Gangs (24 page)

Catching those working at the highest levels of high-tech organised crime calls for specialist skills and techniques. Security companies employ people to pose as hackers, hanging around in chatrooms and trying to pick up the latest gossip – hackers are notorious for their love of bragging. As well as being experts in computing many such operatives also have a background in psychology to enable them better to understand group behaviour and the mindset of those they are dealing with. They will create a series of net personae – up to twenty or more – which they use to gain the confidence of other hackers on the web. It is a long, slow process. It is not unknown for the teams to spend more than a year just listening in to conversations before they join in.

Although reports of successful hacks will be made to the police, the teams are far more concerned with prevention. Their Holy Grail is to get hold of a piece of computer code that a hacker is working on before he has a chance to try it out. This enables them to add preventive measures to the systems they are working on, ensuring their safety.

Similar techniques are now being employed to catch another group of computer-savvy criminals who do most of their work in Internet chatrooms: paedophiles. When I visited the offices of the Child Protection Command of the National High Tech Crime Unit at Scotland Yard, a nine-year-old girl, a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker and a forty-eight-year-old geography teacher were quietly surfing the Internet. The girl was bored, lonely and looking for pen-pals; the stockbroker was looking to add to his collection of hardcore, sado-masochistic child pornography; while the teacher was looking for someone who shared his interest in sex with pre-pubescent blond boys. The girl was typing slowly, misspelling some words and abbreviating others. She made passing references to her favourite television programmes, complained about her lack of pocket money and told silly jokes.

In reality the girl, the stockbroker and the teacher were just some of the dozens of fictional characters created by the unit’s undercover officers.

‘Some of the paedophiles out there are the best hackers in the world,’ Detective Inspector Brian Ward told me. ‘They have the ability to examine the hard disk of someone online to check whether they are who they say they are.’

This means that if an officer is going to pose as a nine-year-old girl, he has to ensure that everything on the hard disk fits in with that. There will be certain types of music files, emails to and from friends about problems at school and home. All this information has to be created simply to ensure the deception is complete. Stacks of hard disks containing the different identities are spread around the room.

Child pornography – or, rather, the threat of it – also features in the latest crime to emerge from the growth of computer technology in the home and the office. Cyber blackmail is on the rise, with dozens of computer users receiving emails from criminals who threaten to delete essential computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom.

The extortion scam, which first emerged early in 2003, indiscriminately targets anyone on the corporate ladder with a PC connected to the Internet. It usually starts with a threatening email in which the author claims to have the power to take over a worker’s computer. It typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid – at first no more than twenty or thirty pounds – they will attack the PC with a file-wiping program or download on to the machine images of child pornography. As is the case with the 419 gangs, the scam works even if only a handful of the countless recipients follow through and pay up.

But high-tech crime doesn’t only revolve around the Internet. Former paramilitary gangs in Northern Ireland are using the latest computer technology to run a sophisticated, multi-million-pound counterfeiting and smuggling operation, whose tentacles reach across the globe. Forsaking politics for profit, loyalist and republican terror gangs have linked up with the likes of the Russian and Italian Mafia and the Chinese Triads to reap huge rewards from a wide variety of criminal activities. Up to a hundred criminal gangs are operating in Ulster and at least two-thirds are linked to the Provisional IRA, the Ulster Defence Association and other paramilitary organisations. The province has become a major UK hub for the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods, which is believed to have earned the gangs more than £150 million last year.

Law-enforcement agencies in Northern Ireland seize more counterfeit goods than all other UK police forces combined, but still believe they stop only five per cent of the total market. ‘Pubs, clubs and taxi firms who operate in districts influenced by paramilitary groups are known to facilitate a lucrative trade in counterfeit goods. Door-to-door sales are also undertaken. The most popular goods include clothes, computer games, DVDs, CDs and videos.’

Much of the counterfeit clothing is believed to originate from factories in the Leicester area, while a raid on a fair in Ballycastle last year was tracked back to an operation in Glasgow.

Counterfeit currency produced and printed in Northern Ireland has been discovered all over the world. In addition to copies of sterling – complete with watermarks and foil strips that only experts can tell from the real thing – the gangs are also producing dollars and euros. They make use of sophisticated scanners and digital cameras to take close-up photographs of real notes, then manipulate them electronically to allow them to be reproduced more accurately.

Customs officers have uncovered a trade in counterfeit cigarettes, made in factories in the Far East with only a minimal amount of tobacco and harmful fillers. Fake vodka, made from watered-down industrial alcohol, has also been found.

One up-and-coming development, straight out of the pages of a science-fiction novel but enough of a reality to be a major cause for concern, is the development of so-called ‘cyber narcotics’. Rather than being taken orally or via injection, these digital stimulants would involve hooking up to a special machine that would then directly stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain. The technology is in the early stages of development but the FBI believes such products have the potential to be more addictive than heroin and cocaine. Furthermore, they could be transmitted across the Internet or using radiowaves, and could be taken without anyone ever needing to possess them.

Such products may still be some way off, but there is no doubt that the web is increasingly replacing pubs or nightclubs as the favourite criminal forum for exchanging useful information. The simplest of searches will produce dozens of sites dedicated to providing details and descriptions, often including the registration numbers, of unmarked police cars operating across the country. Many of the lists are compiled by youngsters employed by criminal gangs to stand outside their local police station and note every vehicle entering and leaving. Most experienced undercover officers now prefer to park their vehicles some distance away and walk to the station when attending briefings.

More sophisticated searches reveal the existence of sites where specific information about suspected police informants and the identity of officers working on covert operations is disclosed. The information is often found within anarchist sites alongside tips for manufacturing explosives, picking locks and creating false identities.

