THE Council HOUSE CRIME LORD
He amassed a fortune as one of Britain’s most feared gangsters, with a £1m home filled with Picassos and boxes of cash. But as he pays to dodge jail AGAIN, why are we paying for the roof over his head?
Slap bang in the middle of Bloomsbury, surrounded by boutiques, wine bars and world famous cultural institutions, is a handsome Victorian terrace london estate agents call a ‘truly outstanding’ place to live.
Houses on this sought-after street, a crown jewel of the local ‘conservation area’, five minutes from the British Museum, are valued at between £2million and £3million. Flats start at £650,000, for a single-bed bolthole.
Here, among the assorted local bankers, lawyers and captains of industry lives a dapper 64-year-old called Terry adams.
Married to Ruth, 58, an actress whose CV includes bit-parts in EastEnders, 999, and (perhaps ironically) The Bill, this strapping, grey-haired gentlemen makes what one might call a ‘colourful’ addition to the community.
For Terry adams is the notorious boss of Britain’s most feared modern crime family.
In a career spanning almost five decades, he has ruled london’s underworld with an iron fist, controlling a hefty portion of its drug trade and presiding over an estimated 25 murders and scores of horrifically violent attacks with a ruthlessness described by police as ‘worse than the Krays’.
at its peak, his Mafia-style empire was valued at up to £200million.
Recent times have brought the odd setback, with adams finally sent to prison in 2007 for money-laundering (he was freed in 2010), while his leading henchmen have clocked up a string of convictions. Three of his brothers — patrick, Michael and Thomas (known as ‘patsy,’ ‘Micky’ and ‘Tommy’ ) — are behind bars now. Terry adams himself came close to joining them a few days ago until, as we shall see, he found a way to keep his liberty once again.
For all that, adams — who was once taperecorded discussing a knife attack that would ‘open up’ a rival ‘like a bag of crisps’ — has maintained the trappings of success: dining at top restaurants, wearing bespoke suits, and travelling in a fleet of luxury cars.
So it’s scandalous to report that his gilded lifestyle is being subsidised by taxpayers.
This became public knowledge as a result of a recent court hearing in which adams revealed that his aforementioned home, where he’s been living for 18 months, is owned by the labour-run Borough of Camden.
Quite how this gangland boss, with his reputation for breaking bodies and slashing faces, came to occupy one of Britain’s most sought-after council houses — for a rent believed to be £160 a week — is unclear.
after all, in March 2016, shortly before the adamses got the keys to the period property, Camden Council announced that anyone with assets worth more than £32,000 would be removed from the 27,000strong council house waiting list for one of its homes.
prospective tenants would also have to be able to prove they’d lived in the borough for at least five of the previous seven years.
Terry adams didn’t remotely fit the bill on either front. But he was housed anyway. Meanwhile, thousands of more honest, if less wellconnected, folk were cut adrift.
They included Samantha Davies, a 29-year- old in remission from bowel cancer, who told a local newspaper that she’d been kicked off the waiting list, after three years, because she was no longer considered sufficiently needy. as a result, she was sleeping on her parents’ living room floor.
all of which begs a question: how exactly did Britain’s most infamous gangster end up being granted his plum tenancy?
Camden Council this week refused to comment, insisting that its housing system ‘prioritises people in accordance with legislation’.
So we cannot be sure whether corruption, incompetence, or something less murky was to blame. What we do know, however, is that adams — a keep-fit fanatic who reputedly did 2,000 press-ups a day during his various stints behind bars — is a very hard man to say ‘no’ to.
He owes his status to a remarkable ability to play the system, whether applying for council housing or trying to stay out of jail.
Time and again, he’s used corrupt public officials to frustrate investigations. In 1999, to cite one example, a Crown prosecution Service clerk called Mark Herbert was jailed for conspiring to pass details of 33 secret police informants to the gang.
