How shocking masked robbery at traffic lights led police to £2m organised crime operation in city
A huge illegal drugs operation, a missing bag containing a six-figure sum, talk of violent Albanian gangsters armed with lie detectors being sent to get it back and the police who cracked the case – Jason Evans reports on Operation Tilbury
IT WAS a brazen and shocking robbery like a scene from a television crime drama – masked men armed with crowbars jumping from a car and smashing the windows of a van waiting at traffic-lights before snatching a bag from the passenger and fleeing. But this was no TV programme, this was the centre of Swansea on a Friday morning.
The hours and days after the theft of the bag led to a flurry of activity to find the robbers, activity on both sides of the law – while armed police were carrying out a series of raids at addresses in the city, those to whom the bag belonged were planning to send Albanian gangsters to find those responsible and to get it back “by any means necessary”.
The smash-and-grab on the van was no random attack, no opportunist strike on an ordinary van stuck in a queue of traffic.
Inside the stolen bag was £106,000 in cash which members of a Londonbased organised crime group had just collected after dropping off a consignment of cocaine in Swansea.
And equally worrying for the dealers, hidden inside a secret compartment in that van – a van the police now had in their possession – was another £81,000 cash and more than 1kg of cocaine.
The dealers desperately wanted the vehicle back before police found what was inside.
While the robbers had got away with the loot, they had made one crucial mistake which would lead police to discovering a £2m drugtrafficking operation that was shipping huge quantities of high-purity cocaine from London to Wales.
South Wales Police called it Operation Tilbury, and it involved an eagleeyed crime scene investigator, some good old-fashioned detective work, mobile phone analysis, forensics, tracking the movements of vehicles, and invaluable information gleaned from Encrochat, the secure tele
phone network once favoured by serious criminals the world over but which French law enforcement agencies managed to access.
Operation Tilbury gives a fascinating insight into how organised crime groups, or OCGs, operate – and how police can take them down.
Early on the morning of May 28 last year a van left London and headed for south Wales. It was a white VW Caddy, the kind of van you probably see a dozen times a day being driven by tradespeople and delivery drivers. At the wheel of the VW was 37-yearold Alex Shields, a man who had once run a thriving clothes company and was said to have a “flair for design”. Originally from Newport, he had latterly been living in Essex, where he worked in a fishing tackle and bait supply business. He was also a drugs courier for an OCG, and in the back of the van were kilos of high-purity cocaine.
An “order” for 3kg of cocaine had been confirmed the previous evening over EncroChat from the head of the Swansea side of the operation, Dale Martin, with a simple message reading: “3 to Swansea”. The Swansea dealer also made the scale of the operation in the city clear to those in
London he was buying from, boasting that “I can do 5 a week”.
Aside from the three kilos of Class A in the van for Swansea, there were two kilos which were destined for dealers in the Pontypridd area, and a further kilo which was earmarked for Leeds. It was a big operation.
The Caddy made its way down the M4, and by 8am was taking a detour south near Bristol to pick up Nicholas Bailey, one of the two men running the London end of the operation.
At 9.45am the Caddy was in Taff’s Well, north of Cardiff, and shortly afterwards dropped off a consignment of cocaine at an industrial unit
near Pontypridd, where £81,000 in cash was collected. The next stop on the delivery route was Swansea. This was not the first time Shields had made the run to Wales. In the previous fortnight alone he had made no fewer than five trips from the Essex and London area to south Wales, carrying an estimated 25kg of the Class A drug. It was a risky job. By 10.45am the Caddy was heading into Swansea on Fabian Way, and was soon at a house in Tegid Road in Mayhill – the house belonged to a relative of Martin. Wood and Bailey delivered the 3kg of cocaine and collected their £106,000 payment, and
then began the long journey to their next drop-off in Leeds. So far so good. But their onward trip was to be a short one, a journey which would end suddenly just over a mile away.
The pair drove down Townhill Road and Gors Avenue and then onto Carmarthen Road, where they stopped at the traffic-lights at Dyfatty. Also heading into the city centre along Carmarthen Road at that time was an ambulance, and as the crew exited the Cwmbwrla roundabout and went under the railway bridge they saw a black Ford Mondeo perform a U-turn in the road ahead of them and speed off towards town. Unbeknown to the paramedics at the time, they had just seen a group of robbers preparing to strike.
