Episode 6 Caught Red Handed

Thieves will steal our cash, our cars, our valuables,

just about anything they can get their hands on.

But now the police are using cutting-edge technology

to catch the bad guys.

The CCTV is gold dust.

-Great evidence for the police.

-Got to have him stopped.

Local councils, shops and businesses are fighting crime

with their own tricks and traps.

There's a eureka moment when you get that evidence.

And the public are using secret cameras

to make sure crooks get their comeuppance.

It makes me feel so angry.

He's paid the price, he's been dealt with.

Yes! We've got her.

So anyone who's up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get caught red-handed.

Today...

Linda discovers the most valued member of her shop staff

has been organising a supermarket sweep for her friends,

free of charge.

You know, you feel exploited, you feel...

why were you so naive to have trusted somebody totally?

Also today, a sports car owner goes into kung fu mode

to try and stop a cheeky thief stealing his wheels,

but the carjacker doesn't give up easily.

But first, Welsh farmer Greg loves his wild boars,

but when his farm is burgled, they escape into the night,

and he fears he might never see his valuable animals again.

Things were going round in my head.

They say your life flashes before you. It was.

Police find the van used by the thieves

and make a shocking discovery.

Out of the back, there were drops of blood on the floor.

It was either, A, wounded animals in there,

or, B, it could have been a wounded burglar in there.

In South Wales, there's a farm which is a little...

well, out of the ordinary.

Farmer Greg isn't interested in cows and sheep.

For him, it's all about wild boars.

Yeah, my boy.

This is Scratch. This one was hand-reared from a baby.

And he got his name because he loves a little scratch.

He's the only one that does.

Greg began rearing wild boars six years ago,

and now he has over 80 of them.

Wild boar has always had a mystique about it.

I've done pigs. Pigs are boring!

Come on. This is Boris, he's the main stud boar.

Loppy, because she's got slightly loppy-eared ears.

This is Bertha.

She's the matriarch of the whole sounder, she's the boss.

With boar, you get to know them, you know the characters,

you've got them for a minimum of two years

before they go out the door.

It's more of a way of life.

Fully grown adults can weigh over 27 stone

and cause serious injury.

They're not like a lion or a tiger. They wouldn't attack you to eat you.

The danger comes with their size.

They can cause damage to people rushing past,

they can run at 30mph-plus.

They don't go over fences, they just go through them.

You only contain them with electricity.

Greg has built electric fences to keep the boars in.

He's also trained a Rottweiler and set up security cameras

to guard against thieves taking his farm equipment.

We started using trail cameras on here

because things were going missing, little things,

diesel pinched out of some of the machinery,

and they give you a good insight into wildlife

and what's happening on your farm.

The cameras are triggered by movement, and capture still images.

Soon after Greg installed them,

they snapped squirrels and foxes paying his farm a visit.

But it wasn't long before his security system

captured something far more sinister.

It's Sunday morning in early spring,

and Greg's just arrived at the farm.

It was about 8.45am I got here.

Turned the corner, the gate was open. Panic stations instantly.

Greg's father has the only other key for the gate.

My first thought was, why is he here this time of the morning?

Then Greg turns the corner

and sees his wild boars have got out of their pen.

It was like, oh, my God, what has happened?

Has something happened to him inside the pen?

Has he got in feeding them and left the gate open?

Has he had a heart attack?

But his father isn't there.

Greg sees a barn door has been forced open

and realises he's been burgled.

Things were going round in my head.

They say your life flashes before you. It was.

All the farm machinery and tools have been stolen.

You name it that we use on the farm, they took it.

The pigs that were now running round outside had gone in there

because we keep the feed in there.

There was 600 quid's worth of feed just thrown away.

It was bedlam. The losses were just mounting up and up and up.

Greg reports the burglary to the police.

His next problem is the havoc the escaped boars might cause.

He phones local farmers who are experienced in controlling animals

and asks for their help.

It's important to have one of these emergency plans

for a nightmare scenario like this.

We got half a dozen people here within about 15 minutes.

Some of these boys are armed, like myself.

If we have to, we would destroy them,

if there was endangerment to public.

