Gangs (37 page)

Welcome to Southall Broadway, the heart of Britain’s Sikh community and an area where around 90 per cent of the residents are of Indian origin, mostly from the Punjab.

With its numerous temples and colourful bazaars, its bustling streets, specialist Indian shops and lively atmosphere, Southall is a prime example of the benefits of multi-cultural society – a chance for everyone to experience life in another country without ever stepping on to a plane. Take the Glassy Junction public house, for example – it’s the only pub in Britain that accepts rupees as well as sterling.

But there is also a dark side. Southall is the centre of the fastest-growing branch of the heroin trade and its associated gangland culture. Sporadic violence has been exploding off and on for the past few years and many believe it is only a matter of time before the area explodes into full-scale urban warfare.

Traditionally the perception of Asian culture was that the strong family links and rigid parental control – particularly among Sikhs – helped isolate the youth from drugs and the associated crime. Historically, Asian crime was mostly low-level and non-violent. But criminal intelligence reports from detectives based in Southall have revealed that two Asian-led gangs have grown into powerful criminal organisations by deluging the area with heroin. They control a network of dealers spread all over west London and have amassed wealth and weapons. And now they are at each other’s throats.

The current battles are a chilling fulfilment of a prophecy first made in 1995 in a highly controversial Home Office research paper: it warned of a demographic time bomb of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian youths that threatened to shatter the long-held belief that Asians were the most law-abiding community in the United Kingdom. Citing a notable increase in the number of Asians being jailed in young offenders’ institutions, the report predicted that many of the groups that started out aiming to protect the community from racist attacks would soon evolve into full-blown criminal syndicates.

And so they did. The gangs started out dabbling in credit-card fraud and low-level protection rackets but have since moved into drug-trafficking. In so doing, they have vastly increased the number of addicts within the Asian community. In 2002 a study in the south of England estimated that more than half of new heroin smokers in the area were from the Asian community, and experts say the figures are echoed across the country. A few months after the study was released the MP Oona King described the East End as the ‘heroin capital’ of the country after seeing young Bangladeshi boys passed out on the stairs of tower blocks as a result of injecting the drug.

Asian community leaders from Bradford and Tower Hamlets in east London have spoken publicly in recent years about their concerns over the spread of drugs and youth gangs. Tower Hamlets has long been the centre for drug abuse and is also linked to petty street crime led by Bangladeshi gangs of youths with names like the Brick Lane Massive and the Stepney Posse.

More recently it has been associated with large-scale drug-smuggling and distribution. In 2002 a gang of five Bangladeshi men who generated £12 million in six years were jailed after operating a heroin ring in east London. The operation was highly sophisticated. Members of the street teams had their own expense accounts and were reimbursed for meals, mobile phones, hire cars and petrol by people higher up the hierarchy.

Although the majority of Britain’s heroin trade remains in the hands of Turkish gangs, customs investigators have of late noticed an increasing number of Asian couriers bringing the drug into the country, often on direct flights from India and Pakistan.

The syndicates often make use of family members to assist in their enterprise. This is partly for added security and partly because relatives can be more easily ‘got at’ in the event of a betrayal. In April 2002 a thirteen-year-old Asian girl from Bradford was stopped at Heathrow and found to be carrying heroin worth more than £1 million. In another case, heroin was found sewn into a quilt that was wrapped around a six-month-old baby coming off a flight from Lahore.

In Derbyshire a study of the local drugs scene found not only increasing numbers of Asian gangs and dealers but that they were rapidly expanding their operations to the point of competing with other gangs.

‘We have found that a growing number of young Asian men are becoming involved in the heroin business,’ says Drugs Squad officer Steve Holmes, who is in charge of the study. ‘While once any Asian dealers tended to stick to a limited customer base in their own communities, they are now becoming bolder and are prepared to compete in the wider market. These are mainly British Asians who have lived here all their lives. They have seen white and black dealers and the lifestyle they lead and have thought, Why shouldn’t I have some of that?’

