was just 13 in 1979 when the Clash released I Fought the Law. Forty years later, the crime boss sang the chorus as he was sent down for 11 years and six months – his first proper prison sentence in a career spanning more than two decades.
Whether his race is run is another matter, and one the Cable explores in this exclusive four-part series about the Cornerman – so-called because Baker took a piece, or corner, from the many opportunities that came his way. Alternatively, he was waiting around the corner if his victims didn’t pay up.
In December 2018, local papers ran the police press release when Baker and nine men from his organised crime group were sent down at Bristol crown court. But we knew there was a far bigger untold story, because of the months spent investigating the Cornerman’s rise and fall.
Bristol
Section 01
No longer untouchable?
Efforts by the Metropolitan police between 1998 and 2009 to put Baker behind bars – for forcing at gunpoint a director of Queen’s Park Rangers football club to sign over his shares and resign, for the kidnap of a printer and for the killing of an off-duty prison guard – all resulted in acquittals.
The Teflon gangster appeared untouchable until 2017, when Avon & Somerset police began secretly targeting his crime group, which operates along the M4 corridor between London and Bristol.
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Andrew Baker:Whenyou’redownthere…giveAdacallandsay“ifyoucouldfindsomewherehecouldrampupaloadofdebt,we’dappreciateit”yeh…
A bug in Baker’s car secured vital evidence of his involvement in the supply of cocaine from London, where he grew up, and a conspiracy to blackmail businessmen in Bristol, where he lives.
During the 2018 trial, one terrified witness gave evidence from behind a screen, and officers were stationed outside the court to prevent Baker escaping.
Police sources hope that, now he has been convicted, new witnesses will come forward. But for others, prison will not hinder the Cornerman’s reach. Reputations travel, and Baker has long traded on his links to one of the UK’s most significant organised crime groups to keep people in line.
Liam Waugh moves bag of cocaine
West London
Section 02
The plums and the gangster
Little about 52-year-old Andy Baker’s past emerged during the recent two trials except for his role as a ‘security consultant’ to high-society nightclubs.
Tim Grattan-Kane, a now-retired senior Met murder squad detective who chased Baker for years, said: "He managed to slip through lawful justice on so many occasions. He controls so many things. He's a nasty influence behind nightclubs."
Baker started off as a bouncer in the Epsom, Surrey area where he was born. Before long he was working the doors in a variety of west London pubs and clubs. The overweight young thug caught his big break when he started working for a group of well-heeled entrepreneurs he called ‘the plums’, who in the 90s and 00s provided the negronis and dance floor magic for A-list celebrities, young aristocrats and posh west London socialites, or ‘Sloane Rangers’.
A club insider close to the plums said many enjoyed the frisson of having Baker around. “They are almost Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels-type characters – public schoolboys running clubs – and someone’s said, ‘You need a gangster looking after you, sunshine,’ and they’ve sucked it all up and thought it was rather glamorous.”
He managed to slip through lawful justice on so many occasions. He controls so many things. He's a nasty influence behind nightclubs.
Tim Grattan-Kane, retired senior Met murder detective
Baker told the jury in his recent trial that his big break came after a conviction in 1991 for assaulting a clubber.
“I got in trouble with the law and I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman called Christian Arden, [who] gave me a chance to work with a public company, earn a good living and live a very nice lifestyle… I used to work on the licensing and things like that, and the hiring and firing of security firms,” he said.
Arden was chairman of the Moroccan-themed Po Na Na bars and Fez club group, which in the mid-90s embarked on a rapid expansion in top university cities, especially along the M4 corridor.
Baker built a network by putting together security teams for the venues in Reading, Cheltenham, Oxford, Swindon, Marlborough, Bath, Bristol and then further south-west into Cardiff, Swansea and Newport.
But the nightclub kingpin whom he has stayed most loyal to over the years is Howard Spooner, a former student of Gordonstoun, the top public school where his parents taught and Prince Charles was educated.