Greg and his posse start to round up the escaped wild boars.

Even though they're called wild,

there haven't been any living in the Welsh countryside for 300 years.

We were counting them in

and we thought we were getting on top of it.

And as we were doing this,

there was more and more animals coming in,

and I kept thinking to myself, "Have I miscounted?

"Have we got more animals than I thought I had?"

They were coming from everywhere.

Not realising, as fast as we were putting them into the pen,

they were just hopping out of the pen

and coming back around in circles.

Greg spots holes in the electric fence

through which the boars were escaping.

The burglars must have cut their way through it to get to the barn.

The whole system now was defunct.

The police arrive, and Greg gives them a list of his stolen property.

They went off then to do whatever they do best.

We were left to try and corral the animals in.

Greg works out that 42 wild boars are missing.

He checks his cameras.

Some boars can be seen escaping seven hours earlier.

Seven hours would give them a 10-, 12-mile head start on us,

so I was starting to panic then.

The cameras also shows snapshots of the burglars.

They aren't identifiable,

but the pictures do reveal useful information.

We could see the people, we could see the timescale,

they were here almost eight hours on-site.

We see the van they were using,

so we had enough information now

to phone the police and say, "Look, this is what I've got."

But time is of the essence.

Greg and the police need to track down the thieves

and the escaped boars fast.

Later, will Wales have wild boar

living in its woods for the first time in centuries?

We could be discussing this in 20 years and saying,

"Pff, that was a storm in a teacup."

Or it could be, "Oh, my God, it's an absolute nightmare.

"They're everywhere."

Also coming up...

A shop owner who's not only faced with a thief,

but with a thief who's brought

a lot of her thieving friends along with her, too.

We could have lost everything.

Everything that we'd worked so hard for.

The shoplifters are shameless as they casually empty shelves.

She's come in her nightdress.

Yeah, she's also brought a trolley with her,

which she fills up with goods.

This man's been helping himself

to various medications at his local chemist's.

And he's going to need some headache tablets in a moment,

when he takes steps to escape.

Very uncertain steps.

When this bungler... Oops! ..sorry, burglar,

decides to exit through the ceiling,

he falls from a great height, not once...

..but twice...

bringing half the roof down with him.

Then he opts for a different exit route, ten feet away.

He does like removing chunks of the ceiling, this chap.

Careful! Careful!

Well, he appears to have done it.

Now he just needs to avoid that hole ten feet away.

Yep, that's the one.

The police find this comedy of errors less than funny,

and before long, his criminal clumsiness will be his downfall.

Ouch.

Every year, over £2 billion is stolen from Britain's retailers

by their employees.

But, fortunately, some of those dishonest staff get caught,

because greed conquers brains.

In the game show Supermarket Sweep,

contestants emptied the shelves of all they could carry,

rather like these people are, but this is no game.

These are thieves.

She's brought a trolley with her, which she fills up with goods,

and she walks out of the shop without paying for them.

They've been betrayed by a valued member of their shop's staff

at the same time as their family-run store is on the brink of bankruptcy.

I was absolutely devastated when I was told that it was her.

Linda and Kamal moved to Portsmouth, on the south coast, from London,

34 years ago, to try and make a go of running a small local store.

We bought the shop.

It was quite rundown, but with two young boys,

cos Bobby was a year old and Ricky was four,

we've managed to build a business and bring them up as well.

Linda and Kamal's son Bob has recently joined the family business,

and works full-time in the shop.

I think, working with my parents,

I've come a lot closer to them than when I was working outside.

I'm proud of what they've achieved.

When the recession hit, back in the '80s,

they worked hard, got through it,

and it's a lot busier from when we took over.

It's lovely that you have a family who are so involved.

They have six part-time employees.

We don't treat our staff, really, like staff.

It's like more of a friendship.

Some of them, who've been with us 24 years,

also have a lot of input into how we run it.

But after many years of steady success, suddenly,

the business starts to fail.

My parents started planning their retirement,

but with what's happened, it didn't go to plan.

It turns out that inside this family grocers,

they have a rotten apple.

