Crimewatch Caught Season 2 Episode 3

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Transcript

00:01Hello, police emergency.

00:08I'm police!

00:21We'll work around the clock if it means putting criminals behind bars.

00:24It only takes that one mistake for us to catch you.

00:27Crime doesn't pay. You will be caught.

00:35Organised crime groups will go to any lengths to avoid detection.

00:40Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?

00:41They operate in cities and towns across the UK,

00:44selling everything from illegal drugs to counterfeit goods,

00:48with no thought for the havoc they caused communities.

00:51From using retail units as a front to peddle dangerous counterfeit vapes and tobacco,

00:56We've seen £600,000 worth of goods.

00:59to couriering vast quantities of Class A drugs and money around the country.

01:04I've got £300,000 by the looks of it.

01:06These gangs will try anything to obey detection.

01:10In October 2023, detectives in South Wales were monitoring an individual

01:16whose curious long-distance car journeys had caused suspicion.

01:20He was relentless.

01:33The prolific professional drug courier.

01:35Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?

01:37600 kilos of cannabis.

01:3911 kilos of cocaine.

01:40Jesus Christ.

01:41And in excess of £1.7 million in criminal cash.

01:44Search me, search me now.

01:46It was next level.

01:47It was something that they've not come across before.

01:49And we had to put a stop to it.

01:51Tarion is the regional organised crime unit covering the three southern Welsh police forces.

02:04Established in 2003, they collaborate and investigate the most complex crime gangs.

02:10My name is Sean Merrick. I'm a detective constable within Tarion.

02:14I work within the disruption team.

02:16Our goal is to target and disrupt organised criminal gangs

02:20that are operating and causing the most harm to southern Wales.

02:23Drug trafficking and money laundering is quite prevalent for us.

02:27Drugs are trafficked by air, land and sea.

02:30One of the areas that we target within the supply chain

02:33is organised crime gangs exploiting the road network in and out of southern Wales.

02:40For operational reasons, this detective's identity must remain hidden.

02:46For the past 12 and a half years, I've been involved in COVID policing.

02:50The vast majority of the cases that I've dealt with

02:53has been serious high-level drug trafficking.

02:56There's a huge problem across the entire UK with drug trafficking.

03:00Everything from cocaine, heroin, cannabis, MDMA, the whole range.

03:06Drug couriers, at the level that we work at, carry significant multi-multi-kilos of drug commodity.

03:14Their sole role is to pass it on from one courier to the next courier.

03:20We target vehicles that we suspect are being utilised by organised crime groups,

03:26couriering Class A drugs or any illegal commodity in and out of South Wales.

03:29Millions of people travelling out of Wales on a daily basis, so it's not an easy task.

03:35However, we have a system in place where we're able to triage vehicles that are coming in and out of Wales.

03:41There's certain aspects of the investigation work that I can't go into detail about.

03:46There's a key factor in which we look at to try and determine what is a travel that we would refer to as a clandestrian exchange.

03:53However, if I was to tell you that the tactic would change overnight,

03:57and it would frustrate law enforcement for future investigations.

04:00Within the police, we're familiar with areas that are quite vulnerable to drug supply.

04:05So we look at the destinations that they go in.

04:08We try and effectively take a chink out of their armour in terms of that supply chain.

04:13In September 2023, a vehicle of interest came to our attention.

04:22It had been to Wales on two previous occasions.

04:25The vehicle was registered out of our force area.

04:28The areas it was attending was known to us for drug supply.

04:33So we determined that this vehicle was of interest to us.

04:36We conducted checks which revealed that that particular vehicle was actually registered to a gentleman by the name of Nathaniel Armani.

04:47Nathaniel Armani was from the Hertfordshire area, just outside of London.

04:51He was what we would refer to as a clean-skinned individual.

04:56Clean-skinned is an individual that had not previously come to the police's attention or received convictions.

05:03Up until the vehicle came to our interest in September 23, he was someone that we had no knowledge of.

05:10Suspicious of some of Armani's unusual driving routes, police put him under surveillance monitoring his journeys across the UK.

05:18When you target couriers, you see movements of the vehicle that's not generally consistent with an ordinary member of the public travelling about living their life.

05:28On the 12th of October, 2023, Mr. Armani had travelled a significant journey north from Hertfordshire to Scotland.