Around 75 per cent of heroin supplies on the British market come from the opium-poppy fields of Afghanistan, within easy reach of Asian dealers’ Pakistani contacts. Cities like Bradford and Birmingham have major links with Pakistan and Afghanistan, a factor that has promoted them to the top of the Asian drug-dealing division.

For the traffickers, importing direct from Pakistan rather than via Turkey means the potential profits are huge. Refined opium, bought in the lawless tribal lands of Pakistan, costs as little as £150 a kilo. On the streets of Southall it will sell for up to £80,000.

But the days of stopping at Southall are long gone. Rather than confining themselves to a limited customer base, the Asian gangs are taking advantage of their ability to undercut the price of heroin yet still make a profit to rake in thousands of new customers. Such is their power that many Asian gangs now employ black and white youngsters to work on their behalf.

In the back room of the Glassy Junction I meet up with Jas, a twenty-four-year-old Sikh who uses heroin on a regular basis (he insists he is not an addict) but recently retired from dealing to support his habit.

It was here in his very room, Jas explains, that he decided enough was enough and that he had to get out of the gang business. ‘I was having a drink with a couple of friends and there was a big group of Sikh men in that corner over there. All of a sudden they started arguing, standing up and pushing one another around, and then I just remember hearing shots. One of them had pulled out a gun and started firing. The whole place just erupted. Everyone got up and ran the hell out of there. I thought I was going to die.’ Three men were left injured, one shot in the arm, another in the hip and a third in the back. The argument was later linked to a dispute between rival drugs gangs, and for Jas it was the final straw.

According to Jas, the two gangs behind the heroin trade in Southall are known as the Bhatts and the Kanaks. The Bhatts are controlled by the members of a leading Asian family who have a number of business interests including a hugely popular restaurant in west London. The Kanaks, also based in west London, have strong links with Yardies and other black gangsters, whom they have been known to hire to carry out acts of violence on their behalf.

Both the Bhatts and the Kanaks had been active for some time but the full extent of their operations only emerged in early 2002 following the arrest of a gang who were part of the Bhatt organisation. Nicknamed the ‘Fiat Bravo Boys’ after the nondescript cars they drove to avoid drawing attention to themselves, the gang, headed up by brothers Sukhdev and Rajinder Bassi, had become one of the most successful and ruthless drug syndicates in British history. While on the surface they deliberately adopted low-key, modest lifestyles, they regularly enjoyed breaks at luxury hotels in west London and on the south coast, including the five-star Grand Hotel in Brighton.

They booked the best suites, lavishing girlfriends with champagne and gifts as well as hiring top-of-the-range BMW convertibles instead of the more humble Fiats they used in London. They also took regular luxury holidays in Europe and America, and while in the latter made a point of visiting dozens of firing ranges to hone their shooting skills.

Behind closed doors, the Bassi brothers, along with Jagdev Kallha and Rajinder’s girlfriend Rajvinder Gill, relished the lifestyle their criminal activities afforded them and regularly taped their exploits on a series of camcorders. They filmed themselves snorting cocaine, toasting their successes with bottles of Cristal champagne and even brandishing their many guns.

The Bassi brothers started out small, importing heroin a kilo at a time from Turkish dealers and using a network of family members to distribute it. Although both brothers were born in the UK they had strong family ties to the Punjab and soon made use of these contacts to secure new, cheaper supplies of the drug. Sales and profits soared, but as the gang’s business grew, so did the level of violence as they fought the Kanaks for control of the increasingly lucrative trade. Soon, wherever they went, the Bassis got into the habit of carrying loaded pistols because of the risks of a shootout with rival dealers.

They also hired Manjit Sangha, a notorious local thug, to work for them as an enforcer on a salary of £1000 per week. His job was to identify the top dealers in the Kanak organisation and scare them away from Southall to ensure the Bassi brothers and the rest of the Bhatt organisation maintained their premier position.

On 5 October 2002 Sangha and an associate walked into the Lady Margaret pub, north of the centre of Southall and known to be a popular hangout for members of the Kanak gang. Sangha, bursting with Dutch courage thanks to several lines of cocaine, marched up to one of the rival gang’s leading figures, pulled a gun from the waistband of his trousers and pushed it hard against the man’s temple. ‘If you don’t keep away from our patch, you’re a dead man,’ he warned.