The largest and most sophisticated gangs now employ technicians and engineers, and subscribe to trade journals to keep up with developments in forensic and technological science, helping them counter the threat from law enforcers. They also have their homes and vehicles swept regularly for bugs following convictions in which police have gained crucial evidence after breaking into a suspect’s property and planting listening devices. These gangs keep up to date by sending representatives to court to listen to detailed evidence of how rival gangs were tracked down. Increasingly aware of this, the police will often seek a public-interest immunity certificate, or even drop a case rather than disclose the technology used to gather the information.

But for all the power and versatility of the Internet and the speed and flexibility of credit- and debit-card payments, one fast-growing area of crime revolves around nothing more sophisticated than the humble cheque book.

Although cheque use is falling each year – we wrote 2.8 billion cheques in 1999 and the figure is expected to drop to 1.7 billion by 2009 – the amount of money lost to cheque fraud is rising dramatically. Intercepted in the post or stolen during house burglaries, cheques with crudely forged signatures are used to pay for millions of pounds’ worth of goods each year and no amount of technology seems able to defeat the problem. In 2002, losses from cheque fraud involving forged signatures increased by a third to £23 million.

All of which goes to show that, no matter how sophisticated and computer-savvy society becomes, some criminals will always prefer the low-tech approach.

 

If it had been any other Stephen Cunningham, there would have been little cause for concern. By the end of the second week of September 1997 the family of the forty-six-year-old civil engineer from Swindon had not heard from him in almost five days. After contacting a few of his friends and confirming that they, too, had heard nothing, his daughter decided to file an official missing-persons report at her local police station. On average, around four thousand such reports are made each week, and middle-aged men are one of the groups most likely to disappear – a way of temporarily escaping concerns about careers, debts and growing old. The vast majority simply return of their own accord, but from the start this case was different.

This particular Stephen Cunningham was a man better known to the police as ‘Grumps’, a leading member of the Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Cunningham had achieved a dubious level of notoriety in April 1991 when he travelled to Southampton and attempted to plant a bomb under a car belonging to a member of a rival biker gang. As Cunningham moved the device into place it detonated early, tearing off his right hand.

The car-bomb attack came in the midst of a fierce battle between the Nomads and the Southampton chapter of the Satan’s Slaves. The fighting had begun a few months earlier when Nomads chapter president Stephen Harris, a motorcycle salesman, and fellow member Barry Burn, a mechanic, were shot at during a trip to Bristol. Harris was hit in the arm but Burn escaped without injury. A few months later another member of the gang, David McKenzie, was stabbed eight times in an attack outside a Gloucester pub. Rescued by fellow Nomads, McKenzie was taken to the grounds of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and stripped of his ‘colours’ – the patches that identified him as a Hells Angel – before being taken in for treatment. Within a few days McKenzie had discharged himself.

With no sign of Cunningham the fear was that the war between the two gangs had claimed its first life. ‘Both the police and his family have grave concerns for him,’ Detective Sergeant Jerry Butcher said at the time. ‘It is rare for him to go for more than a couple of days without making some form of contact. It means you have to consider that he may have come to some harm.’

His daughter, Michelle, seemed to accept this. ‘Whatever may have happened, my family needs to put it to rest,’ she told the
Swindon Evening Advertiser.
‘Not knowing anything is worse; we are in a state of limbo. Even if it is just to confirm our worst fears, we would like to know.’

But the more the police probed, the more the mystery deepened. Their inquiries showed that Cunningham had left his Swindon home early on 9 September, driven to Ramsgate in Kent and boarded the four p.m. Sally Lines ferry to Ostend as a foot passenger. Video footage showed him arriving in Belgium at around six p.m. UK time, and records show that he used his mobile phone an hour and a half later to get it switched to a network that would allow him to make calls across Europe. Although Cunningham had booked a return passage on the ferry for 11 September, he never used it.

In accordance with the rules and regulations of the Hells Angels, the other members of the Nomads chapter refused to give the police any assistance, not making so much as a single statement. The message was loud and clear: whatever reason Cunningham had to travel abroad, whatever he planned to do while he was there and whatever trouble he had got himself into, it had absolutely nothing to do with the club.

According to its one-time spokesman, the late Ian ‘Maz’ Harris, Ph.D: ‘The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is a loosely based organisation of motorcycle enthusiasts who own bikes of 750cc or more. We are primarily and exclusively a motorcycle club. That is all.’

The Memorandum of Association for Hells Angels Limited, registered at Companies House in October 1976, adds the following objectives: ‘To foster, encourage and advance the sport and recreation of motor-cycling and to promote the acceptance of the ethical code of morality of the Hells Angels club; to encourage, promote and hold race meetings, happenings, rallies, reliability trials, exhibitions and shows and give entertainments of all kinds related to motor-cycling.’

Indeed, every year the club’s 250-odd members, along with hundreds more associates, attend a number of exclusive rallies and conventions, stage huge, highly profitable shows where customised bikes are displayed, and donate thousands of pounds to various charities. In June 2002 it was a Hells Angel, Alan ‘Snob’ Fisher, who led a cavalcade of fellow bikers in a Jubilee procession past the Queen, raising money for the anti-child bullying charity Kidscape in the process.

However, according to the police, the Hells Angels are a major international criminal organisation, a ‘pure form of organised crime’, who ‘have accomplished in twenty-five years what it took the Mafia over two hundred years to do’. Interpol describes outlaw motorcycle gangs as ‘one of Europe’s faster-growing criminal networks’ and closely monitors their activities. Not surprisingly, the bikers disagree: they insist that the police are simply paranoid and that, because they live an alternative lifestyle yet remain highly visible, they are the ideal soft target.