British Mafia

British Mafia is a term designating a wide range of organized crime groups and groupings originating in Britain and the former Greater British Empire. In Britain itself the British mafia is almost always euphemistically referred to as “serious organized crime”.

Since the early 1980s, when the British mafia became especially active, these groups have amassed considerable worldwide power and influence and achieved a large scale penetration of the British government structures as well as local authorities and law enforcement agencies in Britain and elsewhere. They are active in virtually every part of British and Western European society.

British criminals are also internationally active in illegal oil trade, the trafficking of women and children for sex and hard labor, white and black slavery, grand larceny, the smuggling of weapons and narcotics, money laundering, protection racket, prostitution, fraud and contract killings. The British also control the global e-mail scam racket. One British mafia boss, Christy “Godfather” Kinahan, was recently arrested in Spain; it is believed that he became the boss of several British mafia syndicates and worked hard to promote unity among British organized crime groups.

With many British people leaving the country to live abroad in the late 20th and early 21th century, there is no doubt that there is not only crime involving British expats abroad but there is in fact an organized structure of criminal groups comprising British expats in foreign countries.

Long History of the British Mafia

The British mafia is much older than the often mentioned Italian “mafia”; in fact it is the world’s oldest organized crime phenomenon as organized crime has existed and has been endemic in Britain since the inception of the British State about eight hundred years ago and during the Imperial times and thereafter, especially in the form of banditry, piracy on the high seas, colonial looting, pornography, prostitution and thievery.

In the nineteenth century a class of professional thieves emerged in Britain. They had to abide by certain rules whilst in the prison system and out of it. However professional British criminals were always willing to make deals with the British authorities, and vice versa. During the many wars that Britain fought, many criminals made deals with the British government to join the armed forces, to serve as secret agents in return for the authorities turning a blind eye to their activities.

In the 16-18th centuries British criminals engaging in piracy on the high seas were often recognized by the British government and the ruling monarch and given license to kill, to loot and to plunder, to enslave free people in return for paying a percentage of their spoils to the British crown and for doing various commissions of the British state, like attacking shipping of the competing maritime powers and looking for territories to be invaded, grabbed by Britain and claimed as her “rightful” colonies.

During the post-WWII era when the British economy started on its protracted but still terminal decline, the British gangsters would often take control of the black market with the help of corrupt officials, supplying products such as food, tobacco, alcohol, condoms, pornographic images during the post WWII rationing era which were hard to get for the ordinary British citizen but much in demand.

Collapse of the Greater British Empire and the Decade of Greed (1980s)

Following the collapse of the British empire in the 1950-60s and especially during the erratic 1970s when the British State as such teetered on the brink of disintegration, the British secret services (MI5 & MI6) became involved with organized crime and the British mob became a long arm of the British government. MI5 & MI6 often recruited and trained criminals for use both outside the country and within. At the same time many “former” and active British agents joined international and domestic racketeering, drug-trafficking and prostitution-controlling gangs, sometimes leading them, a trend which is still continuing and even intensifying today.

The real breakthrough for British criminal organizations occurred however during the economic disaster and mass civil protests of the 1980s that followed Margaret Thatcher’s misguided economic “reforms”. Desperate for money, many former government workers, miners — whose jobs and livelihoods were taken away from them by the Thatcher “criminal group” with headquarters at Downing Street 10 — turned to crime, others joined the numerous former British citizens who moved overseas, and the present-day British Mafia became a natural extension of this trend also.

Later former MI5 and MI6 agents, professional athletes and veterans of the Falklands-, Gulf-, and North-of-Ireland wars, now finding themselves out-of-work but with experience in areas which could prove useful in crime, joined Britain’s organized criminal groups. Widespread corruption, rising poverty and distrust of the authorities only contributed to the rise of Britain’s organized crime — the situation which is likely to be repeated in the near future as a result of the policies of the current unelected ConDem government.

