The reason is simple: Roberts grassed on Sean Bradish. ‘I know I pissed a lot of people off with the way I was behaving and that a lot of them would be only too happy to see me out of the way, would pay money to see me dead,’ Roberts says bitterly, ‘but what Sean did was completely out of order. Once I heard that he was trying to have me killed, I knew I had no choice. I had to betray him.’
Having broken the ultimate criminal code and agreed to give evidence against the other members of his gang, Roberts is set to become a member of the Protected Witness Programme. But just before this transformation takes place he agrees to give me a chilling insight into the life and times of a modern-day pavement artist.
‘How did it all start? I honestly don’t know. The first part of my childhood was fine, really happy. I had a good upbringing and my family are good, honest people. I’ve got a bunch of brothers and sisters but I’m the only one of them who has ever been in trouble with the law.’
The problems started when he became a teenager.
‘I was sent to a Roman Catholic school, which was fine apart from the fact that there was a Church of England school right next door and there was always trouble between the two of them. Someone seemed to get attacked every day and that someone always seemed to be me. It got so bad that I got permission to go to school late and leave early, just to avoid the other kids, but I couldn’t handle it so I decided to leave. I started hanging around with a bad crowd instead.
‘I was hanging out in Harlesden, which is where I grew up, and everywhere I went I was surrounded by drugs and guns and criminals. There was no escape from it. Of the people I grew up with, some of them have died from overdoses, some of them have been murdered and the others are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. I got into stuff like stealing cars, burglary and street robbery, and the older I got, the bolder I became, the less I cared.’
Then things became a lot more serious. ‘Two of my best friends were these two massive black guys, Roy and Chris. One day they came round to see me and said they had a proposition. They’d been getting quite heavily involved in the local drugs scene, selling crack and cocaine around the Stonebridge estate, and they’d found out about a dealer over in west London who had a big stash of drugs and money in his flat and decided to rob him. The reason they needed me was because the guy had been robbed before and didn’t trust black guys. White guys were another matter and if I posed as a potential buyer, Roy and Chris figured he’d be willing to open up the door and they’d have a chance to rush him with the guns and take everything off him.
‘It worked like a dream, so we started doing it more and more. Pretty soon we became quite sophisticated. I managed to get hold of a police badge and walkie-talkie and started posing as a copper. I would knock on the dealer’s door, show them the badge, explain there had been an accident, and ask if I could use their phone because my radio wasn’t working.
‘As soon as they opened up, a bunch of us would rush in, tie them up and put guns to their heads. Sometimes they refused and it would all get pretty violent, really nasty, but most of the time, once they saw the size of the guys I was working with – Chris was six foot seven and weighed nineteen stone, Roy was almost as big – they usually gave it all up.
‘It was a good living. One time we came away with forty-six thousand pounds in cash, another time we got a kilo of cocaine and more than four grand in cash. The best thing about it was that, no matter what we did, no matter how much violence we used, how many guns we carried or how much we took, the people could never go to the police. It was the perfect crime.’
As the 1990s progressed, incidents of ‘taxing’, as the robbery of drug-dealers became known, reached epidemic proportions and became increasingly violent. In May 1993 a notorious thirty-four-year-old Yardie, Christopher ‘Tuffy’ Bourne, bit off more than he could chew. He and his posse travelled to a crack-house based in a council flat at 54 Vassel Road, Brixton, south London, to carry out their second robbery of the premises in two months.
The first raid had generated a healthy haul – two kilos of cocaine and crack, £10,000 in cash and a number of thick gold chains from around the necks of the occupants. Four weeks later, hearing that the crack den had fully restocked, Tuffy decided to return.
But this time it was a set-up and he was met by a volley of hot lead. Trapped between the wall and the reinforced steel door, he was totally outgunned. Three bullets lodged in his chest, two more passed right through him and a further ten were recovered from the wall behind him. Immensely strong, Tuffy managed to stagger out of the flat and collapse on the street, only to be discovered bleeding to death by his ten-year-old son, who happened to be passing.
