Gangs (34 page)

Right from the start he demonstrated a considerable talent for deceit and a remarkable ability to get people to do his bidding. When two of his accountancy clients, who made their living from drug-smuggling, lost their supplier, they asked Michael if he knew anyone who might help. He told them he would set up a meeting with some friends of his, but insisted it should take place at his office. The gang met and Michael sat there. Only he was aware that the police had placed hidden microphones all around the room and were monitoring every word.

The flow of information continued for eight months while Michael awaited trial. Then, when the time arrived and, eventually, the case was drawing to a close, it was payback time. The public and press were sent out of court and the police made private representations to the judge about what an important asset Michael had become. Despite the serious nature of his crime, and that it was his second offence, he served just two months in prison.

By the time he was released and their first child was born, Lynn and Michael’s sauna business was flourishing. They now had several branches spread out across London and, with no police interference, were making profits of tens of thousands of pounds each year. Some of the money they spent on property, buying ever bigger and more elaborate houses. The rest they spent on luxuries.

Michael continued to sing like a canary at every opportunity. Every little piece of information he came across he would pass on. If the police felt they could make an arrest or prevent a crime taking place without compromising the source of their information they would do so.

As the months ticked by, many of Michael’s underworld associates suffered occasional spates of bad luck. Vehicles carrying shipments of drugs would get pulled over by the traffic police because of a faulty light or broken mirror, only for the officer to notice an ‘odd smell’ and uncover the booty; gangs who had spent weeks casing out a location for an armed robbery would arrive to find the cash truck was taking a new route; budding contract killers would find their homes being searched on a pretext and all their weapons being confiscated.

On other occasions, when approached and asked if he knew of any prospective customers for shipments of heroin or cocaine, Michael would agree to find someone, then introduce the gang to a man who would later turn out to be an undercover police officer. This first officer would then introduce the gang to another and then another so that by the time they were arrested it was impossible to link it back to Michael, and his position as an informant was not compromised.

But not every tip led to an arrest or a raid. Most of the time the police simply added the information Michael had provided to their intelligence files, using it to help give them an unprecedented insight into the workings of the country’s top gangsters.

To Michael, the concept of ‘honour among thieves’ was a mystery. In May 1991 he gave information about a flat in Northolt where up to a thousand ecstasy capsules were being made each day. The police report recorded the name of the suspect and noted: ‘Ridgley is in a position to assist us heavily with info in this matter and it would appear the Northolt address is a major outlet.’ It was many years before anyone realised that Michael had informed on his own brother-in-law.

In the offices of senior police officers up and down the country, Michael was soon being talked about as one of the best and most reliable of their informants. He was proving an absolute gold mine. No other informant had access to or was so trusted by the senior figures in the British underworld. So when the police wanted to run an undercover sting operation against the A team, Michael seemed the obvious candidate to help. The police were desperate to find out what the family did with their money so they transferred tens of thousands of pounds into Michael’s own bank account and told him to approach the family to see if they could help him to launder it.

Michael told the family that the money was profit he had made on drugs deals and, with their assistance, transferred it to a bent solicitor who often acted on their behalf. He in turn transferred the cash into an offshore company. Behind the scenes the police quickly became hugely excited – it seemed they might be able to pursue the family for tax evasion, the same method the FBI had used finally to bring down Al Capone.

But the scheme fell apart when Michael himself came under the scrutiny of the tax office. ‘They said they had information that had been passed on by the police that I was involved with the A team, that I owned a yacht in Cyprus, which I never did, that I was a front man for the A team, which I never was. Then they said that I owed them seven hundred and fifty grand in taxes. The police tried to sort it out and tell them to forget it because I was part of an operation, but they wouldn’t listen. In the end I became an informant for the Inland Revenue as well and they agreed to reduce the amount to a hundred and twenty-five thousand of which I paid off around twenty thousand.’

Although the débácle temporarily soured his relationship with the police, things were soon back on track and the tip-offs flowed once more. It was around this time that Michael started providing information about a shadowy underworld figure known as the Pimpernel, a.k.a. Mickey Green.

Originally hailing from north London, Green switched from bank robbery to the drugs trade in the late 1980s and never looked back. He is said to have amassed a £100 million fortune from his global drug-smuggling empire, appears in the top ten most-wanted list of at least a dozen countries and has spent almost half his life on the run.

Green got his nickname from his ability to evade the best efforts of law enforcement to track him down. When the police in Britain got a little too close, he fled to Spain, leaving behind speedboats, yachts, Rolls-Royces, a Porsche, a Ferrari, gold bullion, cash and cocaine. The loss seemed to have little effect on his wealth and he soon became a well-known figure in Marbella, driving around in a white Rolls-Royce and enjoying the millionaire lifestyle.

He then travelled to France and made millions more smuggling cocaine, fleeing just before the police raided his apartment in Paris. He turned up next in America where he had extensive contacts with the Mafia and the Colombian cocaine cartels. Green was lounging by the pool in Rod Stewart’s former home in Beverly Hills when he was arrested by the FBI.

Imprisoned in San Francisco, Green needed someone to sell one of his properties in Spain to help fund his escalating legal bills, which could only be paid with money that was shown to come from a legitimate source. His estranged wife, Ann, was a childhood friend of Lynn and, having heard all about Michael’s formidable accounting skills, asked if he would be interested in helping out. Michael readily agreed and was soon working on behalf of one of the most dangerous criminals in the world.

It took two years and a dramatic escape from custody – Green was being flown to France to face trial there but slipped off the plane during a refuelling stop and fled to Ireland – before they could finally meet in person. By then the relationship between the two had developed into a firm friendship.