Spooner, now 48, has had a troubled association with Baker for over 20 years. The pair were arrested and released without charge in 1999 over an alleged shooting at a garage in west London. A few years later, Spooner financially helped Baker when he was tried and acquitted of kidnapping a printer involved in the club business.
The Wiltshire-based racehorse owner told the Cable that he did not see Baker as a gangster until his recent conviction. “I had no idea. I thought he was a bit of a geezer who liked to drop loads of names. He didn’t drop gangster names on me. He dropped the names of posh, rich, influential people who he claimed to do business with. It was all lords and ladies.”
But it was while minding the doors of Spooner’s first nightclub that Baker became close to one of the biggest gangster names in the UK: London’s notorious Adams crime family. In fact, the Met suspected Baker of involvement in the murder of two of the Adams’ key associates as he rose through the ranks of the underworld.
South London
Section 03
‘You don’t kill the golden goose’
Spooner became friendly with Princes William and Harry when they and the Middleton sisters started coming to his Chelsea nightclub, Public, in 2010. Spooner first took over the club in 1994, when it was called Embargo. Almost immediately, the Adams’ main enforcer, , tried to muscle in, with Baker at his side.
Wynter had been recently acquitted of killing Claude Moseley, a former high-jump champion turned drug dealer, with a samurai sword. “You may not believe in God but you’ll have met the Devil when you meet Gilbert,” said the club insider.
Baker and Wynter worked from offices at Linford Studios in Battersea, and had a plan to set up a training company for doormen. The owner of the studios, , was a struck off solicitor who used Baker to run security for his drum and bass club nights.
You may not believe in God but you’ll have met the Devil when you meet Gilbert
Club insider
In 1997, when Wynter went to see his mother in Jamaica, Baker stepped up. "Andy was the brightest of a bunch of goons [working] for Gilbert. He’s got a natural cunning when it comes to making money,” the club insider explained.
While Wynter was overseas, Spooner sold Embargo and bought a new club, Leopard Lounge, in Fulham, whose investors included Lord Edward Spencer Churchill.
Wynter saw himself as a silent investor in Embargo, and when he returned from Jamaica started demanding his cut from the Leopard Lounge.
The demand, it is said, forced Baker to intercede on Spooner’s behalf. But Wynter remained resolute, and told Baker he wanted his share of the takings from the Leopard Lounge or Spooner was going for a long walk.
Then, one morning in March 1998, Wynter failed to show up. His body has never been found. The disappearance was a blow to the Adams family – and the turmoil continued. Six months later, two men on a motorbike killed , their chief money launderer, outside his north London home.
Police bugs and phone taps on Terry Adams, the head of the family, showed disarray but no evidence he had ordered the hits.
Initially, it was suspected that both deaths could be part of a power play within the family. However, police sources confirm that almost immediately Baker’s name came into the frame.
That suspicion hardened when Duff, the struck off solicitor, became a protected police witness. He had fallen out with Baker over a number of issues, including Baker’s demand for £50,000 to pay for his legal defence against the kidnapping charges.
Howard Spooner was already helping Baker, by supplying him with a surety or guarantee to the court that he wouldn’t jump bail. “Me [and] Christian [Arden] made it plain we weren’t standing surety because we were supporting him but because we knew he wouldn’t slip the country … At the time, Po Na Na had security from [Baker] all over the country. He was running their security and [Po Na Na] were buying my business – they didn’t in the end – and that was what I was told had to be done.”
The Met was also investigating Baker over the December 2002 murder of Aaron Chapman, an off-duty prison guard moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer.
Detectives received what they regarded as good intelligence that Baker had put out a contract to have Duff killed. In June 2003, the former solicitor was taken into the witness protection scheme and remains there to this day.
Documents seen by the Cable show that Duff told police what he claimed to know about Baker’s involvement in the murders of prison guard Chapman, former gangland security partner Wynter and Adams family money man Nahome.
Duff claimed Baker had admitted killing Wynter at a flat in Chelsea, then had the body crushed and dumped. Duff explained to his debriefers that Wynter was going to kill Spooner. Instead, Baker murdered Wynter, took over the door security business and justified his actions by saying, “You don’t kill the golden goose.”
