Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (19 page)

B
orn Monday, 23 April 1923, in Plaistow, the son of a railway foreman, Albert ‘Bert’ Wickstead was the UK’s answer to Eliot Ness. He was educated at Burke senior school, and then took up factory work. His chosen career would have been as a West Ham footballer, but two broken legs put paid to any possibility of him kicking a ball around a pitch; he did, however, go on to kick a large number of criminals into touch.

During World War II, he served with the SAS, and was stationed in India, Burma and Ceylon. He joined the police after being demobbed, encouraged by his uncle, also a police officer.

As a young inspector at Stoke Newington, north London, he solved 19 murders in two years – a record that has never been equalled. In 1965, he investigated a
series of arson attacks on synagogues by the neo-fascists of the National Socialist Movement. The perpetrators were jailed. He was dubbed ‘The Old Grey Fox’, and was renowned for jumping up and disappearing almost as quickly. He was affectionately known as ‘Gangbuster Wickstead’, one of the last of the high-profile Scotland Yard detectives, part of an era when men in belted raincoats and trilbies would stand on the steps of the Old Bailey after a trial and pronounce on the latest twist or a successful verdict in underworld-related trials.

Unlike many of his contemporaries at the Yard, Wickstead was an honest cop and a man never to take a bribe. In fact, when the chance arose, he pursued the Met’s bent policemen with as much relish as he chased the villains.

Bert was promoted to the rank of commander to run what was then ‘J’ Division, in London’s East End. In 1970, he headed the investigation into what was then Britain’s biggest bank robbery, committed by the Wembley Mob. A year later, he was given a free hand to form his own team, the Serious Crimes Squad, to tackle major professional crime in the capital. The group was the first of the specialist units set up by the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s.

Perhaps Wickstead’s most controversial case was the torso murder investigation of 1976–77, at the end of which Reg Dudley and Bob Maynard were both jailed for life for the murders of Billy Moseley and Micky Cornwall. At 135 days, it was the longest murder trial in British history, and both men furiously protested their innocence from the dock. Between them, they would go on to serve more than 40 years behind bars.

The thrust of the case was that Moseley had been having an affair with another criminal’s wife and had also accused Dudley of being a police informer. For this, he had supposedly been murdered in September 1974, and his body had been chopped up and dumped in the Thames – hence, ‘The Torso Murder’.

According to the prosecution, when Moseley’s friend, Cornwall (a character known as ‘The Laughing Bank Robber’ because he was always smiling) was later released from prison, he went hunting for the killers. He, in turn, was murdered. He was shot in the head and dumped in a shallow grave in Hertfordshire in September 1975.

Dozens of people fell under suspicion for the murders before the police charged the seven who appeared at the Old Bailey. The prosecution evidence came primarily from two sources – the alleged confessions made to the police by Dudley and Maynard, who worked at the illegal end of the jewellery business, and their so-called admissions to a fellow inmate, a young bank robber called Tony Wild, while they were awaiting trial in Brixton Prison.

According to police, Dudley had, during a journey in a police car, said, ‘The cunt [Moseley] had it coming. He tried to fuck me so I fucked him good and proper.’ Later, Dudley was said to have told the police questioning him about Cornwall, ‘You can take it from me it is not on my conscience… He deserved what he got and that’s it.’ For his part, Maynard had supposedly told the police after his arrest, ‘It’s about time you came for me.’

The police investigation was led by Bert Wickstead, and although he was not a man to accept a bribe, it was a well-known fact that he
was
prepared to do what was
necessary to ensure that those whom he believed to be guilty were brought to justice.

The trial, in front of Mr Justice Swanwick, seemed everlasting. Maynard and Dudley ran a criminal empire which was named the ‘Legal & General’ – a nickname the two men had been given after walking into a pub dressed like two characters from a Legal & General television commercial. In reality, there was no gang.

The dramatic high point in the trial came when Wild – a prison snitch – walked into the witness box. A handsome figure, he gave evidence that he had met the two accused men in prison. He said that Dudley had boasted about killing Cornwall, who had apparently said, ‘He went up in the fucking air, didn’t he, boys?’ Wild also claimed that Maynard had said, ‘I didn’t know guys would squeal like a pig.’ All in all, Wild made for a compelling witness, although later events would prove it all to be something less than the truth.

