Post by uz on Jun 25, 2012 17:25:04 GMT -5
Has eastern European immigration fuelled a crime wave in Britain?
The wanted posters offered a £500 reward for information that might lead to a team of ruthless criminals: "Peter Piatkok, a native of Russia, an Anarchist … complexion sallow; Joe Levi … foreign appearance, speaking fairly good English, thickish lips, erect carriage … A woman aged 26-27, fairly full breasts, sallow complexion, face somewhat drawn ... Foreign appearance." The posters appeared almost exactly 100 years ago, not far from the area of London about to host the Olympic Games which, the Metropolitan police suggested last week, have now been targeted for easy pickings by predatory eastern European gangs.
The quarry being hunted by the police back in 1911 were Latvian anarchists engaged in a struggle with the tsar of Russia and in need of funds, to which end they had already carried out a deadly robbery in Tottenham, prompting the Times headline: "Alien Robbers Run Amok." When they were tracked down to 100 Sidney Street, in Stepney, the home secretary, Winston Churchill, called in the Scots Guards from the Tower of London and directed the operation himself. When the house caught fire during the siege, he prevented the fire brigade from extinguishing it: "I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals." Calls for tighter restrictions on immigration from eastern Europe were immediately made by an outraged press.
Now the Met police's Operation Podium, which has the security brief for the Olympics, suggests that a fresh batch of eastern European miscreants are heading to London and have already been impersonating police officers and extorting bogus "fines" from unwary tourists. Earlier this year, the Daily Mail blamed a quarter of all London crimes on eastern European crooks, although this turned out to be an exaggerated figure that was later corrected. What's it all about?
Fast forward from the Sidney Street siege to 2006 and the world's largest-ever cash robbery, £53m stolen from a Securitas cash depot in Tonbridge, Kent, by a gang dressed in latex masks and police uniforms. The inside man for this robbery was Ermir Hysenaj, an Albanian who entered the UK as a teenager in 1999, claiming to be a Kosovan refugee. He moved to Hastings and remained in touch with a childhood friend from Albania, Jetmir Bucpapa, a wide boy who had paid money to a smuggler to take him across the Adriatic sea in a speedboat and had made his way across western Europe, also posing as a Kosovan refugee.
As Howard Sounes recounts in his book on the case, Heist, through Albanian friends, Bucpapa met a small-time local villain, Lea Rusha, who in turn introduced him to the man regarded as the robbery's ringleader, Lee Murray, a cage-fighter. The plot was hatched. Hysenaj signed up with a recruitment firm that had the contract to supply staff to Securitas's nearby depot. He was interviewed for a job as cash administrator and, six days later, having passed the security checks with false name and birth-date, became the inside man.
Confident that no one could understand him, Hysenaj spoke in Albanian on his mobile phone to Bucpapa, passing on details of the depot's security weaknesses. But the robbery was a sloppy one. Hysenaj, no longer working in the depot but easily traced, was picked up soon by Kent police. His mobile phones linked him to Bucpapa. At the end of an Old Bailey trial in 2008, both were jailed along with the other robbers. The involvement of two eastern Europeans alongside British villains was seen as significant by police and criminals alike, in that such a spectacular crime would normally have only been undertaken by a homogenous crew.
In the same year, there was a fatal shooting in an Albanian/Kosovan social club in Acton, west London. A gunman had opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. The reason for the shooting? A turf war over which Albanian gang was entitled to steal from the parking meters of Westminster. Using skeleton keys, small teams of Albanian-speaking Kosovans, Montenegrans and Albanians had been supping heartily from one of Westminster council's most reliable revenue streams.
