Tag Archives: crime

Cocaine,Guns and Wads of Cash: The double life of criminals from Bromley and Berkhamsted

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Harry el Araby pic credit: Met Police

One criminal was brought up in his parent’s £1m house in Berkhamsted and runs a vegan supermarket in Hackney

Last month the Metropolitan Police revealed they had arrested 113 people as part of huge Europe wide operation against serious and organised crime. Altogether in the UK some 746 people were arrested after the National Crime Agency working with Europol cracked an encrypted phone network called EncroChat used by criminals.

What emerged was that many of the criminals were not based in the cliched inner city housing estates but in the leafy suburbs and posh, respectable towns in the Home Counties.

At the end of last month two of the criminals who were arrested in May were convicted in the courts after pleading guilty to firearms and drugs offences. Jody Hall, 46, of Carters Hill Close, Mottingham was sentenced to 12 years and Harry El Araby,33, now of  Palmers Road, Bethnal Green, to six years.

Jody Hall; Pic credit:Met Police

A picture of the two characters emerged in the Met Police’s report. Jody Hall lived with is partner in a respectable flat in Mottigham in the London borough of Bromley.

The police who must have been monitoring their phones staged a stake out near his home. They saw Hall leave his flat and go to a lock up garage.

The Met Police report goes on :

“A minute or so later he left the garage carrying a bulky item wrapped in a white carrier bag, which also had yellow and green on it. He carried the item in his right gloved hand to his car where he placed it inside the driving seat area. He then closed the car door and walked away towards his home address empty handed.

A short while later, Hall walked back to the car where he briefly parked in front of his garage and made a phone call before driving to the exit of the close.

Once there he parked and was met by El Araby who arrived on a bicycle with a rucksack on his back.

An exchange took place and El Araby cycled off while Hall returned to his car.”

Then the police pounced. El Araby was stopped and the contents of the bag seized. In it were £10,000 in cash, a Glock hand gun, a silencer and 50 rounds of ammunition.

Cocaine and guns seized by the police Pic credit: Met Police

Hall’s home was raided and police found 11 kilograms of cocaine and £4000 in cash. They checked his garage and found  a revolver concealed in an old washing machine. A specialist search team then conducted a more thorough search and found a Berreta handgun with six rounds of ammunition in the clip.

Neither of them would disclose to the police why they had guns but the suspicion must be that someone was going to be killed.

Detective Constable Gio Antoniazzi, the investigating officer, said: “These guns, and every individual bullet, represent a life that could have been lost or changed forever and so I am delighted that we were able to remove them from streets of London.

“This was a fantastic team effort and the evidence gathered resulted in Hall and El Araby having no option but to plead guilty. I hope this makes people think twice about procuring dangerous weapons.”

On the surface Harry El Araby appears to be a very respectable person. He was brought up in Berkhamsted . His parents house is in a respectable leafy cul de sac in Berkhamsted where house prices have gone up ten fold in the last twenty years. El Araqby registered one of his companies there.

He also runs the Plant Based Supermarket in Homerton, Hackney where last July he gave an interview to East London Lines as a pillar of the local community.

The friendly vegan supermarket in Hackney. Companies House lists Harry Anthony Robert el Araby as a sole director since 2017

He claimed then to be living in New Cross and told a reporter:

“I have been vegan for more than four years and I have tasted a lot of stuff; I try to pick things that I know are good and I try to hit every angle. I feel we have the widest range of vegan products and all are very good quality”.

 “We believe in the little man,” says El Araby. “Most of our suppliers are English, so we support the local economy and we impact the environment less”.

“we contribute to charitable purposes” – El Araby

“There are a lot of smaller brands in here and we try to help them as much as possible, we use coffee from Climpson & Sons, a local coffee place brewed in Hackney that has a better-than-fair-trade policy, we get the bread from Better Health Bakery, which is a charity that helps people get back into work. We try to be local as much as we can and contribute to charitable purposes”

He also tried crowdfunding to raise enough money to create a national website to sell vegan food on line – but only raised £150 towards a £3000 target. He now has a website.

One can only imagine what drove this man brought up in respectable Berkhamsted ( the house last changed hands in 1998 according to the Land Registry) and running an eco friendly shop to a life of crime with guns and bullets and wads of cash. Might make a good crime story for TV and I suspect this won’t be last exposure to come from those 746 arrests last month.

” Darth Vader” mandarin’s unstellar performance on crime mustn’t pay

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home affairs committee christmas-cards

Mark Sedwill as Darth Vader centre right next to Theresa May

CROSS POSTED ON BYLINE.COM

Earlier this month I railed about the extraordinary findings of a report by the National Audit Office which showed Whitehall’s abject failure to confiscate the stolen assets of  criminals.

Theresa May’s claims that crime musn’t pay were torn into tatters by a report which showed  what a woeful record the present government has in confiscating them.

You would think that her top Home Office civil servant – permanent secretary Mark Sedwill – would do everything to make amends for this poor performance.

