Episode 5 Filthy Rotten Scoundrels

All over the country, officers are fighting to keep our streets clean and keep the great in Great Britain.

Every one of these persons caught, prosecuted, should receive two years in prison straight away.

Every 30 seconds, someone somewhere in the UK

illegally dumps rubbish.

From bags of dog mess to mountains of rubble,

it's wrecking the streets where we live.

On today's programme -

it doesn't get more serious than this,

can officers in London bring to an end the nine year reign of a hardcore criminal gang?

This is a racket.

It's organised crime and there's nothing else to say.

In Leicestershire, could officers be dealing with a serial flytipper

that's ruining a farmer's livelihood?

When consumed by the cow in the winter,

it will almost inevitably mean the death of a cow.

And the incredible story of how more than 20 lorry loads of sinks were dumped on private land.

This was a considerable amount of waste.

I mean, several tens of tonnes I should imagine.

And up to a depth of 2-3ft deep.

This is the ongoing fight against Britain's filthy, rotten scoundrels

Islington, north London.

Where flytipping has been taken to the extreme.

We're talking of not 10, 20, 30 tyres,

we're talking of, in some instances, tens of thousands of tyres.

And it's thought one notorious criminal gang is behind it all.

I think they have scouts that go out and find locations like this,

areas where they're out of public view,

they can get on with what they're doing.

It's a massive problem.

Not only are these tyres dangerous to the environment, but it costs a fortune to clear them.

In the last two years alone, Islington Council has cleared 10,000 dumped tyres

at a hefty cost.

Wait for it - £60,000.

One man who's fallen victim to the gang is Dino Carnivali.

He runs an Italian wholesale food business in King's Cross

and was astounded when he found over 1,000 tyres piled up in his car park.

Eight months ago, we started noticing tyres which had been dumped.

To dump this many tyres would... You know, it takes some going.

It's not someone who's just taken an opportunity.

That's somebody who's got contacts. You don't really know where to go.

I'm suddenly lumbered with a two grand bill,

I've got tyres on my land, which I don't want and I don't need.

You know, there's nothing to stop 'em coming back and refilling the area tomorrow.

You know, unless I physically get involved myself, what can I do that's legal?

Not a lot.

So you can understand why Dino's at his wits' end.

His car park is jammed with thousands of tyres

and there really is no end in sight for him.

But this tyre-tipping gang is prolific.

And it's not long before they make another daring strike

at a warehouse in York Way, King's Cross.

Close to Dino's business.

Kenny Wilkes is at the scene.

This former dustman heads up Islington's elite environmental crime team,

and he's seen it all before.

They use a large box-type Luton vehicle.

They'll go around to people that are in the tyre business,

pass themselves off as being registered waste carriers, which they're not.

Then find a warehouse like this or somewhere that's out of the way.

They'll unload the tyres, drive off, secure the gate behind them,

so that they can come back.

They'll keep coming back until they fill the premises up unfortunately.

At Islington HQ,

Kenny's team is determined to bring these criminals to justice.

So fellow environment enforcer Tim Troon has been

trawling through hours of CCTV footage of the warehouse

to try and spot these guys in action.

This camera is used for various parking offences and it's also used for antisocial behaviour,

which, King's Cross, has been known for in the past,

but obviously has benefited from CCTV

to produce that fear of crime and crime aspect.

The tyre-tippers have been operating across North London for the past nine years.

So they're well known to Tim.

And sure enough, they've been caught on camera.

They work in a trio

and there will be two offloading the tyres into the warehouse.

The third member of the gang will actually come outside

and spot, basically.

It is quite late at night. It is dark.

You can see here, the vehicle's coming out now.

The spotter is speaking to both the occupants of the vehicle.

And the vehicle will go forward, the spotter goes in, closes the gates.

The problem we have here, all we're seeing

is the vehicle going in the building and exiting the building.

We don't actually see the issue of the tyres being dumped.

Unless Tim catches the trio in the act,

he's powerless to bring them to justice.

He needs hard evidence or this is going to keep happening.

Seen in vehicle. Charlie, Charlie, Uniform, black...

One of the ways his elite team traps flytippers is by taking part

in police roadblocks to stop suspicious vehicles.

-You carrying any rubbish on you?

-No.

And when Tim's with the police, he spots their van.

Just after the roadblock, we saw the vehicle actually going through the borough.

We were fortunate enough to have police with us at the time.

They actually pulled the vehicle over.

Unfortunately there were no tyres in the back of the vehicle at the time,

but there is other evidence to lead us to believe

that his has been used in fly-tip cases,

through other local authorities with photographs with this vehicle.

And there's also documentation which was held inside the vehicle

which leads me to believe the vehicle has been used for flytipping.

This is a big breakthrough for Tim.

Even though there were no tyres in the van,

he was able to impound the vehicle and now he can carry out

a daring covert operation to try to catch them out.

They're leaving nothing to chance on this one

and have pulled in some serious technology.

-That's the best place to put it, because...

-If it bangs, it's going to stay on the chassis.

-It'll go over bumps an' all that.

-Yeah.

-It's pretty solid.

-That's fine.

It's absolutely fine.

