FROM council estate tower blocks and dingy terraced houses to luxury penthouse apartments and sprawling country mansions, Britain’s criminal underworld network has a home in every corner of the land.
Even the most unassuming properties have been found to be the base for drugs empires and multi-million pound money laundering operations – even a farmer’s shed. So, as we spill the secrets behind these dens of iniquity, is one lurking in your neighbourhood?
Nestled on streets up and down the country, you may be just a stone’s throw from some of Britain’s most ruthless mobsters and their homes – but not even know it.
Retired Met detective Peter Bleksley says the cleverest crooks are the ones who don’t flaunt their wealth or operate their illegal businesses from their homes as they are the most likely to escape detection.
“The most successful criminals love a mock Tudor mansion near the M25,” he says. “They don’t run their operations from their homes – instead they have a legitimate business through which they can launder the cash.
“The ones that get up in the morning and go about their illegal business never going anywhere near a legitimate business are much easier to do a process on by the law enforcement, particularly since the proceeds of crime act came in.
“This has shifted the emphasis on the people with their ill-gotten gains having to prove how they have bought the prestige cars and the luxury mansions.
“The real damaging thing for crooks of any level is not doing time, because they regard that as an occupational hazard. Coming out of prison and being skint is the thing they live more in fear of.
“Their wives understand them going to jail, so if they are not around for six or seven Christmas Days they kind of accept that, as long as they come out and they have still got the wealth, because the wealth equals power and influence.”
And he says the temptation to flaunt five star holidays, penthouse apartments and supercars on social media is a criminal’s biggest downfall.
“There is a new stupid level of criminal who will go on social media with the watches, with the cars, doing the firearms poses with their hands,” says Peter. “This will inevitably bring you to the police’s attention and the prisons are bursting at the seams with these types of clowns. A famous crook is a foolish crook.”
Here, we reveal some of Britain’s most remarkable – and surprisingly unremarkable – criminal secret lairs funded by ill-gotten gains.
‘Golden triangle’ drug mogul
Gregory Bell lived a life of luxury in the same village as footballers Wayne Rooney and Kyle Walker.
He was a ‘company CEO’ with more than 34 properties around Greater Manchester and two villas in Spain as well as the penthouse apartment he lived in in swanky Prestbury.
But his business was far from legit and last week he was jailed for his role as head of one of the country’s biggest drug dealing gangs.
The illicit organisation was said to operate like a business dealing multiple kilos of cocaine, heroin, MDMA, amphetamines and cannabis on a daily basis.
He was raking it in and lived in a ‘prestigious rented apartment’ at Butley Hall, Scott Road in Prestbury, and sent his daughter to a private school – paying her fees with wads of cash.
Even though he had not declared any income for six years, Greater Manchester Police said “it was evident he was living a lavish lifestyle”, with his apartment costing £2,200 per month.
Bell pleaded guilty to conspiring to supply cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, ketamine, amphetamine and cannabis, and money laundering. He was jailed for 18 years and nine months.
Shedley Manor
From the outside it looked just like any other modern farm building.
But inside the cheekily named ‘Shedley Manor’ was a £1.2million luxury mansion, home to drug dealer Alan Yeomans.
The six-bedroom property near Ashbourne, Derbyshire, was built to look like a farmer’s shed to disguise the fraudster’s wealth.
He filed for bankruptcy claiming he owned just £300 and a £30 watch but was running three firms to launder cash from cannabis production.
When police raided the property they found £83,000 in fine art, designer shoes and cannabis worth £40,000 hidden inside.
Yeomans was jailed for six and a half years in 2016 after pleading guilty to nine charges relating to the production and supply of cannabis, stealing electricity, concealing criminal property and failing to disclose bankruptcy.
Derby Crown Court heard he had built the manor in 2002 in his mother’s back garden, without planning permission, and with green cladding to disguise it as a large shed.
The property was initially ear-marked for demolition after his conviction, but it was then re-sold. The current owners have now been given planning permission to renovate it and add windows so it can become a proper luxury home.
£10m property portfolio
Over two decades Mansoor Mahmoud Hussain developed an impressive property portfolio across the North of England, posing as a legitimate businessman and hobnobbing with celebs including Simon Cowell and Beyonce.
