The slap that led to the bloody gangland war that ripped North London to pieces
IT started with a slap.
Kemal Armagan, feared leader of the Hackney Bombers, was assaulted by a member of the rival Tottenham Boys in a snooker hall in 2009.
It was a humiliating public show of disrespect between North London’s “Turkish mafia” clans. The hot-headed Armagan shouted that he was going to kill those who had attacked him.
The subsequent gang war has seen ten murders and more than 30 violent incidents from North London to southern Turkey.
One expert told The Sun: “To lose respect in front of others is unforgiveable.
A vendetta can go on for decades. People can forget what the original cause of the feud was.”
The fatal police shooting last week of dad-of-two Jermaine Baker, during an alleged attempt to spring two convicts from a prison van, also appeared to be linked to the gangs’ grim cycle of violence.
That seemingly innocuous slap at the Tottenham Boys-controlled Manor Club in Finsbury Park nearly seven years ago intensified what a judge described as the “medieval turf war” between the two mobs that has since reached
“epidemic proportions”.
However, the ethnic Kurdish gang war is not only being fought over a man’s honour but also the lucrative heroin trade, once believed to be controlled by feared drug lord Abdullah Baybasin.
The wheelchair-bound Kurdish don — also known as Uncle and the Godfather of Green Lanes — centred his multi-million pound criminal fiefdom on the kebab shops and groceries that hug the six miles of Green Lanes in North London.
Crippled in a shootout in the Eighties, he was once seen on a police surveillance video beckoning awe-struck pimps and drug dealers under his control to step forward one by one and kiss his hand.
One detective described it as “like watching a scene from The Godfather”.
The cameras were also rolling when one gangster was stripped, beaten and threatened with castration by machete.
Having been acquitted of drugs charges in 2010, four years into a 22-year jail term, Uncle, 54, is now in a Turkish prison after being sentenced to 37 years for cocaine smuggling.
He had assumed control of the clan from his elder brother, Huseyin, a heroin wholesaler once described as “Europe’s Pablo Escobar”.
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Huseyin masterminded the refining of raw Afghan opium into heroin at isolated farmhouses in the remote Lice district, in south eastern Turkey.
Until 2002, his cartel was thought to control up to 90 per cent of the heroin entering Britain, worth £10billion.
Uncle’s scruffy Green Lanes office belied the family’s vast wealth.
When the Baybasins first arrived in Britain they lived in a seven-bedroom house in the upmarket Canons Park area of Edgware.
Neighbours remember them talking business on mobile phones at the bottom of their garden.
One said: “They kept a low profile. If it wasn’t for the sound of the front door being kicked down by the police from time to time, they would be pretty good neighbours.”
In 1998 Uncle was arrested after a loaded handgun was found next to his bed during a raid on the address.
Huseyin, 59, was convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to murder, kidnapping and drug smuggling and jailed for 20 years — later increased to life — in the Netherlands.
The Baybasins’ whispered name had once been enough to terrify their own foot soldiers, as well as their bitter rivals. Now both could run amok.
After Uncle was jailed in 2006, peace was supposed to reign in London’s Turkish and Kurdish enclaves.
Instead, all hell broke loose as the Bombers and Boys — run by the Eren family — battled to fill the power vacuum he left behind.
In 2009 the Met’s then Commander for North London, Steve Kavanagh, said the Baybasin network had given way to something “much more chaotic” leading to “levels of violence that are shocking”.
In March that year the Bombers sought revenge for the infamous slap.
Innocent shopkeeper Ahmet Paytak, 50, was gunned down after a hitman hired by the Bombers shot the wrong man.The pendulum of violence swung the other way.
A Boys member died in a volley of shots at the wheel of his Range Rover on October 2, 2009, in front of his five-year-old stepson.
Retribution was swift. Three days later a hooded man opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon at Hackney’s Clapton FC club, frequented by Bombers’ members.
Innocent bystander, Cem Duzgun, 21, was shot 11 times while playing pool.