Contract killings, bombings and kidnappings are on the increase with more and more gangland murders taking place in Britain and elsewhere, a substantial number remaining unsolved. It is believed that almost all British banks are either owned by the mafia or have strong mafia connections and ties to the British underworld and international crime. It is not unheard of for British businesses to pay protection money, and this phenomenon is set to increase dramatically as the times of plenty are being supplanted by the times of need. At the same time, the new criminal class of Britain is trying to take a more businesslike approach to organized crime and is looking to merge with Britain’s political elites as the brutal British gangsters of yesteryear may be fading into extinction, although one cannot exclude the possibility of a reversal in this process.

Britain Now a Mafia State

At the present day, the mafia is so strong in Britain, has such a wide reach, has so successfully penetrated all government and civil society structures that there is really no other way to describe Britain but as a mafia state even more so than Spain — another mafia ridden Western European country.

Internationalization of British Mafia Operations

Britain’s opening up to the world and the internationalization of its economy starting in the late 1970s also gave the British mafia connections to other criminal organizations around the world such as the Chinese Triads, the United States’ many (more or less ethnically defined) mafias or the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

Connections with Latin American drug cartels allow the British mafia to import cocaine into the country whilst heroin is imported into Britain straight from Afghanistan allegedly via British and American military bases.

However it’s with the Spanish mafias that the British mafia has the strongest links.

British organized crime has spread to many other countries as well including Pakistan, India, Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, the United States, Ireland, Portugal, France, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Russia, Italy, Thailand and Spain which has become a virtual mafia state.

British Mafia-Affiliated Companies and Entities

• BAE Systems is a major British “defense” company, dubbed the British merchants of death, which is especially adept at using corruption and links with organized crime to promote its business interests around the world.

• Guardian Media Group is a British newspaper conglomerate. Whilst the Guardian likes to pose as Britain’s leading quality “independent” left-of-center paper, it too is nothing but a plaything of the British Secret Intelligence Services, both domestic and foreign (MI6 & MI5), and through them is inextricably linked to the British government and the British mafia (in rare aspects where the two do not overlap). According to some reports, the Guardian also uses a string of offshore companies in the Caymans and Luxembourg for tax evasion purposes.

• HSBC Holdings P.L.C. is a British multinational banking and financial services organization headquartered in London, England, United Kingdom, and is Britain’s largest bank and one of the world’s largest banks. It is also reportedly affiliated with a number of British mafia families who apparently used it since inception in 1991 until very recently to launder proceeds of organized crime, especially, illicit drug trafficking and supply. In December 2012 it was even severely punished by the U.S. authorities (even though they themselves are mired in corruption and similar criminality) and made to pay a huge fine for facilitating vast money-laundering operations, including washing money from Mexican drug cartels, on behalf of British mafia families, such as the Adamses. The irony is that Lord Green, who was chief executive of HSBC during the years it was turning over hundreds of millions of pounds of mafia money, is a current trade minister and member of the Treasury team deciding how to reform Britain’s banks. But at least it illustrates to which extent the boundaries between mafia, government and banks are blurred and permeable in Britain.

• Paradise Bet Ltd is a company based in the west London suburb of Hounslow that operates paradisebet.com. The company’s assets are owned by the criminal Parisi clan from the southern Puglia region of Italy, whose members are accused of contract killings, drug smuggling and money-laundering.

• Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is Britain’s answer to America’s FBI. It is an elite “crime fighting” unit set up by the British Government to fight major criminals. However it has failed to catch crime bosses and has been infiltrated by the underworld — by the British Mafia. Originally it recruited from the cream of the British police, immigration, customs and MI5 and had more than 4,000 staff in offices all over the world. But pretty soon it was mysteriously dropping investigations into crime bosses, links between SOCA senior officers and suspects were alleged and proven, allegations of serious sexual misconduct were covered up. In a well documented case it transpired that an investigation into a suspected Nottingham crime boss in 2007 was halted because the suspect had contacts inside SOCA. In an extraordinary turnaround, a major “crime fighting” unit has now become a tool in the hands of the invincible British mafia.