But in reality the National Crime Agency say Hussain, known as Manni, was acting for gangsters, including a murderer and drug trafficker and laundering their dirty cash through his property empire.
His social media accounts showed him living a luxury lifestyle involving high-performance cars, executive jets, super-yachts and appearances at VIP events attended by celebrities.
He posted pictures of him rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous – although there is no suggestion that any VIPs he posed with knew who he was.
The 40-year-old was never convicted of a crime, and while detectives claimed to have evidence linking him to serious crooks they could not get detailed enough evidence to bring charges of money laundering.
So instead they used an Unexplained Wealth Order to force the businessman to open his books and prove his wealth had come from legitimate sources.
In 2020 the NCA said he gave up fighting the order and agreed to hand over the vast majority of his empire including apartments, offices, terraced houses and a mansion.
The biggest single property handed over to the NCA was a high-specification apartment and office development, Cubic, on the outskirts of Leeds.
The other properties include a seven bedroom home on Sandmoor Drive in Leeds – one of the city’s most expensive roads – an apartment opposite Harrods in London and terraced housing in Leeds and Bradford.
Towers HQ
The ‘Hellbanianz’ made their name from the tower blocks of the Gascoigne estate in Barking.
The notorious Albanian cartel flaunted their lavish lifestyle filled with fancy cars, diamond-encrusted Rolexes and half-naked girls in music videos, as they bid to take over the UK’s multi-billion pound cocaine trade.
The mobsters – who released their own drill music where they gloat of owning AK-47s – chose the high-rise flats as their base because they are easy to defend.
But a regeneration scheme by Barking and Dagenham council has seen almost all the flats – which the group ‘had taken control of’ – knocked to the ground.
Many of the gang are now believed to have relocated to Dubai, where they continue their flamboyant lifestyles.
Bulletproof mansion
As the billionaire Kinahan drug cartel’s “main man in the UK”, Thomas “Bomber” Kavanagh considered himself untouchable.
He operated from a gated Staffordshire mansion complete with bullet-proof windows and reinforced doors in the posh Oak Hill area of Tamworth.
Through criminal connections overseas, he organised, imported and distributed drugs worth millions of pounds for the Irish cartel.
When agents from the National Crime Agency raided his fortress on Sutton Road in 2019 they discovered revolvers, stun guns, Samurai swords and drugs.
Kavanagh, 55, was jailed in 2022 for 21 years for smuggling £30million-worth of cocaine and cannabis into Britain in a tarmac removal machine.
North London narco
It was home to a notorious Turkish crime family, but now the seven-bedroom mansion is on sale for £1.8million after being seized by the courts.
At the height of their powers, the Baybasin brothers were known as the ‘most dangerous men in Europe‘ for overseeing a global drug trafficking network that controlled 90 per cent of the heroin flowing into Britain.
They settled in the UK in the early 1990s and bought the seven-bedroom family home on Dukes Avenue in the exclusive Canons Drive estate in Edgware.
The Baybasins’ former family home has been boarded up for a few months.
It was seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act at Liverpool Crown Court after the youngest of the three brothers, 59-year-old Mehmet, was jailed in 2011 for plotting with a Merseyside gang to import £4billion of cocaine from South America.
It’s ‘for sale’ advert bills it as a ‘modernisation project’ suitable for families who may want several generations to live together.
Mean street
An ordinary terraced house in Salford was this year unveiled to be the nerve centre of a drug dealing operation worth £52million.
In June this year Payden Candland, Leo Groves and Ricky Lee pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply class A drugs at Bolton Crown Court after a six-year police investigation and were jailed for a total of more than 40 years.
When officers searched the house in Salford in 2019 they found cocaine with a street value of £173,000 alongside cash totalling £33,080.
Detectives, who also raided two other properties, also uncovered notebooks which detailed drugs transactions dated back to 2009.
Detective Inspector Sarah Langley of GMP’s Economic Crime Unit said: “This was without doubt a long-running and large-scale drugs supply operation which was running from a small terraced house in Salford.
“The three men ran a sophisticated business model which was professional and commercial, they were boldly selling drugs across our region and exploiting vulnerable people.