He would say, ‘He’s in the O2, I put him there. [Wynter] ain’t never coming back.’
Club insider
The club insider, who knew Baker for over 10 years, told the Cable that the security consultant bragged about murdering Wynter. “He would say, ‘He’s in the O2, I put him there. [Wynter] ain’t never coming back.’”
Spooner said he was unaware how close he had apparently come to being killed. The nightclub entrepreneur only realised there was a threat to his life when the police mentioned it years later while inquiring about the Chapman murder.
Baker was feeling the heat in London and moved to Bideford, north Devon, with his wife, the daughter of a London policeman, and their son.
He continued to earn money helping new club entrepreneurs pick over the bones of the Po Na Na group, which went into administration in 2002 with more than 35 venues across the UK to offload.
Spooner, meanwhile, went on to strike gold with a return to the troubled venue on King’s Road that used to be Embargo. He cleverly teamed up with Guy Pelly, a childhood friend of the princes, to launch Public in December 2010.
Pelly was the pied piper of young royals and the Sloane Rangers. The palace had once wrongly blamed him for introducing the two princes to marijuana, and he was present at the now infamous fancy dress party where Harry came as a Nazi.
Soon, Public was the place to be for A-list celebrities, as well as princesses Eugenie and Beatrice and the Middleton sisters. Harry celebrated his 27th birthday there.
However, complaints from neighbours eventually closed down Public in 2012, which Spooner blamed on “anti-royals who hate toffs”.
The club entrepreneur continued to do well with another venue, the Clapham Grand, in south London. Last year, it caught the eye of Avon & Somerset detectives who were following Baker up and down the M4. The crime boss’s driver was seen emerging from the Grand with an envelope stuffed with cash.
Spooner, who recently invested in a hotel in Yarmouth, gave a statement to the police about his long association with Baker. He told the Cable that he was surprised about Baker’s involvement in drugs and denied the gangster had ever blackmailed him. “Baker earns £300 a week from us as a security consultant. He’s been paid in a variety of ways depending on how he wants it,” he said.
All this cash was interesting for another reason: the taxman had recently made Baker bankrupt for non-payment of taxes, yet detectives saw him renovating his large house – located, appropriately enough, in Baker’s Ground, on the outskirts of Bristol in Stoke Gifford.
Bristol
Section 04
The Bristol connection
Between mid-2017 and early 2018, police surveillance on Baker showed him frequently meeting in Bristol with , a former British lightweight champion cage fighter, and , a convicted drug trafficker from Bath.
Sellars, 40, had got into financial trouble as the owner of Chasers nightclub and was desperate for cash. Hoddinott, 48, wanted to buy a kilo of high-purity cocaine but didn’t have the £36,000 to pay up front. Baker agreed to act as a “guarantor” to close friend , who agreed to supply the drugs from London.
Gordon and Baker went back 20 years to their days working doors as young bouncers, and shared a passion for Crystal Palace football club. It was Baker’s modus operandi to recruit members of his organised crime group from the security industry.
Detectives watched 37-year-old Gordon and Baker meeting in January 2018 at a lorry park in a service station on the M25 and garnered vital intelligence. Weeks later, they swooped on the conspirators and took out the drug parcel on route to Bristol.
Baker was later recorded in his cell making a revealing comment to the police. “Listen,” he said, “in my circle of people I stand quite high and I won’t give up anyone around me. Do you know what I’m saying? There’s things that I know, that I do know and you know I know because I’m a cunt. I ain’t going to bullshit you. I could put on the table what I can put on the table.”
As far as we know, Baker never did trade. Hoddinott, however, who had just come out of prison for a similar offence, immediately pleaded guilty to get a lighter sentence.
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Andrew Baker:Definitely,theywereoldBillalldaylong,ifI’veeverseenoldbillinmylifetheywereoldbill,andyouknowI’veseenoldBill.Scotty:Yup.AB:I’lltellyouwhatdoneit…Apartfromthecoatinthebackofhiscarsayingpolice.Agreenone,flourescent,allIcouldseeonitwasICE,so,unlesshe’ssomethingelselikeICE…S:CouldhavebeenICF.AB:NoitwasdefinitelyICE,unlesshe’stheiceman,it’sjustthewaytherewastwoofthem,andtheywereinthecar,andhelookedarightwanker…shejustlookedfartoosnottytobewithhim.
