Britain's Most Notorious Gangsters: London's Nefarious Underbelly (Crime Documentary) | Real Stories

hello and welcome to the doc exchange a real stories podcast in partnership with the grierson trust every week i'll ask a new filmmaker or filmmaking team about three documentaries connected by a single theme that have made a meaningful impression on their work and life [Music] london has always had criminals the largest city in britain is like a magnet to anyone wanting to make a bob or two even if that means taking the law into their own hands since the 1900s as many as 70 gangs have fought it out on london streets gun battles knife crime gang rivalries and alliances robberies protection and drug dealing the city has seen them all the most gang-infested districts of london has been the east end to some a deviant area one of physical and moral disorder to others it's both a kingdom and a gold mine london has never bowed to one boss as a city made up of many villages it's always had many gangs we're going to look at two gangs past and present both caught up in the urban battle for survival [Music] [Music] gangs have come and gone in london the second world war putting pay to many of them the sabinis from clarkenwell a mob not unlike the mafia flourished for almost 20 years but by the 40s they were gone the elephant and castle mob in the south endured into the 50s but there was one gang which survived right up until the 1960s and their origins go back to the 1800s they were the watney streeters [Music] originally an irish fighting gang the watney streeters owed their success and survival to one thing the river it enabled them to make a good living from the docks which sprung up beside its banks to find out about the warning streeters i've come to meet author and historian james morton so james i think we should talk about the history of the docs first well the docs of course have been here since people started importing stuff into england one of the principal times was the 18th century when really sort of the pool of london between london bridge and tower bridge was taking something like 1500 ships at a time when it was really only designed for 600 there were tremendous opportunities for theft from those ships which were not properly guarded not released the cargos which were coming in were ivory furs tea coffee anything and anything could be stolen and was and what sort of people were working on the doctors well generally speaking an awful lot were irish immigrants who come over certainly in the 18th century and also in the 19th century particularly after the potato famines of the 1840s the irish immigrants really settled around whopping somehow there would have been lots of stealing going on from around the docks and there are small gangs and families who who did those sort of things eventually they all sort of came together didn't they yes certainly the the most powerful collection were the wattness treaters and they were the people who controlled the docks who got work on them who could get a ticket later on to work regularly who was picked for casual labor and so on and they were to a large extent they were fighting gangs so how do they make their money well they of course they were paid a wage for start but there was uh as with any docs if you have a dock you've got enormous opportunities for theft they could the people who control the union could also decide who worked there and so consequently if you wanted to work on the dock you had to pay money to the people running the dark souls and what about if other gangs stole things they if other gangs if other people stole things uh then really it's the same as the craze down the east end later the the the wattley streeters would expect to tax them perhaps if the property came to i don't know say 20 pounds they'd want to fire that sort of thing during 1919 1500 people were arrested for cargo poaching the shipping police was formed to oversee cargos being loaded and unloaded but the stealing went on thieving from ships was almost customary the theft of rum was prevalent one method known as sucking the monkey was where they would siphon off the alcohol from the barrel using a hose a second technique called spiking the cask involves simply drilling holes in the keg and having extra long pockets sewn inside their trousers was a neat way of hiding any stolen goods from the day during the first world war pilfering was organized by the older dockers they hired lads to do their dirty work the boys could earn four pounds a week when the normal wage was only 12 shillings to the streeters it was more money for old rope the irish immigrants settled down by the docks a hundred years later a new wave of asian immigrants were arriving in london [Music] this is south or in west london in the 1950s indian and pakistani immigrants came here to find jobs in the factories at the airport now 85 of the residents here are asian [Music] the influx of asians gave rise to the likes of the teddy boyz and the much more powerful groups like the national front the asians had to defend themselves so they form gangs now one of these gangs is called the tutti nung i'm meeting up with a man who has done a lot of research into this journalist and crime writer tony thompson first of all tell me about when did uh gangs first emerge in this area well around the south area they really started around the late 60s early 70s which was around the same time that we started to get a large population of people from the indian subcontinent coming to this part of london and setting