Hi guys, The Mob Reporter here with an incredible story of a remarkably brazen strong-armed robbery
crew that had a fondness for sledgehammers and axes. The story starts like this...
And ends like this
Let me tell you about it
The place is Manchester, a large city in England's north. It's best known now for great soccer
It was here that a robust organized crime group began an unusually
heavy-handed crime spree. The gang formed around this guy, local hard man and career criminal Gareth
Robinson. He was the center of a core leadership of three including Peter Clarke and Ryan Stuart
And from there it grew to a violent, bold and ambitious crew of 13 men with varying skills
and specialties. They caught the attention of police in a dramatic way in October 2018
they smashed through the front doors of a large shopping mall in Oldham, just a few miles outside
Manchester. They used sledgehammers and axes, once inside they repeated that rampaging style to get
inside the stores and clear out the valuables. You see them bringing in large scoop bags to
toss the goods into and then drag them away to a motorcade of waiting vehicles outside. Just imagine
what police thought when they saw the security video after arriving to investigate. Although
maybe they weren't that shocked since they had earlier caught a glimpse of their tactics when
a police patrol noticed a car with stolen license plates and tried to stop it. It turned out to be
one of the gangs getaway cars. Instead of giving up or racing away two guys jumped out and immediately
attacked the police car with sledgehammers. Wait, is this guy wearing a Scream mask? This became part
of the crew's M.O. — wildly brazen, they were willing to do anything to escape, repeatedly confronting
police and civilians and homeowners and business owners who happened upon their crimes in progress
On another occasion, when police caught members of the crew smashing into a fish and chip shop, one of
them took an axe to the police van and threatened to do the same to the officers. They all got away
When police found an Audi sedan they had stolen, the officers called for a tow truck to retrieve it
Members of the gang then swooped in, threatened the driver and the cop with sledgehammers and simply
reclaimed the car off the back of the truck. In one raid the crew smashed their way into a car
dealership, cracked open the lockbox where the keys to the new cars were kept, and made off with 20 new
vehicles in one swoop. Let's listen to Detective Chief Inspector James Faulkner with the Greater
Manchester Police tell us how police responded: "So the operation started in July of 2018 and
ended in May 2019, which is when we made the first arrests.The scale was huge, it was over
120 offenses were reinvestigated by the team at Oldham and those covered five different force areas
across the North generally and they included offenses of personal robbery, business robbery
and aggravated burglary dwelling and commercial, so the scale was massive. The value of the goods
stolen amassed to over a 1 and a half million pounds and the damage caused by this team was
over two hundred and thirty thousand pounds, so it's a really big job. So the first offense that
came to our notice was the the incident at the Spindles shopping centre in Oldham and from that
incident we had a rough idea who may be capable of doing that type of offense. We built the case
from there looking at those individuals and the people that are now convicted of these offences
and we built a case with traditional policing tactics both covert and overt but we used a number
of options that were open to us to pinpoint their locations at the time of the offence is occurring
and then eventually we were at the point where we could go and arrest these people. The message to
offenders thinking that committing similar types of crime is simply: Don't bother, you're putting your
life and others at risk and and police officers and security personnel at risk and the rewards
aren't that great.' And these convictions show that GMP do investigate and do take seriously
the offense of burglary and robbery and we are committed to putting gangs like this behind
bars which is where they belong."
Given all this, I can't help but think that frustrated cops decided to give the crew a taste of their own medicine but at least the cops stayed afterwards to sweep up