To the police, it was a puzzle. Robbing parking meters was not one of organised crime's portfolios. Who would put so much effort into something so painstaking – all those sacks of coins – that yielded such relatively small sums? But to those involved, a share of the £1,243,000 that was stolen in one year alone in Westminster was worth the bother, not least because no home-grown criminals seemed interested in the franchise – and because coins, unlike banknotes, are untraceable. So if someone tried to trespass on this territory, they had to be chased off. The gunman, Herland Bilali, fled to Denmark, was tracked down, extradited and is now serving a life sentence with a 34-year tariff; a co-defendant, Timi Spahiu, protests his innocence. Another Albanian parking-meter turf war murder in Golders Green in 2008 remains unsolved.
A couple of years earlier, Luan Plakici, an Albanian "immigration expert", as he described himself without irony, was jailed for 23 years. He had smuggled around 50 eastern European women, mainly from Moldova and Romania, into Britain for prostitution. He entered the country as an asylum seeker in 1999 and worked for law firms as an interpreter. His trial at Wood Green crown court was a rarity. Usually, the witnesses are too frightened of what might happen to their relatives at home to appear. This time, some brave young women gave evidence against him.
So do those crimes – big robbery, gangland murders, organised sex-trafficking – mean that there is a wave of high-level eastern European crime in Britain? Since Churchill's "ferocious rascals" perished in the flames, newly arrived immigrants from all over the world have been blamed for importing professional crime and violence into Britain. In chronological order, from the start of the last century – Russians/Jews/Latvians (robbery, firearms), Chinese (opium in the 20s), Italians (protection rackets, robbery, gaming in the 30s), Maltese (vice in the 40s and 50s), Chinese again (heroin in the 60s), Pakistanis (heroin in the 70s), West Indians (marijuana, gun crime in the 70s), Turks (heroin in the 80s), Colombians (cocaine in the 90s), Nigerians (fraud now) have all been associated in the public mind with the breaking of a new crime wave on the shores of Britain.
The pattern has been that within most waves of immigration is a small criminal group. They benefit from the fact that the police don't speak their language, know their records or have their fingerprints. Some of their compatriots, to whom they are an embarrassment, will eventually join the police, which means, a generation or so later, they can no longer act with impunity. Since the 90s, the most prominent new arrivals have been from eastern Europe and they, like their predecessors, come with a small criminal class attached, as duly enacted in David Cronenberg's 2007 film, Eastern Promises.
Muhamed Veliu, an Albanian investigative journalist, feels that his countrymen, in particular, have had a bum rap. "Only a small minority are involved in organised crime but the tabloids have created a stereotype of Albanians as the new gangsters," he said when I spoke to him last year about the cases. "In the past 12 years in Britain, I have read only one positive story about an Albanian – a barrister, in Time Out – but there are Albanian doctors in the NHS, Albanian LSE lecturers, Albanians in the restaurant business. The success stories are never reported." However, he added, the Securitas robbery was regarded with some national pride in Albania: "It was 'the crime of the century', it was seen as very different from making money from prostitution, which is the lowest form of crime. It is wrong, of course, but they did need bravery to get involved and at least they went for a bank, that was the feeling in the Albanian community. The British media are now trying to stereotype the whole Albanian community."
A survey carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2008 found no evidence for suggestions that eastern Europeans were responsible for any crime wave. Peter Fahy, the chief constable who co-authored the report, noted that "you get misunderstandings, you get rumours".
Crime has always been an import-export affair and in many ways mirrors "legitimate" business. As old family firms in Britain have been replaced by multinationals so, too, have the family-based gangs in Britain (the Krays, Richardsons, Arifs, Adams) been overtaken by multinationals, where different nationalities co-operate in the pursuit of higher profits. This is a two-way street. Many British criminals have moved abroad, most famously establishing themselves on the Costa del Crime. Many still operate there, making money from everything from bent time-share deals to drugs smuggled in from Morocco; more than 2,000 Britons had their collars felt in Spain last year alone. British criminals also made themselves at home everywhere from Thailand to Florida. The police may well be right when they say that the Games will attract villains from the east but, if there was to be an Olympics for crime, homegrown Britons would still be going for gold.
www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/25/eastern-european-immigration-crime-britain?newsfeed=true
Albanians/Albania are mentioned 19 times in this article.