In the underworld the message was received loud and clear: the dealers were no longer soft targets and were prepared to defend themselves or retaliate. It meant that the only safe way to rob a dealer was to kill him. In October that same year, three men robbed and executed Ghanaian drug-dealer William Danso, chasing him around his south London home and firing more than seventeen shots. As the killers left they came across PC Patrick Dunne, a popular community beat bobby who made his rounds by bicycle. PC Dunne, who had been called to a nearby domestic incident, walked towards Danso’s home to investigate the noise of gunshots. When he was ten metres away, he was shot in the chest by a single round from a 9mm automatic. He died instantly and his killers allegedly laughed as they fled the scene.
Other deaths followed as the trend gathered momentum. For those involved in the ‘taxing’ business the choice was either get out and move on or stick around and risk ending up on a murder rap. Luckily for Roberts, new opportunities were just around the corner.
‘I used to drink in a pub called the Coach and Horses just off the Stonebridge estate. At the time there were at least eighteen well-known armed robbers who would meet there to drink, chat and celebrate whenever they had a good pay-day. Sean, Vincent and a few of their mates were regulars and, although I didn’t know them, I was instantly attracted by their lifestyle.
‘I was doing pretty well, making most of my living from stealing cars and robbing dealers, but the money the two of them were making was just incredible. They also knew how to make the most of it. They drove around in flashy cars, were always going off on holidays to the Caribbean or staying in posh hotels in and around London just to enjoy a bit of luxury. Everyone in the pub knew how they made their money – armed robbery – and the more I got to know them, the more I knew I wanted to be involved.’
At the time the Bradish brothers were working for a man called James Doyle, known in underworld circles as the Ayatollah because of his ruthless leadership style. A clever and cunning career criminal, Doyle had worked out that if he only ever attacked relatively small targets where the haul was never particularly high, changing tactics and using different members of his team to carry out the actual robbery, the police would assume the raids were the work of random amateurs rather one single gang.
He began by focusing his attention on bookmakers’ offices and then, just as the Flying Squad began to suspect the string of attacks might be linked, moved on to building societies, then banks. The Doyle gang’s biggest ever haul was a relatively modest £36,000, but with one or two successful raids being carried out on an almost weekly basis, there was always more than enough money to go round.
Doyle perfected his technique, and it was through him that the Bradish brothers learnt the skills that served them so well in later life. A typical robbery would begin with two members of the gang going on the morning of the robbery to steal two cars for the getaway. Doyle would select the target but rarely go inside himself. Instead, positioned in a nearby phone-box or at another vantage-point, he would supervise the action.
The actual raid would be carried out by two gunmen, backed up by a driver outside. They would arm themselves with weapons from an arsenal of sixteen guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition that Doyle kept, somewhat ironically, in bank safety-deposit boxes. Wearing masks or crash helmets, the two men would burst in. One would clear the tills while the other kept guard and a watch on the time to make sure the raid was completed before the automatic alarm system kicked in.
Doyle ruled the gang with an iron fist, punishing anyone who let him down with extremes of physical violence. When he heard that one of the gang had taken more than his fair share of the pot, he beat the man unconscious with the nearest weapon to hand – a frozen chicken.
‘I met Doyle a few times and he was an absolute lunatic. The man spent as much time working on his wardrobe as he did planning the robberies. It all came on top for him when he was caught red-handed in 1995 and sent down to await trial. While he was on remand he convinced the prison to let him go to Moorfields Hospital in London about this long-standing problem he had with his eye. He’d been a few times before and knew the place well. After his appointment he asked to go to the toilet, and once he was inside, some bloke runs in with a shotgun, forces the coppers escorting him to get on the floor, then unlocks the handcuffs. He got away for a while but ended up getting caught in Ireland and sent down for twenty-four years at the Old Bailey.
‘By a stroke of sheer luck, Sean and Vincent were having a day off when Doyle was picked up so they were still out and about when the rest of the gang got put behind bars. They had a little break, then decided to carry on, forming their own little firm. They had their own guns and all that but were having trouble finding someone reliable to steal cars for them. That’s where I came in.
