An electronic bug inside the north London town house picked up a chilling
voice that was all too familiar to the MI5 desk officers listening in.
“I mean it, Gil. You’ve got to liven him up,” said the speaker. “Put the fear
of God into him, mate, [so] he knows it’s only down to you that he’s walking
about and breathing fresh air.”
The man giving the orders was Terry Adams, the feared boss of Britain’s
leading crime family. He was instructing Gilbert Wynter, a trusted enforcer,
to beat up a debtor. Wynter, who had once butchered a victim with a samurai
sword, was only too happy to please.
“I’ll open him up like a bag of crisps,” he enthused. It was the sort of
can-do attitude that Adams expected. He was asking for no more than he would
do himself.
In another secret recording he boasted: “When I hit someone with something I
do them damage. And I went to the geezer . . . I went crack. On my baby’s
life, his kneecap come right out . . . all white, all bone.”
Ruthless thuggery was one of the trademarks of the Adams crime syndicate - a
gang with global links and an accumulated fortune of more than £50m from
drugs, clubs, fraud and extortion.
In a criminal career spanning three decades, Adams, the oldest of five
brothers and the family’s self-styled chief executive, seemed untouchable.
But last Tuesday at 2.43pm in a south London courtroom, Terence George Adams
did something many in the police and underworld thought would never happen:
he pleaded guilty.
Will this villain now spend the rest of his life in prison as his predecessors
the Kray brothers did? Not a bit of it: although the Adams family has been
synonymous with evil in London for so long, the dapper crime lord’s lawyers
have reached a plea bargain with prosecutors that should ensure his exit
from jail when he is still young enough to enjoy the life of a very rich
man.
Like Al Capone, the Chicago gangster, Adams was finally nailed for a financial
crime after the police failed to amass sufficient evidence to send him down
for his more bloodthirsty activities.
Capone went mad after his release. Perhaps that is the worst that his victims
can hope for Adams. But how did he reign as London’s Capone for so long and
why did the crimebusters reach a deal with him?
BARNSBURY is now one of the most expensive enclaves in Islington, north
London. Tony and Cherie Blair lived in one of its gentrified Victorian
villas in the 1990s, giving birth there to new Labour.
When George and Florence Adams brought up 11 children in Barnsbury in the
1950s and 1960s, however, it was still a tough neighbourhood where disputes
were settled with fists - not over a tuna tartare in the Granita restaurant.
The three oldest Adams boys, Terry, Patsy and Tommy, left school at 15 and
served a criminal apprenticeship with local “faces” who taught such useful
skills as armed robbery.
As their activities grew, Hatton Garden, London’s gem centre in Clerkenwell, a
few miles from Barnsbury, became their base. They turned to one of the jewel
dealers, Solly Nahome, as a financial adviser. The “little fella” looked
after the money that began to pour in as the brothers entered the drugs
trade in the mid1980s.
The Adams organisation, nicknamed the A team, helped to flood London with
high-grade cocaine and became leading suppliers to clubbers of the dance
drug ecstasy, which they smuggled from the United States and Holland. Rivals
such as the Islington-based Reillys, another Irish Catholic crime family,
were displaced with extreme violence.
One National Crime Squad source said: “Adams was into everything: nightclubs,
pubs, horse racing scams, ticket touting, drugs, money laundering . . . His
tentacles stretched across the Continent and into eastern Europe.”
The gang was suspected of involvement in several high-profile acts of violence
including the attempted murder of the gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser outside
a nightclub in Clerkenwell in 1991.
Wynter, their enforcer, was tried in 1994 for the murder of Claude Moseley, a
former athletics champion, with a samurai sword. Hewas acquitted but
vanished four years later - and was thought to have been killed for getting
out of control, just as one of the Kray gang had perished.
Unlike the Krays, who became celebrities on London’s louche nightclub scene,
the Adams family was feared but invisible. The name was whispered widely,
but the public knew little else.
For a long time the brothers were also invisible to the UK tax authorities.
Court documents seen by The Sunday Times show that throughout his rise to
godfather status, Adams paid no income tax and did not even come to the
attention of the Inland Revenue until 1995. When the Revenue’s special
compliance office at last investigated his affairs, Nahome and other
advisers helped him to pretend that he had legitimate sources of income. He
cut a secret deal with the Inland Revenue to pay only £95,000 tax on his
multi-million pound fortune.
