Gangs (36 page)

It was only when he heard the screaming that Selahattin realised something was wrong. Until then the young student, who shares a house in a quiet side-street just off Green Lanes, had believed the sounds he had heard were down to some local kids messing about with leftover fireworks.

‘I looked out of the window and saw a man crawling across the pavement on his hands and knees, screaming with pain. His clothes were soaked with blood. I knew then that the sounds I’d heard were gunshots. He was moving towards another man who was lying on the ground, not moving. He’d been shot too. It was absolutely terrifying, just like something out of a film. And that was when I called the police.’

What Selahattin had witnessed on 11 November 2002 was the end of a vicious confrontation during which more than a hundred Turkish and Kurdish men, armed with guns, knives, tyre irons and baseball bats, fought a pitched battle in the streets. The fight had started in the Dolstar Lokali social club, close to the Manor House end of Green Lanes, and quickly spread to the surrounding streets as rival gang members pursued one another, often firing indiscriminately. When it was finally over, one man was dead, four had life-threatening gunshot wounds and another twenty or so had been badly injured.

As with the battle I had witnessed five months earlier, the bloodshed was initially dismissed as the result of simmering tensions between the area’s Turks and members of the fast-growing Kurdish community, who have been campaigning, sometimes violently, for an independent homeland on the edge of the Turkish state.

The truth is far more complex and disturbing. The fighting was actually part of an ongoing struggle for control of protection rackets, business interests and, most importantly, the international trade in heroin. It is a miniature war that has seen dozens of murders and shootings in the past decade. Furthermore, it is all being orchestrated, funded and controlled by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful figures in organised crime – a man who, despite being virtually unknown outside Turkish circles, has become to heroin what Pablo Escobar was to cocaine.

He is known as the Emperor. A drug-smuggler for more than thirty years, the forty-six-year-old Turk has amassed a fortune of more than £10 billion.

Born in the small Turkish district of Lice, his criminal life began humbly enough when he started selling black-market cigarettes in Istanbul. From there he moved first into hashish-trafficking before finally getting involved with the drug that would ultimately make his fortune.

From 1970 onwards he purchased vast quantities of raw opium from India, Pakistan and Iran and converted it into high-quality heroin at a series of secret factories close to his home town, selling the drug first to the Turkish and then to the international market. Modelling his empire on that of the Italian Mafia, the Emperor employed only members of his direct family or close relatives. Some remained in Turkey but others were sent out across Europe to establish distribution and sales networks wherever there was an expatriate Turkish or Kurdish community. The Emperor himself set up home in Green Lanes.

As his business grew and the money rolled in, the Emperor invested heavily. He bought a string of business and property interests in Britain including a seaside hotel in Brighton and several foreign-exchange bureaux. He also owns dozens of beach resorts, electrical shops and car-hire businesses along Turkey’s southern coast, many of which are used by thousands of British holiday-makers each year.

In 1984 he was arrested in London with a large consignment of heroin and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment. But after just three years behind bars he was transferred to Turkey and immediately released, prompting allegations of corruption at the highest levels of Turkish government.

Following his release he went on a media offensive. He admitted that his wealth came from heroin, but said he became head of one of the world’s biggest drugs syndicates only with the full support and approval of Turkish politicians, police officials and the Turkish security service. (Although the Emperor’s view that he was acting on behalf of the government is generally dismissed, there have long been concerns that Turkish drugs gangs are being protected by the Turkish state. In 1996 a car crash near Istanbul sparked scandal when it emerged that the passengers were a top crime boss, a senior police commander, a beauty queen and an MP.)

In 1998 the Turkish government, stung by Turkey’s international reputation as a haven for drugs barons, orchestrated a round-up of the Emperor’s family members across Europe. In January 2001, the Emperor stood trial and was jailed for twenty years.