up shop here so um in the early days when they were being here there was a lot of racism a lot of people being attacked by sort of people at the national front and so on and they started to defend themselves by gathering together in vigilante games to defend themselves against the racists but what happened was once once the threat from the races started to fade a little bit those gangs stayed around started attacking each other and started praying on the local community themselves what happened a lot of time was that they would go to shop owners and local businesses and demand protection money saying that you know they would help them to prevent being attacked by racists and so on and guard their properties yeah um and once they were attacking their own community really yeah i mean they started off defending them but then they went into attacking them once the actual problem disappeared because they still wanted to be around and i thought well we must make some money out of this and slowly moved into organized crime it's actually exactly what happened with the mafia in sicily as well they started off the same way being a group of vigilantes who once the threat had gone ended up becoming an organized crime group initially the gang was known as the holy smokes but cast divisions within it created a rift so so the holy smokes in the 70s they were the big gang the big asian gang and they uh they split at one point didn't they yeah what happened is that the whole indian community has a big problem with them with cast if you're the wrong cast you can't sort of associate with people of a different cast and within the holy smokes they had several different cards and uh some of the people at the in the lower caste felt they weren't being treated properly by those in the higher caste so they ended up going off and forming their own gang which they called the tutee nungs they saw themselves as being from the lowest caste tutti nang means the worthless ones where there had been unity there was now bitterness and rivalry between the tutti non and the holy smokes to find out about the consequences of this rift i'm going along to see dr avatar lit founder of sunrise radio which has been here in southall since the 80s the radio station is kind of part of it's really a centre of the community right so when was the first time you heard about the tutti nang there the holy smokes well we used to run a radio station from the marketplace which is about you know in the sort of early 80s right from the heart of the town and um and we used to play uh dedications and songs to two teenagers and holy smokes young girls to call up to say you know this is this next song for so and so we didn't know who they were i came from outside southall and it was just a normal broadcasting it's like a a daughter sending a dedication to an auntie or something and it's only later on we found out that tuttings and holy smokes were really local sort of mini gangsters you know sort of sort of speak you know the holy smokes for example uh they were made of youngesters and uh one would like to think that the pillars of the community would be there to give guidance and disperse but in this particular case they actually fostered those gangs unlike most outfits that grow from the street upwards this gang was formed and nurtured by the elders from the top down the local community actually had a legitimate way of making money they were community organizations at the time control of those those community organizations became very important yeah and this is how gang culture was actually encouraged by the members of the community uh all the members of the community the pillars of society the kind of people who would sit at the local superintendent business superintendent's office to sort out the community problems so it was ingrained quite deep it was actually encouraged by the community elders they did it uh not because they want lawless listeners in the in the community or in the country or or in the town they did it because that was their muscle effectively yes you know in order to control inauguralization but you said basically this is not um something new to the asian culture i mean if you look at the indian cities of bombay and all the rest of it it is almost customary that you know a shopkeeper would actually pay the local gang protection money on a weekly basis it happens today and you can't even escape from it you know most members of the public didn't know anything about it but i think you know in the late in the early 80s uh it's you know people starting to fear if somebody would say well you know i'm some gang member so and so people will shy away from challenging that person so if you were a kid would you choose to be either one or the other or or were you born into it almost i think they were actually actively recruiting people from schools and other things and i think that you know it was almost fashionable to be part of one or the other it only hit home to avatar how threatening the gangs were when he realized that influence extended into his own news team with the journalists so intimidated they felt unable to even mention the gangs in their reporting there was uh one supposed to be head of gang who was sent to prison and he was uh he went he went inside and my news team actually refused to carry the story because the news team actually they're all very famous journalists now but 20 years ago they were beginners they worked for local newspapers they came to work for the radio station and i threatened to sack the entire news