Episode 20 Caught Red Handed

Thieves will steal our cars, our valuables,

just about anything they can get their hands on.

To cut down on crime and antisocial behaviour,

police and other agencies are using new technology and tactics,

where the bad guys are actually getting caught in the act.

I can see the man actually commit the robbery.

Lovely, thank you very much.

Local councils, shops and businesses are laying some traps of their own.

Why should we feel frightened for the rest of our lives?

And the general public, too,

can help unsuspecting crooks get their comeuppance.

No way are you getting away.

We did it for everyone else as well that she might be stealing from.

We will name and shame you.

So, anyone who is up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get caught red-handed.

Today, a friend in need but not in deed,

because what she's doing is stealing from a friend.

By doing errands for my mum she gained her trust.

She's grabbing a great-grandmother's pension,

but the family are filming her.

Also today, a blot on the landscape.

Over 30 bags of illegally dumped rubbish rotting in a country lane.

-We're absolutely fed up with it.

-But what's this?

In the middle of the junk, a fast-food receipt

that's a clue to the whole dirty business.

Also, mind your backs and mind your bags.

You'll be asking yourself, "Why didn't anybody see that?"

How police in London bagged a gang of bag snatchers.

LOCATION DOT BEEPS

Bridlington, Yorkshire.

This building is part of a retirement home complex.

This is the view inside one of the flats.

It belongs to Hazel, a 92-year-old great-grandmother.

We can see inside because her son, Roy,

has hidden CCTV camera on top of a cabinet.

That's Hazel there, ready to go out for Sunday lunch with Roy.

A moment later, she's collected and the flat is empty.

All is quiet, but not for long.

The CCTV camera triggers after just three minutes. And a woman enters.

She's a friend of Hazel's called Gillian.

This was the lady

that had befriended mum

and got bread from the shop for her and things like that.

But it turns out that Gillian is not such a good friend after all.

92-year-old Hazel lives by herself.

She manages pretty well

but have some problems with her mobility, which means

she needs regular support from Roy and his wife, Cherril.

Hazel is a very loving, thoughtful lady.

My mum used to be very active, by getting on the buses

and having days out on her own.

Since her legs have started playing up, she's now

more or less housebound unless we take her out.

Hazel is also extremely hard of hearing

and can find communication difficult.

What are you going to have for dinner?

-What am I going to have for dinner?

-Yeah.

Salad. Mince pie and a salad.

-Are you having a cup of tea?

-Yes.

-Does she want one?

-Yeah.

She's never been 100% confident, even when she was younger.

And obviously now she's older, certainly not.

She relies on a lot of people and trusts everybody.

So when Gillian, a nearby neighbour,

offers to run some errands, Hazel welcomes her help with open arms.

This neighbour lives in this complex

and she's made friends of an awful lot of people.

She goes to the shop for them

and collects their pension and this, that and the other.

I think over a period of time,

by doing errands for my mum, she gained her trust.

As did many others.

But soon after, Hazel tells her family that she is finding

her pension isn't stretching as far as it should.

Money seems to be disappearing.

We didn't know whether she was buying the odd pair of earrings,

buying the odd skirt. So we just had to brush it by.

But Roy doesn't brush it off completely.

He begins to keep a closer eye on Hazel's finances,

collecting her pension and noting what she spends.

We used to come up every other day

But now it got to where we were coming up every day.

On one occasion, he finds £80 has gone missing from her cash box

when he'd only just put it there the day before.

It's a mystery how it happened and a mystery he wants to solve.

She hadn't been anywhere, no cause to spend it.

It was only the day after, we knew it was there.

So that's when we decided, well, something needs doing.

Our thoughts were obviously somebody had been in,

somebody had stole this money.

The only way to catch that somebody was to put some cameras in.

Roy buys a set of motion sensor CCTV cameras and puts them in position,

and he checks what's being recorded every day.

Nothing happens for a fortnight.

Then on a Sunday, Hazel goes out to Roy and Cherril's for lunch,

leaving her flat empty.

But only a few minutes after she's left,

one of the motion sensor cameras is triggered.

Someone has entered the room.

It's Gillian, and she's in a hurry.

She goes straight to the kitchen cupboard

where Hazel keeps her cash box.

