Gangs Read online

  GANGS

  Tony Thompson

  A Journey into the Heart

  of the British Underworld

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Tony Thompson

  Gangland Britain

  Copyright © 2004 by Tony Thompson

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Hodder and Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  The right of Tony Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 054 3

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 83053 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Harriet

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Also by Tony Thompson

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction

  ARMED ROBBERY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  COCAINE

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  CRACK

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  FRAUD

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  HI-TECH CRIME

  Chapter Eleven

  BIKERS

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  CANNABIS

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  MONEY LAUNDERING

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  HEROIN

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  SYNTHETIC DRUGS

  Chapter Twenty

  PEOPLE-SMUGGLING

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  KIDNAP

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  GUNS

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  In the ten years since the publication of Gangland Britain the nature of organised crime has changed almost beyond recognition. It used to be the case that both the criminals and the commodities they dealt with could be neatly isolated, most often along ethnic lines: one gang dealt crack, another smuggled cocaine, another heroin and so on. This is no longer the case.

  Though the individual ethnic gangs are still there, the lines between have become increasingly blurred. The members of a gang that falls under the umbrella of ‘Yardies’ are just as likely to have been born in the UK and will be as active in fields like fraud, prostitution and heroin as they are in crack cocaine.

  The very nature of criminal activities has changed too. A decade ago crimes like people-smuggling, identity theft and even money-laundering were in their infancy in the UK and virtually unknown to a wider public. They are now staple gang activities. Before 1999 there had never been a case of kidnap in the Greater Manchester area. Then, in a single weekend, the police force there found itself dealing with three all at once. Kidnap is now one of Britain’s fastest-growing crimes and the trend looks set to continue.

  With this and other trends in mind, the philosophy behind the writing of Gangs has been a simple one: despite the best intentions of police and law-enforcement agencies in Britain and around the world, the only people who truly know exactly what is going on in the world of crime are the criminals themselves.

  To this end in the course of writing this book I have socialised with robbers, thugs, killers and thieves the length and breadth of the country, propositioned prostitutes of multiple nationalities, bought guns, been threatened with knives and sampled two of the most dangerous drugs known to man.

  Many of those who assisted me on my journey are too shy to be mentioned by name; others made it clear that if I indicated in any way I had ever spoken to them I would not live long enough to regret it. A few agreed to speak only after I handed over my full address and that of my parents so that they might more easily seek retribution should I ever betray them.

  There have been some memorable encounters: the fearsome gangland hitman who asked me not to leave the bar where I had interviewed him until I had written up my notes and read out my piece to him. When I told him that simply would not be possible he explained that if I didn’t he’d break my legs. Suitably inspired, I spent ten minutes transcribing my notes, then gave a fifteen-minute presentation of the man’s life and times, thick with puff and praise.

  ‘That was lovely,’ he said. ‘Just wait there one minute.’ He left the room and returned with a group of burly friends. ‘Now,’ he said, taking a seat, ‘read it again so this lot can hear it.’ It took more than three hours of multiple readings before he finally let me go.

  Then there was the time when I naively agreed to meet a notorious villain at his home so that he could ‘put me straight’ on some facts he felt I had got wrong in a magazine article. ‘Ron’ and his minder Chris – a man so tall that he had to stoop to avoid his head bashing on the ceiling of Ron’s south London home – installed me in the back of a large silver Mercedes and set off at speed.

  For more than ten minutes neither man said a word to me or one another and I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Then finally Chris turned to Ron. ‘What do you want to do with him?’ he grunted.

  Ron briefly glanced at me in the rear-view mirror then turned to Chris. ‘Let’s take him down the docks.’

  It’s a cliché, I know, but my life really did flash before my eyes. How could I have been so stupid and put myself into such a sticky situation? I had a chilling vision of my lifeless body floating down the Thames.

  My mind was racing but so was the Merc. I wondered how badly hurt I would be if I threw myself from the car at speed, what the chances of being hit by the vehicle behind were. The panic started rising. I could feel my chest tightening, my throat getting dry, my heart pounding against the walls of my chest. This is it, I thought. I’m going to die.

  All this and more was running through my mind as the car suddenly turned left and pulled into a small car park. One minute I was in fear of my life, the next I was laughing hysterically. They had taken me to the docks all right, their local pub – the Dockers Arms.

  But not all my encounters ended well. In particular there was the time I travelled to Cambridge to meet a retired career criminal by the name of Jeremy Earls, who insisted he had information about widespread corruption and drug-dealing by members of Lincolnshire’s police force.