But think again. When he came to account for missing almost every target set by Parliament a few years before his complacent response so angered MPs on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee that he was sent packing by the chair Labour Mp, Meg Hillier.

I have written about this in Tribune magazine.

Now Mark Sedwill has a stellar nickname – thanks to a jokey reference in a  recent Christmas card put out by the Commons Home affairs Committee, which monitors the home office.

He is proud to be depicted as” Darth Vader ” the evil figure in the Star Wars movie – to Theresa May’s Princess Leia as part of cast of characters on their Christmas card ( see picture above.)

As he told Civil Service World  ” It’s always better to be one of the stars, even if you’re the dark lord, than to be disregarded. I think he’s the coolest character in the pantheon – so I’m not that bothered.”.

His performance before the committee was anything but stellar. And the criminals would be delighted that the man representing the Dark Side was happy to pretend he had recovered their loot.

He obfuscated, denied reality and pretended that he had never agreed with the report’s findings in the first place. He even started quoting government propaganda that  ministers were delighted with his efforts – which left at least £203m worth of assets uncollected.

So angry was one Tory MP, Stephen Phillips, a QC and member for Sleaford and North Hykeham, that he accused him of turning the hearing into ” a farce”and said his performance was ” an exercise in Sir Humphreyism.”.

And the committee abruptly halted the hearing – an almost unprecedented event- when Meg Hillier told him:” I do not think we have any option but to adjourn this. This is something I never wanted to do in this Committee. As Mr Phillips said, we want to get answers. This is a hugely important area and I am really disappointed that we are going to have to take this form of action. I do not think we are going to get very much further today.”

He has a chance to redeem himself next Tuesday when he will have to come up with some real answers at a resumed hearing.  We have to hope  this time the  MPs will turn into Jedi knights to get some explanations.

You can watch the hearing here..

 

 

Smart riots need smart solutions

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Rioter in London: Pic courtesy: Daily Mail

Are we going to fall into a simplistic trap over the riots that gripped London and England this week? So far much debate on the causes, much discussion on bringing the people who did this to book, and a sort of numbness over the horrific and frightening scale of it. But what is the long-term solution and how should we deal with the smart phone savvy generation that perpetuated it?

Up to now the debate has concentrated on making sure the people are punished – from ludicrous calls from one Tory MEP to shoot the rioters on the spot to making sure we fill our overfull prisons and detention centres with every single person who was on the streets. As David Cameron said today: “We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done. ”

What of the cost to us the taxpayer of all this. Higher insurance premiums (a £200m pay out is on the way) or taxes running to hundreds of millions to pay for the damage to buildings is now to be followed by a huge bill  for legal costs, extra policing, and jailing the offenders. Remember the cost of  jailing each offender will be more expensive than the daily bill for educating David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Eton. And given the depressing picture of conditions at Wandsworth prison published this week by the Chief Inspector of Prisons,(see http://bit.ly/oEcESH ) much good may it do us.

It is likely that when the rioters emerge from these detention centres and prisons they be more savvy in avoiding detection, have lucrative drug dealing contracts, and learnt from hardened crims new ways to commit burglaries.

Looters in action in London. Pic courtesy ibtimes.com

So what is to be done? I have one suggestion – when people are convicted of damaging a police vehicle, fire engine, a shop and a home, or stealing goods they  should be presented with the bill and ordered to make a contribution to compensate the victim or the service.

Instead of going to prison they will bound over  by the courts to pay back money to victim or store – and  this will be enforced by either direct deductions from their wages or benefits or even from their credit cards if they have any, over a five, and in bad cases, a ten-year period. This would not apply if they had killed or seriously injured anyone where they would go to jail.

In case anyone thinks this is a ” bleeding heart ” soft option I would propose  very tough enforcement to back this up. If they fail to do this they will face – like a suspended sentence – going to jail for the full period of their repayment term, which would be much longer than a normal jail sentence for burglary or criminal damage. This would act as a strong deterrent but fewer people might want to risk going to jail.

Second there is a need to reconnect the alienated rioter with mainstream society. I suggest this is done by making him or her meet the victim, whether a small shopkeeper, the local fire or police station, or the local manager of  the wrecked Tesco’s, Carphone Warehouse or Barclays Bank. Then they might see this is not a victimless crime and that the people who work and live there are human beings with human feelings and their lives are blighted by such actions. The rioters may also want to see where the money is going and could mitigate the bill if they returned some of the stolen goods.

There needs to be a conversation between the community and the rioters not  separate anger among communities and young people themselves about what has happened.

How this can be organised  at a  time of huge spending cuts I do not know particularly when even some of the magistrates courts handling the emergency – such as Westminster – are about to be closed down, but organised it must be.

 Political leaders at Westminster and in town halls across England need to take the lead. Organisations like Victim Support and the probation service, must be able to play a role. There should be a simple way to set up an organisation that could pull this together. Any ideas?

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