But ever since the £80 went missing, Hazel has kept the box locked.

All she finds is some loose change,

so Gillian sets off rummaging around the flat.

She's obviously looking for the key to the cash box.

Gillian rifles through Hazel's handbag,

making sure she's out of sight of the window.

She doesn't find the key,

so Gillian goes to plan B and decides to take the whole cash box.

She sticks it under her coat.

Far from helping out a vulnerable neighbour,

this so-called friend is helping herself to Hazel's pension.

Gillian then leaves.

When Roy and Cherril bring Hazel home a couple of hours later,

they immediately sense something is wrong.

I put the key in the door, realised it was unlocked and that straightaway

made me suspicious because I felt sure that Mum would have locked it.

So I did what I've been doing for a fortnight since the cameras went in.

Straight into the kitchen to check where her money was.

And of course the box was missing.

With that I immediately checked the footage.

What he sees comes as a real shock, but Roy is pleased that

the evidence from his cameras will mean that the thief will be caught.

I was absolutely delighted, absolutely bang to rights.

What can you say?

We had such good footage, she actually walked right up

to where the camera was and we had a really great picture of her face.

Angry at the betrayal of his mother's trust,

Roy hands over the film to the police and Gillian is soon arrested.

She was still saying it wasn't her, she had an alibi,

but then they confronted her with the footage and she just came clean.

-She said, "Oh, yes, you've got me."

-We'd actually caught a thief.

In court, Gillian Carlton King pleads guilty to burglary

and is sentenced to nine months in prison.

But it took months before Hazel could get over the actions

of the woman she'd come to regard as a friend.

She's calming down a lot now but obviously at first

she was extremely wary because this woman lived in the same complex.

She was frightened that she'd bump into her in the corridors and things.

Hazel will never again have to see the woman who abused her friendship.

As well as receiving a prison sentence,

Gillian has also been evicted from this building

where her actions caused such shock and disbelief.

A lot of them, even now, don't believe that she has done it.

Even though she's been placed in prison,

there's still disbelievers, which is amazing.

Everybody needs good neighbours, yes, but thankfully Roy's cameras

were there to protect Hazel from a neighbour who was not a good friend.

-Oh, thank you.

-OK?

-Yes.

Your bloomin' hands are freezing!

-Cold hands, warm heart.

-Oh.

Well, I'm just really pleased we put those cameras in

and that we actually caught the thief.

Criminals like to operate at times and in places

when we are off guard.

Sneak thieves especially like happy hours in pubs,

when they are very, very busy.

And if you don't keep your eye on your valuables during those

times, that happy hour could soon turn into a very unhappy hour.

LOCATION DOT BEEPS

The City of London.

One square mile of high-rise offices, restaurants

and bars that cater for the influx of 300,000 commuters each day.

Two professional-looking men walking past this busy restaurant

appear to spot a table they'd like to take their lunch at.

The man who's carrying a bag

squeezes into a seat behind other customers.

But just a couple of minutes later,

before they've even ordered,

the pair get up and leave.

The maitre d' finds a bag on the floor and assumes it belongs

to the nearest customer. But she says it's not hers.

And it isn't. It's a decoy.

The customer's actual bag

went out the door with those two businessmen a moment earlier.

These are professional criminals. This is their career.

They are stealing from professional people in the City,

who are enjoying their job and dressed appropriately,

these people are dressed appropriately

to carry out their job, which is to steal.

These thieves may be professional, but some of the venues

where they choose to work are under secret surveillance

and the police are on their trail.

It's early summer in the City and the weather is hotting up.

Tourists and commuters

pile into the restaurants, seeking refreshment.

The crime reports begin to

pile in on Detective Sergeant Grahame Mace's desk.

We were finding that our thefts from licensed premises and restaurants

were really starting to go up, and over quite a short period of time.

Grahame is working as part of a special unit

at the City of London Police, dedicated to lowering thefts

from restaurants and bars.

They start by gathering any CCTV evidence.

What we specialise in is linking crimes

and being able to identify offenders.

We're able to look at footage to pick these people out

and we're able then to identify three people

that were committing the crimes through the CCTV footage.

