Tuesday - November 03, 2009

500 officers smash their way into thousands of safety-deposit boxes, could cost txpayers millions

OOPS ... Did someone get something wrong here?

How this story made its way to BMEWS might be a short story itself.

It appeared in our Sunday magazine section of The Sunday Mail on Oct. 25th. The magazine is called “Live.” But I didn’t see it.  The wife did. That evening before going upstairs she handed it to me and said I just HAD to read it. So I did. I put it aside where I could grab it next day and post.  Well, I can’t recall now if I was even on line the next day but things got kind of busy and I forgot it.  But I found it again today and intended to post BUT .... a bunch of my photos went missing after a Kodak EasyShare upgrade. Like 137 of them.  (I have problems after every upgrade Kodak issues) So after spending something like an hour and a half on the phone with Kodak, and NOT a free call as they don’t give away 800 numbers here, and getting NOTHING fixed, the tech guy decided to upgrade my problem and they’re gonna call back.
By that time, I had put the magazine somewhere and forgot about it again and with some frustration I went to check my mail and what do I find but a note from the Bmews Tiger with a link to this story.
So at very long last ... here it is.
It is edited due to its length, there are more photos at the link and I’d encourage everyone to read the entire story.  They make movies out of this sort of thing,
really and truly they do.

H/T Argentium Tiger

More than 500 officers smashed their way into thousands of safety-deposit boxes to retrieve guns, drugs and millions of pounds of criminal assets. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate
By ADRIAN LEVY and CATHY SCOTT-CLARK

The Finchley Road is one of the busiest thoroughfares heading out of London. It leads traffic north past Lord’s Cricket Ground and the multimillion-pound houses of some of the country’s richest hedge-fund managers all the way to the M1. At three in the afternoon it’s always pretty slow going, but on this particular summer Monday the traffic was almost at a standstill.

This was partly because the normal three lanes going north had been cut down to one. But it was also because of drivers slowing down to a crawl so they could gawp at the massive police operation unfolding on a busy corner of the road.

Police vehicles - both cars and menacing armoured trucks - jammed up two lanes. Dozens of armed officers in bulletproof vests were standing ready, waiting to be called inside an anonymous-looking building. From the sheer manpower and weapons on display it looked like the capital was under another terrorist attack.

But while this was the Metropolitan Police’s most ambitious operation in its 180-year history, it had nothing to do with national security. Only hours before, at a special briefing, teams from SCD6 (the Economic And Specialist Crime unit) and C019 (Specialist Firearms Command) hunkered down with technicians armed with angle grinders and drills. Also present were dog handlers, their animals trained to sniff out guns, drugs and explosives.

In all, more than 500 officers had gathered to receive orders to raid smart addresses in well-heeled parts of the capital. The locations included three of Britain’s largest and most well-established safety-deposit box depositories in Edgware, Hampstead and Park Lane as well as an office and the homes of the three directors of Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, which owned the vaults - two in Hampstead and one in Barnet.

For most of those at the briefing, arriving just before 3pm on June 2 last year, this was the first they had heard of the operation. Secrecy had been paramount and, with so many involved, keeping the operation ‘airtight’ had been one of the largest headaches in the pre-planning for what was codenamed ‘Rize’.

The police rolled through London in a convoy: scores of patrol cars, armed-response vehicles, outriders on their bikes, vans with their windows shielded by metal cages. With a Met film unit recording everything, detectives forced their way past startled security guards, demanding receptionists open the secure doors that led to the normally hushed strong rooms, which in the three centres housed 6,717 safety deposit boxes.

Over the next few hours, the three depositories were transformed into makeshift evidence-sorting centres, decked out with tables to bear the contents of the safety-deposit boxes that were soon to be forced open. Within a day, the first stage of the operation was finished but it would take over ten more to complete the next intricate and prolonged phase.

Investigators wearing gas masks and blue overhauls used power tools to chop away at the locked doors that protected the boxes themselves. They had rehearsed this bit for many hours, on mockups, trying numerous methods to get quickly and safely at the deposit boxes.

Forged passports found in deposit boxes
Diamond drill bits forced down into the locks proved disastrous, potentially damaging evidence inside. Instead, they settled on Makita angle grinders, with which they now effortlessly hacked at the hinges, allowing them to slide out the individual strong boxes, some as small as an A4 pad. Larger ones required a more bullish approach - strong-arm tactics that the police maintained were essential as key-holders would have been unlikely to co-operate.
As the first of the boxes was opened, detectives began probing the contents. Many were spilling over with bank notes and jewellery. Each was given a rough designation - for instance, ‘cash’ or ‘gun’ - and the words scribbled onto labels before they were placed in sealed evidence bags that were loaded into vans and given an armed escort to their final and secret destination, a secure counting house.
Here, every one of the thousands of boxes was to be intimately scrutinised. Not only did detectives have to itemise what they had found but match the contents to a person.
A few of the box-holders’ identities had been acquired through months of police surveillance. Others were revealed in vault registers seized by police during the raid. Some used aliases and would be hard to track down; more still would be identified by scrutinising the vaults’ CCTV cameras. Sixty officers would sift, analyse and count until November 2008 and beyond, racking up £1.4 million in overtime bills alone.

There was a lot at stake. Never before had the British police been granted a warrant as broad as this. The raids had been made possible under a controversial law, the Proceeds Of Crime Act (POCA), which came into being in 2002 and introduced an array of wide-ranging new powers to seek out and confiscate dirty money - the houses, cars and boats bought by criminals.
However, lawyers watching the police operation unfold were quick to warn that the strong-arming of these vaults and the crashing into each and every box was tantamount to the police having obtained permission to smash down the doors of an entire housing estate.

David Sonn, of Sonn Macmillan Walker, one of the largest criminal defence practices in London, says, ‘POCA was never intended for this. No one objects when criminals are caught and their assets seized - but shaking down everyone to get to them is specifically not what lawmakers wanted.’

When vice-squad detectives raided five premises connected to a southeast Asian businesswoman who had more than £100,000 in cash in one box, they found brothels worked by girls who had all potentially been trafficked to the UK, as well as a string of foreign bank transactions showing £800,000 flowing out of the UK. In the months after Rize there were more than 40 arrests and 11 prosecutions.

However, by talking to scores of box-holders, none of whom have spoken before, Live has uncovered a different version of Operation Rize, one that shows how the vast majority of those caught up in the raids were innocent. They have had their lives turned upside down over the past 17 months. Many have struggled to recoup their money and possessions, been forced into legal trench warfare with police lawyers and told they must prove how they came by the contents of their boxes.

This is also a story told through secret legal papers, including confidentiality agreements struck with some vault depositors whose cases threatened to topple the entire operation. Although the police told a judge that ‘nine out of ten’ of all of the thousands of box-holders were probably criminally minded, criminally connected or felons, the paper trail reveals that perhaps only as few as ten per cent of the boxes have any connection to serious crime.

More worryingly, according to eminent lawyers and barristers, Operation Rize has seen the Yard employ unethical tactics, driving a coach and horses through the new POCA legislation, leaving the Met facing a raft of legal actions that could potentially cost taxpayers millions of pounds.

LIVE MAGAZINE/SUNDAY MAIL FOR MORE PLUS PHOTOS

Posted by peiper     on 11/03/2009 at 09:51 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous • UK •  
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