Other times, when adams and his cohorts have faced prosecution, they have generally escaped unscathed. a string of trials have, over the years, either collapsed amid rumours of witness intimidation, or ended in acquittals. perhaps the most famous involved David McKenzie, a Mayfair financier who laundered drug money for the adams family, but lost around £1.5million in the late 1990s after a string of poor investments.
The Old Bailey subsequently heard how he was summoned to Terry adams’s home in North london, and told to pay the money back. ‘Everyone stood up when he walked in,’ McKenzie said, referring to the gang boss’s entrance.
‘He looked like a star — a cross between liberace and peter Stringfellow. He was immaculately dressed, in a long black coat and white frilly shirt. He was totally in command.’ Unfortunately, for McKenzie at least, the cash was not instantly forthcoming.
a few days later, he was savagely beaten by an adams associate named Christopher McCormack.
In an attack lasting 20 minutes, the financier was kicked and beaten, suffering three broken ribs, before being slashed around the wrists and face with a Stanley knife. By the time the punishment beating ended, his ears and nose were flapping, held on by slivers of skin, while two tendons in his hands had been severed permanently.
When the case reached court, DNa samples showed that McKenzie’s blood was spattered on McCormack’s motorbike jacket. The defendant maintained that it must have come from an earlier incident when he’d broken up a fight between McKenzie and another man. The jury agreed.
as the verdict was read out, McCormack said ‘thank you’ to them, adding: ‘Come and have a drink over the pub’. One elderly male juror waved at him.
among the many other controversial cases, in 1985, Tommy adams was acquitted of helping launder the proceeds from the £ 26million Brinks- Mat bullion robbery, while brother patsy was cleared in the 1990s of importing three tons of cannabis worth £25million. Not long afterwards, when patsy was arrested for a further drugs offence, officers found a gun and a complete set of bulletproof body armour. But patsy claimed they belonged to his wife. The jury believed that, too.
Throughout this time, the adams family has been protected by the code of omerta by which career criminals refuse to co-operate with police investigations. In 1991, for example, East End thug ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser was shot in the head outside a Clerkenwell nightclub, and nearly killed.
The perpetrator was widely believed to be patsy adams. But when Fraser came to, and was asked ‘who did it?’ by detectives, he replied: ‘Tutankhamun.’
By then, Terry adams had been a fixture of london’s gangland for 20 years. The eldest of 11 children, born to a Northern Irish Catholic lorry driver and raised in a then deprived corner of Islington, he began his career extorting money in the playground.
after leaving school at 15, in 1969, he graduated first to running protection rackets involving market stall- holders, then to armed robberies. In the Seventies,
How did he land a plum tenancy in stylish Bloomsbury? Most languish for years on the waiting list
his family syndicate — known as the A-Team — diversified into the more lucrative drug trade, building links to Colombian cartels and creating a network of dealers to distribute cannabis and cocaine, and later ecstasy.
Terry Adams ran it like a business, chairing corporate- style ‘ board meetings’. His brothers tended to be the ruthless enforcers who got their hands dirty.
With the spoils, Adams bought a large home — for £1million in cash — and filled it with antiques and artworks, including Henry Moore prints and Picasso etchings.
Above the fireplace was a lifesize poster of Al Pacino in his role as Tony Montana from the mafia movie Scarface.
Adams also owned a holiday villa in Cyprus, along with a yacht, and paid for his daughter, Skye, to be privately educated at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. This life of luxury was, of course, fuelled by sickening violence.
The Adams syndicate turned killing into an art form, importing the Mafia assassination technique of using gunmen riding pillion on motorbikes. In the Eighties, a rival Irish crime family, the Reillys, found this out to their cost.
First, Patsy Adams walked into a pub with a companion who insulted George Reilly in front of his wife.
After Reilly raced home to get a gun and returned in a BMW with several brothers, he was ambushed by a group of Adams henchmen, who peppered the car with shotguns and pistols. While no one died, the Reillys realised they’d been out-gunned, and have never bothered the Adams clan again.
For Terry Adams, the violence came easily. Somewhat harder was the business of laundering the vast sums his criminal enterprises generated.