We're at a stage now where we will put a tracking device onto the vehicle

so we're able to see where the vehicle's actually flytipping,

where its routes are around London,

so we can identify where the hotspots are likely to be.

This is the actual tracking device part here.

It's actually battery-run.

It's attached simply by a very strong magnet.

Cos he'll be suspicious. We've given his vehicle back.

He'll be suspicious why we've given his vehicle back.

So at this stage, we need to attach it to the vehicle

where he's not going to physically look around and find it.

So it needs to be well concealed and of course, it's a lot of money,

we need to be able to retrieve this.

The transmitter that's now on the van will send a signal

that's picked up by officers who can remotely monitor

where the van is at all times.

This is a high-risk operation,

but it could get Tim the crucial evidence he needs to arrest the flytippers.

I don't want to see flytipped tyres being left in people's front gardens,

people's driveways, people's warehouses,

children's play areas.

We need to bring him before a court of law.

So the daring sting operation is all ready to go.

But, they first need to hand back the van

without the men noticing the tracker device.

Still to come: Could the operation be scuppered from the outset

as soon as the illegal fly-tippers get their van back?

They've actually asked whether we've tampered with the vehicle or put a tracking device on it.

The theory is they might find the tracking system

and therefore lost the evidence.

But if the criminals haven't noticed the tracker,

the officers believe they know exactly what they'll be up to next.

I'm confident that he will definitely come back

to the one in our borough.

Everyone's waiting with bated breath

to nail these scoundrels once and for all.

Sitting within a triangle made up of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby,

the borough of Charnwood is defined by its picturesque countryside

where animals roam freely among its rolling hills and wild valleys.

This is a piece of old England

that has truly withstood the test of time.

A lot of the Charnwood borough area is rural,

it's absolutely gorgeous countryside.

You can imagine on a lovely sunny day

there's no better place to be, really.

But that doesn't stop selfish rogues from ruining this idyllic spot

with their shameless behaviour.

Fly-tipping, rotten tyres, bags of rubbish,

and all manner of things that pollute the fields and roadsides.

Chris has received a call about an outrageous fly-tip on farmland

that needs urgent investigation.

We're going to a fly-tip that occurred yesterday.

That's occurred on a farmer's field

where they've knocked down a wire fence to gain access

to the field, driven about 100 yards into the field, and just tipped it.

The rogues had no qualms about barging their way onto the farmland.

What's more they are sharp ends,

screws and nails sticking out everywhere.

Chris is investigating this potentially dangerous incident

with Sarah Coleman and Steve Lally from Leicester Council.

They're all desperate to catch the culprits responsible,

for the sake of farmer, Eddie Kirk.

It's a scene that we have become accustomed to.

Fly-tipping's a huge problem in the countryside now.

You know, as we got nearer I knew what had happened

and it was just an awful feeling.

These law-breakers were going for it

when they dumped all this waste in Eddie's field

but there's so much rubbish here there's a good chance

of finding a crucial piece of evidence hidden away.

Farmer, Eddie, hopes they do find something

because this lot has caused significant damage

and could potentially be lethal for his animals.

The biggest problem we've got here is...

There's timbers here as you can see, they've all got nails in.

That presents a huge problem for the growing crop

because there's various screws and nails.

This would be, no doubt,

collected up by the machines as we harvest the grass.

Ultimately, it will go into the cattle feed for the year

and wires, screws, nails, bits of rusty metal

when consumed by the cow in winter

will almost inevitably mean the death of the cow,

or any livestock for that matter.

I would almost say, this field now,

it would have to be probably ripped up and reseeded

and we'll start again with it.

The enviro-enforcers have got everything to play for.

They're going to track down the scoundrels that desecrated this piece of countryside.

A receipt, a piece of paper, they're looking for anything

that could point them in the direction of who dumped this lot.

And then, it looks like Chris has struck gold.

There's a receipt, or an invoice,

from a company in Leicester that is, although it's plain on the front,

it gives the address, and on the back

it lists four times starter, three outlets,

six gutter, four brackets,

everything that's associated with a company

that's putting up new fascias and gutters

either at a house or a company.

So, when you look at the stuff that's recovered here,

you know the chances are that it is related.

Bingo! Chris has found some more evidence.

Yes, we've got a piece of cardboard from FedEx

delivering to a company in Oadby.

Now we can start a point of inquiry and carry it through.

That is great news, Chris, an excellent lead to follow up on.

His colleague, Steve Lally, is just as happy with this development.

Chris has done a good job recovering the evidence

so that gives Leicestershire an active line of inquiry

with two commercial companies

that perform this kind of maintenance to people's houses.

It may well be that the company themselves

have no knowledge of this.

It may well be that they've got employees

that have been doing the job

that have unscrupulously got rid of the remains of a job in this way.

Coming out in the dead of night, removing wire from the fence

is a determined effort to bring this here

with a view of not getting caught.

You might think the enviro-enforcers are now ready to follow up on their lead.

However they haven't quite finished here yet.

Farmer Eddie has been hit in another field just a stone's throw away.

This time, the criminals have unbelievably charged through an electric fence.