team it's mainly because because they had gone to school local schools they knew how the setup was far more than i did and they said they weren't prepared to carry the news although the man had been convicted sent to prison and they said they they value their face a lot more than actually um um their jobs yeah so they were really controlling the community with fear yes yes it was it was i think they fear um i think they probably did lot less but you know the fear was far greater but by the 1980s the fighting between the two gangs became so violent and so public that everyone in southall became aware of a serious gang problem i want to know why it got so out of control despite the fact that they started off together uh within the same game once they split they became mortal enemies um i think in some ways it gave them something to do by attacking one another they'd be vicious battles i mean sort of like nothing that had ever been seen in the area before that they'd be involving machetes and hammers and screwdrivers and all sorts of knives and people would be often very badly hurt um belize was seen as a great source of pride for the gangs as to who would come off better it was a bit like sort of the worst kind of football hooliganism you know these two mass gangs coming together in public and just brawling together and it would happen on a regular basis were they out to kill each other or i think the idea was never specifically to kill it was always just to sort of win win the fight but some people did die occasionally but it was more about people getting really badly injured and badly hurt as a result of the activities that were going on the horrors of the street battles prompted ordinary residents to start coming forward and gradually information began to seep out the police set up a special squad to investigate it was called operation shampoo it would reveal an international organization of more than 2 000 soldiers with interest in illegal immigration extortion fraud violence heroin dealing and armed robberies operation shampoo was about to lift the lid off of organized crime in southall in the early part of the 20th century london's east end was a patchwork of gangs in white chapel there were the bess arabians russian jews who went from fighting anti-semitic violence to running protection rackets to counter them there were the jewish vigilantes called the odessians the blind beggar gang was a team of pickpockets from bethnal green street thugs formed into groups and called themselves the titanics the hoxton mob or the vendetta mob there were the jamaican eddie mannings and a japanese outfit called ses miyakawa running drug rings and then down beside the river controlling some of the busiest docks in the world with the watney streeters up until the late 40s they were led by a man called jimmy fuller and this was their manner watney street in whopping i'm hoping that james can tell me something about the place james here we are on what knee street not quite how it would have been in the 20s no in those days it would be back to back no indoor lavatories um some shed in the back garden certainly no baths nothing like that but pubs and shops hubs and shops certainly i mean turn of the century turn of the 20th century it would have had a hundred shops and probably a hundred stalls on a sunday morning and a strong island a very strong irish neighborhood i'm they all married intermarried a big catholic community within to marry i mean it's always said you never knew who your cousin was because of the intermarriage in those days at the size 8 turn of the century and the whatnostreeters maintained presence certainly throughout the 1920s for example they were used by a man called arthur harding or so he says to break up parts of the general strike how many people were in this game i don't know it's a very loose amorphous thing i can't think it's a gang i think that they were generally speaking of fighting community and if you needed uh them they would rally around you that if they weren't fighting themselves they'd um come and come held back yeah they were they were obviously fighters to hide a big fighting gang yes there were several gangs that the streeters had to fend off one of them was the sabines a mafia outfit from clarkenwell certainly the story is that they are one they ambushed the sabinis who came on a recce down here i think to deal with some bookmakers and they found that they'd walked into a trap and the what this street is allegedly what their middle twenties again uh gave them a good hiding and sent them back to clarkenwell the streeters had been going for over a century they made a tidy income they'd got through the war when others had fallen they'd survive the loss of their leader jimmy fuller but now there will be two forces which would bring about their demise the first of these was out of their control it was quite simply progress the docks in whoppings suffered heavy bombing during the war it wasn't worth rebuilding them the ships were now getting much larger they needed deeper water trade was moved down river to tilbury by the 1950s the london docks were closing and this street was the heart of it how did it change once the docs started to well of course you've got terrible deprivations in the war i mean you've got um sort of surrey docks for example in the war one night 380 000 tons of timber was destroyed so you can think of the the terrible deprivation that the east end suffered after the war there's a sort of regrouping but by the 1960s you're getting container ships