Linda and Kamal begin to notice a dramatic drop in their takings.

It was getting increasingly difficult to pay bills,

and we'd be having arguments at home.

My husband would say to me, you know, "You've got to pay the bill,"

and I would say, "I haven't got the money,"

and he said, "Where's it going?"

We thought it was our expenses, we thought our expenses were too high,

but we worked out how much we should be making in the shop

with our turnover,

and we worked out that it can't be our expenses.

They also rule out shoplifting, because the losses are so huge.

It was like we're fighting a losing battle.

Linda starts working six days a week

to try to spot where things are going wrong.

I did that for a year, but not working on a Sunday,

because Sunday was a day that we wanted it to be a family day.

On Sundays, Linda asks her most trusted employee

to take charge of the shop.

She'd been with us 11 years.

She was more of my right-hand woman, she was totally, totally trusted.

My mum took her on from young, my parents treated her like a daughter,

the same they would me and my brother.

Despite her best efforts,

Linda can't get to the bottom of what's going wrong.

The family realise they must take drastic action

to keep the business afloat.

All our savings that we had, we were putting back into the business.

Half their life has gone into the shop,

and to end up with nothing, it's quite sad.

I cashed in all my husband's endowment policy,

and put that money in.

The shop was on the verge of collapse.

But one Monday morning, Linda makes an alarming discovery.

She checks the cash dispenser in the shop,

and is shocked to find it's completely empty.

I know we'd banked £1,600 in our ATM,

and it showed it had dispensed £460-odd,

so there's about £1,200 gone missing.

Linda thinks the ATM might be faulty,

and phones the supply company, but they assure her the machine

won't be to blame for the missing cash.

Then I thought, instead of arguing, let's check the cameras,

let's just check how many people have gone to the ATM.

Bob views the shop's security camera footage from the Sunday.

It shows the member of staff they trusted

taking the cashpoint money boxes behind the counter.

Bob is shocked by what happens next.

She was actually taking money out of the ATM, instead of loading it.

I just couldn't believe it.

I had to go back two or three times, to make sure what I saw was correct.

Very hard to get over.

Bob breaks the news to his mum.

I was absolutely devastated when I was told that it was her.

It wouldn't have been in my wildest dreams,

because she was treated part of the family,

and she, in turn, would make sure

that I got to the car all right every night.

She'd say to me, "Lin, people know you've got a shop."

So, she'd built up such trust that you wouldn't have even thought.

Bob looks at more footage, and it gets worse.

He finds that stealing from the cashpoint isn't the only scam

this employee has been up to.

There was her friends coming in, ex-member of staff coming in,

picking up goods, filling up their trolleys,

filling up bags full of cigarettes,

and just walking out with no payment.

Bob's horrified as he watches the thief and six cronies

carry out a crooked Supermarket Sweep at the store.

She's selecting goods from the shelf,

she's actually bagging her items up

without scanning them through the till...

Linda's heartbroken to see that one of the other shoplifters

is a former employee and friend.

She's appalled just how casual these people are,

as they go about stripping the shop that supports her family.

She's come in her nightdress.

Yeah, she's also brought a trolley with her,

that she fills up with goods,

and she walks out the shop without paying for them.

It makes me feel sick, cos it's the first time I've watched this.

-It looks like she's doing, like, a full weekly shop.

-Mm.

And she doesn't make any payment.

She's just put some money in her pocket. Very upsetting.

The family's detective work has found the truth, but there's no joy.

It's a bitter blow to their trust in people.

We could have lost everything that we'd worked so hard for,

and I feel...

I feel so guilty in this.

I...

Because it was a shop that was run by me,

that I'd trusted her so much...

And I feel like...

You know, you feel exploited, you feel...

why were you so naive?

Why were you so naive to have trusted somebody totally?

The family showed their findings to the police,

and the thieves were arrested.

In court, the now ex-member of staff

was sentenced to two years in prison.

Six accomplices were given six-month sentences, suspended for a year,

as well as community orders.

They also had to pay compensation, fines and surcharges.

Linda and her family have decided to treat this traumatic time

as a valuable learning experience.

I think you've got to have trust to go through life.

