Inspector Woodward filled David in. Knowing why the journalist was there, and despite his desire to avoid getting too embroiled with him, he was ready enough to share what he knew. As a good policeman he was quick to point out that what he was telling David was only half the story. For a variety of reasons, even after the passage of time, the events were still fresh in his memory.
The Lincolnshire Police, he told him, had been taken by surprise by the ferocity of the attacks on the Romanian farm workers. Smith’s Co-operative had generally been regarded as one of the more enlightened employers of immigrant labour. It soon transpired that that was the most likely root of the problems that had unfolded in 2008. It was seen as an easy target by gangs of all persuasions.
At first, the police had thought the attacks had a racial connotation, as the workers most heavily involved were Roma.
‘But we didn’t hold that view for long,’ said Inspector Woodward as he recognised that David’s lunch-primed nods and grunts were encouragement. It was the sort of background that was very useful to David. ‘Not that you would have been going to get much confirmation from the Chinese lot; they were unlikely to be too cooperative even if we had known who to talk to.’
Back in 2008, it seemed, the tall Chinese man had been as enigmatic a figure then as he still was now.
‘The common factor and key figure in all of this always does seem to be our Mr Kim, but he’s about as elusive as the abominable snowman,’ added an officer from the Border Agency. ‘Based on past experience, after a fracas like this he’ll be on his way to Australia or Canada, or somewhere else by now.’
Inspector Woodward sketched out the situation. Supplying seasonal labour, no questions asked, over the years had become big business even after the horrific events of Morecambe Bay. The regulation that followed that incident allowed the authorities to keep better track of where the largely itinerant immigrant communities were, gave them some hold on working conditions, but didn’t prove very helpful in preventing abuses. It hadn’t taken long for the criminal gangs already involved to refine their activities and to then use the regulation as a cover for the things that they had always done. Needless to say, the Chinese element in the supply of labour had remained, but the police and Border Agency sensed that they had upped their game. The whole activity had become much more sophisticated and was centred much less on isolated local gangs.
‘Where there’s a lucrative operation going on with very little hands-on oversight, there’s always going to be competition for the rewards. And the poor powerless immigrants are the cannon fodder for the battles that develop, especially in large multi-crop areas like here in Lincolnshire.’
The inspector reminisced about a particularly bad incident in 2008. It was cauliflowers again which had been at the centre of the eruption, On one of the Smith’s Co-operative’s farms, like the one that they had just been investigating, the cauliflower fields were so large that they could accommodate four machinery trains. And, in line with their liberal policies, Smith’s had recruited two labour gangs from two registered organisations. The one that employed the Roma workers they had used many times. The second crew were also East Europeans but the gangmaster worked for an organisation that had been registered only for a few months but which was offering very competitive rates.
‘The Smith’s people were cautious,’ the inspector recalled. ‘Experience told them that they should have established the group’s track record before they did a deal. But money talks.
‘Trouble started even before the gangs arrived at the farm, it seems. Working to the same start time, the mini-vans of the two groups arrived at the access road together. The van of the new group had a reinforced bumper and tried to shunt the other van carrying the Roma workers off the road. A third mini-van was idling about a hundred yards behind the first two.’
Eventually arriving at the farm’s machinery area ready to start harvesting, the driver of the Roma vehicle had confronted the other driver. It was something of a mismatch to start with, because the Roma crew were supported by three large and tough-looking men who had arrived earlier at the farm and who turned out to be the minders for the Roma gangmaster.
‘The long-standing gangmaster, it seems,’ continued the inspector, ‘was expecting trouble, as the other group had tried to muscle in on the work crews at another of Smith’s Cooperative’s farms a few miles away. Armed with baseball bats, the thugs quickly beat the driver of the second mini-van to his knees and left him bleeding heavily from a serious head wound. Deterred by the violence of the assault on their driver, the other East European workers, from Ukraine apparently, held back.
‘They of course, knew about the third mini-van and a group of their own minders following behind.’ The inspector shook his head in disbelief at the memory.
‘The farm manager, seeing what was developing, had already called the police and I and my team of ten men in riot gear sped over there.’
The inspector continued his story, much of which he had gathered from witness statements from the farm managers given at the time. The odds were now decisively against the Roma gang’s minders. Armed in their turn with baseball bats and iron bars, the Ukrainian thugs weighed in immediately the third mini-van had come to a halt. Again, none of the Roma or Ukrainian workers made any attempt to join the fight. By now one of the Roma minders lay in a crumpled heap beside the first damaged mini-van. He wasn’t moving. One of the Ukrainian minders was on his knees a few feet away, his head almost unrecognisable behind the mess of blood and pulp that was his face. Elsewhere in the yard the other two Roma minders were being beaten down by their attackers.
Finally, the farm managers intervened. An explosion of noise overtook the shouts, groans and curses that were accompanying the fighting. The farm manager and his assistant cocked their shotguns ready to fire another volley into the air.
As the groups were forced to separate and an uneasy quiet took over, the wails of the emergency vehicle sirens began to fill the gap as the riot police and ambulances got closer.