In his defence, Baker painted a picture of himself as a man whom the police “hated” and “harassed” because of his work in nightclub security. He needed to explain away the many incriminating comments made in his bugged car. “I can be arrogant, obnoxious. It’s me having fun with the police,” he told the jury, who didn’t buy it and found him, Gordon and Sellars guilty of the cocaine conspiracy.
Baker declined to answer the Cable’s questions about his association with the Adams crime family and alleged involvement in the deaths of Gilbert Wynter and Solly Nahome in 1998.
Both cases are still open and under periodic review by the Met. A spokesman for the force said: “Detectives investigating the murder and missing person inquiry would appeal for any witnesses or anyone with any information to contact the police.”
Tim Grattan-Kane, the retired Met murder detective, said of Baker: “People will be a lot safer with him behind bars. Hopefully it might now encourage others to talk.”
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During his recent trial, Andy Baker, 52, claimed that efforts to become a draughtsman in the building trade were dashed by the recession in the early nineties. Like many criminals, he apprenticed as a doorman in the nightclub business where he rode the coattails of Gilbert Wynter and made contacts with influential entrepreneurs servicing the more genteel clubbers of affluent west London.
Those who worked with the Cornerman said he liked to boast of his involvement in crime, including the murders of Wynter and Nahome. His association with the Adams was another boast used to increase his reputation as he built a security empire along the M4 corridor.
Baker moved to Bideford with his first common law wife, Vanessa Heather, in the late nineties. They had a son together. Heather left Baker, apparently after catching him in bed with a stripper. In 2004 he moved to Bristol with his new partner, Kate, with whom he has six children. Heather is one of at least ten people who the Met police took into witness protection between 2003 and 2009 after giving information or evidence against Baker.
His acquittals in three major trials - for kidnap, blackmail and murder offences - may have encouraged his cocky performance at Bristol Crown Court in 2018 where he often entered the dock singing. One day, Baker was brought to court from prison shackled and in an escape suit after showing off to his barrister in front of a security guard how easy it was to slip his handcuffs.
Some associates suspected that Baker’s charmed criminal career was because he traded information with the police. A former senior police source, however, said Baker was suspected of having corrupt police contacts.
The taxman bankrupted the Cornerman after an investigation into his income tax payments from 1993 to 2013. Baker had to sell a house to pay back taxes. At the time of his arrest in March 2018 he had large five figure deposits in his bank account from well-known businessman and was renovating his family home.
Name:
Adam Hoddinnot
Rank:
Drug dealer and enforcer
Status:
In prison
Bath-based Adam Hoddinott, 48, was Baker’s main enforcer in the south west. He wanted a kilo of cocaine to sell but couldn’t pay £36,000 up front. Jon Gordon agreed to supply the cocaine because Baker said he would act as “guarantor” that Hoddinott, his “extremely muscular, twenty-stone man”, would pay.
Hoddinott was also involved in an ecstasy factory running out of a residential house in Bristol. But his loose lips were in many ways the undoing of the whole criminal network. Unlike Baker, Hoddinott talked freely about criminal activity in his car, which the police had bugged. This and surveillance led him to plead guilty. Hoddinott had 25 prior convictions for violence and drugs and had only recently finished a prison sentence for similar drugs offences.
His guilty plea meant a reduced sentence but caused Baker and Gordon serious difficulties as the prosecution no longer had to prove the conspiracy to supply cocaine had taken place. Hoddinott also pleaded guilty to blackmail with Baker of three Bristol businessman. Not the brightest of criminals, he left his name and number on a threatening voicemail to one victim.