Individual British Mafia Gangs

• Adams Family Firm, also known as A Team, is a powerful British mafia syndicate run by the vicious Adams brothers, Terry, Patsy and Tommy, originally based in North London but now operating throughout Western Europe and beyond. Its main activity is drugs trafficking and supplying drugs to European clubs and discos. The Firm can supply large quantities of drugs thanks to strong ties with Colombian cartels. It has also been involved in contract killings, protection racket and money laundering as well as prostitution and has successfully infiltrated law enforcement authorities in many countries.

• Cheetham Hill Mob was an inner city gang in Manchester specializing mainly in the sale of illicit drugs. Its young leader Anthony “White Tony” Johnson was killed at age 22 allegedly by the rival Noonan brothers.

• Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate is the other name by which the Adams criminal family enterprise is known (see “Adams Family Firm” above).

• Deepdale Gang is a major drugs gang in Preston ran by two brothers — Hafiz and Salim Razaq. In addition to trafficking and distributing drugs, the Deepdale gang was also involved in kidnappings, torture and killings as it fought vicious turf wars with rival mobs. Hafiz Razaq was running street ops for the crime family while his brother Salim “Sal” Razaq was taking care of things on the police side — a police sergeant, he was effectively a “mob boss in a British police uniform” and a special asset to the gang members, providing them with access to the police national computer, among other things.

• Kensal Green Boys (KGB) is a gang of mostly black juvenile boys in North-West London. The group engages mainly in turf warfare with members of rival gangs; they also serve as foot soldiers to drug dealers; members are often contracted to carry out jobs for more mature British criminals, including contract hits.

• KGB is the acronym by which the Kensal Green Boys gang from North-West London is known.

• Kinahan Network is a powerful British gang specializing in supplying drugs (mainly cocaine) to Britain as well as handguns to British inner city gangs. Headed by Christopher “Christy” Kinahan, the gang also offers “bespoke” money-laundering services to rival mafia figures throughout Western Europe and channels hundreds millions of British mafia money into building projects mostly in Spain, offshore accounts and companies. The Kinahan Network is one of Western Europe’s wealthiest criminal organizations involved in drugs, guns and savage beatings and has extensive links to the Spanish Mafia, the American organized crime, a major Israeli mob, Colombian cartels and other Western European crime entities.

• Man dem crew is a North London drug dealing gang with links to Jamaican Yardie gangsters.

• Nottingham Gunn Gang is believed to be one of Britain’s most feared and violent gangs operating in Nottingham but also has a presence in many other British cities. It was founded by Colin Gunn and was initially mainly involved in drugs trafficking and drug dealing but later expanded into murder-for-hire, extortion and infiltration of legitimate businesses. Its boss has been incarcerated since 2006 but continues to run his associates from prison, apparently in collusion with prison officers who are forbidden to address him other than as Mr Gunn.

• Organized Crime (OC) gang is a gang made up of black boys based in Peckham, South London. The gang engages in turf warfare against rival South London gangs, deals in drugs, muggings and stages shoplifting raids, plans and executes robberies. Its bitter rivals are the Peckham Young Gungs, a rival South London gang, with which its members have been involved in a number of shoot-outs.

• Pekham Young Guns is a black boys gang based in Peckham, South London. In addition to turf warfare, the gang is active in the drug distribution business, and engages in other usual London gang activities, such as muggings, intimidation, beatings, shoplifting, robberies, etc. Its rival is the Organized Crime (OC) gang also from Peckham, South London.

• The Star Gang is a drug dealing gang based in Tottenham, North London, and trading in violence, intimidation and drugs. Mark Duggan was a senior member of the gang at the time of his death at the hands of the police, which event sparked major riots.