The attack’s mastermind, a leading Tottenham Boy, was jailed for a minimum of 33 years for Mr Duzgun’s murder.
The feud continued when Kemal Armagan’s brother Ali, 32, was shot dead in his Audi near Turnpike Lane Tube in February 2012.
Kemal Eren, a relative of would-be hitman Izzet Eren at the centre of last week’s alleged jailbreak attempt, fled the UK while wanted for the murder.
He was shot and paralysed in Elbistan, southern Turkey, shortly afterwards.
Still blood flows. In April 2013, Izzet’s brother Zafer, then the leader of the Tottenham Boys, was shot dead on his doorstep by a hitman known as “Freddy”, nicknamed after Freddy Krueger, from the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The 23-year-old killer put on a Guy Fawkes-style mask and shot Zafer, 34, in the back three times outside his fortified home. He had previously shot and injured Zafer’s cousin Inan.
Four days after the attack the hitman shot his getaway driver because he feared he was a “blabber”.
The driver survived and the assassin has been jailed for a minimum of 38 years.
On October 13 this year, balaclava-clad Izzet Eren and an accomplice were stopped while riding a stolen motorbike.
It is thought the pair, who were armed with guns, were en route to shoot a Bombers member to avenge Zafer’s death. Izzet got 14 years.
The vendetta has left the law- abiding Kurdish community despairing.
Kurdish community activist Cuma Anil Kepez, 23, said last night: “People are scared. It sounds like a gangster film but it’s real life.”
Frank Bovenkerk, author of The Turkish Mafia, added: “Honour sensitivity is still very strong in Turkey.
“To lose respect in front of others is unforgiveable.”
In Green Lanes — the epicentre of London’s Turkish community — locals pray the futile gang war has run its course.
Yet, the eye-for-an-eye nature of this bloodthirsty feud suggests the snooker hall slap has yet to be truly avenged.
Tottenham boys
INAN EREN – permanently on crutches after being ambushed by Jamie Marsh-Smith, the hitman known as “Freddy”, as he arrived home on December 30, 2012. The 35-year-old was shot three times in the arm, stomach and buttock.
OKTAY ERBASLI – a leading member of the Boys, the 21-year-old died on October 2, 2009, after a Bombers hitman on a motorbike opened fire at traffic lights in Tottenham.
KEMAL EREN – nicknamed “No Fingers” after losing some digits, he is the one-time leader of the Boys and believed to be behind the killing of Ali Armagan. In December 2012, Eren was shot and paralysed in an attack in Turkey.
ZAFER EREN – targeted by Marsh-Smith after his cousin Inan survived. Zafer was shot dead on April 18, 2013.
YUSUF ARSLAN – senior Boy 25, was shot in a gangland attack in 2007, losing his spleen. He was behind the murder of Cem Duzgun, 21, an innocent bystander at a Hackey club on October 5, 2009.
Hackney bombers
ALI ARMAGAN — the 32-year-old brother of Kemel Armagan, the man slapped in the snooker hall, was murdered outside a Tube station on February 1, 2012.
Ali was shot six times, staggered to a nearby barbers shop but died of his wounds.
SAMUEL ZEREI – Jamie Marsh-Smith’s getaway driver, 22, was shot by the hitman in Markfield Park, Tottenham, four days after he killed Zafer Eren.
Zerei survived the attack by running to a house and getting help. He was jailed for a minimum of 28 years at the Old Bailey for his part in Zafer’s murder.
RICARDO DWYER – hitman hired by the Bombers. The 29-year-old killed innocent shopkeeper Ahmet Paytak, 50, on March 22, 2009, with a semi-automatic pistol in a bungled revenge attack.
The bullets were meant for another staff member, Mehmet Senpalit.
JAMIE MARSH-SMITH – Bombers’ “Freddy” hitman, 23, who killed Boys’ boss Zafer and shot his cousin Inan Eren.