05:39It added a red flag to us.

05:41We've organised crime groups. The reward has to significantly outweigh the risk.

05:47So when we looked at this particular journey on that day, it's not going to make that journey for a small amount of commodity.

05:53We anticipated that that journey would yield a significant recovery of a commodity or cash.

05:59So we decided that it was a good time to act.

06:02Convinced Armani was travelling to Scotland for an exchange of drugs or cash, detectives enlisted the help of police in Cumbria.

06:12The aim? To stop and search his car as it travelled back down south.

06:16From the moment we've contacted Cumbria-Costarbury, it's then a waiting game for us.

06:20Until that vehicle stopped, we don't know what's in there.

06:23You know, we've got to make sure that we're not stopping innocent members of the public.

06:27You all right, pal? You all right, buddy?

06:29Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?

06:31We're in limbo waiting for that phone call to determine if our working hypothesis was correct.

06:36We're going to give you a search in your vehicle, a search, OK?

06:39And do the misuse of drugs at Section 23.

06:42Is there anything on yourself or in the vehicle that there shouldn't be?

06:45Not on me.

06:47Not on you?

06:48Mr. Armani was calm and was compliant and engaged with officers.

06:53And then during the search of that vehicle, officers recovered a significant fine.

06:59200,000 pound cash.

07:04With their hunch that Armani could be moving cash and drugs for an organised crime group looking more likely,

07:11detectives brought him in for further questioning.

07:14Top of their list, where did that 200k come from?

07:22Meanwhile in Cardiff,

07:24Trading Standards had been alerted to another gang using corner shops to sell counterfeit and dangerous tobacco and vapes.

07:32We just thought it was a corner shop and someone was hiding cigarettes under the counter or behind a drawer.

07:41We seized in excess of 600,000 pounds worth of illegal tobacco.

07:47Identified multi-million pounds worth of money laundering.

07:51You could see that it had become an organised crime group which had tentacles that spread across all of Wales into England and even abroad.

08:07Illegal cigarettes and illegal vapes usually are counterfeit.

08:10That's basically tobacco that shouldn't be sold on the streets.

08:17The public don't necessarily see the hidden danger.

08:19So they're buying it because it's cheap.

08:22And it's cheaper for a reason.

08:24It doesn't go through our stringent checks.

08:28And it can include anything.

08:29Really high levels of tar.

08:32It can have like droppings off the floor.

08:36There's been reports where there's been tobacco and they've actually found things like rat poison.

08:41Someone buying them would not know this.

08:43It's always been a problem.

08:48It's never been so organised as it is today though.

08:52They've now bringing in it from abroad and they're bringing it en masse.

08:59The smuggling of black market cigarettes might be an old crime.

09:03But officers were becoming aware of an alarming new trend happening alongside this.

09:08The sale of fake vapes.

09:11Which have been found to contain all sorts of hidden substances including harmful psychoactive drugs.

09:17Including spice.

09:19With a spike in reports of shops selling these fake goods.

09:23The team wanted to crack down on these unscrupulous sellers.

09:29In June 2019 it was decided to have a review of actionable intelligence that we've received within trading standards.

09:37As a result of that it highlighted some criminality.

09:40That criminality was around the sale of illegal vapes, caldific goods and cigarettes.

09:45We found a hotspot between Clifton Street and Cardiff.

09:51And when we looked a little bit deeper we could see there was three or four premises that were constantly being mentioned.

09:56In August 2019 we decided to put observations and conduct surveillance within Clifton Street.

10:04This particular area of Cardiff accounted for over a quarter of all our intelligence.

10:11Clifton Street is quite a small street but there's lots of retail units there.

10:17The street itself had spotters on them.

10:19We could see that outside these shops there was usually young lads who were watching up and down the street.

10:26They were looking for police to arrive, they were looking for trading standards to arrive.

10:31And we noted that as soon as one of them saw something they would pass it on to the other shops.

10:36And we could see that there was a ripple effect down the street.

10:42We could see there was a lot of footfall within those shops.

10:45They were buying small objects such as tobacco or cigarettes.

10:48And that footfall obviously raised our suspicions even more.

10:52Especially combined with the fact that we went in and we did some test purchases with hidden cameras and we bought some illicit tobacco.