and the london docks can't cope with them they haven't got the depth to cope with them and so the docks move down to tilbury and consequently the watmas street is then or the people on the docks start to lose their power the streeters began to diversify they work with the jewish gangs in all gate who run the clubs the brothels and the gambling joints they provided protection for them that always had a tough reputation and they like to fight [Music] the watney streeters had always been enemies of bethnal green they crossed the sabinis a few times when they were in power there but the streeters had always managed to deal with them now they faced a new threat which will eventually lead to their destruction the craze what other types of gangs were coming up through the 50s that were making their lives less easy i don't think they were making their lives less easy i think in fact the the the the families were getting old they'd made their money uh some were moving out for example george cornell who is killed by ronnie cray he married a girl from south london went over south london it just sort of generally drifted away right and there was a sense that with the when the craze came around that the craze and and and the watley streeters were going to meet the craze in the watley street is always going to clash sooner or later without any doubt by 1956 the twins were making serious money they controlled an area from bethnal green east to milen stepney and bow and north to hackney and walthamstow within this area of 14 square miles every gambling den most of the pubs and many businesses down to petty thieves all paid their dues to the craze they were already known as the most dangerous mob in london they would always be a threat to any surviving streeter and it wasn't long before one of them called charlie attracted their attention streeter charlie would encounter the craze on several occasions he had a scam going with local post office drivers who would re-address parcels to places where he could collect them ronnie cray hearing of the potential of the post office scam demanded 50 of the profits charlie was not forthcoming with any money he became listed by ronnie as someone he would soon have to deal with severely ronnie's violent hatred towards anyone coming into his manner would lead him in the autumn of 1956 to use a gun and shoot someone for the first time one of the wattles streeters a friend of his has a run-in with a garage who sells him a dud car and he creates a bit of difficulty with the the vendor of the car putting it absolutely neutrally uh red ronnie won't have this and he shot the man in the leg he shot the docker in the leg was the garage was paying protection to the craze at that point yes that would be the way of putting it i think ronnie would always says it was a friend of his but i have a horrid feeling that money was exchanged for the friendship and do you think ronnie did this because he wanted to show other gangs that wanted his power yes but of course ronnie was completely out of control anyway even back then and whereas another person would have just given him a bad beating or perhaps a cutting uh ronnie took it that one stage further but it was it was the with these moments in ronnie's these are these are defining moments where he never had to be violent again once that once those fired those guns in those first few years of his career he could live off that's right and anyway eventually just to show his power he has a whip around in the east end and the the docker is bought a pub or a share in a pub and it shows that really sort of the lord giveth the lord take off he's a charity as well but what happened did ronnie get caught for this there was an identification parade and no one was picked out surprisingly enough because legend has it that reggie turned up that day reggie turned up and was going to say if he was picked out oh i'm reggie and would foul up the identification parade anyway it never came to it the fix was in to the watney streeters this was just a foretaste of what was to come the craze were a new breed of criminal unpredictable violent and ruthless their hunger for power knew no bounds and they were about to unleash violence of a type never before seen in the city [Music] in southall at the end of the 80s there was another game flexing its muscles the tutti nun they may not be so well known as the craze but they soon became every bit as powerful [Music] one man who had been on the receiving end of their threats was a greenford shopkeeper called mirinda palmer shortly after depositing his life savings of twenty thousand pounds into a local building society two young asian men walking through his shop asked him to come outside for what they said was a business proposition [Music] he was directed into the back seat of a car and a gun was pointed to his head one of them said we're a tutti nung you know how important we are and we want 20 000 pounds it's a simple choice you either pass the money or we kill you and we feed you to our dog mahinda palmer withdrew the 20 000 pounds and handed it over one week later worried that the gang knew exactly how much he had in his account and terrified they will return he phoned the police i'm meeting up with the man he spoke to former detective superintendent roy herrich tell me about mahinda palmer and his part well i understand that mr palmer was being put under a number of threats in his shop and it appeared to be protection now i know my officers investigated that and in the end the case finished up at the the