Utter depravity of Dundee grooming gang who plied teenagers with crack cocaine after which pressured them into prostitution: What occurred inside horror brothel and darkish background of feminine rapist, uncovered by GAVIN MADELEY

The beaten-up cars parked outside the rundown flat had become such a familiar sight that locals had stopped noticing them.

Their shifty-looking drivers would rock up at all hours of the day and night, usually accompanied by teenage girls with glazed expressions on their faces.

Once they had disappeared inside the tenement building, the women would be out of sight, out of mind. It was only much later that neighbours learned the true horror of what was taking place behind closed doors in that squalid flat in Bright Street, Lochee, a district of the Scottish city of Dundee.

Photographs taken by police forensics officers can only hint at the utter depravity of what happened to a string of vulnerable women who were plied with drink and drugs before being subjected to a catalogue of appalling sexual abuse by a merciless band of predators.

In the corner of one room is a dirty bed with a stained mattress; in another, discarded bottles of alcohol, litter and filthy carpet.

Another photo shows drug paraphernalia stacked on shelves alongside hairspray, eyeshadow palettes and sunglasses.

Such scenes were repeated at other addresses scattered across the city centre, where a ruthless Romanian grooming gang targeted, trafficked and trapped their helpless victims in a life of sordid exploitation.

The gang latched onto each of the women after they had fallen on hard times, luring them with the promise of friendship, if not romance.

But the parties would soon take a darker twist as the women – aged between 16 and 30 – would be made to take part in sleazy ‘sex games’, like ‘Truth or dare’ and ‘Spin the bottle’, fuelled by an endless supply of crack cocaine and whisky.

Then they would be raped. Repeatedly. Often by more than one gang member at a time. Their friends turned out to be monsters, whose ultimate aim was to force their victims into a life of prostitution.

In one disturbing video posted online by the gang’s ringleader Mircea Cumpanasoiu, 38, he can be seen smoking behind the wheel of his VW, as he blasts out the 50 Cent hit ‘P.I.M.P.’. At the end of the video, he winks at the camera.

One of Cumpanasoiu’s victims, a 16-year-old girl, was forced into prostitution after he and his brother-in-law, Remus Stan, set up a profile of her on a website and drove her to meet men to have sex with.

The girl later said she was sold a ‘pipe dream’ of how she could make ‘lots of money’ from selling her body but Cumpanasoiu became angry when her earnings failed to match his expectations.

A video was found on his phone which showed the victim climbing a tree, with Cumpanasoiu threatening: ‘Because you do not make money, you stay all day in the tree.’

Last week, in a landmark case, Cumpanasoiu – described as a ‘winking, smirking pimp’ – was jailed for 24 years for raping 10 women during his reign of terror that spanned 2021 and 2022.

His accomplices, Cristian Urlateanu, 41, Alexandra Bugonea, 34, Catalin Dobre, 45, and Stan, 35, were also locked up following a six-week trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

But any sense of relief at the news that the group has been taken off the streets is tempered by fears that grooming gangs have become endemic, operating in virtually every town and city in Scotland.

Figures published earlier this year suggest that 650 cases of ‘child sexual exploitation’ have been recorded in Scotland since 2016, when the category was added to the Child Protection Register after the Rotherham grooming scandal. But the concern is that many more cases a year go unrecorded as many victims, whether through fear or mistrust, are unwilling to contact the police.

So far, however, First Minister John Swinney has refused to follow the example of the UK Government and commission an independent report into the scandal.

This is despite the fact investigators looking into the Dundee case quickly noticed that it bore chilling echoes of the grooming and sex exploitation networks uncovered in places such as Rotherham and Telford.

The Scottish Tories have been pushing for a separate probe into rape gangs north of the border ever since gangs were busted in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

And last month, they lodged amendments to the Scottish Government’s Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform Bill in a bid to force the commissioner to conduct a Scottish gangs inquiry but they were voted down by the SNP.

Shadow justice spokesman Liam Kerr claimed there was a ‘terrifying lack of detail’ on grooming gangs in Scotland, adding that there is a ‘real risk’ the nation will fall behind in dealing with child sexual abuse if the Government ‘buries its head in the sand’.

One leading victims’ advocate warned that the scale of the grooming-gangs problem was far bigger than many people realise because it is hidden away.

Sandra Brown, founder of the Moira Anderson Foundation, which supports victims of abuse, said: ‘Our charity has existed for 25 years and we have come across these gangs time and time again. The big thing these groups have in common is that they are highly organised. They could be anybody, you could walk down the street and pass these men and you would never know it.’

Certainly, the Dundee gang took advantage of such a gap in the public consciousness. Privately, of course, many harboured suspicions about the unusual activity at shabby properties in Castle Street, Perth Road, Meadowside and Gellatly Street, some of which were run as brothels.

One local said: ‘We were here during the day and saw those involved turning up in a beat-up BMW. There would be customers waiting to get access to the block on Castle Street – it had a pin code.

‘They would either wait over the road or at the flat entrance for the code to be sent. The customers could be anything from 20 to 60 years plus. The girls who worked there would be getting dropped off and picked up. They were holding big wads of cash sometimes.’

