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Crimewatch Caught Smoke and Mirrors (27th October 2025)
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00:01Hello, police emergency.
00:08Mark, please do me work!
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.
00:39Do 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,
00:47with 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 evade 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.
01:33A prolific, professional drug courier.
01:35Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?
01:37600 kilos of cannabis, 11 kilos of cooking.
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 have not come across before.
01:49And we had to put a stop to it.
01:51Tarrion 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 Tarrion.
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.
02:45For 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,
03:26currying class A drugs or any illegal commodity in and out of south Wales.
03:30Millions of people travel in and 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
03:51that we would refer to as a clandestine 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're going.
04:08We try and effectively take a chink out of their armour in terms of that supply chain.
04:15In September 2023, a vehicle of interest came to our attention.
04:21It 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.
04:32So we determined that this vehicle was of interest to us.
04:37We conducted checks which revealed that that particular vehicle was actually registered
04:42to 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.
04:55Clean-skinned is an individual that had not previously come to the police's attention
05:01or received convictions.
05:04Up until the vehicle came to our interest in September 23,
05:07he was someone that we had no knowledge of.
05:10Suspicious of some of Armani's unusual driving routes,
05:14police put him under surveillance monitoring his journeys across the UK.
05:18When you target couriers, you see movements of the vehicle
05:22that's not generally consistent with an ordinary member of the public
05:27travelling about living their life.
05:31On the 12th of October, 2023, Mr. Armani had travelled a significant journey north
05:36from Hertfordshire to Scotland.
05:39It added a red flag to us.
05:41With organised crime groups, the reward has to significantly outweigh the risk.
05:46So when we looked at this particular journey on that day,
05:50it'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.
06:03Convinced Armani was travelling to Scotland for an exchange of drugs or cash,
06:08detectives enlisted the help of police in Cumbria.
06:11The aim? To stop and search his car as it travelled back down south.
06:17From the moment we've contacted Cumbria-Castardbury,
06:19it's then a waiting game for us.
06:21Until that vehicle stops, 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.
06:28You all right, pal?
06:29You all right, buddy?
06:30Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?
06:32We're in limbo waiting for that phone call to determine
06:34if our working hypothesis was correct.
06:36We're going to give you a search in your vehicle, a search, OK?
06:39And do a 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,
06:56officers recovered a significant fine.
07:02200,000 pound cash.
07:05With their hunch that Armani could be moving cash and drugs
07:08for an organized crime group looking more likely,
07:11detectives brought him in for further questioning.
07:14Top of their list, where did that 200k come from?
07:18Meanwhile, in Cardiff, trading 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 became an organized crime group which had tentacles that spread across all of Wales into England and even abroad.
08:00Illegal cigarettes and illegal vapes are usually a counterfeit.
08:10That's basically tobacco that shouldn't be sold on the streets.
08:15The 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.
08:27And it can include anything.
08:29Really high levels of tar.
08:31It can have, like, droppings off the floor.
08:35There have been reports where there's been tobacco and they've actually found things like wrath poison.
08:40Someone buying them would not know this.
08:47It's always been a problem.
08:48It's never been so organized as it is today, though.
08:51They're now bringing in it from abroad and they're bringing it en masse.
08:56The smuggling of black market cigarettes might be an old crime, but officers were becoming aware of an alarming new trend happening alongside this.
09:08The sale of fake vapes, which have been found to contain all sorts of hidden substances, including harmful psychoactive drugs, including spice.
09:19With a spike in reports of shops selling these fake goods, the 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, cultific goods and cigarettes.
09:45We found a hotspot being Clifton Street in Cardiff.
09:51And when we looked a little bit deeper, we could see there was three or four premises that were constantly being mentioned.
09:57In 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.
10:10Clifton Street is quite a small street, but there's lots of retail units there.
10:16The 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.
10:25They 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.
10:41We could see there was a lot of footfall within those shops.
10:44They 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.
10:59There 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.
11:07Suspicious these were hallmarks of an organised network moving illegal products between different shopfronts.
11:15Officers worked quickly to identify suspects and properties of interest.
11:23Following the surveillance period, our colleagues in Newport Trading Standards were doing some routine tobacco work with the sniffer dogs.
11:31And 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.
11:44It identified four of the people that were already on our radar following the surveillance.
11:50Which was Aisha Bibi, Farhad Sofizadeh, Shwan Sofizadeh 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.
12:11So the value of the find is actually quite significant.
12:14There was over 7,000 tobacco products.
12:18And the value of those goods was over £77,000.
12:22But the pandemic put a stop to any more raids or surveillance, giving them an opportunity to dig into their case more thoroughly.
12:32During Covid, I think we were starting to realise that it was perhaps a bit bigger than we initially thought.
12:39It 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.
12:53By the spring of 2021, when they could get back out on the streets, they had a list of premises to target.
12:59On the 13th of May, then, we were able to organise an Operation Day with South Wales Police.
13:06But 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?
13:33Their work had paid off.
13:35The team searched nine properties plus flats above the shops in Cardiff and were stunned at their findings.
13:45When 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.
13:57There were multiple secret compartments locked by remote control.
14:01They were using electronic magnets to keep them shut.
14:06So 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.
14:23In some cases, it was transported by electric winches and inside plastic tubes from the flats above the shops.
14:31Straight down to the counter below.
14:34I suppose it's like a little win for us on that day.
14:43So following on from our operation in the May, some of those people that were running the shops in Clifton Street then started moving elsewhere.
14:52Suddenly we had intel that shops were opening in Barrie.