  For more than two hours I sat in his car and listened patiently to Earls’s increasingly paranoid and gun-obsessed explanation of what he believed was going on. When he had finished he insisted I take away reams of statements, papers and tape-recordings that he said would support his claims. More than anything, Earls was convinced that his life was in danger, that he would be murdered and that his killers would attempt to make his death look like an accident or that he had committed suicide.

  A few days later his name caught my eye as I flicked through some local news bulletins. Earls was dead. Soon after our meeting he had brutally murdered two young brothers, then shot h
imself in the head, all with an Uzi submachine-gun that he kept under the passenger seat of his car at all times. The same seat in which I had sat during our initial meeting.

  A slightly surreal inquest later concluded that Earls was severely mentally ill and had committed suicide after deliberately laying a false trail to make it appear he had been murdered.

  Despite such experiences, the lasting impression I have come away with is just how ordinary most of those involved in the world of organised crime truly are. Sure, there are a fair few psychopaths out there but even the people who are known to be as violent and ruthless as they come generally have families, a sense of humour and go through the same stresses and strains as the rest of us. Just because they manage to put it to one side when they are ‘working’ doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  ‘It’s like that bit in Pulp Fiction,’ one gang member told me, ‘when the two hitmen are on their way to a job and they’re talking about different burger chains around the world. Then before they go into the house one says to the other: “Let’s get into character.” It’s just like that. When it’s time to go to work, you go into a different mindset.’

  It is this same mindset that Gangs seeks to explain.

  Tony Thompson London 2004

  ARMED ROBBERY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jimmy Tippett Jnr throws open the door to his Humberside home and demands to know who the hell I am and what the fuck I want.

  The stocky thirty-two-year-old, once jailed for beating a man senseless with a baseball bat and who famously fought as an unlicensed boxer under the sponsorship of Reggie Kray, is in no mood for visitors and cannot contain his anger at my arrival.

  I stutter and stumble over my words as I try to explain the reason for my visit – to find out whether he’s willing to talk about his alleged friendship with a long-dead drugs baron – but I manage only a few garbled phrases before a mobile phone bursts into life and Tippett rushes off to answer it.

  The door is open so I step forward gingerly into the hallway as Tippett takes the call in his kitchen. I can make out a few snippets of conversation and soon realise that he’s talking about the death of George Francis, a notorious south London gangster gunned down in an apparent contract killing just a few days earlier.

  It was the second time that Francis, strongly suspected of helping dispose of gold bullion from the £26 million Brinks Mat robbery, had been the target of an assassination attempt. In May 1985, just two years after the Brinks Mat job, a hooded man ran into his Kent pub, singled him out and fired a volley of shots, one of which hit him in the shoulder.

  Eighteen years later nothing was left to chance. As sixty-three-year-old Francis arrived at the office of his Bermondsey courier company, his killer emerged from hiding and pumped four bullets into his head and chest at point-blank range.

  His death echoed that of another south London ‘face’, Brian Perry, also sixty-three and linked to the Brinks Mat raid, who had been shot dead in almost identical circumstances seventeen months earlier as he, too, arrived for work. Perry had died just a few hundred yards from where Francis had been shot but nobody had been convicted for the murder and there was an immediate suspicion that the same hitman was responsible for both deaths.

  Tippett finishes his call and returns to the hallway, surprised to find me still waiting there. He motions towards the door and explains that I’ll have to leave as he has some urgent business to attend to.

  ‘Has something happened with the Francis murder?’ I ask.

  Tippett eyes me suspiciously. ‘What do you know about it?’

  I quickly tell him everything I’ve heard about it from other gangsters, journalists and police contacts, and he listens intently. I also take the opportunity to reiterate the reason for my visit, talk about the book I plan to write and also manage to mention the name of the well-respected criminal who provided me with Tippett’s address. When I’ve finished, Tippett seems much calmer and the earlier hostility has almost gone.

  ‘So, what’s happening with the Francis case?’ I ask again.

  ‘The police have pulled in a seventy-two-year-old for questioning.’

  ‘Anyone you know?’

  ‘It’s my dad.’

  For a moment I am struck dumb with shock. Then a question falls out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop it: ‘Do you think he did it?’

  There is a long pause, then Tippett shrugs his shoulders and moves to one side. ‘Perhaps you’d better come in after all.’

  Jimmy Tippett Jnr was introduced to the gangster life at an early age. His father, a hugely successful boxer in the early fifties and once the leading contender for the British Lightweight crown, had been an honorary member of London’s underworld almost from the moment he stepped into the ring.

