Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (23 page)

In the late 1970s, vigilante gangs of second-generation Asians took to the streets to help protect the Asian communities from white racist groups such as the National Front in east London. The Asian Gangs formed to protect their community and local businesses and they mark their territorial boundaries with graffiti. They are predominantly Bangladeshi, while those of the West End are Indian and Pakistani.

Gang violence between groups such as the Holy Smokes and Tooti Nungs back in the 1980s was organised by the Asian mafia to take police attention away from its organised activities. Newer Asian gangs, such as the Bhatts, are more ‘street gang’ orientated, fighting violent battles over the heroin distribution in their area. However, many of the Asian gangs are still influenced by Asian families owning reputable businesses within London.

Good old Hackney is where the black gang, the Kingsland Crew, battle the Hackney Posse for dominance, while in Bow and Canning Town, the Hunts – a white,
working-class crime family – have gained ascendancy in drugs, extortion and, until relatively recently, the theft of upmarket cars. They have also moved into Soho and are thought to ‘go very big’ very soon.

Bermondsey and Rotherhithe is traditionally the base for largely white crime gangs with big interests in drugs. The Brindle family and the Arifs have fought turf wars here for over a decade.

To some, the name ‘Arif’ might conjure up a string of kebab outlets, those of the type that teem with late-night boozers and produce vomit-stained pavements, but nothing could be further from reality. Indeed, the Arifs are a south London-based Cypriot-Turkish criminal organisation heavily into armed robbery, contract killing, drug trafficking and just about any other
racketeering-related
activity one can think of. They have been part of London’s seedy underworld since the late 1960s, and they command respect among their underworld colleagues.

To begin with, following the downfall of the Kray empire, the Arifs were one of several criminal organisations who took control of the London underworld, including the Clerkenwell crime syndicate and the Brindle family, with whom they were engaged in a highly publicised gangland war during the 1990s.

The Arifs themselves were considered the leading crime family in the London area throughout the late 1980s, before the arrest and conviction of its leadership, including most of the Arif family members, for armed robbery and drug-related offences in the early 1990s. In 2004, the
Irish
Daily Mirror
called the Arifs ‘Britain’s number-one crime family’. Considering that the newspaper had the IRA on its doorstep, this was praise indeed!

Led by brothers Dennis, Mehmet and Dogan Arif, the organisation had been involved in a decade-long gang war between the Daley and Brindle gangs which has resulted in eight deaths since 1990. In November 1990, Dennis and Mehmet, wearing Ronald Reagan masks and wielding shotguns, were arrested in Reigate Street as they attempted to rob a Securicor van. By the new millennium, Dogan Arif was ranked seventh in the
Sunday Times
‘Criminal Rich List’. Clearly, these guys were seriously big players, with considerable staying power, while they saw others rise and fall around them.

Bekir Arif, now into his fifties, is known as ‘The Duke’. He is one of the seven brothers in the family and was convicted in 1999 of conspiracy to supply 100kg of heroin worth
£
12.5 million. He received a 23-year term in jail. For his part, Dogan was also jailed for drug smuggling, and it is said that he controls the family fortune from behind bars. Their family is said to maintain ties with relations in Turkey who oversee shipments in mainland Europe.

Today, the Arif brothers are still a common and feared name on the streets of London as they have been suppliers to many of London’s street gangs, some of which include SUK and PDC.

The case against the Arif brothers came about with the arrival of Michael Boyle, an Irishman with Republican terrorist links, as a hitman on the streets of south London. His appearance would mark an alarming development in a murderous underworld vendetta. Over the next seven years, the ensuing feud was responsible for at least eight killings – three of innocent bystanders – and further shooting incidents. It was a tale, as writer John
Steele noted, ‘punctuated by brawls and bravado in pubs and bars, fights with baseball bats and glass ashtrays and, in its later stages, a series of gun attacks.’

The feud was between the Daleys, the Brindles and others. It started around August 1990, when a group of men entered the Queen Elizabeth pub at 42 Merrow Street, Walworth, and threatened the landlord, John Daley, the brother of Peter. One of the group – in true Kray style – put a gun into the mouth of Peter Daley when he arrived.