You cannot tarnish everyone with the same brush.

And I must say, the staff we've got at the moment are wonderful.

But you've also got to make sure that they don't get to a situation

where they start taking advantage of you.

The family can now once again look to a happier future.

It's going to take us a few years to recover,

but we're already seeing the difference.

Cos we've been there for so long, it's something...

that I would hopefully want my kids to take it over,

hopefully keep it going for many more years.

Now, the owner of this car loves his hot set of wheels.

It's the sort of car he would do anything to protect,

including a stunt straight out of a kung fu movie.

It's nine o'clock at night,

and a sports car owner makes a pit stop at a petrol station.

After filling up, he leaves his car on the forecourt,

and goes to pay for his fuel.

Suddenly, a mystery man appears, clocks the car is unlocked,

and decide to steal it.

He gets in the car.

The key is still in the ignition, so he thinks it's his lucky day.

But it isn't.

The owner spots the stranger in his car,

and what follows is like something from a martial arts movie.

Hi-yah!

A two-footed karate kick Jackie Chan would be proud of.

Let's see it again, in slow motion.

He accelerates to the car, jumps, and boom!

Take that!

And the action isn't finished yet.

The carjacker manages to drive off,

but the owner climbs through the window, Dukes of Hazzard-style.

And the crook scarpers.

He doesn't get very far, though.

Soon, he's arrested and charged with attempted car theft.

And for the sports car stuntman, Hollywood could soon be calling.

Well, that guy went to great lengths to stop the thief in his tracks.

But what can the rest of us do to protect our vehicles

without resorting to death-defying stunts?

During last winter,

we had about 13 vehicles stolen outside people's houses,

either on their drives, or on the road,

where they'd left the engines running

so that they defrosted and they warmed up

while they had their breakfast, and people need to remember,

sometimes your insurance is invalidated

by doing something like that,

making it the temptation that it is to thieves.

Cars are vulnerable if somebody breaks into your home,

so my advice would always be,

make sure your keys are out of harm's way,

make sure that they are not readily visible,

so you're also protecting your car

when it's left unattended outside your house.

If you leave your sat nav and your car keys and your home keys

in the same location and they're stolen together,

that can be a really deadly combination,

because what the suspect can do

is identify from the home setting on the sat nav where you actually live.

If you're outside the newsagent's,

just nipping in to pick up a newspaper or some sweets,

turn the engine off, take your keys with you.

It is so easy for somebody just to jump in, and they're away.

Back to Greg's farm in South Wales, where during the night,

thieves had broken in.

They cut holes in his fence and stole valuable farming equipment.

They also released a large number of wild boars

that escaped through the holes into the surrounding countryside.

The police have just called Greg with some news.

They phoned me to say that they'd made several arrests,

and they'd recovered what they thought

to be all the property that was involved.

Acting on a tip-off, the police have arrested suspects at a house nearby,

just a few hours after Greg reported the crime.

The officers that had been here were part of the team going in there,

and as he walked in there, he thought, "My God,

"everything that I've just been told on this ginormous list is there."

Greg goes to the house,

and shows the police a van he'd seen on his security camera footage.

We went looking for this van,

and it wasn't immediately parked outside the property,

it was parked up the road a couple of hundred yards.

Out of the back, there were drops of blood on the floor.

We made a decision to get in there.

It was either, A, wounded animals in there,

or, B, it could have been a wounded burglar in there.

They forced the van's rear doors open.

It was quite a horrific sight. Dead animals in there.

It was very messy, you know?

In the van, there are two dead wild boars.

It was worse knowing that...

The pain and suffering the animals went through on that night

was worse than the burglary, you know?

We spend a lot of time nurturing these animals, to get used to us.

When I turn up, they think they're going to be fed,

so when these people come up, they probably thought the same.

They were going to them looking for food, and ended up being butchered.

But Greg can't dwell on that for long.

Lots of his boars are still missing.

We were unaware how many they had killed.

We found, about four miles away,

an animal which had had a wound under its jaw,

so we knew some might have escaped and bled to death,

so we really didn't know what we were chasing.