14:58We did three more days of coordinated operations with partners and it just hit them again.
15:04It 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.
15:22It 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.
15:53We recovered substantial amounts of money, substantial amounts of tobacco.
15:58Huge financial intelligence was gathered from those addresses.
16:03They estimated that each shop was making around £1,000 a day.
16:09So it was a gold mine from our perspective.
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.
16:25And there was five immigrants living in the basement of this store.
16:31It's quite a shocking moment really.
16:35You can imagine the scenes.
16:38No ID, hadn't been in the country that long.
16:42And they had been trafficked in.
16:45This illegal tobacco trade is generating funds that's underpinning organised immigration crime.
16:55As they made the final preparations to their case, one of their key players, Rebin Ahmed, was arrested in an unrelated incident.
17:06In his possession at the time of arrest, he won my ticket to go back to Iraq.
17:10That obviously expedited things from our perspective because we realised that he was trying to leave the country.
17:18And the court decided obviously it was going to be a flight risk, so they remanded him to prison.
17:22In total, 11 people were charged.
17:26On the 6th of November 2023, the first six defendants to trial at Swansea Crown Court.
17:33All were found guilty.
17:35The 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.
17:49So 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.
18:19In 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.
18:54But 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.
19:00Um, and obviously when that didn't happen, it was, 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 is involved.
19:22And obviously the risk of the general public is much, much higher.
19:26We continue to carry out those investigations and those inspections.
19:30And we will displace, we will disrupt, and where at all possible, we will prosecute.
19:35With 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 do a favour? Do you want to just step in our vehicle for us?
19:56Officers from Cumbria Constabulary have stopped and searched the suspect.
20:00We're going to give you a search in your vehicle and a search, okay?
20:03Jesus Christ.
20:07Receiving 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.
20:16I've got another mobile phone in here.
20:18He was found in possession of three mobile phones, which is typical of a courier.
20:24Search me, search me now.
20:26Keep your hands out your pockets.
20:28Search me.
20:30They also found Armani had £1,000 in his pocket.
20:35Couriers can make huge amounts of money. They tend not to take a cut of the proceedings. They tend to be paid a wage.
20:43Officers 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. The likelihood is that he has been involved on a greater, more organised scale.
20:59With the £200,000 confirming their instincts that Armani could be involved in an OCG, detectives took him in for questioning.
21:08If it's not your cash, who does that cash belong to?
21:15No comments.
21:16Is that cash criminal property?
21:18No comments.
21:19Mr 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?
21:28Winner machine, no service station.
21:30What machine?
21:31Service station with a fruits machine.
21:33Oh, right, so...
21:34Gamble.
21:35Gotcha.
21:36So...
21:38Which service station was that?
21:41I stopped, the lead stations. I stopped a few times.
21:45OK.
21:46Can you tell me what those three service stations are?
21:49No, I don't...
21:51I don't know, no comments.
21:53The evidence that we had on Armani on this point was that he was found in possession of £200,000 cash,
21:58and that he's failed to provide a plausible explanation for being in possession of that amount of cash.
22:04The three mobile phones recovered during the arrest were sent to the cyber departments for extraction.
22:11They 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.
22:30Armani 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.
22:43Upon examination of that extraction report, the true extent of Armani's offending was revealed.
22:51We recovered images of wholesale amounts of cannabis, blocks of cocaine, and videos and images of large amounts of cash,
22:59hundreds of thousands of pounds at a time.
23:02The messages revealed that Armani was a professional courier.
23:06He'd been doing this directed by another to various postcodes and destinations,
23:12not only in Wales, but throughout the entire UK.
23:16Armani was also in possession of tokens, images of foreign banknotes,
23:20which 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.
23:31The courier will take a photograph of the token, the vast majority of time.
23:36It's a banknote with a serial number on.
23:38The selling courier would then send that to whoever he was controlling within his organised crime group.
23:45It's basically a proof that the two OCGs have met the correct individuals for the transaction to take place.
23:54It eliminates 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.
24:09We 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.
24:26Through telecoms and traffic camera data, detectives identified a second vehicle that Armani was using.
24:33This 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.
24:43He 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.
24:57With the incriminating GPS data taken from Armani's three phones, detectives re-interviewed him.
25:07It 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,
25:15and the supplying of wholesale, multi-kilo quantities of cocaine and cannabis.
25:21Do you wish to say anything about that?
25:22No comments.
25:23OK.
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.
25:32No comments.
25:34The evidence is very damning.
25:36Armani was relentless.
25:38He was constantly on the road, constantly everywhere, throughout the entire UK.
25:43Complex investigations like this often require a drug expert witness.
25:49My role is to be completely impartial and independent from the investigation team,
25:55to 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 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.
26:39The 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.
26:48In 2025, Armani pleaded guilty to money laundering and drug supply offences.
26:55Armani was sentenced at Mirford Crown Court on the 2nd of May.
26:59The 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 imprisonment.
27:09That sentence was extremely significant, certainly for someone with no previous convictions.
27:15It's the highest sentence I have seen for a professional courier.
27:18Armani was a key figure for the group that he operated within and by taking him out of the picture,
27:25it certainly has disrupted that particular organised crime group's operations.
27:29Although 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 who 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.
28:07The glauben.
28:11What all living is the third period of freedom that we'll do is not intend to occupy our own acts on any other side.
28:13So that's a unique story.
28:15I love you, I love you, I love you.
28:17I love you!
28:19I love you too, I love you.
28:20I love you too!
28:23I love you too!
28:25I love you too.
28:28I love you too, I love you too!
28:31I love you too!
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