10:58There was multiple visitors to the shops in various vehicles.

11:03Some of the intelligence we had was deliveries were being made of cigarettes in the evenings.

11:08Suspicious these were hallmarks of an organised network moving illegal products between different shopfronts.

11:15Officers worked quickly to identify suspects and properties of interest.

11:18Following the surveillance period, our colleagues in Newport Trading Standards were doing some routine tobacco work with the sniffer dogs.

11:32And they had a seizure of tobacco in a self store unit in their area.

11:37And they found a link from that unit to one in Cardiff.

11:40It identified four of the people that were already on our radar following the surveillance.

11:50Which was Aisha Bibi, Farhad Safazada, Shwan Safazada and Ali Al Darawish.

12:01With four people of interest linked to this lockup in Cardiff, investigators raided the unit and found a haul of counterfeit goods.

12:08So the value of the find is actually quite significant.

12:14There was over 7,000 tobacco products.

12:17And the value of those goods was over £77,000.

12:23But the pandemic put a stop to any more raids or surveillance giving them an opportunity to dig into their case more thoroughly.

12:31During Covid, I think we were starting to realise that it was perhaps a bit bigger than we initially thought.

12:41It gave us that little bit of space, I suppose, to really look into the finances to then plan what we needed to do in terms of further people, further warrants.

12:52By the spring of 2021, when they could get back out on the streets, they had a list of premises to target.

13:00On the 13th of May, then, we were able to organise an operation day with South Wales Police.

13:07But this time we were able to identify other premises, residential premises, that we knew we wanted to go into.

13:14Ahead of that operation, you are slightly nervous that you'd had that period of time where not really much had happened.

13:26So there is that doubt, a little bit of doubt in your mind around what are you going to find, is it going to be OK?

13:32Their work had paid off. The team searched nine properties plus flats above the shops in Cardiff and were stunned at their findings.

13:44When you go into some of these places, you suddenly see the lengths they're going to, to hide or conceal.

13:52And then you begin to realise that perhaps how lucrative it is for them.

13:56There were multiple secret compartments locked by remote control.

14:02They were using electronic magnets to keep them shut.

14:05So we started turning the power off.

14:08And of course, then, these electrical magnets wouldn't work.

14:13And they started pinging open while we were in the stores.

14:16Just to see it ping open and all the tobacco product is behind it, yeah, we found it.

14:22In some cases, it was transported by electric winches and inside plastic tubes from the flats above the shops straight down to the counter below.

14:34I suppose it's like a little win for us on that day.

14:37So following on from our operation in the May, some of those people that were running the shops in Clifton Street then started moving elsewhere.

14:53Suddenly we had intel that shops were opening in Barrie.

14:57We did three more days of coordinated operations with partners and it just hit them again.

15:06It just kept adding to who we needed to look at.

15:10I think at the height of it, we had over 50 people identified as part of this group.

15:16And that's when we really started to realise how well organised these people were.

15:20It was a much, much bigger picture that covered the whole of South Wales.

15:27We targeted shops, we targeted home addresses, we targeted the flats.

15:32The gang was stashing their illegal goods inside their homes.

15:36One of the suspects, he'd actually shrunk his son's bedroom, which created a small little room behind.

15:45And he filled it full of tobacco.

15:48We interviewed him, he actually blamed his 75-year-old mother.

15:55We recovered substantial amounts of money, substantial amounts of tobacco.

15:59Huge financial intelligence was gathered from those addresses.

16:02They estimated that each shop was making around £1,000 a day.

16:09So it was a gold mine from all respect.

16:12Even more alarmingly, it wasn't just counterfeit goods they found during the raids.

16:18There was like a set of stairs with like a dead end, it had been boarded up.

16:23The police officer that we were with put this through.

16:26And there was five immigrants living in the basement of this store.

16:30It's quite a shocking moment really.

16:34You can imagine the scenes.

16:37No ID hadn't been in the country that long.

16:41And they had been trafficked in.

16:44This illegal tobacco trade is generating funds that's underpinning organised immigration crime.

16:51As they made the final preparations to their case, one of their key players, Rebin Ahmed, was arrested in an unrelated incident.

17:05In his possession at the time of arrest, a one-way ticket to go back to Iraq.

17:11That obviously expedited things from our perspective because we realised that he was trying to leave the country.