The work went on right into the night, you know,

we were searching till silly hours o'clock.

Although wild boars are unlikely to attack people,

it is unknown what their effect on the countryside will be.

PC Mark Goulding,

one of just three specially trained wildlife officers in Wales,

is alerted.

I received a telephone call to say

a burglary had taken place to a wild boar farm.

That in itself was unique.

Why anybody would burgle a wild boar farm...

But when they told me that at least...

40-odd boar were unaccounted for

and were beyond the boundaries of the farm,

they didn't know what to do,

how they were going to deal with it, and what the offences were.

As well as the burglary, the thieves could be charged

with causing an animal unnecessary suffering, if it can be proved.

So, Mark asks for a postmortem to be carried out on the two dead animals

found in the back of the thieves' van.

The importance of an autopsy helps me evidence how they died,

to show a cruelty offence.

The thieves could also be charged

with allowing a non-native species to escape into the wild.

I had a significant challenge.

I had to prove and evidence

that the animals were beyond the boundaries of the farm,

that they were indeed in a wild state.

And that means getting a definitive photo

of one of Greg's boars in the countryside.

Four of the animals were female, but more importantly,

two were pregnant, which meant those piglets,

those boarlets, would fundamentally be a first generation

of Welsh wild boar.

Wild boar became extinct in Wales three centuries ago.

Mark teams up with animal tracking experts from Cardiff University

to see if that's about to change.

We utilised trail cameras, we baited the trail cameras as well,

and we started picking up trails of where the animals were moving.

Meanwhile, Greg continues to try to catch the boars

that come back onto his land.

They were going probably in a 30-mile circle of this place

before they were coming back here, and we were able, in the night,

for two days either side, to sit here and wait,

and as they were coming in,

we'd bait them into a catch pen, and boom, we had them.

But the traps only work for a short while.

Boars are observant and intelligent.

Once they learnt what these traps were doing,

as soon as they wised up, they were useless.

Over the following weeks, Mark and his trackers

use jam and peanut butter

to try to lure the wild boars in front of their cameras.

Finding these animals was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Everything else was activating our trail cameras bar the wild boar.

Badgers started eating the peanut butter, squirrels eating the jam,

and it was becoming incredibly frustrating.

They were like ghosts.

We'd go into thickets, and I could hear them, but could I see them?

Finally, after three months of weekly camera checks...

..Mark gets the evidence he needs.

I remember putting it in the laptop,

and for a minute, I really struggled to comprehend what I was looking at,

and then as the animal moved and it turned, I realised it was wild boar.

The sense of relief was significant.

I was so, so happy.

I had enough for the Crown Prosecution.

That was a moment I will never forget.

There's now enough evidence for multiple charges

against the three men who raided Greg's farm.

In court, they were sentenced to a combined total

of ten years, six months in prison.

And Mark had broken new legal ground in this country,

proving the thieves' raid

allowed a non-native species to escape into the wild.

This is the first conviction of its kind

against a viable breeding population of wild boar.

And that, in itself, is unique.

The case helped Mark win a National Wildlife Officer Of The Year award.

He continues to monitor Britain's newest wild species - boar.

This is snuffling.

So, basically, the wild boar are ploughing up the ground.

We've also got some lovely footprints of a wild boar.

That's unmistakable - that is wild boar.

Farmer Greg has boosted his security system,

and now has permission to build a house on the farm

so he can keep an eye on things overnight.

And his escaped boars seem to be adapting to their new lives.

After a 300-year gap,

wild boars are now officially back in the Welsh countryside.

A couple of months ago, I attended a call-out,

and there was a large boar, female boar, there, in a stables,

who'd given birth on Christmas Day, with three little boarlets.

So we know they're now breeding.

Of course, they were native here hundreds of years ago,

but at the same time,

we have habitat now that's gone on for hundreds of years without them,

so it's a bit of an unknown.

We could be discussing this in 20 years and saying,

"Pff, that was a storm in a teacup."

Or it could be, "Oh, my God, it's an absolute nightmare.

"They're everywhere."

That's all for today.

Join us next time to see some more villains getting their just deserts

when they're caught red-handed.