Yet despite this, the Emperor and his criminal network continue to dominate the streets of north London. At least a dozen of his close relatives and extended family live in the area and their grip on the heroin trade and local protection rackets remains as firm as ever. Massive heroin seizures involving members of the Turkish community are now so common that they rarely make the news. In 2003 alone, more than £150 million pounds’ worth of the drug was seized in raids linked to Green Lanes.

The drug usually arrives in specially converted lorries and shipping containers direct from Turkey. The value of an Emperor load is rarely less than £10 million. Once safely inside the country the drug is stored in safe houses, watched over by specially hired couples. For a fee of around £300 per week, their job is to live as normal a life as possible while ensuring that at least one member of the family is always at home to guard the heroin.

Every few days or so members of the gang drop by to check the stock or pick up a few kilos for resale. They also employ couriers (often working for mini-cab companies) to ferry packets of heroin around the country as needed.

‘The fact that he is in prison has changed nothing,’ says Selahattin. ‘His soldiers are everywhere. There are three street gangs – the Bombacillars [Kurdish for bomb-makers], the Tottenham Boys and the Kurdish Bulldogs – all directly controlled by him. Some of them are just kids, even younger than me, but they have guns and everyone is terrified of them. The kids in the gangs consider themselves to be untouchable. They think they are above the law. They think they can do whatever they want because they know the Emperor’s family is behind them. It’s anarchy out there.’

The young gunmen are paid up to £200 to oversee a drug delivery, or ensure that protection money is paid. The guns and money are supplied directly by the Emperor’s relatives, and the members of the Bombers (Bombacillars) in particular are said to be supremely loyal to him. Clashes between the Bombers and other gangs fighting for control of the heroin trade have pushed the number of murders in the Turkish community to an all-time high.

In May 2001 twenty-six-year-old suspected dealer, Oguzhan Özdemir, from Enfield, was shot dead. Two months earlier Hasan Mamali, twenty-three, and his friend Sama Mustafa, twenty-six, were gunned down in Hoxton, east London. Mamali was shot in the head as he sat in the back of a convertible BMW car. Mustafa tried to run, but was brought down with a volley of shots. His killer then hovered over his body and finished him off with another shot to the head.

In July that same year gangs of gunmen fought outside Wood Green police station one afternoon, firing twenty shots in a busy street. Police arrived at the scene to find bullets in briefcases and three guns left smoking on the ground. One, a .45 magnum, had been loaded with ‘dum dum’ bullets, outlawed under the Geneva Convention because of the devastating damage they cause. Several of the gangsters are known to possess AK47 assault rifles and other military hardware.

In November 2002 Murat Over, a twenty-nine-year-old heroin dealer, was found guilty of the murder of Mehmet Adiguzel, who had been shot dead six times as he sat at the wheel of his car on Upper Clapton Road. Adiguzel used the cover of working as a property developer to mask his own drug-dealing activities but he was also a police informer and had many enemies. Although Over and Adiguzel had clashed in the past – Over has been stabbed by one of the dead man’s bodyguards – many believe he was paid a fee to carry out the killing so that a rival gang could take over Adiguzel’s patch.

The most recent murder took place in November 2003 when a twenty-three-year-old Turkish man was found in a canal in east London. He had been shot in the head at point-blank range. Since the dawn of the new millennium, at least ten murders have been attributed to the activities of the heroin gangs, and if this trend continues, they will soon be responsible for more gang-related deaths than any other criminal faction.

And all the signs point to the situation getting far worse. Detectives are also alarmed at signs that the heroin market is expanding rapidly. The key indication of a growing drug market is falling price and rising purity, both of which have been witnessed since 2000. The street price of a kilo of heroin has fallen by more than £2000 to an all-time low of £13,000. The purity of street-level heroin is also at an all-time high – around 40 per cent, compared with 15 per cent during the 1980s.

But the trade in heroin is not the only cause of violence within the Turkish community. In 2003 a survey of 200 Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers in the area found that 65 per cent of them said they were paying protection money, some up to £10,000 per year.