Name:
The A-team
Rank:
UK organised crime group (OCG)
Status:
Active
The A-team are an old school family-based organised crime group originally controlled by three brothers from an extended Irish Catholic family who grew up on the Barnsbury Estate in Islington, north London. Terry Adams is oldest and the nominal head of the family, but Patrick and Tommy are equally dedicated crime figures who will operate separately but together became the dominant OCG in 1990s London.
The Adams brothers started out running protection rackets, robbery and fencing stolen goods through Hatton Garden, the capital’s jewellery hub. Detectives watched Tommy outside Farringdon tube station collect what they suspected was gold bullion stolen from the £26m Brinks Mat robbery at Heathrow Airport in 1983. He was acquitted in 1985.
By the nineties, the A-team were moving vast amounts of contraband tobacco, cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy into the UK. They formed associations with other UK and international crime groups.
In 1995, the police began a sustained covert operation (codenamed Trinity) against the crime family after a shoot out with a rival Islington firm. Tommy fell first in 1998 for organising a large cannabis importation from a black cab that he used as an office and which the police had bugged.
Terry was arrested in 2003 and driven to Bristol for his arraignment because of concerns about police corruption in London. He finally pled guilty to money laundering and was jailed in 2007.
Patrick was sent down in 2016 after going on the run for shooting an associate. In 2017, Tommy was back in jail for money laundering offences and last year younger brother Michael was convicted of cheating the taxman.
The extent of the A–team’s wealth is impossible to accurately quantify but could run into tens of millions of pound. Some assets are in the names of their wives or associates, but strict financial reporting requirements make it hard for the brothers to access cash. Police intelligence files link the A-team to a number of beatings, shootings and murders but evidence has proved allusive.
Name:
Andrew Wylde
Rank:
Car dealer and debt collector
Status:
In prison
Andrew ‘Ginge’ Wylde, 50, is a second-hand car dealer and garage owner from Bristol. The prosecution described him as “the pleasant face” of the blackmail conspiracy with Baker and Hoddinott.
Ginge and Baker became friends in 2004 through their common law wives who went to school together in Bristol. Baker visited Ginge’s New Cheltenham Road garage almost every day.
Ginge’s common law wife, Ellie, is the daughter of John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, and the car dealer used the connection when trying to persuade a businessman to pay up. Another businessman was told that “geezers from London” would come up if he didn’t pay.
Ginge was furious that Baker “put him in the shit” during his evidence in the blackmail conspiracy trial in November 2018. Ginge was taken to hospital with suspected heart problems just before taking the stand. He returned the next day to give a combative performance and felt afterwards that he had torn the prosecutor “a new one”. But his barrister had to carry out acute reconstruction surgery on her client and told the jury that Baker had “used” Ginge.
Name:
Carl Newman
Rank:
Drug factory host
Status:
In prison
Carl Newman’s Warmley home was used to store the cocaine brought from London and house the ecstasy factory. Newman, 38, struggled with employment over the years, was brought up in care and became a carer for the mother of his three children. His barrister said he was “effectively a storeman”. He pleaded guilty to both the ecstasy and cocaine charges.
Name:
Danny Bond
Rank:
Drug courier
Status:
In prison
Scaffolder Danny Bond, 46, of Surrey also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply cocaine. Bond, another coke addict, was nicked with Justin Green at Reading services where they stopped for a loo break on the way back to London.
Name:
David Duff
Rank:
Former gangland lawyer
Status:
In Witness protection
David Duff was the former chairman of Hibernians Football Club and business partner of Tory party donor David Rowland. Duff was later struck off the solicitors’ roll after an unrelated conviction for mortgage fraud. On his release from prison in the early nineties, he immersed himself in moody property deals and through a Bristol licencing agent met Gilbert Wynter and Andy Baker. Duff helped Terry Adams, Wynter and Solly Nahome in the sale of the lease of the Connaught Rooms. He also provided crooked financial advice to Baker’s OCG.
However, the pair fell out in 2003 and Duff was taken into the witness protection scheme after police received intelligence of a plot to have him killed. He was debriefed about the Cornerman’s criminal activities, the disappearance of Wynter and murder of Nahome and gave evidence against Baker and three others accused of involvement in the fatal stabbing of off-duty prison guard, Aaron Chapman, in December 2002. Duff remains a protected witness.