Moments later the Ford pulled in front of the stationary Caddy at the traffic-lights, blocking its escape. Two masked men jumped from the Mondeo and smashed the windows of the van with crowbars. They snatched the bag Bailey was clutching, along with the keys from the ignition, jumped back into their getaway car, and sped off. The incident was over in seconds.
Barrister Paul Hobson, who prosecuted Operation Tilbury at Swansea Crown Court, would later describe the robbery as “an ambush by people with knowledge of the drugs conspiracy”. And though the robbers probably thought they were doing the smart thing by taking the keys and thus ensuring their victims could not pursue them, taking the keys would be their “undoing” – and result in the police discovering the drug-trafficking operation.
The events of 11.22am that Friday were quickly reported to police by shocked motorists at the lights, and officers were soon on the scene. They found the immobilised VW and Shields, the driver, waiting for them – the van was, after all, registered in his name so perhaps his best option was to play the victim of a robbery.
Bailey, his passenger, the man who had been holding the bag, had run away and left him to it. After statements from witnesses were taken the van – a crime scene as far as the police were concerned – was taken to a secure garage on Swansea Enterprise Zone.
The police, of course, weren’t the only ones who were told about the robbery that morning. Within minutes of the raid Swansea man Martin was on EncroChat and contacting a man called Ainsley Wood who, along with Bailey, was the London end of the supply operation.
The on-the-run Bailey also contacted his associate Wood in London saying he had been “set up”.
In those crucial few minutes after the robbery Martin also contacted his two business partners in Swansea, the men involved with him in buying cocaine from London and distributing it to street dealers in the city – Daniel Harris and Leon Ley.
The picture that eventually emerged from Operation Tilbury was of Martin, Harris and Ley, the Swansea men with access to money and local contacts, buying large quantities of cocaine from Wood and Bailey in the London and Essex areas – in turn Wood and Bailey were buying the cocaine from other London dealers further up the chain. Shields was the primary courier transporting the drug to Wales.
Understandably Wood was furious at the loss of his money, and at the prospect of losing more money and a consignment of drugs if the police were to find the hidden compartment in the Caddy. Meanwhile Martin, or “OpenPanther”, was desperately trying to convince him that neither he nor his close friend Harris were involved in the heist, trying to convince him that they were not the double-crossers.
In the hours after the robbery there was talk of using a lie detector machine when interrogating suspects, and of employing members of a violent Albanian gang – referred to as “Albos” in the messages – to recover the cash, using violence and intimidation if necessary.
Perhaps in an attempt to prove their loyalty, Martin also told Wood that he and Harris would attempt to recover the Caddy with its secret cargo.
On the Saturday morning the men – together with another male who has never been identified – travelled to the Swansea Enterprise Park compound in Harris’s van to try to get access. It quickly became apparent that they would not be able to get at the Caddy, so the trio left the garage and their failure was reported back to London. But their attempts to access the van had aroused the suspicion of police.
A crime scene investigator examined the vehicle and its cargo – a humble portable electricity generator – carefully. Inside the generator she found a hidden compartment accessible only with an electronic key. Police, of course, didn’t have the fob to open it but they did have a crowbar. In the compartment was more than a kilo of cocaine and £81,000 in cash.
The officers’ interest naturally then turned to the individuals in the van who had been snooping around the recovery garage that morning. Thanks to CCTV footage, automatic number plate recognition cameras, and the van’s distinctive paint job and personalised registration it was quickly identified as belonging to Harris.
The members of the Swansea end of the drugs operation were sentenced to a total of more than 39 years in prison – with credits for guilty pleas Martin was sentenced to 12 years, Ley to 11 years and three months, and Harris, who was convicted at trial and therefore had no credit, to 16 years.
Shields, the courier, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty on the day he was due to stand trial.
The London end of the drugs trafficking operation was sentenced to more than 29 years – Bailey was sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison, and Wood to 15 years and nine months for the cocaine conspiracy, and to eight years for a ketamine conspiracy to run concurrently.
Norris, the only one of the trio of robbers caught, was sentenced to nine years in prison.
The whereabouts of the bag containing £106,000 which was stolen from the Caddy remains unknown.