It turns out that one small but very active gang

is responsible for the sudden spike in thefts.

We didn't know who they were at this point.

We just literally had faces and their description.

The gang seemed to work in pairs.

Let's just look at how they stole that woman's bag earlier.

They're very, very confident. They were able to go into bars,

interact with staff, be comfortable

and not draw any attention to themselves.

They take their seats next to the bag they've chosen to steal.

Their main method was to sit back-to-back with the victim

so that the victim's directly behind them.

They would take their jacket off, place it on the chair behind them.

This helps to cloak what they're up to.

Then in one swift movement,

the man takes the woman's bag and leaves his decoy bag in its place.

It's quite unbelievable what they actually do.

They pick the bags up, they pass it over the table to each other.

You will be asking yourself, "Why didn't anybody see that?"

And the reason is, they're doing it so open,

it's not drawing any attention to them.

They make up an excuse to the staff and leave.

Cold, calculating

and with no concern for the effect on their victim.

This isn't just a bag worth £400-£500.

Everything is stored in there,

our mobile phones, laptops and our tablets.

So we would liken it to somebody coming in

and burgling your house and taking all your personal possessions.

This is somebody's life

that is actually getting taken away from them.

It's a loss Melissa knows only too well.

I was going out with friends and having a really nice night.

We just went out into one of the bars. We were sat down.

And I had my handbag next to me on the seat, and I remember getting

up to go to the bar, and I went to get my bag and it had just gone.

I just felt complete panic.

I had my passport in there, my mobile phone, my house keys.

I even had my car keys in my bag, as well.

It was actually quite a sick feeling that I'd never felt before.

Because I'd never had anything stolen. I'm quite a sensible person.

I don't normally lose things,

so it was really distressing, really, really distressing.

Graham and his colleagues want to stop this gang causing misery

in the City's bars and restaurants.

They still don't know who they are,

but hope that CCTV evidence can help them get one step ahead of the game.

We were able to actually find out what their habits were.

They are creatures of habit, these types of criminals,

and we were able to track them around the City.

We see here two of the gang entering a very busy bar.

They sit down next to a coat stand which has bags under it

and spend 30 minutes waiting for the right moment.

They're going to make their move. See how they're dressed.

Quite clearly, they're fitting in. They put on their nice coats.

Taking their time.

And one of them moves away.

The other one bends down.

Takes the victim's bag, no rush.

And then just walks out, nice and calmly.

Another bar, and some more CCTV evidence against them.

A man in a red shirt crossing to his table

is about to have his holiday ruined.

Tourists are a favourite target.

People who are here on holiday, they're sitting in a bar,

relaxed, they're off their guard.

Scouting the bar, the thieves spot their next victim's bag.

It's on the floor beside him,

and they go to the vacant table alongside.

One of them goes to sit down.

The other one leaves his coat and his jacket, like he normally does

in all the thefts, takes the bag, and he's away.

Very, very quick.

It takes just 15 seconds.

Out on the street, the younger man darts into an alley

and throws away the items from the bag that they don't want.

But Graham and his colleagues

are about to get a breakthrough in the case.

The younger man turns out not to be so professional after all.

He goes on to try a bit of solo work, and makes a mess of it.

He tried to steal a bag off a female who wears

it on her shoulder, and as he tries to grab it, fortunately for us,

members of the public actually intervened.

And actually stopped him.

A man is arrested. His name is Marian Abukaff.

Once he'd come in, our unit was alerted

and we were able to link him to six other offences.

But he doesn't give away the identity of his partner,

the leader of the gang.

The ringleader, straightaway, within a matter of a week,

had got a new apprentice and carried on with his crimes.

Grahame and his colleagues are getting ready to strike

and arrest the gang, when the trail suddenly goes cold.

At that point, everything stopped.

And I knew that there was two options.

One, they'd left the country, left the city, left this area,

or two, more than likely, they had been caught.

And, yes, the gang had been bagged by the neighbouring

Metropolitan Police for similar crimes.

Grahame has the missing link.

The ringleader is called Farkas. His new apprentice, Mumtean.

Grahame visits them in prison

armed with the evidence that his own team has gathered.