Name:
David Woolley
Rank:
Drug dealer
Status:
In prison
The one-time head of the infamous Aquila Motorbike club in Plymouth, David Woolley, 54, was jailed for his involvement in the cocaine and ecstasy conspiracy. He planned to shift the drugs in Plymouth.
He was well known for running a tattoo business in the city and was the annual organiser of the Plymouth Tattoo Convention. Woolley suffered burns when his home was firebombed during a spate of arsons in the city between suspected rival gangs. He was jailed for 9 years in 2015 for repeatedly stabbing a man in the back of a Plymouth taxi.
Woolley befriended Adam Hoddinott in prison, who shared an interest in motorbikes, tattoos and drug dealing. The two worked closely together once released.
Name:
Gilbert Wynter
Rank:
Enforcer
Status:
Missing, presumed dead
Gilbert Wynter was one of the Adams’ main enforcers and a key link to criminals in London’s black communities. Wynter carried a stick after claiming the police caused an injury to his leg.
He lived in Tottenham, north London but sometimes stayed at the Chelsea flat of an Adams associate near to Embargo, the nightclub on the Kings Road. Wynter claimed to be a silent partner of the club’s owners, Rusty Egan, the new romantic Dj, and landlord, Jeremy Norman. Howard Spooner bought the club out of administration in 1994 and inherited Andy Baker as a doorman. Baker was an apprentice to Wynter, who wanted to set up a door security training company.
In 1997, Wynter went to Jamaica to visit his mother and was apparently shot in the head. He survived and spent months convalescing before returning to London. The 37-year-old disappeared in March 1998. His body has never been recovered.
Name:
Justin Green
Rank:
Drug courier
Status:
In prison
Justin Green, 45, of Brentwood, Essex pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply cocaine. Adam Hoddinott approached him about buying a kilo and he went to Jon Gordon, who got a guarantee from Andy Baker. Green, a coke addict with 13 convictions, was arrested at Reading service station after delivering the cocaine to Bristol. He refused to give up any names.
Name:
Jon Gordon
Rank:
Drug dealer and enforcer
Status:
In prison
Jon ‘the barber’ Gordon operated in south London and Croydon. He had convictions for violence and blackmail. Baker and Gordon knew each other through door security and a shared love of Crystal Palace football club. Gordon earned his nickname from running a barbershop and for reputedly being good with a knife. He stood trial with Dorling and John Pearson in 2006 for the Chapman murder but was acquitted. Pearson was sentenced to 15 years for a related offence.
In January 2018, Gordon, 47, was observed by the police meeting with Baker at a lorry park in a M25 service station. The men were discussing the supply of one kilo of high purity cocaine to Baker’s enforcer in Bristol. Gordon was found guilty with Baker and others in September 2018.
Name:
John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer
Rank:
Gold dealer, Timeshare shark
Status:
Dead
Palmer moved from Birmingham to Bedminster where he ran Scadlyn Limited, a gold business involved in smelting some of the bullion from the Brink’s Mat heist. He was acquitted in 1987 after telling the jury that he didn’t know it was stolen.
Palmer went on to run a crooked timeshare empire in Tenerife built on fraud and terror until his conviction in 2001. The gangster associated with international criminals and had developed close links with Russian organised crime after the collapse of the Soviet republic.
He left Marnie, his beauty queen wife, and two daughters in Bristol for Christina, who he met through the timeshare business. Palmer lived with her in an Essex mansion, where in 2015 he was shot dead in the garden by a sniper. The murder remains unsolved and is the latest in a long line of killings of key figures associated with the iconic Brinks Mat heist. Essex police bungled the investigation, admitting six days after his death that Palmer, 64, had not died of a heart attack. At the time of his death Palmer was facing trial in Spain connected to his collapsed timeshare business.
Name:
Liam Waugh
Rank:
Enforcer
Status:
In prison
In August 2017, Liam Waugh, 30, burnt down a newly opened Bath tattoo shop and a barbershop in Saltford. The bodybuilder pled guilty to both attacks and in summer 2018 was jailed for 3 years and 8 months.