• The Yardie drug gangs, aka the Yardies, are criminal Jamaican drug gangs in the United Kingdom, aka Britain, specializing in the importation, production and sales of illicit gangs, with a particular emphasis on crack cocaine. There are many Yardie gangs in Britain — more than in any other country in the world. In 2003 it was reported that Yardie gangs were present in 36 out of the 43 police force areas in England and Wales. The Yardies have produced some of the most well-known British crime figures, such as Derek “Yardie” McDufus.

Notable British Mafiosi

• Terry Adams is the ruthless and undisputed king of the British mafia, from North London, who made his name by being personally involved in killings, drugs trafficking and savage beatings among other activities and who became obscenely rich by running his drug-dealing empire in Britain, a virtual state within a state.   A vicious British man (of Irish ancestry) who is now temporarily behind bars for money laundering was for many years the so-called “chief executive” of the Adams family firm, also known as the “A Team”, a vicious British mafia gang operating from North London.   Terry Adams is considered one of the most cunning and venomous mafiosi of modern times in Britain who left quite a trail of the broken bodies and slashed faces of his many victims and who at one time seriously considered buying the Tottenham Hotspur FC.   His family’s fortune is estimated to be at £100-200million.  He also had a (semi-) legitimate business career creating a string of money laundering companies, in which he himself held various positions, including “public relations adviser”, “jewelery designer” etc. However his main — criminal — career has spanned nearly three decades of drugs trafficking and extortion.    Adams and his violent brothers Patsy and Tommy generated such fear in the British underworld that they were able to start franchising out the “Adams” name and reputation.    Terry Adams was letting other criminals buy the right to say they were working with or on behalf of the Adamses.    In one instance a fee for loaning out the fearsome name was £250,000 (with payment within seven days).   They extended their reach well into the Crown Prosecution Service where they had a mole who gave them details of police informants’ names and other information.   It is estimated that at least 25 people have been killed, and dozens maimed, for crossing the family.   One of these was former British high jump champion Claude Moseley. He was stabbed through the back with a Samurai sword by Gilbert Wynter, one of the Adams enforcers.   Wynter was charged with murder but strolled out smiling from the Old Bailey when the charges were dropped because the prosecution’s chief witness was “too terrified” to give evidence.   Some time later Wynter himself disappeared.  It is believed that he was strangled and his remains can be found in the deep footings of the Millennium Dome.   With Terry Adams currently in prison doing seven years for money laundering (of all things) [Updated: he may have been released in June 2010], the family continues to be run by his brothers very much like “business as usual” — they have in place a huge network distributing drugs to clubs and discos throughout Europe, with strong links to Colombian cartels, and with HQ somewhere on the Spanish Costas.

• Ashley Bucknor was a member of the Organised Crime (OC) gang based in Peckham, South London. In 2008 he took part in a shoot-out with members of the Peckham Young Guns, a rival South London gang, and fired a bullet that killed an innocent bystander. He did it just six months after being released early from a jail sentence for stabbing a 40-year-old man who tried to confront a group of young gang members.

• Dave “Dodgy” Courtney, aka Dave Courtney OBE [= one big ego], is a British criminal and one of Britain’s best known living gangsters. He may have started his criminal career as some kind of junior associate of Reggie Kray, at least he claims so himself. Later he collected debts for his bosses and became famous for liberally applying his famed knuckle-duster in the process. He claims to have survived a huge number of fights, shootings and assassination attempts and himself caused grievous bodily harm, maimed and killed rival mafia figures. In recent times he however has become a public celebrity figure in Britain and almost a household name. He has starred in movies, television documentaries, recorded singles and written a succession of books.

• Paul Cryne is a British free-lance contract killer based in Thailand who carried out hits for about a £30,000 fee. Cryne, 62, is also an accomplished British athlete and holds a Guinness underwater swimming title.

• Mark “Starrish Mark” Duggan was a senior member of The Star Gang, a Tottenham drug-dealing gang. He was murdered in August 2011 in cold blood by police officers. His death initially sparked the 2011 London riots. He was also the nephew of the late Desmond “Dessie” Noonan, a major Manchester crime boss.