I then arrested the males for the 11 offences that had

occurred in the City over the three-month period

and they were subsequently interviewed and charged, which they

admitted to committing the offences and received longer prison sentences.

Malu Farkas, the ringleader, is given a 44-week prison sentence

for his crimes in the City

and ordered to pay over £3,500 in compensation.

Marian Abukaff, his first apprentice,

gets seven months in prison.

And the second apprentice, Alexander Mumtean, is jailed for four months

and ordered to pay over £500 in compensation.

And all Grahame's team's hard work has paid off.

It was a fantastic result for us. We managed to clear up 11 detections.

At least with some closure for the victims,

they know that we are working hard,

we are bringing these people to justice, and we will take them down.

Of course, the best way to deter bag thieves

is to make life harder for them in the first place.

Wrap the handbag strap round your leg, so that,

if it does move, you know someone's after it.

Don't put it round the back of a chair. Don't leave it under a table.

You might check your bag every couple of minutes,

but a thief is checking it every couple of seconds.

Just in case the worst happens, do not keep your keys,

phone and address book in the same place.

Keep your key in your pocket so at least you will be able to get home

and you will not have to have your locks changed.

Coming up.

Somebody's illegally dumped their junk in this country lane.

It's irritating.

A council officer hopes a single fast-food receipt

will help identify the phantom fly-tipper.

Northumbria. It's just gone 6am,

and it looks like some sort of ninja warrior's got lost.

But actually, this is an early bird,

trying to worm his way into somebody else's house.

Not surprisingly, he finds the doors locked.

But this suburban shinobi isn't to be deterred.

Spotting a window left ajar, he creeps over there, stealthily,

his black garb hiding him in the shadows.

Except, there are no shadows.

It's broad daylight

and he's breaking in to a bright, white conservatory.

He doesn't know it

but he's providing a perfect picture for the hidden camera.

He climbs in very slowly.

He knows the homeowner is asleep in the house.

Once inside, he walks around until he finds an internal door

to the garage, where he selects a mountain bike he fancies.

But he's been a noisy ninja.

He's woken up the homeowner, who comes to investigate.

And the intruder scrams, showing him a clean pair of heels.

And it's those heels that will eventually do for

our self-styled man in black.

Watching the footage,

a police officer recognises the thief from his trainers.

They also found he's taken a picture on his own mobile phone

of the bike he stole. He ends up being jailed for 16 months.

So less of a ninja, more of a nincompoop.

Meanwhile, if you have a conservatory or patio door,

best check your security.

Here's another thief who's got in that way, in Chiswick, West London.

He left the bike but took two laptops and a tablet.

And he's still at large, so if you recognise him,

his clothes or his trainers, then the Met would like to hear from you.

"Fly-tippers will be prosecuted," or so the signs say.

But that doesn't stop some thoughtless people from dumping

their rubbish and leaving it for others to clear up behind them.

What you're about to see might make them think twice.

The illegal dumping of rubbish is a country-wide problem.

It's harmful for the environment

and potentially hazardous for the public.

It can also be a pretty unpleasant task for council workers to

clean up the fly-tipping mess.

It can get a bit gut-wretching.

It is a real filthy job.

It's difficult to catch fly-tippers red-handed.

The majority of them pick

out-of-the-way places to do their dirty work.

But in East Sussex, to find a culprit,

this single, crumpled receipt, found in over 30 bags of rubbish,

sparks off some old-fashioned sleuthing.

And an intriguing investigation begins.

The district of Rother in East Sussex

has many areas of natural beauty.

Beaney's Lane is one of them.

Dog lovers Peter and Madeleine live nearby.

Beaney's Lane is a few hundred yards from our house. Good girl.

It's a country lane.

We go down there twice a day, usually, with the dogs.

It's relaxing.

But Beaney's Lane is being blighted by the fly-tippers.

The sort of rubbish we find down there, is like car seats

and radios. It's a worry when you take the dogs down there

because they could pick up things to eat.

This gets right up my nose - the plastic bags.

It's mainly the builders' stuff that's the real problem.

Whereas most of us

can dump our household rubbish at the local tip,

tradesmen obviously generate more waste, and have to take it to

specially designated places, or pay somebody to take it away for them.

Yet despite some rather blunt warnings in the area,

some don't bother in Rother.