17:17And the court decided obviously it was going to be a flight risk, so they remanded him to prison.

17:23In total, 11 people were charged.

17:26On the 6th of November 2023, the first six defendants to trial at Swansea Crown Court.

17:34All were found guilty.

17:37The following February 2024, the remaining five gang members were also found guilty.

17:43We were absolutely elated.

17:46The actual fact that they found guilty was tremendous.

17:50So we'd successfully prosecuted and convicted 11 of them.

17:55As a result of that, we had the most successful prosecution that we'd had in relation to this type of offending and the largest amount of sentencing.

18:02They were convicted of participating in a fraudulent business and for selling unlawful tobacco and nitrous oxide.

18:12Five of the gang were jailed for between three and seven years and the rest received suspended sentences.

18:20In total, we identified nearly £3 million worth of money laundering between all of these people solely relating to the sale of illegal tobacco and vapes.

18:32And it just shows the sheer scale of what was behind this.

18:38When the judge was handed down the sentence, when he called the first defendant to stand up, and when he gave seven years, the reaction in the court was incredible.

18:50I firmly believe they thought they'd get away with it.

18:53But even in court proceedings, some of the comments that they'd make, this is going to go nowhere, we're going to walk away free.

19:02And obviously when that didn't happen, that's a real marker.

19:06People think it's a harmless crime. You know, all you're doing is protecting the taxpayer because obviously there's no tax on this, these goods.

19:16But that's not the case. Communities were suffering from these individuals.

19:19There's a much, much bigger area of criminality that's involved. And obviously the risk of the general public is much, much higher.

19:26We continue to carry out those investigations and those inspections.

19:29We will displace, we will disrupt, and where at all possible, we will prosecute.

19:36With one of the largest illegal tobacco rings in Wales now safely dismantled, another set of investigators are working on their own case involving a suspected drugs courier.

19:53Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?

19:56Officers from Cumbria Constabulary have stopped and searched the suspect.

20:01We're going to give you a search in your vehicle, a search, okay?

20:04Jesus Christ.

20:08Receiving that phone call to say that, you know, you've taken £200,000 worth of criminal cash out of an organised crime group's hands, that's rewarding.

20:17I've got another mobile phone in here.

20:19He was found in possession of three mobile phones, which is typical of a courier.

20:25Search me, search me now.

20:27Keep your hands out your pockets.

20:29Search me.

20:30They also found Armani had £1,000 in his pocket.

20:35Couriers can make huge amounts of money.

20:38They tend not to take a cut of the proceedings.

20:41They tend to be paid a wage.

20:43Let's go.

20:45Officers have then arrested Mr Armani and then taken back to the nearest custody unit in Cumbria.

20:49In our experience, a courier doesn't go straight into couriering £200,000.

20:56The likelihood is that he has been involved on a greater, more organised scale.

21:00With the £200,000 confirming their instincts that Armani could be involved in an OCG, detectives took him in for questioning.

21:09If it's not your cash, who does that cash belong to?

21:15No comments.

21:16Is that cash criminal property?

21:18No comments.

21:20Mr Armani was very calm, didn't appear phased, certainly by it at the time.

21:24The £1,000 in your pocket, where's that from?

21:28A window machine, no service station.

21:31What machine?

21:32Service station, like a fruit machine.

21:34Oh, right, so...

21:35Gamble.

21:36Gotcha.

21:39Which service station was that?

21:42I stopped.

21:43The lead stations.

21:44I stopped a few times.

21:46Okay.

21:47Can you tell me what those three service stations are?

21:49No.

21:51I don't know.

21:52No comments.

21:53The evidence that we had on Armani on this point was that he was found in possession of £200,000 cash

21:59and that he's failed to provide a plausible explanation for being in possession of that amount of cash.

22:05The three mobile phones recovered during the arrest were sent to the cyber department for extraction.

22:12They contained so much data, and that takes time.

22:14But he was frustrated further by Mr Armani's refusal to provide his PIN codes,

22:19Owing to the significant amount of cash that was recovered.

22:23The likelihood of Mr Armani fleeing resulted in us submitting a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service that evening.

22:29Armani was charged with money laundering and drug supply offences and remanded in custody.

22:36Meanwhile, the digital forensic report from his three handsets showed just how much travelling he had been doing.

