They described him as one of a new breed of ruthless and sophisticated ‘godfathers’ who’d completely overhauled the way criminal gangs worked – so that bringing bosses like him to justice proved all but impossible. They listed on a whiteboard the differences between this ‘new wave’ of crime lords and the ‘pavement-crossing, sawn-off shotgun merchants’ of yore. Some stuck in my mind.
* They acquire legitimate businesses and use them as a front for their illegal activities.
* They employ top accountants, lawyers, barristers, financial advisers to make this happen.
* They are willing to deal with any group globally, including terror organisations.
* They are surveillance aware, tech savvy and shun fame. Photographs of these people do not exist in the public domain.
* They are willing to kill or punish people personally rather than employ others to do their dirty work, to eliminate the risk of blackmail or betrayal.
Officially, Reilly made his money in security, recycled metal and waste management – the classic gangster’s holy trinity of Slap, Scrap and Crap. But as the Scotland Yard spooks explained, his rise from nowhere came about through the far more dubious trio of gold, protection rackets and E.
The youngest of 12 kids, he’d been brought up on London’s meanest streets in Canning Town – an irredeemably drab and pitiless slum near the Royal Docks on the river Thames. The East End of his childhood pre-dated Canary Wharf, City Airport, Docklands Light Rail and fancy apartment blocks, performing instead as London’s coke-caked arsehole, the watery outlet for miles of ironworks, chemical factories and filthy gasworks.
By the time Reilly left school in 1975, aged 15, any docks that hadn’t been shut down were closing. Rampant unemployment led to a thriving black market and the emergence of local gangs like the Snipers and the Inter-City Firm (ICF), soccer hooligans who’d attached themselves to local club West Ham United, aka the Hammers.
Like five of his brothers before him, he was recruited by the Snipers and got involved in lorry hijacks, armed robbery, protection rackets and muscle for established local criminals.
By 21, he reputedly headed the Snipers and ran his operations out of the Duke of York pub on Freemason’s Road, at the edge of Canning Town. He’d terrorised the landlady into giving over the lease even though her name was still above the door.
That same year, 1981, after a shooting at an illegal drinking den in Homerton, detectives raided the Reilly family scaffolding business and seized stolen goods, a sawn-off shotgun and ammunition. Reilly was convicted of handling stolen goods but escaped prison, receiving a nine-month suspended sentence – his only conviction.
This brush with justice spurred Reilly to identify less risky, more profitable criminal enterprises in which he didn’t have to get his hands dirty. He muscled in on local massage parlours, taking a cut of the profits. He invested in an amphetamine sulphate factory ran by major league East End criminals with distribution networks all over the country. He set up a security firm supplying bouncers to clubs and pubs, employing his old pals from the ICF and the Snipers. This proved an ingenious ruse as he could ‘charge’ drug dealers to work inside, barring anyone who refused to pay the going rate.
Then, in November 1983, a robbery near Heathrow airport set Reilly and his ‘new wave’ criminal contemporaries on a whole new trajectory. The five-man gang who pulled off the ‘Brink’s Mat robbery’ expected to get away with £3 million in cash. Instead, their overloaded getaway blue Transit van trundled up the A4 weighed down with 6,800 bars of gold in 76 cardboard boxes, a three-tonne booty worth £26 million.
This jackpot altered the British criminal landscape forever.
Police nabbed the robbers and put tabs on any major criminals with the clout/contacts to move/melt such a large amount of precious metal. So the major criminals divided the gold and delegated the moving/melting to trusted fledgling gangsters or specialists on the rise. Men like John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, Kenneth Noye, the Evans brothers from Islington and to James Declan Reilly from Canning Town.
These criminals became masters in a new art – laundering or cleaning dirty money so that it couldn’t be traced back to criminal activity. Reilly hired dodgy expertise to rinse his filthy lucre through property, clubs, bars, restaurants and a waste recycling plant. He shifted yet more into untraceable offshore accounts.
By the late 1980s, he’d become something of a criminal venture capitalist, investing in the importation of ecstasy from Holland while his ‘muscle’ forcibly took over nightclubs where it could be distributed. He also set up chemical companies to develop ‘designer drugs’, substances that could replicate the effects of E and cocaine while avoiding the illegal classification.
But he still wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, especially when it came to dealing with people who crossed him.
Reilly’s flair for innovative savagery underpinned his fearsome reputation.
First, they quoted a statement made by criminal Paul Clarke who’d borrowed a car from a dealership controlled by Reilly in Barking – only to have the vehicle seized by creditors. When Clarke returned to the showroom and broke the news, Reilly explained how he ‘couldn’t be seen to let something like this go’ and produced a four-inch knife. Clarke thought he was about to be stabbed. Instead Reilly pushed the knife up through Clarke’s chin then pulled it all the way to his left ear. Clarke described ‘this terrible scraping noise’ and ‘feeling as though the skin on my face was flapping’. He made the statement after receiving 45 stitches and life-saving treatment at the local accident and emergency ward, then promptly withdrew it the next day.
Just before Christmas, Reilly carried out a ruthless double hit on a couple in Epping Forest, Essex. Terry Golden, 39, and his girlfriend Marlene Anderson, 28, were found slumped in the front seat of a black F-reg Mercedes on an isolated forest track, blasted to death by a sawn-off shotgun. Police could prove that Golden, an accountant, had been managing the accounts of a string of clubs and pubs connected to Reilly. But they couldn’t prove much else.
Golden had been siphoning off funds when Reilly invited him to an emergency meeting at the Good Intent pub in Upshire. Golden brought Marlene along, believing this would protect him from any extreme censure, at least for now.
Reilly waited for the couple in the pub car park, climbed into the back seat and directed them to the spot on a lover’s lane where they were later found riddled with lead. Apparently, Golden had protested: ‘You can’t shoot me in front of my girlfriend.’ So Reilly shot her first and said, ‘Well, you’re not going to die in front of her now.’
But the most infamous example of his pitiless streak took place three years ago when he learned that an old associate, Bobby Atkins, had been a police informer.
Reilly instructed his son and daughter, aged 11 and 15, to invite Bobby’s unwitting nine-year-old girl Amy over for a party at their outdoor swimming pool. Later that sunny afternoon, medics found Amy on the second step down to the wading pool, arse clamped to an uncovered suction drain so powerful that it had already caused a two-inch full rectal tear and drawn out a foot-long section of small intestine. Trans-anal intestinal evisceration is the technical term. Loss of blood caused her to go into hypovolemic shock. Paramedics performed a blood transfusion at the scene.
Over the following weeks, she underwent small bowel, liver and pancreas transplants. Her body rejected one of these imposters and she died.
When questioned by police, Jimmy blamed the ‘accident’ on a Portugese pool attendant who’d removed the drain cover to carry out general maintenance and had failed to replace it. Officers didn’t get a chance to quiz 19-year-old Christiano before he vanished. Most suspected he ended up at Jimmy’s waste recycling plant in Dagenham, incinerated with the rest of his rubbish.
Reilly topped it with