crown court where people were prosecuted and dealt with that was one of the first people that came over and gave us information as what was going on and i think after we dealt with the individuals who were dealing with palmer then the public had confidence in the team that were investigating matters and from that time onwards a lot more information stemmed yeah from that one inquiry the courage of mr palmer going to the police opened a tiny crack in a vast criminal organization but this hadn't brought the suti nung down because the structure of the gang meant it was almost impossible to penetrate it's actually a very similar way to the way that terrorist cells work and that you have an organization and you have these independent cells and if you bust one of the cells you haven't broken up the organization at all you've just taken out that one cell and these gangs are kind of started working from that model so if the police did ever have any success and find a few gang members and find out what they were doing and arrest them or put them away the rest of the organization was completely isolated and could still carry on independently by the late 1980s the inroads made by the police had shown that there was a hierarchy to the gang at its heart led a group of powerful men up until now they had remained untouchable it was this inner circle the operation shampoo set out to crack it would unearth one of the largest heroin smuggling operations ever discovered in britain by the mid-50s the craze had control of the east end now they wanted a slice of the action up west but the watney streeter called charlie who'd cross them before would jeopardize their plans in 1956 friends of the craze called jones and ramsey took over a drinking club in soho called the stragglers club jones and ramsey called in the twins to handle any troublemakers reggie and ronnie were delighted to form a partnership with them but like a bad penny the watney streeter charlie would reappear jones got into an argument with him charlie beat him up severely now his business partner ramsay together with the cray twins would retaliate with a merciless attack [Music] so james this is where the fight happened at the britannia it's now a perfect fried chicken place absolutely it's just of course by the shadwell railway station and this is where reggie ronnie billy jones and bobby ramsay came looking for the watmas treaters who had done up ramsey what happened was the street has got wind that the craze mob was on its way in the front was a fellow who got nothing to do with it but was related to the street his man called terry martin out the back go the what the street is whom the craze are really looking for and there is for old terry martin in front left really more or less on his own he's dragged out and given the stabbing with the beard and possibly bobby ramsay it's difficult to know who really does what but they all give him a terrible hammer just here on this channel here on this pavement yeah and where the watney street is hopefully camped yes very sensibly interesting but it sent out quite a big signal to the watley street it did and instead of having taken their revenge on terry martin they then went looking for these cowardly whatness treaters to give them a lesson i think bobby ramsey runs a traffic light and in those days you might find people police on the street and they're pulled over and there's a blood stained bearing and various other ammunition and equipment in the car there's some blood on reggie's tie which he explains to the court when they go to the old bailly that it had come from a nose bleed while he was watching a boxing match it was somebody else's blood that learnt out of the ring and the germany wore it and there was no dna in those days romney gets three years um jones and rems you get five and three years the cray twins were tried for assault on terry martin their attempt to bribe him had failed in court the jury accepted that the blood stains on reggie's jacket might have come from boxing in the gym and he was acquitted ronnie had no such luck he took the fall and went off for his first stretch in prison for three years ramsay got five jones three the stragglers club was shut down the craze were out there getting their hands dirty but the outfit i'm looking at a hindu gang called the tutti nang is a totally different setup on the street level there's intense game rivalry but at the top the bosses delegate they don't fight they work together they're not interested in rivalry they're interested in making money the inner circle at the top scoops up all of the money from their scams and puts it all into the big money maker heroin the inner circle of the tutti now were always removed from their crimes insulated you could almost say untouchable but there's always that one fatal slip that little in the armor and in this case when it appeared roy herridge and his team on operation shampoo jumped on it as well as making around 80 arrests among the tuti now operation shampoo also stumbled upon more senior gang members one of them called barkat khan began to bribe witnesses how does barkit khan came toward this but once the police started operation shampoo dovers had a number of cool cases that resulted in one of those cases one of the witnesses was bribed and the person who was accused of putting the bribes in was this character called bucket khan as a result of that the police then started following him to see what he was involved in and it turned out that he was a massive heroin smuggler on a scale that the