Police surveillance also revealed that Waugh had been also working for Adam Hoddinott as an enforcer and drug distributor. Waugh picked up the cocaine from Green and Bond when they drove up from London. He also met with Woolley, who he knew from prison, to show samples of the ecstasy destined for Plymouth.
Name:
Mark Dorling
Rank:
Enforcer in Baker’s OCG
Status:
In prison
Mark ‘Robocop’ Dorling was a former prison guard who became a doorman and enforcer for Andy Baker. His nickname was due to his physique rather than a dedication to law enforcement. A club manager who knew him said he was a very “angry” man who worked the door at Howard Spooner’s club, the Clapham Grand.
Dorling referred to himself as Baker’s “right-hand man” and collected his cash envelopes from London pubs, clubs and lap dance venues. The 38-year-old was convicted in 2006 of murdering Aaron Chapman. The prosecution case was that Baker had agreed to give Chapman a beating and sent Robocop and two others. But Chapman fought back and later died of multiple stab wounds.
Dorling told the police that Chris McCormack, a feared armed robber and former enforcer for the Adams family, was the man who had approached Baker to hurt Chapman. The prison guard’s crime was to have mistreated the best friend of McCormack’s daughter. Dorling later told the police that the beating was a favour to McCormack, who Baker wanted to impress, and was part of a wider deal to import firearms from Holland.
Dorling claims he was not present when Chapman was stabbed. His appeal against conviction was turned down and in 2015 judges also rejected a referral from the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Name:
Matthew Sellars
Rank:
Former cage fighter and club owner
Status:
In prison
Matthew Sellars, 40, had got into serious financial trouble as owner of Chasers nightclub in Bristol. The chemistry and law graduate and former MMA lightweight British champion was once head doorman of the club.
Andy Baker agreed to help rescue Chasers but also saw an opportunity to take over the city’s nightclubs from a rival security firm whose boss had fallen out with Sellars over this and a jewellery shop in Bristol.
Baker introduced Sellars to influential businessman and took him to meet the Adams crime family in London. But the Conerman eventually tired of Sellars and mocked him behind his back.
Sellars, a bankrupt, helped in the cocaine conspiracy. Separately, Hoddinott and Baker tried to extort money from a Bristol businessman who had bought the lease of one of Sellars’ nightclubs.
At his trial, Sellars said he had a breakdown because of his financial predicament and blamed his choice of friends for subsequent actions. His barrister told the judge that from 2010 to 2013 Sellars was in the UK Special Forces Reserves based in Newport but never deployed in action.
Name:
Michael Warman
Rank:
Enforcer
Status:
In prison
Michael Warman burnt down the barbershop in Saltford with Liam Waugh. On the same night in August 2017, Waugh firebombed a Bath tattoo parlour but Warman denied having any involvement. Warman was found guilty of the barbershop arson and of possessing an illegal weapon – a stun gun disguised as a torch.
Name:
Solly Nahome
Rank:
Money launderer
Status:
Dead
Solly Nahome, a jeweller in Hatton Garden, laundered the Adams family’s money through a variety of investments with varying success. Operation Trinity had placed a bug in the offices of his company, Pussy Galore. However, a well-placed police source said the bug suddenly went dead, leading detectives to suspect a corrupt cop or cops had tipped off Nahome. The bug had previously captured several detectives offering help to Terry Adams, according to a 2002 Met police intelligence report on corruption in the force.
Nahome, 48, kept most of the financial information on the Adams’ money in his head. In November 1998 he was shot dead outside his north Finchley home where he lived with his wife, Joanna. The couple were close friends of Terry and Ruth Adams.
Bugs in Terry Adams’ home revealed the crime boss was distressed at the assassination and having to locate his criminal assets. Gilbert Wynter was still missing when Nahome was killed fuelling speculation about a fall out within the Adams family. Alternatively, it was suggested that Wynter and Nahome had fallen out with gangsters outside of London over a real estate deal in Lancashire.