Crime doesn’t pay! Ex gang boss ends up in council flat
FORMER millionaire crime boss Terry Adams has been living in a council flat, the Sunday Express can reveal.
Adams, 64, and wife Ruth, 58, have set up home in a council property in a converted townhouse in Bloomsbury, central London.
He gave the address to a court where tomorrow he faces a hearing over £46,000 of unpaid court costs.
The couple previously lived in a nearby housing association flat from 2015 after joining the council emergency housing waiting list.
The move for the couple into social housing from Camden Council represents a gradual climbdown.
Six years earlier they were forced to sell their £1.6million mansion in Mill Hill, north London, after a money laundering case. The property, called Fallowfield, was famed for having a grand piano, giant harp and a portrait of Al Pacino in The Godfather movie.
Adams is said to have run the crime family, known as the A-Team, with brothers Patsy, 62, Tommy, 60, and Michael, 53, who are all currently in prison. The gang was suspected of links to 25 gangland murders, crimes such as extortion and drug dealing and police corruption.
At its height in the 1990s and early 2000s, police believed the gang amassed £200million that was stashed away in offshore bank accounts.
Adams had his own yacht and the couple sent their daughter to a private school.
Despite the alleged level of criminality, since 1992 the only conviction Adams has faced was for money laundering in 2007. He was jailed for seven years after a £10million operation by MI5 and the Serious Organised Crime Agency that involved bugging his home.
After selling the mansion, the couple initially moved into plush privately-rented properties, first at London Colney, near St Albans, Hertfordshire, and then a flat in a converted 19th century manor house in Barnet, north London.
The moves will help support Adams’s claim tomorrow at Westminster Magistrates Court that he has been left virtually “penniless”.
At a 2014 hearing Adams claimed he could not afford to pay £720,000 of criminal earnings.
The High Court heard Mrs Adams had spent thousands of pounds since her husband’s release, including £12,000 on dental treatment, £2,500 on a weight-loss programme and more than £5,300 on parking fines.
Mrs Adams said she was “living beyond her means,” but the prosecution claimed she spent around £97,000 a year and it must be from criminal proceeds “hidden away”.
The Adamses have declined comment. to