police have never really come across before certainly in this part of london no one had ever been operating on that kind of scale the car case gave a real insight into the methods used by gangs to import heroin the distribution was through gang-owned restaurants who can safely import large quantities of goods from india and pakistan on a regular basis they have a high cash turnover extensive storage space and no one ever looked suspicious going into a restaurant barket khan ran a highly sophisticated well-planned and lucrative operation all the money the tutti nun made in their other frauds and scams the protection money the credit cards the bogus mortgages was all invested into a massive and regular smuggling operation of heroin into heathrow airport it involved a vast network of gang members men and women all working together it all depended upon couriers trusted friends or families from the gang and usually women they would be flown out of heathrow to india or pakistan they would usually go for a few weeks and be able to visit their families and have a paid holiday but on their return they would bring back heroin boarding and body checks in pakistan could be easily avoided the gang wielded considerable power there officials could be bribed to turn a blind eye but it was the return trip to heathrow where the gang's ingenuity and planning will be critical with vigilant customs officials and the latest scanning devices it would be risky trying to smuggle the drugs through customs but the tutti nung had a simple undetectable and foolproof solution when the couriers entered the baggage reclaim area they would slip off to the ladies toilets there they would remove the packages of heroin each courier had been given a key to the tampon dispenser here the drugs were hidden and the courier now totally clean could pass through customs and leave the airport now there was just one more link in the operation the gang had people employed at the airport as cleaners as soon as the couriers had cleared their job was now to move and pick up the drugs once in their hands it was no problem to take the drugs out of the airport with so many people regularly going back and forth nothing looked out of the ordinary this operation didn't raise any suspicions that must have involved the gang being everywhere right working in airports yeah what they did was actually got gang members to go and get jobs in specific places if they knew that it would be useful to them in terms of getting drugs into the country there was a very sophisticated operation from that point of view and police believe that he was bringing in about 10 kilos of heroin a day but what about 100 000 pounds a day but they reckon it was operating for about 10 years before they discovered it so we're talking millions and millions of pounds that his gang was making um all of which was coming into the into the uk at heroin and being spread out within this community and within the rest of london as well the tutti nong were bringing in 10 kilos a day worth a hundred thousand pounds they did this for 10 years that's 365 million pounds that's the proceeds of all those bank cards and pin numbers that went missing in the post all those bogus mortgages and insurance scams all those threatened shopkeepers all collected up and invested in drug trafficking the tentacles of this operation stretch into every corner of everyday life creating misery for every person they touch on november the 5th 1956 ronnie cray entered wandsworth prison to start a three-year sentence during that time he was moved to parkhurst on the isle of wight and also the psychiatric wing of winchester prison by his release in spring 1959 he would be certified insane but three years away hadn't erased ronnie's memory he hadn't forgotten the culprits who he'd wanted to hunt down the night he was caught the watney streeters and so the legend goes in spring 1959 ronnie and reggie and the rest of the firm came down here to the london hospital tavern inside drinking with the watney streeters this time there will be no escape ronnie and the firm stormed in and the beating they gave the watney streeters was severe the following day the newspapers described it as the worst gang fight in the east end for years not long after that the leader of the streeters asked reggie for a job it was the end of the watney streeters [Music] but they lived on as individuals many of them joining rival gangs and i think that um the maltese who are coming into the area at the time sort of commercial road and so on running clubs and spielers and indeed running girls they are starting to pay money to what's left of the walkman street is who in turn are paying it to the craze and they're all moving out now of the area the docks are diminishing the docks are now and they're older the 60s are gone yes they they've made their money they're going respectable they're moving out of dockland out to essex to basel and romford places like that but there would be one more murder the final nail to be hammered into the watney streeters coffin and eventually ronnie uh kills one of the wotley streeters and george cornell yes now george cornell has moved he's one of the ones who's actually gone over to the south london and aligned himself with the richardsons cornell comes over to meet a man whom actually it was suggested ronnie had shot as well he comes over to visit him in hospital and thinks he'll have a drink out of presumably out of bravado and sheer folly in in the blind beggar in the milan road and that is when ronnie gets wind