The minders instinctively began to shuffle towards their gang’s mini-vans.
‘I wouldn’t,’ yelled the farm manager, uncertain of course whether the minders were carrying weapons in their vans.
Then, for a few brief moments, farce took over.
Suddenly a dark-blue 5-series BMW shot into the farmyard, braked furiously when confronted with a mass of bodies and vehicles, and then slithered to a screeching halt in one of the barns that opened on to the yard. The grinding clunk indicated that the BMW hadn’t been unscathed by its unexpected and enforced trip into the Smith’s Co-operative machinery yard. The car reversed out of the barn and positioned itself ready to leave.
As the cacophony of official noise erupted into the farmyard in the form of two police vans, a police Land-Rover and two ambulances, it was clear that the BMW had been already in the farm lane and had been flushed into the yard by the following police vehicles. It was abundantly clear that the driver of the car was now very anxious to leave the scene. The Land-Rover parked in front of the gate precluded this option.
The injured were despatched to hospital where they were met by more police officers who would keep a bedside vigil. The remaining participants, workers, minders and the car driver, were formed into groups and placed under precautionary guard.
‘The guy in the back of the car refused to get out,’ said Inspector Woodward, ‘but since we had a death on our hands we weren’t in the mood to argue so we let him stay there.’
Eventually, detectives and other police specialists arrived and the riot police returned to their base. Satisfied on the farm manager’s assurance that the actual Roma and Ukrainian workers had had no part in the mayhem, they were despatched to the fields and the day’s work belatedly commenced.
It took several hours to sort out what had happened and take a preliminary view on why it had.
‘Eventually we got round to the guy in the car. He was not best pleased at having been kept hanging arou
nd but it was obvious that he was holding himself in since all he wanted was to get away and avoid too many questions; provoking the police wasn’t going to help that.’
The inspector seemed amused by the man’s predicament.
‘Joe Kim,’ he said. Inspector Woodward again provided a link and continuity for David.
It was clear that the inspector, having told his tale, was keen to get back on the job. But David was still unsure of the significance of Joe Kim in this and the earlier incident and how it linked to the Chinese criminal groups that they were all convinced were involved in the people trafficking that stood behind the whole immigrant labour scene. Although a picture was building.
As they were leaving the pub, he held back the inspector and asked him the question directly.
‘But how does Kim fit in? Why would he get involved on the ground like that?’
The inspector seemed unwilling to divulge anything further.
‘As you know, there’s a lot of Home Office pressure on the police and Borders people and a lot of information feeding in from the mainstream intelligence organisations. And this is where we think this guy Kim fits. He’s probably a lot more than just an enforcer and messenger.’
The lunch wasn’t quite the end of things. The telephone calls that had both got David involved in the Lincolnshire Police action and had resulted in the superintendent being nominated to oversee the day’s activities had also resulted in him being deposited back at her office for a debriefing. A conversation took place just between the two of them. Although David struggled to understand the significance of some of what he was told, it nonetheless closed off some of the events that he had become aware of.
‘This, as you probably know,’ the superintendent said, ‘hasn’t been the only confrontation between the gangs.’
David thought he was going to be told about 2008 again, but he was wrong, for what the superintendent then went on to say was probably just as valuable as anything else that he had garnered from the first part of his day.
‘The more recent incident,’ she said, ‘was different. And explains why we might have seemed to have been rather heavy-handed today. As you saw, Kim wasn’t the only Chinese man to come here. There have been more and other visits. The gang we suspect he is working for here is trying to muscle in on the Somali gang, though I have to say that that gangmaster is worth ten of them.’
The superintendent gave an apologetic grin; the Somali woman had obviously impressed her.
‘In any event, another Chinese fixer came to talk to the Somali gangmaster about ten days ago. It was all very low key; the gangmaster is very good at leaning in the wind. This guy did whatever business he had to do with the gangmaster, whether successfully or not we have no idea, but whatever the outcome, she and he finished off their meeting with a bout of vigorous sex in one of the barns at the farm.’
David immediately felt himself to be utterly lost. He had no idea where this latest narrative fitted into the picture that he was trying to build.
‘Later enter, you might say, the other suitor for the Somali gangmaster’s favours, both business and sexual. Mr Petrov, head of a Ukrainian criminal syndicate, was in town to try and secure a foothold in the local labour supply market before the Chinese got it all sewn up. Shades of a Whitehall bedroom farce, Petrov and the Somali woman also had sex in the barn!’
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this!’ David said.
‘Oh, it gets better still,’ the superintendent said, with another grin.
‘Descriptions are a bit vague but more Chinese arrived, one of whom was very tall, and finding Petrov they attacked him and his sole bodyguard and apparently killed him. It was all a bit of a mess, but they gathered up all the evidence, clothes, belongings and whatever and spirited the body away. Which of the Chinese actually killed Petrov and what happened to his minder we really don’t know.’
‘This is … Shit, I don’t know what it is. Are you serious?’
The superintendent was.