• Mohammed Ali Ege is a British crime boss. Born in Dubai, Ege ran a drug distribution business in Britain and made various property deals. A deal went sour, and he ordered a hit on his former business partner and hired two heroin addicts. However the two persons involved missed the house of their intended target and killed a completely unrelated person.

• Santre Sanchez Gayle is thought to be Britain’s youngest professional hitman who carried his first “hit” at age 15. Currently in prison, he charged 200 pounds per job.

• Gary Griffiths is a one-time British police officer and a career criminal. A former Met Police officer, Gary Griffiths was a member of Darren Lloyd’s gang of robbers. The gang raided cash-in-transit deliveries in east London, using stolen cars and false number plates. Gary Griffiths would dress as a firefighter to gain access to shops and business premises. The gang planned and executed at least 12 separate raids which netted thousands of pounds. He was captured after his former colleague spotted his distinctive features on CCTV.

• Colin Gunn is a notorious British mafia boss who ran a violent drug-dealing criminal empire in Nottingham and personally ordered hits on his enemies or members of their families and relatives. Behind bars since 2006, he remains — in collusion with prison officers — the leader of one of Britain’s most feared and violent gangs — the Nottingham Gunn gang.

• Ben Hope is a British hitman and a heroin drug addict (now incarcerated) who was paid the equivalent of US$800 to kill a former business associate of one Mohammed Ali Ege, a Dubai-born British crime figure. Hope and his associate Jason Richards, a fellow heroin addict, displayed staggering incompetence when they missed the house of their intended target by a whole 100 yards and killed a completely unrelated person.

• Anthony “White Tony” Johnson, was a British gangster and the young leader of the Cheetham Hill Mob. He was killed in 1991 at age 22. As he walked out of a pub, Johnson had a gun forced in his mouth which was then fired. Rival gangsters, the Noonans — Desmond, Derek and Damien — were implicated in his murder but were never convicted.

• Christopher “Christy” Kinahan, aka Irish Godfather, is one of Britain’s leading gangsters who is said to have a personal fortune of more than 100 million British pounds.   Kinahan’s area of expertise is exporting cocaine and guns to Britain — his gang is suspected of exporting tens of millions of pounds of cocaine to the UK each year whilst also supplying guns to the many urban gangs there. Recently he expanded his operations and started offering rival crime figures a “bespoke” money-laundering service to channel hundreds millions of British mafia money into building projects mostly in Spain, offshore accounts and companies.   To the casual observer, he is said to look fit and handsome and much younger than his years but make no mistake about it — this is a man who allegedly controls one of Western Europe’s wealthiest criminal organizations involved in drugs, guns and savage beatings.   According to reports, his contacts and list of associates read like a who’s who of international organized crime and include links to the Spanish mafia, the US criminal syndicates and mafia families, a major Israeli mob and the Colombian cartels.    In the 1980s and 1990s he served a number of jail sentences in Ireland and Holland for trafficking heroin, Ecstasy and illegal firearms. Whilst behind bars he is said to have learned several languages and taken degrees in sociology and environmental science. According to one report, he turned down a chance to earn early release from prison in the late 1990s in order to finish his studies. 

• Darren Lloyd is a British criminal and the mastermind behind a group of robbers, including a former Met Police officer, who were raiding cash-in-transit deliveries in east London, using stolen cars and false number plates. Members of the gang would often don firefighters uniforms to gain access to shops and business premises. Lloyd planned at least 12 separate raids which netted thousands of pounds.

• Stephen Marshal is a British gangster who was a junior associate of the Adams mafia family. A professional bodybuilder and a former gym owner, he is believed to have dismembered, and disposed of, at least four bodies whilst working for the Adamses and has since committed other grave crimes.

• Derek “Yardie Derek” McDufus is a Jamaican drug dealer and an enforcer for the Yardie drug gangs. In 2005 he killed Desmond “Dessie” Noonan, a Manchester underworld mafia boss.