of this decides who's going to be shown to be the master of the east end and goes in and in front of a really only the barmaid and one other elderly man um pulls the trigger on cornell here at the blind beggar pub in 1968 ronnie shot george cornell a man who'd once been a watney streeter and the rest as they say is history the what these streeters were never seen again [Music] in southup operation shampoo had unearthed a massive smuggling operation bringing 100 000 pounds of heroin into heathrow airport every day it had been run by a man in the inner circle of the tutti nun gang his name was barkat khan how did they catch him in the end they call him because they found out about him from the uh the bribe that he tried to make for the witness once i started following yeah yeah they realized what was going on uh i mean bucket's calm problem but bucket khan's problem was that he didn't like delegating stuff so he was always very hands-on he was always there to supervise what was going on so when the police started following him it was immediately obvious what he was involved in and he got a long sentence as a result the police operation in southall had taken the lid off a massive crime organization khan was convicted of attempting to import heroin he got four years by 1989 prominent members of the tutina had become exposed and more local residents came forward with information to rid gangs from the neighborhood and from the lives of their children well i think really a lot of the parents wanted their children to be dealt with in order because they are a very very law-abiding society in normal life but these youngsters seem to move away from that society and become gang members and the parents a lot of parents came forward to help us what happened to shampoo in the end well in operation shampoo finished just before i retired actually and i think really at that stage um we'd come to a virtual end of our inquiry i think we dealt with the major part of the tutti nuns and holy smokes and i think if you speak to the community now those individuals have been dealt with as far as the law is concerned and have come out and have very happy straightforward families now and they're good businesses so how many in the end were put into prison i think about 40 people overall were put to prison and overall i think we dealt with about 80 individuals overall yeah today avatar lip believes that most youngsters have other aspirations he thinks they now look towards building careers rather than joining gangs i think there has been um in the last few years people who have recently write from india or whatever they think they've got four or five people put together they can actually put pressure on the others but they're not gangs as they were uh you know the in the 80s they no longer have the glass ceilings which they used to have in 1780s i think people now truly that's a really good point yeah uh they've been to people uh people feel they can achieve anything now there you know so therefore uh the same people who were probably members of the gang they're probably coaching their daughters and sons to become accountants and doctors not um gangsters but tony thompson is less optimistic so the tutee number finished but completely i think operation shampoo definitely shut them down for a while but like all of these things um they only really became more sophisticated and realized what they needed to do to not get caught in the future so i think they're still around they just keep a much lower profile um they're not quite so showy and they're not quite so obvious but they're still there and they're still making money well i think what's interesting about youth gangs these days is that it's become a kind of career path it used to be a sort of phase that you went through you'd be in a gang you'd hang out with your mates and when you got to 18 or so you'd give up because there was no money in it but now even at a young age you can make a lot more money out of being in a street gang than you can from doing a legitimate job so a lot of these young kids end up just on the first step of a career ladder that takes them into more serious crime into armed robbery into major league drug dealing by the time they're in their 20s southall is ever-changing just as the british and the irish moved further out in the 1950s so now the sikh population followed them new communities are moving in from somalia and afghanistan the area is becoming more diverse heroin still plagues the southall community in the country at large because of gangs like the tutti nun the price of a gram of heroin has dropped from 100 pounds to 40 pounds while the purity has doubled since the millennium a new generation of gangs have developed they're fragmented less organized and nothing on the same scale as the tutti naan but perhaps that's just appearances perhaps we can't see what's really there all we know is that drugs are still on the street cheaper than ever so someone's still bringing them in [Music] so you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 475,680

Keywords: City Rackets, Crime Rackets, Crime TV Series, Criminal Lifestyle Stories, Criminal Minds, Criminal Networks, Criminal Organizations, Criminal Syndicates, Criminal World Glance, Dangerous Streets Chronicles, Gang Investigations, Gang Warfare, Gangster Films, Gangster Lifestyle, Illicit Enterprises Showcase, Law Enforcement, Martin Kemp, Notorious Criminals, Real Stories, Undercover Operations, Urban Gangs

Id: Tlxn0aVheSU

Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021