The following month, a man called Ahmet Abdullah entered a drinking club and pumped seven bullets into one Stephen Galligan, a friend of the Brindles. Amazingly, he survived. ‘Abbi’ Abdullah was a violent criminal with a long list of his own enemies. He was also close to the Arif family. In March 1991, Abdullah was found shot dead in a William Hill bookies in Walworth. Anthony Brindle and his brother, Patrick, were charged with his murder and later acquitted at the Old Bailey.

The news of Abdullah’s death was broken by two of the Arif brothers to their father, Yusef. He had regarded Abdullah as his son and, even today, his grief is held by the Arif clan to have contributed to his fatal heart-attack. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Arifs were related to the Brindles by marriage, they are believed to have held a grudge against Anthony and Patrick thereafter.

In May 1991, Dennis Arif and his brother Mehmet were arrested following an abortive
£
1 million robbery of a Securicor van in Reigate, in which one raider was shot by police. It was this robbery that marked the demise of the family’s dominance in south London. Then, in August of that year, another Brindle brother, David, entered the
Queen Elizabeth pub frequented by the Daleys, and became abusive.

As it turned out, David Brindle was severely beaten with a glass ashtray wielded by James Moody, a friend of the Daleys and a south London hard man, who achieved a degree of notoriety when he escaped from a prison with Gerard Tuite, then on remand as an IRA suspect. Now David Brindle began making threats to kill Daley and Moody, but he himself was murdered before August was out. Two men, armed with revolvers, entered the Bell pub in East Street, Walworth. An innocent Stanley Silk was also shot dead. Witnesses heard the gunmen shout, ‘This one’s for Abbi…’ – though this may have been
mischief-making
to link the shooting to the Arifs. Moody was among those suspected and, in March 1993, he too was shot dead in the Royal Hotel, Hackney.

Further incidents followed until, in August 1994, two other innocent men, Peter McCormack and John Ogden, were shot dead in Cavendish Road, Balham. One of the deceased bore a striking resemblance to Peter Daley. At this stage, Boyle, an armed kidnapper with lengthy prison terms behind him in Ireland, entered the equation.

Boyle had been recruited in the Daley cause by George Mitchell, a well-known Dublin criminal and friend of Peter Daley’s, a London property dealer. Boyle said that Daley had been described to him as a criminal who was having financial difficulties and ‘problems’ with the Brindles.

Some of south London’s most violent criminals, with their own scores to settle and drug-related turf to protect, became embroiled in the feud. For Scotland Yard and the South East regional Crime Squad, which
would handle the Boyle case, the indiscriminate violence was deeply worrying.

Boyle’s first involvement in the Daley–Brindle feud is in dispute. It is known that, within days of the McCormack/Ogden shooting, another Brindle sibling, George, was shot and injured while visiting his parents. After his arrest for the Anthony Brindle shooting, Boyle called DI Steve Farley to his cell in Belmarsh
High-Security
Prison in south-east London and, among other things, claimed to have been responsible for the George Brindle shooting. Ballistic tests showed that a second gun, a Magnum found in Boyle’s ‘surveillance van’ at the time of the shooting of Anthony Brindle, had also been used on George. However, though Boyle has agreed at various stages that most of what he is said to have told Farley is true, he now claims the George Brindle admission is false.

For Farley and other crime squad officers, Boyle represented an unexpected disruption to Operation Partake, launched in May 1995 to investigate Peter Daley and others. Within days, Daley was arrested in a park in Luton with Mitchell and others. Nearby, police found more than
£
500,000 in cash. Enquiries into the facts behind the haul continued and no one was charged.

Another area of London in which significant gangs operate is Lewisham, where the Ghetto Boys are arch rivals to the neighbouring Peckham Boys and the Younger Peckham Boys, all black gangs. Most members of the once-competing African Crew have now been jailed.

The Ghetto Boys are based in New Cross and Deptford. The gang was formed on the Woodpecker and Pepys Estates and is primarily of Afro-Caribbean origin.
Most of the members hail from the London borough of Lewisham, and some members of the gang are known to carry firearms such as the Mac-10 submachine-gun. A member of the Ghetto Boys fired a shot at the 2004 Urban Music Awards, injuring accountant Hellen Kelly. Fortunately, the lady was wearing a sturdy bra; the bullet hit the underwire, preventing fatal injury.