To put no finer point on it, the evidence was, at best, slim – anorexic would be a more suitable term. Of the seven accused with varying degrees of responsibility for the murder, three were acquitted, including the man whose wife had been having an affair with Moseley. When Maynard was sentenced, he shouted to the judge, ‘I am still innocent, sir.’

Dudley then let loose against Wickstead. ‘Are you happy? You have fitted us all up, but don’t worry – you’ll be fitted up in the end by your own kind.’

In the years to come, Wild finally came clean and told the press that he had stitched up the two men in return for a lighter prison sentence, and that Wickstead was in on the deal. There followed a campaign to free the men
and, after a three-year examination of the evidence, the Criminal Cases Review Commission recommended that the matter should go to the Court of Appeal. Dudley was paroled in 1997, and Maynard was released on bail in November 2000.

Wickstead also played a leading part in the investigation of Soho pornographers Bernie Silver and Jimmy Humphreys, whose revelations led to the jailing of thirteen corrupt members of the Met’s Obscene Publications Squad.

On 25 June 1956, a Tommy Smithson was found dying in the gutter outside a house in Carlton Vale. His last words were said to be, ‘Good morning… I’m dying.’ A handsome man, who, in his chequered and largely unsuccessful career, suffered at just about everybody’s hands, was an ex-fairground fighter with a liking for silk shirts and underwear. He was a man, as James Morton described in his book
East End Gangland
, ‘of immense courage and little stability or ability and was known as Mr Loser’.

It was some years before Bert Wickstead got to the bottom of the matter, and he set his sights on Bernie Silver, a club and brothel owner, whose operations could be traced back to the 1950s. In a nutshell, Silver lived off immoral earnings as part of a highly lucrative business venture. Prostitutes were worked liked slaves, and charged for the privilege of doing so. Bert Wickstead had been called in to investigate the Soho vice syndicates, and he was immensely successful. Two Maltese criminals were eventually charged with Smithson’s murder, although both were cleared after a key witness mysteriously disappeared.

Thereafter, Wickstead became known as one of the country’s finest detectives, a man who would also investigate the case of the prostitute, Norma Levy, which was to lead to the downfall of the Conservative minister, Antony Claud Frederick Lord Lambton, 6th Earl of Durham.

During his three years with the Serious Crimes Squad, Wickstead was often in the newspapers for his
gang-busting
exploits. His critics query whether the gangs, who were supposedly trying to fill the vacuum left by the Kray twins, were quite as mighty as he claimed. And, if the truth were known now, and as we have seen in previous chapters, the Krays were not on a par with many of their modern-day contemporaries as far as their ill-gotten gains were concerned. Consider wheelers and dealers such as the Adams family, for example.

It would be fair to say, however, that some of these firms were just extended families back then – people with violent tempers. But among those he jailed as career criminals were the Tibbs, the Dixons, and Philip Jacobs – standing just 5ft 2in, he was known as ‘Little Caesar’.

The Dixon family had grown up at the end of the war in Limehouse where, in time, they controlled the local pubs and clubs. In the borough of Tower Hamlets, Limehouse is on the northern bank of the River Thames opposite Rotherhithe and between Shadwell to the west and the Isle of Dogs to the east. Primarily ‘debt collectors’, they had worked as freelancers for the Krays and, until his marriage broke up, and drink and drugs consumed him, Alan Dixon had been a ‘running-mate’ with Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. Although the Dixons had known the Krays for some time, it hadn’t stopped Ronnie
Kray from attempting to shoot George Dixon one night in a mock trial held at the Green Dragon Club in Aldgate over some alleged misdemeanour. As described earlier, Ronnie had pushed the gun barrel into his mouth and the gun misfired. Ron gave him the cartridge, telling him to wear it as a souvenir on his watch-chain. He did. For a fuller account of the Dixons and the Tibbs, James Morton’s book,
East End Gangland
, is a must-read.

Unimpressed by the trappings of wealth which dazzled many of his less-than-honest colleagues, Wickstead lived for many years in a council flat in Plaistow, east London, with his wife and three sons. His squad – whom he liked to call the ‘Incorruptibles’ – was devoted to him, as he was to them, sending flowers to sick wives and showing great concern for their welfare.

He was to become one of Britain’s best-known and most active thief-takers. As a former colleague later remarked, ‘He didn’t take money and, if you’re a policeman, you have to deal with scumbags every day. You have to go down to their level to achieve results, so I understand why he did what he did.’