Historically, the protection money went to fund the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a paramilitary group, which was fighting for a recognised homeland for the Kurdish people. But in April 2002 the PKK abandoned the military struggle and restyled itself as the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). The Emperor, a long-time supporter of the PKK, decided to move in on its business. Shop-owners were happy to pay the PKK or KADEK but not the Emperor who, they realised, simply wanted to line his own pockets with the money.

The fighting at a café on Green Lanes, owned by a close relative of the Emperor’s, was in response to an attack earlier that day on the same greengrocer’s that had been the scene of fighting during the World Cup celebrations. At about four p.m. a group of men armed with baseball bats and snooker cues attacked a member of staff at a grocery store run by men loyal to KADEK. Two hours later a mob of around 150 turned up at the café and blocked all the exits. They were armed with a variety of knives, sticks, baseball bats and poles. A few members of the Bombers were initially trapped inside but, because they had their guns on them, were quickly able to fight their way out. Alisar Dogan was not so lucky. The forty-three-year-old father of two was desperately short of money and had taken a weekend job in the café scrubbing carpets. When the mob attacked he was caught in the middle of the battle and brutally beaten before being stabbed in the heart. He was rushed to hospital but died the next day.

Soon after the murder, eager to find out more about the influence of the Emperor’s family in the area, I worked up the courage and called at the £1 million house in the beautiful tree-lined avenue in Edgware where some fourteen members of his extended family live. The door was eventually answered by a demure woman, who listened to my request for information and possibly a brief chat, then told me in perfect English that she did not speak English. She promptly shut the door.

In January 2003 police launched their biggest ever action against the Emperor’s organisation. More than 550 police officers, some of them armed, raided a series of homes and businesses in north London. Over the course of three weeks, more than three hundred people were arrested, including those thought to be responsible for Dogan’s death.

But while the raids went some way towards easing tension in the area, they had little effect on the Turkish Mafia’s core business. Seven months later, Customs officers seized the second largest consignment of heroin ever recovered in Britain. Hidden among 160 tonnes of cat litter they found 368 kilos of Turkish heroin worth more than £50 million.

More raids followed in December 2003 and this time police discovered a makeshift torture chamber inside a scruffy bed-sit just off Green Lanes. Two large metal hooks, hung from the ceiling by lengths of cable, had been used to suspend victims as they were beaten until they agreed to pay protection money.

In the twelve weeks before the December raid there had been three murders, five kidnappings and twenty-seven reported cases of extortion, eight of which involved firearms. Police concede that dozens more incidents would have gone unreported because the victims were fearful of retaliation.

Despite fighting what appears to be a losing battle, the police are determined to smash the Turkish Mafia’s hold over the British heroin market. But the truth is that, for some time, that hold has been slipping. In the past few years a new, equally brutal Mafia has emerged and those behind it are now bringing in so much high-quality heroin that the price looks set to drop even further.

 

The heavily bearded man standing beside me straightens his turban before passing a small wad of rupees to the barman. Like me he has come inside to escape from the stifling heat and we both lick our lips in anticipation as his frosted bottle of Cobra beer is placed on a mat before him. I shift along the bar so that I’m standing directly beneath the large fan and wait for the barman, who looks serene in his pale blue
dhoti,
to take my order. On the wall behind me, on either side of a giant map of the Punjab, pictures of popular Sikh singers smile down while peering over the tops of their sunglasses. A dozen or so men – there are no women to be seen – are scattered at the various tables. Some are drinking pints or bottles of beer, others soft drinks or fruit juice. A few are tucking into huge platefuls of rice and curry, courtesy of a small counter adjacent to the bar.

Every time the doors to the main road open the air becomes thick with the scent of exotic spices, and the warbling beat of Bhangra music can be heard. It’s all such a feast for the senses and so powerfully evocative that, as my beer arrives, I can almost believe that I’m in the heart of Delhi or Bombay rather than a shabby side-street in west London.