In 1995, the Inland Revenue realised that, despite his prosperous lifestyle, he’d never paid a penny in income tax. A Hatton Garden jeweller called Solly Nahome, who helped the gang hide its proceeds, duly created a set of false accounts showing that Terry worked as a jewellery designer.
Though the case was settled via the payment of £ 95,000, the authorities were suspicious.
Then, three years later, Nahome was assassinated on his doorstep, apparently by a rival gang, and the laundering machine he created began to crumble.
Police had by then been monitoring Adams’s home for some time, placing listening bugs in his sitting room and bedroom (they were turned off when Terry and wife Ruth had sex).
The spy system produced evidence of substantial criminality.
At one point, for example, they heard Terry talking with a friend called Dan about a beating he’d personally administered: ‘When I hit someone with something, I do them damage,’ he said.
‘I went to the geezer and I went crack. On my baby’s life, Dan, his knee-cap come right out there... all white, Dan, all bone.’
On another occasion, Adams was recorded ordering retribution on a girl called Aleesha: ‘She’s gotta be done. She’s gotta have acid flung in her face.’
Then there were examples of extraordinary spending: £45,000 in cash on a Mercedes sports car for daughter Skye, tens of thousands more on first-class flights. All this from a man with no obvious source of legal income. When police raided his home they found antiques worth £500,000, jewellery worth £48,000 and £59,000 in cash, in a shoebox in the attic.
It took years for the subsequent case to reach court, mainly the result of cynical delaying tactics by Adams, who repeatedly sacked his defence teams and at one point claimed his IQ was too low to understand the charges.
But in 2007, he agreed to plead guilty to a specimen money-laundering charge, and was jailed until 2010. Crucially, the conviction meant he became the subject of a financial reporting order — often applied to ‘career’ criminals — requiring him to disclose sources of all cash and possessions worth more than £500.
Inevitably, it has seen him bogged down in litigation ever since. In 2012, Adams was sent back to prison after it emerged that he’d failed to declare luxury purchases including a £7,500 facelift, membership of an exclusive Hertfordshire country club, and £2,200 on a Cartier watch.
On his release, he was ordered to repay £750,000 under a confiscation order related to his prior conviction. Adams responded by pleading poverty, saying he was a ‘broken man’ forced to survive by ‘poncing’ off his wife, and couldn’t possibly find that cash.
Prosecutors reckoned otherwise, however, telling the court that he’d recently enjoyed (among other things) massages at The Dorchester hotel, expensive meals at Browns in Mayfair and a string of first-class flights. At the time, 2014, Adams told the court he was living in an apartment near St Albans in Hertfordshire.
Quite how, two years later, he was able to convince Camden Council’s housing department that he’d lived in their borough for five of the previous seven years is anyone’s guess.
The confiscation case rumbled on until 2017, when a judge ruled that Terry Adams actually had substantial means and would be sent to prison for several years unless the cash was produced within a few days. Hey presto, the ‘ broken man’ managed to find £730,000 in less than 24 hours.
Last August, history repeated itself: Adams was told to pay £50,000 in prosecution costs owed to the Crown, but again pleaded extreme poverty.
His barrister Stephen Gilchrist said: ‘He hasn’t got the money.’
This second case continued until last week, when the judge lost patience and announced that Adams would be sent to prison immediately if he refused to pay.
Once again, the ‘broken man’ managed to come up with the cash in around 24 hours. He therefore remains a free man.
Meanwhile, Camden Council — responsible for some areas that are in the ten per cent most deprived in the country and which supposedly doesn’t give properties to people with more than £ 32,000 — finds itself in an awkward position.
For it has rented one of its smartest council flats to a notorious, violent criminal who has, during the 18 months he’s lived there, been able to lay his hands on 25 times that amount.
How appalled local council taxpayers will be to know that they’re footing the bill.
He still has all the trappings of wealth ‘Broken’ Adams found £730,000 in just 24 hours