  With a reputation as a fearsome puncher – twenty-three of his twenty-four professional wins were by knockout – Tippett Snr earned the respect and friendship of the top villains of the day who then, as now, were big fans of the fight game. The links became even stronger when his sister, Julie, married notorious armed robber Freddie Sewell, who sparked a massive police hunt when he shot dead a police officer in Blackpool after a botched raid on a jeweller’s.

  After an unexpectedly early retirement from the fight game – he lost his licence after a brawl with six police officers – Tippett Snr used the power of his name to gain work as a celebrity minder and movie stuntman, associating with the top villains of his day along the way.

  In the mid-1960s he opened a club, the El Partido in south London, which was closed down by Drugs Squad officers after a High Court judge labelled it: ‘the biggest narcotics distribution centre in England’.

  Since then, Tippett Snr’s name has cropped up in connection with everything from the Brighton bombing to a multi-million pound diamond robbery, as well as a number of contract killings. But because none of the allegations against him have ever been proved in a court of law, Tippett’s name has failed to appear in any of the many books that chronicle what is now regarded as the golden era of organised crime.

  As we sit in his kitchen drinking coffee, Jimmy Tippett Jnr’s respect and admiration for his father is unmistakable, and he feels it is high time more people were aware of his unsung status among the criminal elite, particularly as his father is often reluctant to talk about it.

  ‘The problem,’ Tippett tells me softly, ‘is that the only people who anyone ever gets to hear about are the ones that get caught. If you’re doing the business and you make a good living but then you retire without going inside, your name just fades away. In years to come people assume you were a nobody. But that’s not always the case. They say crime doesn’t pay but I’m telling you that’s bollocks. If you do it right, it pays beautiful.

  ‘When I was growing up, I had a fantastic life, thanks to my dad. Me and my sister never wanted for anything. We went on the most beautiful holidays you can imagine all over the world. One year it was off to Egypt to visit the Pyramids, the next it was flying over a safari park in Kenya in a helicopter and after that it was watching the sun rise over the Sahara desert. None of it would have been possible without my dad doing what he did.’

  With the likes of ‘Flash’ Harry Hayward and Charlie Kray being regular visitors to the family home and Freddie Sewell for an uncle it was, perhaps, inevitable that Tippett Jnr would ultimately be drawn into a life of crime himself, though it happened far sooner than anyone expected.

  When his son was around twelve Tippett Snr took over the running of a small spieler in Lewisham, south London. It wasn’t exactly a high-class venture – just three rooms above a kebab shop – but his reputation was enough to ensure that all the local faces made it their regular haunt, coming together several nights each week to play poker, kaluki and bet on horses.

  ‘I was only twelve or thirteen and used to make the teas on a Saturday. The place was electric; it was really buzzy, full of characters, and pretty soon I got to know them all. The place was like a magnet for all the gang
s, and young thieves off the manor would come in and out all day with racks of clothes, trays of diamond rings, you name it, all for a fraction of the real price.

  ‘I remember being so excited every time I walked up the stairs to the place. Just the smell of the cigar smoke – everyone in there seemed to have one between their teeth all day long – would set my heart racing.

  ‘The amount of money going round the place was incredible, especially in the days after some of the lads had a good result. I remember one robber who was losing badly at poker and was down to his last two grand, which was sitting in front of him, all in fifties. Rather than see it go to the bloke he was playing he just picked it up off the table and slung it into the gas fire. A couple of the younger guys ran to try and get it out but the bloke pulled out a .45 and shouted out: “Any cunt goes near that lot and I’ll put a fucking bullet in his head.”

  ‘Every now and then you’d hear about someone from the club getting killed or stabbed or badly injured but none of it ever put me off. I was hooked on the life and I absolutely loved it. I began going sick at school just so I could get up to the spieler and be round everyone. At first my mum tried to get me out of it but after a while she just gave up. I think she knew in her heart I was going to go into the life. After all, I was born into it.’

  The young Tippett joined the ranks of Britain’s armed robbers just at the end of a thirty-year stretch when it had been the crime of choice of the criminal elite. Armed robbery had taken over from the previous favourite – safe-blowing – which had grown to epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Second World War as disgruntled servicemen turned their skills with explosives into a way of making ends meet. Rapid improvements in safe design meant that by the late 1950s the job took too long and too much explosive was needed to make it viable.

  Back then Britain was a wholly cash society and every factory or office would take in huge deliveries of it every Thursday to pay the staff their weekly wage. Despite the vast sums involved, armoured vans were a rarity and most of the deliveries were made by couriers, carrying the cash in simple briefcases.