There's the sign. "No Tipping". And look at it.

One day Peter and Madeleine come across a particularly shameless

piece of fly-tipping.

A massive pile of builder's rubble has been dumped overnight.

It's the last straw.

We thought, "OK, straight back home and phone the council."

We're absolutely fed up with it.

Peter contacts Alex Balshaw

who works as an environmental enforcement officer for the council.

His main job is to investigate fly-tipping.

And it still makes him angry.

We work in a countryside area, a natural beauty area

and to have it trashed with their waste because

they can't be bothered to dispose of it properly is irritating.

Determined to catch the offender,

Alex gets his gloves on and gets his hands dirty.

He methodically goes through the many bags of rubbish

looking for any clue inside as to who dumped them.

I'm into the 30th odd bag that I've been looking through

and I'm still finding nothing.

I then come across a fast-food wrapper.

It says "food made to order".

And with it he finds a receipt with three letters,

AUP, scrawled at the top.

Alex has a flash of inspiration.

For some reason or another, why I know this is worrying that I do.

I know that sometimes

when you go through fast-food restaurant drive-thrus

and you ask for a special order they will ask you to wait.

Park you up around the corner

and take the last three digits of your registration.

As well as the letters he suspects are part of a registration

plate, the receipt shows exactly what food restaurant it is.

And the exact date and time of the order.

Alex remembers that they have cameras at that drive-thru.

He gets the manager to search through footage and before long

they have a screen shot of the car that placed the order.

I've now got a make, model, full registration plate of the vehicle.

Alex calls the DVLA to find out who owns the car.

The name the DVLA have given me

is Graham Wilkinson who just lives

around the corner from Beaney's Lane.

And it turns out that Graham is a builder.

He seems to fit the profile. It's builder's waste that's been dumped.

This is my man.

But is he?

When my wife took the phone call from the council she said

she couldn't stop shaking.

She knew it wasn't me. She knew I would never do that.

I never have and never would.

Though when Graham sees the evidence,

he's stunned to see it is his stuff lying there.

Even though it's a pile of rubbish, you can recognise your own rubbish.

It was partly from my own house

because I'm renovating my own property.

Very slowly, I will say.

And partly from a couple of very small jobs.

Where it's not worth getting a skip in. It was just a couple of bags.

So, the plot thickens. How did Graham's junk get dumped?

For his business Graham uses a reputable waste clearance firm.

But when he had a small amount of his own building waste

he felt he didn't need such a big operator.

One of the guys that works for me

knew someone that done rubbish clearance.

I didn't check him out too closely because I'd met him

a couple of times previous.

So I thought I'd give him a call

and see how much he would charge to get rid of it.

And Graham has some proof of his conversation with the man.

Text messages on his phone.

"Hi, Graham. Sorry I didn't text the other day about the rubbish.

"Can remove it today for £40 if that's OK with you?"

But Graham has no idea the man is then going to dump

his rubbish in a country lane and he's certainly not happy about it.

People that fly-tip are lower than low.

The more that can be prosecuted the better

and I think there need to be seriously hefty fines to deter them.

And this fly-tipper would have got away with it

if Graham's wife hadn't unknowingly provided that vital clue.

When clearing out her car, she had thrown that fast-food receipt

away in the rubbish.

Very impressed with the evidence they've got.

They've really done their job well.

Alex now has the offender's name and number.

He hauls the man in for an interview.

Towards the end we explained how we had traced it.

Initially all from the fast-food wrappings.

Needless to say he was shocked.

Any excuses went out the window, hands came up.

And he admitted it.

In court, the offender pleaded guilty to fly-tipping and was

given a £180 fine and ordered to pay the council's costs of £172.40.

It's very fulfilling to get this result when you know it

just stems from a receipt in a burger wrapper in a lane.

The council have been doing a clean up operation of Beaney's Lane.

But it looks like a strong message has gone out to all the fly-tippers.

Peter and Madeleine have noticed there is less rubbish being

dumped here.

Obviously, those people won't hopefully do it again.

I think word's got around the area, certainly with bigger tipping.

It's not such a huge problem as it was so...

That's it for today.

Join us next time when the police

and the public catch more criminals red-handed.