The wanted posters offered a £500 reward for information that might lead to a team of ruthless criminals: "Peter Piatkok, a native of Russia, an Anarchist … complexion sallow; Joe Levi … foreign appearance, speaking fairly good English, thickish lips, erect carriage … A woman aged 26-27, fairly full breasts, sallow complexion, face somewhat drawn ... Foreign appearance." The posters appeared almost exactly 100 years ago, not far from the area of London about to host the Olympic Games which, the Metropolitan police suggested last week, have now been targeted for easy pickings by predatory eastern European gangs.
The quarry being hunted by the police back in 1911 were Latvian anarchists engaged in a struggle with the tsar of Russia and in need of funds, to which end they had already carried out a deadly robbery in Tottenham, prompting the Times headline: "Alien Robbers Run Amok." When they were tracked down to 100 Sidney Street, in Stepney, the home secretary, Winston Churchill, called in the Scots Guards from the Tower of London and directed the operation himself. When the house caught fire during the siege, he prevented the fire brigade from extinguishing it: "I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals." Calls for tighter restrictions on immigration from eastern Europe were immediately made by an outraged press.
Now the Met police's Operation Podium, which has the security brief for the Olympics, suggests that a fresh batch of eastern European miscreants are heading to London and have already been impersonating police officers and extorting bogus "fines" from unwary tourists. Earlier this year, the Daily Mail blamed a quarter of all London crimes on eastern European crooks, although this turned out to be an exaggerated figure that was later corrected. What's it all about?
Fast forward from the Sidney Street siege to 2006 and the world's largest-ever cash robbery, £53m stolen from a Securitas cash depot in Tonbridge, Kent, by a gang dressed in latex masks and police uniforms. The inside man for this robbery was Ermir Hysenaj, an Albanian who entered the UK as a teenager in 1999, claiming to be a Kosovan refugee. He moved to Hastings and remained in touch with a childhood friend from Albania, Jetmir Bucpapa, a wide boy who had paid money to a smuggler to take him across the Adriatic sea in a speedboat and had made his way across western Europe, also posing as a Kosovan refugee.
As Howard Sounes recounts in his book on the case, Heist, through Albanian friends, Bucpapa met a small-time local villain, Lea Rusha, who in turn introduced him to the man regarded as the robbery's ringleader, Lee Murray, a cage-fighter. The plot was hatched. Hysenaj signed up with a recruitment firm that had the contract to supply staff to Securitas's nearby depot. He was interviewed for a job as cash administrator and, six days later, having passed the security checks with false name and birth-date, became the inside man.
Confident that no one could understand him, Hysenaj spoke in Albanian on his mobile phone to Bucpapa, passing on details of the depot's security weaknesses. But the robbery was a sloppy one. Hysenaj, no longer working in the depot but easily traced, was picked up soon by Kent police. His mobile phones linked him to Bucpapa. At the end of an Old Bailey trial in 2008, both were jailed along with the other robbers. The involvement of two eastern Europeans alongside British villains was seen as significant by police and criminals alike, in that such a spectacular crime would normally have only been undertaken by a homogenous crew.
In the same year, there was a fatal shooting in an Albanian/Kosovan social club in Acton, west London. A gunman had opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. The reason for the shooting? A turf war over which Albanian gang was entitled to steal from the parking meters of Westminster. Using skeleton keys, small teams of Albanian-speaking Kosovans, Montenegrans and Albanians had been supping heartily from one of Westminster council's most reliable revenue streams.
To the police, it was a puzzle. Robbing parking meters was not one of organised crime's portfolios. Who would put so much effort into something so painstaking – all those sacks of coins – that yielded such relatively small sums? But to those involved, a share of the £1,243,000 that was stolen in one year alone in Westminster was worth the bother, not least because no home-grown criminals seemed interested in the franchise – and because coins, unlike banknotes, are untraceable. So if someone tried to trespass on this territory, they had to be chased off. The gunman, Herland Bilali, fled to Denmark, was tracked down, extradited and is now serving a life sentence with a 34-year tariff; a co-defendant, Timi Spahiu, protests his innocence. Another Albanian parking-meter turf war murder in Golders Green in 2008 remains unsolved.
