IT IS 11pm and Abdul Shukur receives a telephone call at home. Trouble is brewing on the streets of East London. A 14-year-old Bengali youth has been mugged and had his mobile phone stolen; he knows who the thief is, and he’s planning revenge. He and his friends have arranged to meet the culprits in a local park.

Shukur, the director of an Asian gang mediation service called Aasha — “Hope” in Bengali — is well used to this kind of late-night call. He has been told that the teenagers are extremely angry, and he suspects some will come armed with weapons. In summers gone by, knives, machetes and baseball bats studded with nails have all been used during gang fights in this part of London.

Shukur calls a colleague and together they head out to the park. “They chose the park because it was away from the street lighting, and it was very dark,” he says.“ I guess there were about 50 teenagers there, from 14 to 19 years old.”

He is barely out of his car when he sees a dozen youths running towards him, and “it’s then I realise they’re carrying blades. We had to take control of the situation very quickly. I shouted out my name — they all know me very well — and I asked them to put their weapons away.

“After a very scary moment or two, we calmed the whole thing down and we talked for a while. There were other issues involved besides the mobile phone and some of the kids were very worked up. But they know that I’ve been there and bought the T-shirt, and in the end they listened to me.”

It’s the kind of incident that happens too frequently in the East End of London. This week the Metropolitan Police announced the formation of a specialist team to deal with soaring crime among London’s South Asian population (including the Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan communities), some of which is inevitably gang-related. The East End’s Bangladeshi community, however, has long been attempting to tackle the problem in its own unique and uniquely successful way.

Officially there are eight Bangladeshi gangs in the district, but in fact most council estates in the borough of Tower Hamlets are home to a loose grouping of teenage boys who might call themselves a “gang”. Aasha seeks to prevent violence by acting as a neutral broker when arguments arise or when territory is perceived to have been invaded. The service works, Shukur says, only because it’s staffed almost entirely by former gang members and leaders — such as Rana, 31, the founder of the Brick Lane Massive.

Rana used to be a “violent little bastard”. He smiles ruefully and drags hard on a cigarette. He doesn’t tell me his second name, but then he’s never really needed one. His reputation is his calling card, he says.

By the time he was 16 Rana was regularly involved in street fights and was dealing and using large quantities of drugs. “I had one rule: I would never sell drugs to anyone younger than me. I did so many drugs. I was a physical wreck and I was permanently paranoid.”

As he got older, he got harder. He handled guns, he beat up pimps (“that business has always disgusted me”) and he once held up a building society. “When you’re 18 and you’re going to score £20,000 worth of drugs, you need a gun because the guy you’re buying from has got one, and he’s older and meaner than you.”

Most weekends Rana’s gang fought territorial battles against other, mostly Bengali, gangs from other estates and streets throughout the East End. A handful, the core leaders, were into serious crime too, but the majority were bored teenagers who looked up to him and fought for him because he asked them to. “If they wanted to join the gang, they paid £50 and showed me photo ID so I knew where they lived. We used to make it a bit more fun and hold initiation ceremonies — things like fighting four guys at once; stuff we picked up from movies. After that, their problems were the gang’s problems.”

In his early twenties and in serious trouble with the law, Rana left London and travelled around Britain, working on building sites. He met his wife, saw how other people lived, and realised there was more to life than drugs, guns and fighting over who controlled which street.

When he came back to East London two years later, he was a changed man. “I looked around me and I saw all these gangs and all this fighting and I thought, we need to do something about this. We need to make them think harder. They’re the future and they’re going to end up dead or inside for a very long time. That’s when I got involved with Aasha.”