By now Michael had all the trappings of the successful criminal. He and Lynn had moved into their £1 million house at Radlett; Michael had a Porsche and a Rolls-Royce. Their two sons attended private school. No expense was spared. To Green, Michael seemed to be cast from the same mould as himself. Of course, Green had no idea that details of everything he said and every new criminal enterprise he planned were being reported to the police. Michael was playing an increasingly dangerous game, but he loved every minute of it. And he was about to become one of the most successful money-launderers in Britain.

The link with Green boosted the value of Michael’s stock even higher. In the words of one detective he was ‘one of the best, if not the best informant ever . . . providing information against arguably some of the most notorious British criminals’. As a result the bigwigs of police intelligence were so impressed that there was talk of him being the central figure in a sting that would be carried out jointly with the FBI. The idea was for Michael to travel to Chicago and link up with some of his Mafia contacts. He would be provided with thirty kilos of cocaine and use it as a lure to get the Americans to agree to make a deal while being secretly filmed.

That particular deal fell apart but the stakes were dramatically raised in the mid-1990s when, due to his old contacts being promoted, Michael was given a new ‘handler’, Detective Constable Paul Carpenter, who worked at Scotland Yard’s elite Criminal Intelligence Branch and was responsible for handling top-secret information between informants and undercover officers. Carpenter explained that he wanted Michael to take an even more active role in the criminal activities of his new associates in order to gather more detailed information.

But while previous officers had played things strictly by the book Carpenter, according to Michael, spent all his time pushing him to get more and more involved.

It wasn’t the only change. Rather than simply guaranteeing a quiet life for the saunas, Michael’s tip-offs were now generating cash rewards, often several thousand pounds at a time. The money would be shared with Carpenter and soon the relationship between the two had become what would later be described in court as ‘completely corrupt’.

The basic deal was that Michael would do pretty much what he wanted – sell drugs, launder money, trade in guns, anything – and Carpenter would make sure the police never went anywhere near him. In return, Michael would provide Carpenter with enough titbits of information to create a few arrests and make him look good in front of his bosses, but also share the vast wealth his criminal activities were generating.

The arrangement suited both parties down to the ground and when Green invited Michael to Spain in order to meet some friends of his, he did not hesitate to go. Then, when Green offered Michael the chance to become the British head of his new drug-distribution ring, he accepted right away. He didn’t worry about not knowing how to run a drug-smuggling operation, Carpenter promised he would give him all the help he needed.

Michael’s first drugs job for Green was to arrange the collection and storage of several hundred kilos of cannabis resin, which had been imported to Britain hidden in soap-powder boxes. It was the first of several shipments that would arrive in this way. The money for the drugs came back in sterling but Green wanted payment in Dutch currency so he could pay his suppliers without having first to change the money over. Michael spoke to a friend about the problem and was soon introduced to a man called Housam Ali, who liked to be called Sam for short.

They met in the central London office from where Ali conducted his finance business and hit it off immediately. Michael then handed over £76,000 in cash, taking Ali’s Lebanese passport as security, and waited.

Ali returned, having changed all the money into Dutch guilders. His contacts in the world of international finance meant he was able to do so without arousing suspicion. The process was repeated several more times until the £250,000 Michael had made selling the cannabis had all been exchanged. Ali had made a small commission on each transaction but, knowing that Green would soon have more business for them, he and Michael soon realised that the best way to maximise their profits would be to set up their own
bureau de change.

Michael and Carpenter then sat down to address the problem of how to get the money out of the country and back to Green. One technique they devised was to place up to £400,000 in a car’s spare tyre and drive it to Spain. For smaller amounts, they decided to use couriers. ‘What you need to do,’ explained Carpenter, ‘is recruit a bunch of pretty girls but don’t let them know what’s really going on. That way they can stroll through Customs and no one will be any the wiser.’

As their experience grew, they adjusted elements of the scheme. They worked out that it was best if as few couriers as possible knew about the existence of the others. That way, the suspicious among them would be more likely to believe they were part of a small scam rather than some massive international operation.

Another rule was that the couriers were not allowed to know how much money they were carrying. There had been a disaster early on when a courier had vanished with £150,000 after discovering just how much those funny foreign notes were worth.

Michael changed tactics. By wrapping the notes tightly in clingfilm he found he could squeeze huge sums into a package only two inches thick. The wrapping also meant there was little chance the money could be interfered with.

The couriers mostly travelled to Spain. On arrival in Marbella they would make their way to the four-star Hotel El Fuerte. All their bills – hotels, meals, car hire – would be paid. The money would usually be handed over later that evening at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel. They would stay overnight and fly back the next morning, receiving £800 a trip.

With authorisation notes from a
bureau de change
Michael had set up showing where the money had come from, the couriers believed that – at most – they were simply helping to carry more currency out of the country than was normally allowed.

One such courier was former page-three girl Tracy Kirby: ‘I met Michael through a friend and he told me he ran a
bureau de change
and employed couriers to take small bundles of cash to affiliated branches throughout Europe.

‘With hindsight it seems obvious, but at the time there was little reason to be suspicious. The bureau had an office on the Edgware Road, Michael’s wife helped out by taking money abroad and every time I went away I was given a letter of authorisation explaining what I was doing and that the money belonged to the bureau. On my first trip I went to Dublin and took five thousand in sterling.

‘On later trips to Amsterdam and Spain I assumed I was taking the same amount of money but I’d actually been carrying more than a quarter of a million pounds each trip and over six months had moved more than four million. I did start to get suspicious, but every time I questioned it, Michael would say something to reassure me. He was incredibly charming and could make you believe anything. If he said black was white, you’d believe him, that’s how convincing he was.’