‘The press were right there when the body was fished out of the sea off the Dorset coast. Everything is so instant these days, what with mobile phone cameras and the like, it’s hard to get a whole story together before the half of it is on the Internet in Australia or Saudi Arabia!’
David didn’t mention that he too had been right there.
In the peace and quiet of his flat David Hutchinson tried to piece together what he had learned. The giant Chinese man seemed to be a thread through all of the events that he had observed or been told about. The picture of mainland Chinese infiltration of the local Chinese gangs and the increase in competition and warfare with the in situ East European and Somali labour gangs was clear enough. The separate information that he had got from the police and Susie Peveral about the trafficking of much of the workforce for these gangs was also now much clearer to him.
But precisely how the enigmatic Mr Joe Kim fitted into this picture he was no clearer about. Hints of other shadowy figures, the Chinese woman, visiting with increasing frequency, who clearly had some kind of clout, the links to past figures in the Border Agency – all of this was no clearer to him either.
The police seemed to think that there was a status quo developing among the gangs and traffickers. So why would they still need an instantly recognisable fixer to keep flying in?
It was a question to which David had no answer.
São Paulo Daily News
English-language Edition – Monday, 12 July 2010
MYSTERY OF SÃO PAULO GIRL’S ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY
The São Paulo Police were recently contacted by the Brazilian Embassy in Canberra, Australia concerning Patience Zhang, aged 25 years, released from captivity in Melbourne, Australia.
Miss Zhang, who claims to be a Canadian citizen, a claim that the federal authorities in Ottawa are investigating, was released in a raid by Melbourne Police on a premises in the famous China Town district of the city. She was being held along with four other Chinese women who claimed through an interpreter to come from Indonesia. Police were called to the premises after reports of fighting among two groups of Chinese men.
Unconfirmed reports from Brazilian officials in Canberra suggest that Miss Zhang was one of a group of young Chinese women who had been trafficked from Brazil to Canada and given Canadian passports. This information, if proved correct, would support the investigations of the São Paulo Police into the apparent disappearance of at least five young Chinese women from their area in the last two years. Both the Embassy in Canberra and the São Paulo Police declined to comment on rumours that they had been given the names of other women who were transported to Australia along with Miss Zhang.
Interpol has confirmed that it is investigating an increase in the trafficking of young Chinese women. So far, women have been identified from the US, the UK and Canada. Numbers are unconfirmed, but are thought to be quite small, and Interpol would give no further information. Evidence is building that all of these women eventually ended up in Australia from where they then subsequently disappeared.
All of the officials that the News has spoken to declined to entertain any speculation about a link to a recent incident in Hong Kong in which a young Chinese woman appeared to be being delivered to a Chinese businessman. The young woman had been drugged.
According to the official at the Brazilian Embassy in Canberra, a common theme linking these women is that all were educated, even middle class, and although each, by leaving Brazil, was seeking to better themselves, there was no suggestion that any of them had been offered to the sex trade.
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Mr Kim was not happy having to rush back to Australia. He had unfinished, albeit interrupted, business in the UK and the call to return to Melbourne to take charge of the hijacking of Alice Hou from the rival group was causing him some concern. While he accepted that Alice was high-value merchandise sought by a specific customer, starting a war with another Chinese gang in Australia was not in his opinion a very wise thing to do. There was
too much evidence accumulating that the authorities in Australia, if not other countries, were now very much aware of this emerging trafficking sideline and their interest could lead only to increasing pressure on the gangs. And strife among the gangs, Kim knew, would only accelerate any clamp-down.
But Mr Xu had spoken and Joe Kim was in no position to challenge his boss’s orders.
Equally, he was concerned about the frequency with which he was being recorded in the immigration and transits records of Singapore or, as in the case in point, Hong Kong. However, despite his desire not to appear too often on the official radar, his regular movements around the world were well known, reported and disseminated.
Joe Kim was travelling on an Australian passport; not that that fooled anybody. Certainly, the Chinese Government’s various agencies who took a particular interest in him all knew his real name, his aliases and the various combinations of the two. Be he Joe Kim or Kim Lee Sung, the intelligence services of the US, the UK and various other countries made an effort to keep each other informed about Mr Kim’s movements and in particular these movements were relayed to Australia and thence to the Chinese. Suspicions abounded in Beijing on what Kim was up to on his various journeys around the world, but he was adept at not getting caught leaving too obvious an evidential trail. And with Mr Xu’s influence in the Chinese infrastructure Kim also had other assistance to obfuscate his activities.
However, when he arrived within Chinese territory, as at Hong Kong International Airport, the authorities were alerted and became especially vigilant while he remained there.
Thus the Australian Head of Intelligence in Canberra was able to write to the Chinese Embassy: ‘We know that he has knocked heads together in Great Britain and forced the various Chinese immigrant gangmasters into line with one of the major mainland Chinese crime syndicates now active in Europe. We also know that his role has changed with the appearance of at least one Chinese woman, of complex origins, who while being registered as mainland Chinese otherwise travels on a UK passport. This woman has started to undertake the courier role that had previously been associated with Kim. And she would appear to have more authority and reach than Kim.’
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