Bert Wickstead retired from the police to become a security adviser to what was then News Group Newspapers, which serialised his memoirs in the
Sun
. He later became seriously ill with emphysema, but he remained, to the end, one of the Yard’s legendary figures.

Bert was far removed from today’s insistence on performance figures, civilian officer managers, budget restraints, and the need to satisfy the stringent requirements of the CPS, who will not prosecute unless there is a 99 per cent chance of a conviction. He was admired and often hated by his colleagues, and abhord
by the villains, yet they always called him ‘Mr Wickstead’ out of old gangland respect; it was the way he would have wanted it.

Bert Wickstead died on Monday, 19 March, 2001. He was survived by his second wife, Jean, their two sons, and a son from his first marriage.

£
50 million is an awful lot of money, and an awful amount to spend, and that’s what Kent’s
newly-appointed
Assistant Chief Constable Andrew ‘Andy’ Leppard pondered upon when between 1.00am and 2.15am on Wednesday, 22 February 2006, a gang of men robbed the Securitas Cash Management Ltd, Vale Road, Tonbridge, Kent, of precisely
£
53,116,70 in used banknotes. It was an audacious operation that netted the crooks the largest amount of folding money in British crime history. At least six of the crew had abducted and threatened the family of the manager, tied up fourteen staff members and escaped with their haul into the night.

As nuts go, the Securitas depot was a tough one to crack. The holding company, Securitas AB, is
Swedish-based
,
and the largest provider of security services in the world with over 230,000 employees. The firm specialises in uniformed security officers, consulting and investigations and cash-in-transit. Their cash handling division, the one that was robbed, oversee the transport, packaging, counting and storage of cash and precious metals.

On paper, at least, there are few companies as experienced at handling extraordinarily valuable cargo as Securitas. But they have had a few misfortunes. Shortly after the depot snatch, a Securitas van was rammed by criminals in a stolen tractor who subsequently hot-footed it with hundreds of thousands of pounds. The heist, which took place in Warrington, Cheshire, on Wednesday, 8 March 2006, also involved a low-loader lorry which had forced the security van to stop at the junction of Hardwick Grange and Kingsland Grange, in the Woolston area of the town at 8.15pm. Two men in balaclavas and carrying crowbars attacked the windows of the van and set it alight. The two guards were uninjured, but police acknowledged that ambushes on cash transit vans were on the increase – there had been scores of attacks in 2005 alone – and this one was less than a mile away from a Securitas facility. A Volvo V40 had been the getaway vehicle, and was found dumped less than a mile away.

In 2006, an armed gang robbed a Securitas van as it unloaded money at Gothenburg’s Landvetter Airport in Sweden.

Another incident occurred on Thursday, 4 October 2007, when two armoured truck guards were shot dead, execution style, with a 9mm automatic in north-east
Philadelphia. Another man was critically wounded. The guards, retired police officers, died at the scene. Hit once in the chest, William Widmaier, 65, married with
grown-up
children, and Joseph Alullo, aged 54, with three daughters, shot three times in the chest and abdomen, were not wearing bullet-proof vests. The third guard was hit by glass as a shot slammed into the windscreen.

The fatal robbery seemed ill-planned. The FBI believe that 36-year-old Mustafa Ali, aka Shawn Steele, simply followed the truck on the spur of the moment and murdered the guards as they serviced an ATM machine. Ali would have got away with the robbery had it not been for several tip-offs to the police. A dark-coloured Acura saloon was recorded leaving the area on CCTV, and Ali owned the same type of car.

In 1993, Steele, then 21, had been convicted of stealing $25,000 in eight Philadelphia robberies during 1992.

Then, on Friday morning, 19 October 2007, the
cash-strapped
company, now renamed ‘Loomis’, was hit again – on Highway 70, just south of Hedemora, Sweden. This time, however, two robbers, both aged 25, were unlucky. They were arrested as they fled the scene in a car. Less than an hour later, two teenagers were also arrested.