22:42On examination of that extraction report, the true extent of Armani's offending was revealed.

22:49We recovered images of wholesale amounts of cannabis, blocks of cocaine, and videos and images of large amounts of cash, hundreds of thousands of pounds at a time.

23:01The messages revealed that Armani was a professional courier.

23:06He'd been doing this directed by another to various postcodes and destinations, not only in Wales, but throughout the entire UK.

23:16Armani was also in possession of tokens, images of foreign banknotes, which drug couriers use during a drug or cash exchange with other OCGs.

23:26Tokens are a concept that has been in existence for several years.

23:32The courier will take a photograph of the token.

23:35The vast majority of time, it's a banknote with a serial number on.

23:39The selling courier would then send that to whoever he was controlling within his organised crime group.

23:44It's basically a proof that the two OCGs have met the correct individuals for the transaction to take place.

23:54Eliminates the chance of it being law enforcement or a rival organised crime group.

24:01As investigations continued, the extent of Armani's involvement as a drug driver really began to unravel.

24:08We could show that Mr Armani was travelling throughout the UK from his data on his phone.

24:14When we looked at the vehicle that he was stopped in, we couldn't tally the movements of that vehicle to all the trips.

24:21So we then believed that, like it is, he's using another vehicle.

24:25Through telecoms and traffic camera data, detectives identified a second vehicle that Armani was using.

24:34This one hired from a car leasing company.

24:38The hire company confirmed that he'd hired no fewer than 15, 16 different vehicles from them.

24:44He utilised for the purposes of courier and controlled drugs and criminal cash.

24:48It's purely to try and frustrate law enforcement, distance himself from the journeys that he's making and to try and blend in as best he can.

24:58With the incriminating GPS data taken from Armani's three phones, detectives re-interviewed him.

25:05It is presented that you are in fact a professional courier for an OCG and you are responsible for the collection of hundreds of thousands of pounds in criminal cash

25:16and the supplying of wholesale, multi-kilo quantities of cocaine and cannabis.

25:21Do you wish to say anything about that?

25:22No privilege.

25:24Review of your bank accounts. There is no sign of a salary whatsoever.

25:28Please explain to me now how you can legitimise any of the money going through your bank accounts.

25:33No privilege.

25:34The evidence is very damning.

25:37Armani was relentless.

25:38He was constantly on the road, constantly everywhere throughout the entire UK.

25:44Complex investigations like this often require a drug expert witness.

25:50My role is to be completely impartial and independent from the investigation team,

25:56to provide unbiased opinion, to assist the court with understanding matters that are involved in drug supply.

26:03In my expert opinion, the defendant was a prolific and professional drug courier working on behalf of others.

26:12He was travelling extensively delivering both drug commodity and collecting vast amounts of drug debts.

26:19We were able to evidence that Armani had transported in excess of 1.7 million pounds in criminal cash,

26:28in excess of 600 kilos of cannabis and 11 kilos of cocaine.

26:34The street value amounted to in excess of 2 million pounds.

26:37The sheer amount of commodity that Mr. Armani was shifting on a daily basis was next level.

26:46It was something that I have not come across before.

26:49In 2025, Armani pleaded guilty to money laundering and drug supply offences.

26:56Armani was sentenced at Mirford Crown Court on 2 May.

27:00The judge, during his comments, made reference that he had supplied quite a staggering amount of cannabis

27:05and actually sentenced Mr. Armani to 15 years in prison.

27:10That sentence was extremely significant, certainly for someone with no previous convictions.

27:16It's the highest sentence I have seen for a professional courier.

27:19Armani was a key figure for the group that he operated within,

27:22and by taking him out of the picture, it certainly has disrupted that particular organised crime group's operations.

27:28Although Armani is safely behind bars, the search is far from over for the Kingpins controlling this gang.

27:36Armani was working for an organised crime group that we believed was operating out of the Metropolitan Police area.

27:43That intelligence has been fed back into the Metropolitan Police,

27:46who are actively pursuing those lines of enquiries.

27:50The arrest and sentence of Armani shows that Tarion will not only pursue individuals

27:57that are responsible for transporting drugs in and out of southern Wales.

28:01We are relentless in our pursuit against disrupting organised criminal gangs operating anywhere in the UK.

28:06The

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