The easy trick that nailed £130,000 bike theft gang in a single day

Detective Constable Matt Cooper might hardly consider what he was seeing. Row upon row of the costliest and sought-after bicycles within the UK — all snatched from the City of London — some complete, others in items, in what amounted to the largest haul of its type within the police drive’s historical past.

‘I was just shocked,’ he tells me. ‘We had tracked one stolen bike to a plant hire business in East London — and found about 60 more. Bikes in the office, bikes in the toilet, bikes hanging up on rails, bikes stacked up everywhere. There was about £130,000 worth. It was hard to take in.’

DC Cooper and a small group of officers from City of London police had simply cracked an enormous prison operation. But they hadn’t spent months or thousands and thousands doing it. They had infiltrated the gang’s lair and arrested its kingpins in lower than a single shift.

It is an operation being praised by cyclists, and one more likely to make different forces, whose efficiency tackling bicycle crime was described final month as tantamount to ‘decriminalisation’, squirm with embarrassment. 

Because all it took was the need to deal with bicycle theft, an acknowledgment that it isn’t ‘petty crime’ and no small quantity of canny policing.

Last week, Louey Baldwin, 29, from Orpington in Kent, who masterminded the operation, was jailed for 2 years and 9 months for dealing with stolen items.

Sidekick Suleyman Akram, 30, from Southwark, London, was jailed for 2 years and 6 months, and right-hand man Ryan Boxcer, 32, of Shoeburyness, Essex, was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Seven different members of the prison operation have already acquired sentences, starting from six months suspended to 18 months in jail — and a minimum of 20 bikes have been returned to their homeowners.

In the months after the sting, bicycle theft fell by an astonishing 90 per cent.

‘This should make other police forces sit up and take notice,’ says Duncan Dollimore, head of coverage at marketing campaign group Cycling UK. ‘I accept policing concerns about resources and priorities, but this wasn’t an operation that wanted large intelligence or cash. 

It required some wise, intelligent policing with an inexpensive quantity of sources — nevertheless it yielded some fairly substantial outcomes.’

According to Statista.com, a bicycle was stolen each seven minutes in England and Wales final yr — equalling greater than 77,000 thefts. The determine is more likely to be a lot larger, as many, if not most, individuals don’t report them. A family survey by Cycling UK urged the determine may very well be as excessive as 237,000.

Last month, in a blistering assault on the police, the Lib Dems identified that just about 90 per cent of all reported bike thefts go unsolved, whereas just one in 50 ends in an individual being charged. Of the formally reported thefts over the previous 5 years, 350,000 resulted in no conviction.

‘These shocking figures will leave people wondering if bike theft has been decriminalised,’ says Alistair Carmichael, Lib Dem house affairs spokesman. 

‘Whether used for commuting, family days out or exercise, people’s bikes are massively valued possessions. So bike thefts go away victims each out of pocket and feeling distressed. Knowing the thief will get away with it simply rubs salt into the wound.’

The City of London operation passed off on November 4, 2020, however the Mail can solely reveal the small print now. During that summer time, on the top of the pandemic, officers had been struck by reviews of a wave of bicycle theft that had seen scores reportedly stolen in and across the Square Mile. 

Sixty-eight had been taken in August alone, with some elite fashions price as much as £10,000. They determined to do one thing about it.

‘We bought a relatively high-value bike and left it locked up in Rood Lane, off Fenchurch Street,’ says DC Cooper. ‘This is an area targeted by bike thieves — but there is also a lot of CCTV coverage. We left it there in the morning and it was stolen by thieves, who cut through the lock with an angle grinder, at 2.30pm.’

For operational causes, the police gained’t say what kind of bike was used as bait, nor what sort of expertise was used to trace it. 

But observe it they did — to a warehouse occupied by Express Plant Hire on a enterprise property a few miles away in Tower Hamlets. By 3.12pm, Baldwin and Boxcer had been below arrest, the police had discovered their very own stolen bike, and the large job of cataloguing the opposite bicycles and components had begun.

‘It took three of our biggest police vehicles to transport all the bikes to Bishopsgate police station — and colleagues in the property store are still emailing me to ask when they can go,’ says DC Cooper.

The officers seized cellphones from Baldwin and Boxcer. CCTV footage from the corporate — a reliable software rental enterprise — confirmed Baldwin handing out angle grinders and bolt cutters to thieves on the warehouse, after which paying them money once they returned with stolen bikes.

The enterprise is owned by Boxcer’s father, Simon, who was additionally charged in reference to the operation, however was discovered not responsible.

By analyzing the CCTV recordings (which coated simply seven days) and data gleaned from the cellphones, DC Cooper was in a position to paint an image of a Dickensian-style crime gang, with Baldwin appearing as a latter-day Fagin. But as a substitute of sending out road urchins to choose pockets, Baldwin’s was a gang of heroin and crack addicts determined for his or her subsequent repair.

