse for this popular explosion of rage had been lit a week earlier when a group of volunteer surf lifesavers were assaulted by a band of young men of Arab appearance, with several other violent assaults occurring over the following days. By midday on 11 December about 5,000 people had gathered at Cronulla beach to protest against the spate of violence against locals. But fuelled by drink, some of the protesters turned to violence themselves, attacking a sunbather of Middle-Eastern origin. Similar assaults occurred elsewhere later that day. Retaliatory riots took place that night and on subsequent nights, resulting in extensive property damage and even attacks on police and ambulance crews. The riots forced NSW Premier Morris Iemma to promise a permanent Middle-Eastern Organised Crime Squad similar in vein to an existing Asian Crime Squad.

The riots might have tarnished Australia’s image abroad – several countries issued travel warnings – but it also awoke police and politicians to the anger of ordinary Aussies in the face of unchecked gang warfare.