In the aftermath of the extraordinary heist perpetrated on the Securitas facility in Kent, ACC Andy Leppard knew very little of the crime on his patch, but what he did know was that the robbers would have had to have used a lorry, or a large van, to carry such a large amount of money, and they would need a discreet location where they could park up and distribute the haul. The gang would have had to dump any sequentially-numbered or traceable notes, and plan to
launder the rest in sizeable chunks, around
£
1 million at a time. The cop reasoned that if he could find the vehicle, he could trace the crooks; unless, of course, an informer gave the police a tip.

One option of disposing of the money was to buy JCBs, diggers and earth-movers which can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Many of these nearly-new models are traded at auctions for cash. Another option was diamonds. One of the few industries left in the world where cash is the preferred method of payment, diamonds also have the advantage of being small and easily smuggled. Stones can be bought in one country, taken elsewhere, repolished to remove distinguishing marks and resold.

A third option, one that Leppard considered, was the setting up of ‘legitimate’ bureaux de change. The money could then be fed through the accounts alongside the takings.

And yet a forth option is ‘Hawala’ (also known as ‘hundi’), an informal value transfer system based on performance and honour and, for
£
50 million, Leppard knew the gang would need a huge network which would have to be primarily located in the Middle East, Africa or Asia. Successfully robbing a Securitas depot was one thing; laundering the loot was a different problem altogether. Perhaps a Kenny Noye might be able to pull it off, but the Securitas boys, maybe not.

An ancient Indian system increasingly used by gangs, the cash is deposited at an office in one country and can be collected in local currency in another – like a type of illegal Western Union network. In the most basic variant, money is transferred via a network of hawala brokers, or
hawaldars. The money is deposited with the hawala, who, in turn, calls another hawala broker in the recipient’s city, gives disposition instructions (usually minus a small commission), and promises to settle the debt later.

The unique feature of hawala is the total absence of a paper or electronic trail. In addition to commissions, hawala brokers often earn their profits through bypassing official, and often extortionate, exchange rates. Most governments do not favour the system, and accusations have been made in recent years that terrorist funding often changes hands through hawala networks.

The Securitas depot robbery was planned with military precision. It started when manager Colin Dixon was abducted at about 6.00pm on 21 February 2006, in a tactic known as ‘tiger kidnapping’, due to the way a beast follows its prey before it strikes. Coerced, often at gunpoint, the employee takes the robbers through the coded alarm systems, in the knowledge that one false move could mean the end of his or her loved ones. Although it’s a method commonly associated with paramilitary groups such as the IRA breaking into banks in Northern Ireland, a similar heist on the British mainland sent shockwaves through the security industry as long ago as 1972.

The manager of the NatWest bank in Sunbury, Middlesex, was kidnapped and held hostage with his family overnight in Surbiton. He was brought to the bank in the morning, when staff arriving at work were bundled inside while the vaults were cleared. And there have been plenty of other examples in the intervening decades, concerning banks and building societies, culminating in the Northern Bank raid in Belfast in 2004, which netted the perpetrators
£
26 million.

Dixon was driving his silver Nissan Almera to his home in Herne Bay, and was pulled over on the A249, just outside Stockbury, a village north-east of Maidstone, by what appeared to be an unmarked Volvo S60 police car. It had flashing blue lights behind the front grill, and the two cars stopped in a lay-by close to the Three Squirrels pub.

A man, wearing high-visibility clothing and a
police-style
cap, approached Dixon, and asked him to get into the ‘police car’, which Dixon did. He was then handcuffed by other men in the car and driven west on the M20 motorway to the West Malling bypass, where he was bound more securely, transferred into a Parcelforce van and driven to a farm in Staplehurst, Kent. Here, he was threatened at gunpoint, being told that, if he didn’t co-operate, his family would be killed.

While all this was going on, at about 6.30pm, two other gang members, also posing as police, went to Mr Dixon’s home and told his wife Lynn and eight-year-old son Craig that Colin had been involved in an accident. They were taken from their home and driven around for six hours, before being taken to the same farm in Kent.

After a short discussion, during which Colin Dixon was again threatened with a gun, he, his wife and son were driven in the truck to the Securitas depot where they arrived around 1.00am. Threatening the employees with a Skorpion machine pistol, a pump-action shotgun, a handgun and an AK47 assault rifle, fourteen employees were bound and held at gunpoint by the crew wearing balaclavas, and the crooks left with their haul in a 7.5 tonne Renault Midlum truck at about 2.45am. They left behind a further
£
154,833,29 because there was no more room in their truck.

