Rise of UK’s FBI who busted ‘El Chapo of Europe’ running cocaine empire and Kim K clone leading double life as cash mule
DIRTY cash smuggled to Dubai, fraudulent passports for murderers and fugitives, and a notorious British criminal known as ‘Europe’s El Chapo’.
This is the new frontier of organised, international crime bred in the UK - under constant investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA), dubbed the ‘British FBI’.
In my new podcast, I reveal some of the organisation’s hardest-fought investigations to take out criminals at the very top of the UK’s most ruthless gangs, in operations that span across the globe from the Costa del Sol to the recent gangster’s paradise of Dubai.
Since the Agency was launched 10 years ago, its work has resulted in more than 12,500 arrests, jail terms totalling over 21,100 years, seizures of 2,000 tonnes of heroin, cocaine and cannabis and seizures of more than 3,100 firearms.
Some of the most high-profile operations involved a Kim Kardashian lookalike who smuggled millions out of Heathrow and the takedown of Robert Dawes, at one point regarded as the biggest drug supplier in Europe.
The cocaine kingpin was first convicted of a crime aged just 11, but made a name for himself when the drug started coming into the Nottingham area in the 80s.
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Dawes’ lethal combination of intelligence and violence made him one of the most influential and feared organised criminals on the continent.
But his criminal empire came crashing down in 2015, after a slip-up led to his arrest at his Spanish home on the Costa del Sol.
The story of how officers from the NCA finally caught up with Dawes and brought him to justice is just one of the cases explored in Underworld: Behind The Scenes of the NCA.
After establishing himself as a key player in the drugs trade in Midlands in the 80s and 90s, Dawes expanded across the UK and into the Netherlands.
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Police chiefs launched a detailed investigation into his activities, revealing criminal connections all over the UK - from Merseyside to Manchester to London - but he kept one step ahead of authorities. In 2001, he had a tip-off that the police were on to him and he moved to Spain.
The NCA took over the investigation and it became clear to Senior Investigating Officer Rob Hickinbottom that Dawes was going to great lengths to conceal his criminal activities, which involved dealings with mafias worldwide.
Dawes’ organised crime gang (OCG) was one of the first groups to use encrypted communication devices. The phones cost £1,500 every six months and gave him the ability to send messages that couldn’t be intercepted.
“His network is intricate, it’s extensive. It’s got corrupt officials across the globe working for him,” Rob explains.
“He was also operating in encrypted communications, which made it very, very difficult for law enforcement to get inside and understand what they were doing.”
In 2013, the NCA finally had a breakthrough. A covert investigation discovered that Dawes’ network was planning to ship 1.3 tonnes of cocaine into France.
The agency partnered with French law enforcement and their operation resulted in the drugs being seized and more than 100 arrests.
But for Rob, this wasn’t enough… because they hadn’t got the top man.
“We knew that Dawes was the man behind it, so we set about trying to prove that he was the person behind that shipment of cocaine,” he explains.
'Eureka' moment
A two-year-long investigation led the NCA to a hotel in Spain, where Dawes was meeting a high-level member of a Colombian cartel.
NCA officers and Spanish authorities were able to get inside the hotel just before Dawes’ business meeting and set up ‘dropdown’ recording devices to monitor his conversation.
In what Rob describes as a “eureka” moment, the authorities were able to record a two-hour conversation between Dawes and the Colombian gangster, where Dawes opened up about his criminal enterprise, including information on high-level corruption across the globe.
But crucially for the NCA - he also incriminated himself with the 1.3 tonnes of cocaine seized in Paris.
“He broke his own golden rule… not to brag about these things,” Prosecutor Andy Young says, adding: “That was the moment for sure… because he’s convicted in his own words.”
Dawes was finally arrested at his villa on Spain’s Costa del Sol in an early-hours raid in 2015, two years after the cocaine seizure in Paris. He was extradited to France to face trial, which eventually took place in 2018.
Dawes was found guilty and sentenced to 22 years in a French prison. He was given another five years earlier this year for paying his defence counsel to introduce forged documents in the court file.
Rob says the extent of Dawes’ global criminal activity earned him the moniker the ‘Lord of Crime’ in a Spanish newspaper - and says the violence, scale of cocaine shipments, and widespread, global network of criminal contacts put Dawes near the top of the NCA’s priority list.
“This is not just a man,” Rob says. “This is a very high-end criminal boss who’s behind a lot of nasty events and violence. We’ve got a lot of pride in terms of bringing this sort of a person to justice.”
My deep dive into the world of serious and organised crime also reveals how the NCA took down two crime bosses who helped murderers and drug traffickers evade justice by supplying them with fraudulently-obtained genuine passports (FOGs).
Anthony Beard, 61, and Christopher Zietek, 67, provided FOGs to organised criminals over a five-year period.
Among the recipients were Glasgow murderers Jordan Owens and Christopher Hughes, Liverpool drug trafficker Michael Moogan – who was jailed for 12 years in March this year – Manchester fugitive David Walley, and suspected Scottish drug traffickers Barrie Gillespie and James White.
Customers paid between £5,000 and £20,000 for the highly sought-after documents, which allowed them to travel the world undetected.
'Costa del Crime'
Like Dawes, some criminals flee the UK in a bid to evade justice - and many can’t resist the draw of the area in Spain often referred to as the Costa del Crime.
The area is so important to the NCA’s work that they even have officers based in the Iberian Peninsula to work with Spanish counterparts to investigate organised crime that links this part of Spain to the UK.
Steve Reynolds, regional manager for the Iberian Peninsula for the NCA, says criminals were initially drawn to the Costa del Sol in the 70s as there was no extradition treaty between the UK and Spain. While one now exists, the pull remains for other reasons.
“The cocaine trade is very active between South America and Spain,” Steve explains. “And obviously the UK is one of the principal users of cocaine. So a lot of UK cocaine traffickers like to go there and do their business.
“But equally, it’s just a nice place for people to live and do their business. If you’re a criminal and you’re making good money at it, you want to live somewhere nice.”
But it’s not just the Costa del Sol - the NCA’s work has caught up with British criminals across Europe and in Dubai.
A vast international money laundering operation came crashing down in October 2020 after the UK Border Force found a huge quantity of cash in suitcases headed for Dubai.
The suitcases were being carried by two women, Tara Hanlon and Megan Reeves - who turned out to be just two cogs in a well-oiled machine run by gang leader Abdulla Alfalasi.
Gang bosses communicated with the couriers and arranged the shipments on a WhatsApp group called “Sunshine and lollipops”, the NCA revealed
The OCG had hustled £104million in dirty cash out of Heathrow and into the Middle East in 83 separate trips in less than a year.
Kim Kardashian lookalike Hanlon had already successfully smuggled £3.5million into Dubai and was now attempting to remove a further £1.9 million - and, much like Dawes, she couldn’t resist the urge to brag about her spoils.
NCA officers found social media posts bragging about her stay in Dubai and showing off her £500-a-night hotel room at the Five Palm Jumeirah.
Hanlon was jailed for nearly three years for her role in the smuggling operation, along with 15 others. The ringleader, Alfalasi, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years, seven months, last July 2022.
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In the ever-evolving criminal underworld, the law is never far behind - especially if you flash the cash.
Listen to the first four episodes of wherever you get your podcasts now.