The Peckham Boys was formed in the North Peckham estate, and its members are primarily of black origin. The gang is split into ‘tinies’, ‘youngers’ and ‘olders’, according to age group, and membership runs into the hundreds. The teenagers convicted of the high-profile murder of Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor on 27 November 2002 were members of the Young Peckham Boys.

Born in Lagos, Damilola had travelled to the UK in August 2000 with his family to allow his sister to seek treatment for epilepsy. He moved on to the North Peckham Estate and began to attend the local school.

On Monday, 27 November 2000, the lad set off from Peckham Library at 4.50pm on his way home; he was captured on CCTV as he made his way along the route. On approaching the North Peckham Estate, he was cut in the left thigh. Running to a stairwell, he collapsed and bled to death in the space of 30 minutes. He was, however, still alive in an ambulance en route to the hospital.

There were two conflicting accounts of how he sustained his injury. The theory accepted by the Metropolitan Police is that Damilola was attacked and stabbed with a broken bottle. The alternative theory is that he fell on broken glass in an accident.

Subsequently, in 2002, four youths, including two
16-year
-old brothers, went on trial at the Old Bailey. They
were all acquitted of murder. Despite this setback, the police vowed to keep the investigation open and new DNA evidence techniques led to a re-examination of the evidence obtained at the time of the murder. In 2005, fresh arrests were made. Hassan Jihad, 19, and two brothers aged 17 and 16, were brought in.

The second trial in 2006 again ended without any convictions. On 3 April, the jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict on Jihad for the charges of murder, manslaughter and assault with intent to rob. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges of manslaughter against the other two brothers, so they were found not guilty, but with the possibility of a re-trial on those charges. On 6 April, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the two would, indeed, be re-tried.

On 9 August 2006, Ricky and Danny Preddie, after a 33-day re-trial, were convicted of the manslaughter of Damilola Taylor. When the verdict was given, Ricky Preddie was dragged down to the cells by prison officers after swearing at the court and saying, ‘You’re all going to pay for this…’

Mr Justice Goldring said, ‘Take him down.’ After a brief pause, when shouting could still be heard in court, he added sternly and loudly, ‘Take him RIGHT down.’

On 9 October 2006, the judge sentenced the Preddie brothers to eight years’ youth custody. They will be eligible for release after serving four years. However, since neither brother has shown even a trace of remorse for the crime, it is hard to say when either may actually be freed on parole. In the unlikely event that they are released
before
their four-year tariff expires, it will be on licence, any breach of which will see them
packed off back to prison to serve the remainder of their sentence.

Should they commit another serious act of violence, they face the possibility of a very long sentence indeed. With the normally tight-lipped Probation Service anxious to not comment on such offenders, this time they have made an exception, stating, ‘They [both brothers] pose a high risk of harm to others.’

In 2006, the Peckham Boys were involved in a widely reported gang war against the Ghetto Boys street gang based at the Pepys and Woodpecker Estates in Deptford and New Cross respectively. In the conflict, one innocent man was shot dead in New Cross, having been mistaken for a Ghetto Boys member by the Peckham Boys. He was shot at by a group of around 50 youths on mountain bikes, who had cycled from Peckham to Deptford.

Shortly after this murder, another man was shot and stabbed in Deptford by the same group, but survived. In a revenge attack, several members of the Ghetto Boys shot at youths in Peckham several days later. During the conflict, police seized handguns and submachine-guns. The dispute between these rival gangs has been ongoing for over 20 years.

Brixton is where 200 or so hardcore Yardies are based in the borough of Lambeth. Some of them are members of the Firehouse Posse or Brixton’s Cartel Crew.

Gun crime is reaching almost epidemic proportions and is beginning to spread within the Tamil, Sikh, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and the murder rate has tripled over the past decades. There were 40 murders involving south Asians and 228 kidnappings in 2003. And it was in 2003 that Scotland Yard created a
specialist squad (The Tamil Task Force) to deal solely with the rising gangland violence in Sri Lankan Tamil communities following thirteen gang-related murders centered round the Tamil areas of Ilford, Walthamstow and Wembley.