But instead of backing off the Kanak men rushed towards Sangha, knocking him off his feet and wrestling the gun from his hand. They then proceeded to beat, kick and pistol-whip him to the edge of consciousness before letting him crawl away in disgrace. The Kanaks had made their position clear. If the Bhatts wanted to challenge them, it would take a good deal more than that.

Two weeks later, just before ten p.m. on 18 October, a twenty-six-year-old key player in the Kanaks’ gang was walking along a Southall street when a shotgun blast rang out from a passing car. The bullet missed him by a matter of inches.

An hour later and half a mile away, it was near closing time at the Lady Margaret. Sue Day, the assistant manager, was in the middle of pulling a pint for one of the twenty or so customers milling about in the pub when she was thrown back against the wall by a huge explosion. ‘We’d been bombed,’ recalls Day. ‘The windows went in, the doorway went in and the whole place filled with smoke. It was a mess, and a miracle that no one was hurt.’

It was only a few weeks after 11 September and attacks by Al Qaeda were first and foremost in everyone’s mind. But when the anti-terrorist police arrived they soon realised they were dealing with amateur bomb-makers. The device had been made by packing gunpowder, almost certainly emptied from fireworks, into a plastic container with galvanised nails. It had been placed next to the door in a bid to catch people leaving at closing time but had exploded a few minutes too early.

‘Everyone knows the Bhatts were responsible,’ says Jas. ‘They were trying to stamp their authority on the situation. They believed they were untouchable, that no one would ever give evidence against them. That’s why they went too far.’

The following day the Bassi brothers attended a twenty-first birthday party at the Agra Indian restaurant in Hounslow. Among the dozens of guests was Sukhbir Pattowala, twenty-five, who ran his own car dealership and had no criminal connections. He had once sold a vehicle to a Bhatt gangster, who was unhappy with it. Through no fault of his own, Pattowala became the next target for the gang as the Bassis continued to flex their muscles.

The early mood was buoyant, if somewhat menacing, and video-footage shot at the start of the party shows Rajinder larking about and waving a gun around. The mood turned darker with the arrival of the gang’s enforcer, Manjit Sangha, who, once again, was high on cocaine.

At some point in the evening, Rajinder told Sangha that Pattowala had ripped him off and ordered him to make an example of the man. Sangha pulled out his revolver and began pointing it at people, pretending to fire it at them. He then pointed it at Pattowala’s head and pulled the trigger. There was a loud report and his victim fell to the ground, a bullet lodged in his brain.

When the police arrived, the killer had long gone and no one in the room could remember having seen anything. One man, who had been standing close enough to Pattowala to be spattered with his blood, said he missed the shooting because, at that precise moment, he had bent down to tie his shoelace.

At his trial Sangha claimed the shooting was an accident and that he had had no idea the gun was loaded. He told the judge that he was full of remorse and sorrow for what had happened and wished he could find a way to turn back the clock. The murder charge was reduced to manslaughter and he was sentenced to three years. When the sentence was announced his sorrow evaporated and he punched the air with joy, then waved to friends in the public gallery.

The Bassi brothers’ reign of terror ended when police, acting on a tip-off, carried out a dawn raid on the home of the brothers’ cousin, Jaspal Bassi. They found a kilo of heroin in his six-year-old son’s Power Rangers rucksack. Jaspal, who had no previous convictions, cracked under questioning and told police he was being paid £100 a week by his cousins to store the drugs at his home. Against the odds, he agreed to give evidence against them.

Guided by Jaspal, the police launched an immediate raid on the Bassi stronghold and discovered several guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, explosives and seventeen kilos of heroin with a street value of more than £1 million.

For Jaspal the arrests marked the end of a normal life. While on remand other prisoners vowed to kill him and his brother received a phone call from Rajinder saying he would die if Jaspal gave evidence. He persevered and, in February 2003, both Bassi brothers were sentenced to ten years for their part in the drug-dealing network.