From then on Adams instructed his advisers to give him a veneer of legitimacy.
With a £2m house, a yacht, holiday homes and millions in offshore bank
accounts, he was anxious to enjoy a more normal life with his wife and their
daughter, Skye.
In October 1997 his advisers set up two sham companies, the Skye and Clouds
consultancies, to make it appear as if he had an income - as little as
£5,000 per year - that could be legitimately taxed.
His desire for respectability was not shared by his brothers. Tommy Adams
conducted large drug deals from the back of his personal black cab as he was
driven around London. Patsy Adams based himself in Spain’s Costa del Sol, a
transhipment point for drugs and illicit tobacco.
What none of the brothers knew was that the authorities had at last had
enough. Several trials had resulted in acquittals and rumours of jury
tampering. This untouchable family had to be smashed. MI5, the security
service, was brought in under its remit to tackle organised crime. Its
operatives are masters of surveillance.
The police and MI5 set up a secret squad based in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, to
dismantle the Adams organisation. The operation, codenamed Trinity, had to
be completely secret as the family was thought to have corrupt police and
customs officers on its payroll. Bugs were inserted into the lounge, bedroom
and loft of Adams’s home and also Nahome’s office.
Domestic rows, inter-family relations and business strategies were all
recorded and transmitted to a room in Thames House, the MI5 headquarters,
where desk officers worked round the clock cataloguing recordings and
passing the best passages on to the police.
Adams emerged as a reclusive figure and keep-fit fanatic. Criminal associates
would often drop by to pay their respects and hand over large bundles of
cash.
He was fiercely protective of the family name, which was franchised out to
other gangsters who used it to command respect. Those who used it without
permission did so at their own risk. “
The geezer’s using the family name . . .he’s got to be hurt,” Adams says in
one recording.
Whenever a gangland killing took place in London - particularly if the gunman
was on a motorbike - crime reporters would suspect the involvement of the A
team. In late 1998, Nahome himself was shot dead outside his home - by a
killer on a motorbike. But bugged telephone calls suggest that Adams was
genuinely shocked by the murder.
Nahome’s death left the gang confused about where all its cash was stashed.
Adams’s wife Ruth was taped explaining to Nahome’s widow: “It’s all over the
f****** place.”
Operation Trinity also bugged Tommy Adams’s black cab. He was overheard
boasting that he had given a £10,000 donation to his local Labour party. He was
successfully prosecuted for conspiring to import cannabis.
There was a limit, however, to what the watchers could pin on Terry Adams.
When he was at last arrested in April 2003 detectives found art and antiques
valued at £500,000, £59,000 in cash and more than £40,000 worth of jewellery
in his home.
When it came to charging him, the only unassailable evidence from the
surveillance operation was of financial impropriety. He was accused of money
laundering. His wife, Nahome’s widow Joanna Barnes and a man who cannot be
identified for legal reasons, were also charged.
For the next four years the trial was plagued with delays, which the judge
consistently laid at the defendants’ door. Behind the scenes, bargaining was
under way over guilty pleas and the confiscation of assets. Ruth Adams
became severely ill.
The terms of the deal that was finally agreed remain confidential. It is known
that in return for Adams’s guilty plea to a specimen charge, his wife was
discharged. Barnes admitted one count of forgery.
Adams will be sentenced next month, when a confiscation deal will be revealed.
Judge Timothy Pontius, who denied bail, told him: “The extent and
seriousness of the criminality represented by [your] plea of guilty means
prison is inevitable.”
Is this the end of Britain’s most successful modern-day crime family? Patsy
and Tommy Adams are in Spain and the criminal underworld is said to be wary
of doing business with them because they are so closely watched by law
enforcement agencies. Terry Adams may still be able to run the gang from
prison, however, and speculation about his sentence ranges from 14 years to
as few as five years.
His lawyers will mitigate that he has been going straight. But last month a
court in Tampa, Florida, heard an extraordinary story when Christopher
Benbow, a Briton, was jailed for life for trying to sell undercover agents
radioactive material for a “dirty bomb”.
The agents had offered Benbow cocaine, heroin or ecstasy as payment. Benbow
had returned to London to find a professional distributor for the drugs. His
contacts, the court was told, were members of the Adams crime family.