The staff and Dixon family had been locked into the cash cages, although eight-year-old Craig was small enough, and brave enough, to be able to squeeze through the bars and free the others. The alarm was then raised.

The Bank of England, to whom most of the money belonged, was reimbursed to the tune of
£
25 million by Securitas the same day, with a promise that the rest would follow once an audit had been completed. The robbery proved to be the firm’s undoing; in July 2007, Securitas announced that it intended to leave the cash management market, and withdraw from the joint venture which gave them business from Barclays and HSBC.

With the money being virtually untraceable, the task facing ACC Leppard was to become career-defining. Described as a broad-shouldered, square-jawed police veteran of 22 years, he cuts an imposing figure. He made his mark in 2000 after leading an investigation which resulted in three people being jailed at the Old Bailey for a contract killing. He hoped that a
£
2 million reward might now help him solve the country’s largest cash heist, and he didn’t have to wait long for a break. The thieves, so methodical in the planning and execution of the robbery, bungled everything from then on in a manner that defies belief.

On Thursday, 23 February 2006, a Parcelforce van thought to have been used in the abduction of Dixon and his family was found abandoned at the Hook and Hatchet pub in the village of Hucking, near Maidstone. The same day, a Volvo S60 and a red Vauxhall Vectra – also thought to have been used and made to look like a police car for the abductions – were found in the village of Leeds Castle. The Volvo had been set on fire. On the
same day, police arrested a 29-year-old man and a women, aged 31, in Forest Hill, south London. A
41-year
-old woman was also arrested by the Metropolitan Police at the Portman Building Society in Bromley, south London. She was dressed as a Salvation Army nurse and drew attention to herself by trying to pay in
£
6,000 in notes in tape marked ‘Tonbridge’. Hours later, Dixon’s Nissan Almera was also found in the car park of the Cock Horse pub in Detling.

On Friday, 24 February, Kent Police recovered a white Ford Transit van from the car park of the Ashford International Hotel. It was found following a tip-off from a member of the public. The vehicle contained two suitcases and a holdall containing
£
1,370,500, along with guns, balaclavas and body armour. Again, on the same day, metal cages and packaging material that had been used to transport the money were found in a field near Detling and, on the evening of Saturday 25 February, armed police also raided a house in Southborough, near Tunbridge Wells.

On the afternoon of 26 February, Kent Police challenged two men who sped off in a blue BMW 3 Series coupé on Marine Parade in Tankerton, near Whitstable. Police marksmen shot at the car’s tyres – other accounts say a Stinger was used – and two men were arrested. Then, on 27 February, two men were arrested by armed officers in the Greenwich area of London.

The following day, 28 February, the white 7.5 tonne Renault Midlum truck was discovered. Again, that same day, Kent Police raided Elderden Farm, off Forge Lane, in the Staplehurst area and conducted extensive forensic searches of the surrounding land and buildings, and
conducted further searches they found
£
105,600 under a tree in an orchard.

Late on 1 March 2006, police confirmed that they had arrested a car dealer, John Fowler, and that he had been charged with conspiracy to rob Securitas; they also referred to three other charges of kidnapping Colin, Lynn and Craig Dixon. A Stuart Royle had been charged with similar offences and Kim Shackleton had been charged with handling stolen goods.

They appeared at Maidstone Magistrates’ Court on 2 March, and were remanded in custody until 13 March, when they appeared at Maidstone Crown Court.

During a police raid on an industrial depot run by Roger Coutts on 2 March, a substantial amount of cash was discovered. Twelve holdalls containing
£
9,655,040 were found at ENR Cars. A Jetmir Bucpapa was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, as was Lea John Rusha the following day. A further arrest was made in Bexley on Saturday, 4 March, and a man was subsequently released on bail. John Lupton was not seen again.

On 5 March, detectives found another
£
8,601,990 in a lock-up in Southborough. So, as of 6 March, police had recovered
£
11 million – stashed somewhere was a further
£
39 million in used banknotes.

A further development occurred on 7 March when two employees of a firm that had been contracted from a local employment agency by Securitas were arrested, strengthening suspicions that it had been an ‘inside job’. In fact, it was a story that couldn’t possibly have been made up – an illegal immigrant called Ermir Hysenaj, and Anthony Black, the brother-in-law of a London gangster and veteran robber, worked at the place.