Since being arrested, Baldwin has married and now has a seven-month previous child. He had no earlier convictions, and though he responded ‘no comment’ throughout his police interviews, DC Cooper discovered him disarmingly ‘mild, friendly and “normal”.’

The police had been in a position to observe his actions over only a two-year interval, so can solely speculate as to how his criminality started.

They consider he might have been provided a stolen cycle by a determined drug consumer, and the illegality grew as phrase received across the drug-using neighborhood in Whitechapel, which borders the City.

‘Baldwin’s actual job at Express Plant Hire was upkeep of instruments rented out within the plant rent operation,’ says DC Cooper. ‘He would fix them up, clean them and get them ready for the next customer. But this also meant he was able to supply equipment to his team of thieves.

‘The CCTV footage shows some of them arriving four or five times a day, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, each time with a new bike. And it shows Baldwin handing out angle grinders complete with new blades and new batteries, as well as cash. The thieves knew there was a safe place where they could sell stolen bikes and that there was always money available.’

The operation was enormous. Officers discovered bikes and components packaged up and able to be delivered to prospects who had purchased them on eBay, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace. They included high-end fashions price as much as £10,000 however, as a result of they had been stolen, the thieves typically didn’t drive a tough cut price.

For instance, a £1,300 Genesis Equilibrium was bought on eBay for simply £400, whereas a specialised Roubaix highway bike price £2,900 went for simply £500. It didn’t matter to Baldwin so long as the money stored flowing.

During the trial, it emerged that Baldwin had suffered a head harm a variety of years earlier which may have brought about him to show ‘hoarding’ tendencies. A jury didn’t must resolve whether or not to take this under consideration, as a result of he pleaded responsible.

At first, Boxcer, his supervisor at work and confederate, didn’t, however he modified his plea as soon as he noticed the overwhelming proof the police had gathered. He, too, had no earlier convictions and is married with a minimum of one daughter. Again, DC Cooper discovered him to be the antithesis of a ruthless gangster.

‘He actually seemed like a nice guy,’ he says. ‘He wouldn’t remark in interview, however we did chat. We had similar-aged youngsters, so we had a dialog about that.’ Akram, the opposite jailed perpetrator, got here to the Metropolitan Police’s consideration when a member of the general public noticed his personal stolen bike up on the market on an public sale web site.

He reported this to the police, who accompanied him when he met Akram to ‘buy’ the bike. When they searched the bike thief’s house in Southwark, officers discovered 27 different bicycles.

Unlike Baldwin, he did match the image of a doubtlessly harmful prison, with earlier convictions for harassment, possession of a knife and customary assault. Akram and Baldwin would textual content one another footage of stolen bikes, boasting about what number of they’d in storage and the way invaluable they had been. 

They typically complained about their gang of thieves — calling them ‘nitties’, a demeaning time period for ‘stupid’ drug addicts — damaging or scratching items throughout thefts with angle grinders.

One of the bikes stolen by the gang belonged to Italian-born Golfetto Massimo, 36, who has been working as a barman in London for seven years. During the pandemic, he had been laid off and so was driving his purple Felt 95 bike — price £800 new, however purchased second-hand for £400 — so he might work as a meals supply driver to herald some money.

‘It was about 9am and I was training at my gym in Whitechapel,’ he says. ‘When I came out and saw it was gone, it was horrible. It left me feeling powerless because at the time everything was closed down and I was using my bike to work as a Deliveroo driver. A CCTV camera showed a man with an angle grinder taking it in broad daylight and nobody stopped him. I reported it to the police, but didn’t count on something to occur.’

Several months later, Golfetto acquired a cellphone name asking him to attend Bishopsgate police station to establish a motorcycle seized within the East London raid. It was his.

‘I was overjoyed,’ he says. ‘I’m so grateful to the police — I by no means thought I’d see it once more.’

DC Cooper’s group has loved handing again bikes to grateful homeowners. ‘Some of them were high-end and expensive because of the type of people who work in the City,’ he says. ‘But many were basic, cheaper bikes used by key workers, cleaners, security people and so on, to get to work.

‘It has been satisfying to reunite these owners with their bikes. A lot of the victims have been bringing in chocolates and cards for the team to say thank you. I think it’s as a result of individuals develop connected to their bikes.’

Duncan Dollimore thinks that different police forces might be taught a factor or two from the City of London police’s operation. Meanwhile, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which represents chief constables, says it’s more and more targeted on this sort of crime, however constructive outcomes have but to be seen.

Their lead for theft-based crime, Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman says: ‘I understand the disappointment felt by victims when they don’t get the result they need by the prison justice system, or from their native drive. Police and prosecutors are working arduous to verify we enhance the expertise of these affected by this sort of criminality.’