‘I got a couple of cars for Sean and then he asked if I wanted to come along on the robbery. I agreed like a shot. We picked up a couple of shotguns, some surgical gloves, and disguised ourselves with bandanas, sunglasses and caps. We set off and ended up parked around the back of the Thomas Cook in Edgware. Sean went in first and I followed close behind. He then shouted at the cashier, “Open the fucking door!” She turned round and her face was a picture. Then she says, “Oh, God, not you again” – he’d already robbed the place about a dozen times before but he hadn’t told me. He said, “Yeah, me again, so open the fucking door.” And she did. Sean went through to where the cashiers were sitting, grabbed a few bundles and then we legged it. The whole thing took less than twenty seconds and we came out with twenty-four grand. It was incredible.’
After losing his cherry, Roberts quickly became a regular member of the team and soon found himself living the life he had previously only been able to admire from afar. The Bradish brothers had a well-established routine to celebrate the end of each robbery, and Roberts joined in eagerly. ‘Most times we would do the robbery on a Friday morning early, at about nine a.m. Then we would book into a flash hotel and count the money, and have a glass or two of champagne.
‘After that we’d go to the nearest shop and buy a whole new outfit. Everything we had worn during the robbery would be thrown away so there would be no forensic evidence. We always bought designer clothes – everything had a label. But once we’d done a robbery, it would just be trash. You’d go out and buy a brand new pair of smart Nike trainers for a hundred pounds and the next day you’d bin them. It was madness, absolute madness.
‘Then it would be off to the pub for a bit of dinner and a few more drinks. By eight p.m. we’d start taking the cocaine and then go out. We’d hit the town, the clubs and pubs, pick up a few girls and enjoy ourselves. Sometimes they were prostitutes – quite often, in Sean’s case, because he wasn’t the best-looking man in the world – but often other girls would latch on. We’d be tossing bundles of money around like confetti, and once they smelled it, they’d be on you like leeches. We wouldn’t stop until Monday morning, and would easily spend three thousand pounds on drink and drugs and women over the weekend.
‘Sean wasn’t into drugs that much, but he liked to experiment every now and again. Vincent and I were always bang on it. Towards the end I’d be drinking vast amounts, take up to twenty ecstasy tablets and an ounce of cocaine. We had some great times. I remember once when Vincent was at a club and he got so out of his nut he got off with this bird who turned out to be a transvestite. He came back screaming and then spent the next two hours marching up and down yelling, “I’m gonna kill it, I’m gonna fucking kill it.” We just laughed our heads off.’
The extravagant lifestyle soon attracted police attention but, having spent years being followed by the police while working for Doyle, the Bradish brothers were more than ready.
‘It became a bit of a game, finding the police and winding them up. We knew what some of the bikes and cars they used for surveillance looked like – we spotted them so many times in so many places – so it was never that difficult. If there was a team plotted up watching us, we’d call
999,
describe the car and tell them the men inside were acting suspiciously. The police would always turn up and by the time they realised they’d fucked up the surveillance operation, we’d be long gone.
‘We all had nice cars – BMW 7 series, Porsches, Mercs – and we’d for ever be finding tracking devices on them. We’d pull them off and stick them to buses or trains, just to send the police on a wild-goose chase. They were never going to catch us in the act because we always used stolen cars for the raids and I’d leave it until the last minute to nick them.
‘Every time we did a job, we used anti-surveillance techniques. All the usual stuff – twice round a roundabout, indicate one way and turn the other, pull over and let traffic go past. Before we hit the target, from the moment we left the house and ever afterwards, we’d be constantly watching everything around us just to be sure they weren’t on to us.
‘We never got over-confident, though. We knew we had to keep up or, rather, stay one step ahead of what the police were doing if we wanted to be able to carry on living the life. In the end, just to be even safer, we started doing the robberies on motorbikes. We would be flying around so quick and dodging in and out of traffic that they could never follow us.