A couple of years earlier, Luan Plakici, an Albanian "immigration expert", as he described himself without irony, was jailed for 23 years. He had smuggled around 50 eastern European women, mainly from Moldova and Romania, into Britain for prostitution. He entered the country as an asylum seeker in 1999 and worked for law firms as an interpreter. His trial at Wood Green crown court was a rarity. Usually, the witnesses are too frightened of what might happen to their relatives at home to appear. This time, some brave young women gave evidence against him.
So do those crimes – big robbery, gangland murders, organised sex-trafficking – mean that there is a wave of high-level eastern European crime in Britain? Since Churchill's "ferocious rascals" perished in the flames, newly arrived immigrants from all over the world have been blamed for importing professional crime and violence into Britain. In chronological order, from the start of the last century – Russians/Jews/Latvians (robbery, firearms), Chinese (opium in the 20s), Italians (protection rackets, robbery, gaming in the 30s), Maltese (vice in the 40s and 50s), Chinese again (heroin in the 60s), Pakistanis (heroin in the 70s), West Indians (marijuana, gun crime in the 70s), Turks (heroin in the 80s), Colombians (cocaine in the 90s), Nigerians (fraud now) have all been associated in the public mind with the breaking of a new crime wave on the shores of Britain.
The pattern has been that within most waves of immigration is a small criminal group. They benefit from the fact that the police don't speak their language, know their records or have their fingerprints. Some of their compatriots, to whom they are an embarrassment, will eventually join the police, which means, a generation or so later, they can no longer act with impunity. Since the 90s, the most prominent new arrivals have been from eastern Europe and they, like their predecessors, come with a small criminal class attached, as duly enacted in David Cronenberg's 2007 film, Eastern Promises.
Muhamed Veliu, an Albanian investigative journalist, feels that his countrymen, in particular, have had a bum rap. "Only a small minority are involved in organised crime but the tabloids have created a stereotype of Albanians as the new gangsters," he said when I spoke to him last year about the cases. "In the past 12 years in Britain, I have read only one positive story about an Albanian – a barrister, in Time Out – but there are Albanian doctors in the NHS, Albanian LSE lecturers, Albanians in the restaurant business. The success stories are never reported." However, he added, the Securitas robbery was regarded with some national pride in Albania: "It was 'the crime of the century', it was seen as very different from making money from prostitution, which is the lowest form of crime. It is wrong, of course, but they did need bravery to get involved and at least they went for a bank, that was the feeling in the Albanian community. The British media are now trying to stereotype the whole Albanian community."
A survey carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2008 found no evidence for suggestions that eastern Europeans were responsible for any crime wave. Peter Fahy, the chief constable who co-authored the report, noted that "you get misunderstandings, you get rumours".
Crime has always been an import-export affair and in many ways mirrors "legitimate" business. As old family firms in Britain have been replaced by multinationals so, too, have the family-based gangs in Britain (the Krays, Richardsons, Arifs, Adams) been overtaken by multinationals, where different nationalities co-operate in the pursuit of higher profits. This is a two-way street. Many British criminals have moved abroad, most famously establishing themselves on the Costa del Crime. Many still operate there, making money from everything from bent time-share deals to drugs smuggled in from Morocco; more than 2,000 Britons had their collars felt in Spain last year alone. British criminals also made themselves at home everywhere from Thailand to Florida. The police may well be right when they say that the Games will attract villains from the east but, if there was to be an Olympics for crime, homegrown Britons would still be going for gold.
www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/25/eastern-european-immigration-crime-britain?newsfeed=true
Albanians/Albania are mentioned 19 times in this article.