The gang even used the shared bins area to fly-tip soiled mattresses. ‘We did report it to police after becoming concerned but we were shocked to read the full extent of what’s been going on,’ added the source.

One man, who works locally, told Dundee’s leading local newspaper, The Courier: ‘The thing is, this wasn’t happening in the dead of night – it was happening in plain sight. The gang would get parking tickets on Castle Street and just rip them up.’

All five members of the gang were arrested after police began investigating tip-offs about the trafficking of foreign women into the Dundee sex trade in 2021.

It sparked a separate 2021 enquiry, Operation Recloir, which quickly focused on the flat in Lochee, one of the most deprived communities in the UK.

Once the hub of the city’s thriving jute industry, the closure of the mills in the 1980s led to rising unemployment and sowed the seeds of a drugs-death epidemic which still claims roughly one victim a week. It becomes a ‘ghost town’ after 5pm because the law-abiding fear to tread the streets.

In August, the area fell under global scrutiny when a 12-year-old girl was charged with possession of offensive weapons after a confrontation was captured on a smartphone clip between two schoolgirls and a Bulgarian man outside a Farmfoods shop, just off Lochee high street.

Now the focus is on the gangs. Detective Chief Inspector Scott Carswell, who led the police enquiry, said the scale and nature of the offending was truly shocking.

The Romanians, the detective said, ‘really homed in’ on the women’s vulnerability. ‘We know that they led chaotic lifestyles, some were immature, out partying,’ he said. ‘One of them had lost her kids. What was apparent was that they all were quite attractive and had been kind of lured into a party life and into drugs.’

He added that a lot of the women believed they had an exclusive relationship with Cumpanasoiu, known as Mario. This ‘boyfriend scenario’ is a familiar ploy in grooming cases.

‘The vulnerable females were just looking for someone to care for them, I suppose,’ said Carswell. ‘And this crowd came in and it was all very nice.’ And then, at some point, it wasn’t.

At first, the detective said, it was difficult to grasp a picture of the criminality: ‘Normally we have victims of crime coming to us, whereas here we had information that these girls were being exploited sexually and given free drugs and it was up to us to go out and make them realise they were victims of crime because they didn’t realise it at the time. Also, they were only aware of their own circumstances while we had the bigger picture.’

The bigger picture was grim: ‘It was clear that they were trying to groom the females, and there was certainly evidence that one had been moved into prostitution and was being advertised on the website as a prostitute. And I think that would have been the end goal for others as well to make the organised crime group money.’

Carswell accepted that the Dundee gang was not an isolated example and that grooming was far more widespread a problem.

‘In terms of grooming and exploitation, you only have to look at the news just now to understand where we are,’ he said. ‘This result for Police Scotland shows we are taking it seriously. The sad thing is we needed this all to happen before we were able to stop it.’

The gang came to Scotland as economic migrants and some worked as fast food delivery drivers, cruising the streets looking for prey. ‘We didn’t know a lot about their background but we believe they had been in and out of Scotland from time to time,’ said Carswell. ‘It was very difficult to ascertain their relationship to each other. Some were said to be related and they had marriages and children elsewhere in Romania.’

During the six-week trial, it was said there were so many young women ‘passing through’ their orbit that the gang struggled to remember who they all were. In total, police identified around 25 victims – including two Romanians – of whom ten were prepared to speak up in court. Prosecutors said it was only thanks to their exceptional bravery as witnesses that the gang was brought to trial.

They gave harrowing testimony of their brutal treatment. The court heard how Urlateanu and his then partner Bugonea, a prostitute who advertised online, teamed up to rape one victim. Jurors were also told how Urlateanu, Stan and Dobre gang-raped one woman after feeding her a substance which made her feel ‘rotten’.

Cumpanasoiu was handed an extended sentence comprising 20 years in custody and four years of supervision upon release. Urlateanu was sentenced to 18 years followed by a two-year extension period of supervision. Stan was jailed for 12 years, Dobre for 10 years and Bugonea for eight years.

Stan will also be subject to a Trafficking and Exploitation Prevention Order for a period of five years after his release from prison. All five were added to the sex offenders register indefinitely.

After the verdicts, it emerged Urlateanu, his lover Bugonea and Dobre had fled abroad while awaiting trial. The first two were eventually traced in Belgium and extradited to Scotland in 2024, while Dobre was found in the Czech Republic.

Before they were led away to start their sentences, trial judge Lord Scott told them they had caused untold trauma to those they had abused: ‘Your victims are now survivors, albeit they are permanently damaged by what you did to them.’

But their crimes have cast a dark shadow across Scotland. Having won this fight, DCI Carswell, for one, is too experienced to imagine that the police have won the war against the grooming gangs. He cannot say with any certainty, for instance, that the Romanians have not already been replaced by another gang.

‘I think it would be naive to think that hasn’t [happened], if I’m being honest. Regardless of what the crime is, there’s always folk looking for opportunity. All we can do is carry on trying to catch them.’