• Desmond “Dessie” Noonan was a notorious British mafia boss who once boasted “his gang had more guns than the police”. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he is said to have been responsible for at least 27 murders in and around Manchester. Noonan, a one-time nightclub bouncer, was one of 11 children and ran his family gang with three of his brothers. He was stabbed to death in 2005 aged 46 by a Jamaican enforcer working for the Yardie drug gangs. His feared family remain major players in Manchester’s underworld. Desmond Noonan was the uncle of Mark Duggan whose cold-blooded murder at the hands of the police led to the 2011 London riots.

• Salim and Hafiz Razaq are two British mafiosi who are brothers from a ruthless British underworld crime family. They ran a major drug trafficking and distribution operation in Preston and were also involved in kidnappings, torture, murder as they tried to muscle out rival gangs.  Hafiz Razaq is known in the Preston underworld as ‘The Enforcer’, ‘Big Haf’ and ‘The Muscle’. He rose quickly through the criminal ranks of the Deepdale drugs gang and became its boss.   At the same time his brother Salim Razaq was taking care of things on the police side. A police sergeant, he led a secret double life as one of the two leaders of the ruthless British underworld crime family. Salim ‘Sal’ Razaq, 31, effectively became a ‘mob boss in police uniform’ after assuming control of a drug and dirty money racket when his brother went to jail over a vicious turf war. He turned his suburban home into a gangland HQ and used it to store automatic weapons with hundreds of live rounds of ammunition as well as major cash stashes. He was also using the police national computer to check on the movements of rival mobsters and offered to “take care of” a key witness in his brother’s case. Thus, Salim Razaq was effectively a criminal in a British police uniform.

• Jason Richards is a British hitman and a heroin drug addict who was paid about the equivalent of US$800 to kill a former business associate of one Mohammed Ali Ege, a Dubai-born British crime figure. Richards and his associate Ben Hope, a fellow heroin addict, displayed staggering incompetence when they missed the house of their intended target by a whole 100 yards and killed a completely unrelated person.

• Stephen Pitman is a notorious British drug dealer. One of Britain’s most wanted men, Pitman was recently arrested on Spain’s Costa del Sol.

• Curtis Warren is Britain’s most notorious drug baron who used to run a multi-million-pound criminal empire. A convicted killer who once topped Interpol’s most wanted list, Curtis Warren is at the time of this writing (Dec 2011) in a high-security prison serving a 13-year sentence for cannabis smuggling. Warren, the only drug dealer to feature on the Sunday Times Rich List, has an illegal empire estimated to be worth up to £300million. He is in Full Sutton prison near York. A former bouncer once described as the ‘most successful British criminal who has ever been caught’, Warren was first jailed in 1995 while living in the Netherlands after Dutch police found a haul of drugs and banknotes worth £125million. While in prison, he killed a convicted murderer, Cemal Guclu, during a fight. He will be released soon and is expected to go back to running his criminal empire.

• The Witneys are a British criminal family clan. Once a hardworking family, the Whitneys embraced criminal lifestyle dealing drugs on the backstreets of Anfield, just a stone’s throw from Liverpool Football Club. Thirteen members of the Whitney drugs ring were arrested, tried and found guilty of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.

• Gilbert Wynter was a junior associate of the Adamses and a feared enforcer for the family. He is credited with killing the former British high-jump champion Claude Moseley whom he allegedly stabbed through the back with a samurai sword. Wynter was cleared of the killing however because the chief prosecution witness was too scared to give evidence. In March 1998 Wynter himself disappeared and underworld sources say he was killed after double-crossing the family. Gang lore says his body was buried in concrete and is propping up the Millennium Dome in London.

British criminal faces

This report on the British mafia is regularly updated by Yanko Phobe, an expert on British mafia and British criminal activity, worldwide and domestic.

Tags: Britain mafia state, British mafia, British mafia state, harassment of journalists in Britain, luke harding, mafia state, organized crime in Britain, Spanish mafia, Spanish mafia state