It's immediately clear though where this lot has come from.

Looking at this, it's all to do with the catering trade.

Aluminium catering foil...

Tomato ketchup...

Direct charcoal, restaurant charcoal.

But these fly-tippers aren't exactly that bright.

Chris has found some damning evidence.

We have got an address of a company on here.

There's a lot of items relating to this company.

So I should imagine,

this looks like they've had a bit of a clearance.

There's more than plenty of clues

for Chris to get his teeth into here.

There's addresses relating to a fast food company.

A lot of the mail shots are all to do with catering trades.

We got enough evidence to try and associate what type of premises it is.

The team has a lot to be getting on with.

The question is, can they get a result and get justice for Eddie?

Back at Charnwood Borough Council HQ, Chris gets down to work.

He's got the leads he needs,

and is now being helped by his colleague, Kevin Vamplough.

The evidence they found on the farmland has proved very useful.

It's not long before they've linked someone to the fly tips,

and they're coming in for a formal, taped interview.

It's a couple of weeks after they first discovered the fly tip,

and officer Kevin is ready to get down to business.

Still to come on Filthy Rotten Scoundrels:

The man's interview reveals some intriguing information.

Could there be more to this case than initially meets the eye?

It is not a point that he could deny.

It was relating to his business,

of which he is the sole owner, the sole manager.

And officer Chris has picked up another urgent case.

He is starting to put two and two together.

To get two quite large fly-tips

in the space of five, six days, is unusual.

Could the officers have a serial fly-tipper on their hands?

Back in north London, Islington's hit squad of enviro-crime fighters

are going for a group of men

who they suspect are dumping thousands upon thousands of tyres

throughout the borough.

We need to bring this gentleman before a court of law.

And it is D-Day.

Operation tyre-tippers is now going full throttle.

The group's impounded van has been handed back to them,

and the enviro-team's big cheese, Kenny Wilkes,

isn't taking any chances.

We are off to a north London police station so that if there is likely

to be any breach of the peace, we have got police support there.

Kenny's following Tim, who is doing the handover

with fellow environment enforcer, Chris Demetrio.

The vehicle will be delivered by our contractor.

Two of my staff will then make contact with the person,

and pass the keys back to him,

and then we will happily let him drive off with the vehicle,

go back to base, and we will see where he goes with it.

The van is there. Tim and Chris are there.

But where are the villains?

Could they have smelt a rat and this be a no-show?

A man has turned up near the van.

Could he be one of the law-breakers?

It is a nail-biting wait for Kenny.

Could they have got cold feet?

After all, the van is parked outside a police station.

Well, the man is obviously too precious to lose,

because a couple of men have finally turned up.

But worryingly, one is checking it over.

The officers have handed the vehicle back.

There are two people there. One of them is the owner of the vehicle.

The other is someone that we know is involved with the gang.

And they have been a little bit cheeky,

as we would have expected, a bit intimidatory.

They've actually asked whether we have tampered with the vehicle

or actually put a tracking device on it.

Well, you're hardly going to say yes, are you?

And they take back their van, complete with Tim's tracker.

But will it get them the result they want?

Back at Islington HQ, and everything seems to be going to plan.

The tracker has been activated,

and Tim and Chris are following

the movements of the van picked up by the law-breakers.

This is Hackney.

This is Hackney, yeah.

What we have got on screen here

is the live update of the tracking system actually in action.

Now we can see where he has left Tottenham

and he has pretty much gone across north London,

through the bottom end of Haringey through to Seven Sisters.

So at this stage, what we are going to do is collate the evidence.

So we're going to view this over the next couple of days at periodic times.

-I suppose the most important thing is to see where the vehicle is parked overnight.

-Absolutely.

And then hopefully that can give us the location of some of the suspects.

More important for us is, if he is visiting the same place on a number of occasions throughout

the day, that would indicate that it is possibly when he's tipping, so we can actually work with that

and we can actually gather the evidence and eventually catch him in the act

and bring him before a court.

But this is a tricky job to get right.

The surveillance team haven't got it in the bag just yet.

The fear is that they may not use this vehicle.

The fear is, yes, they might find the tracking system.

And the fear is they may take it somewhere where...

somebody who's experienced with finding these devices may find it, and therefore

we've lost the tracking system and we've lost the opportunity to gather the evidence.

And that would be a devastating blow after all the hard work the team has put into this sting.

Time to bring the big boss up to speed.

So this is where they have driven to this morning.

And do we know whether any of these addresses link up to any of the information we have got?

It doesn't link up just yet,

but these are the streets that he has been driving down.

So now we can see that he is over in south London somewhere.

But what I would be interested in is from this bird's-eye view is to look at anywhere where

there are disused factories, where there are open spaces, and whether he visits those more regularly.

How long do you want us to track this for...

before we sort of go in?

I've got the authorisation for 30 days.

So we've got a month to analyse.

But I reckon it won't take 30 days before we find him engaged in fly-tipping.

I am confident that he will definitely come back to the one

on our borough that he has partially filled up,

and if we do see him anywhere near there,

that would be an immediate bells out to everybody,

and all get down there to try and catch him in the act,

because that is the best evidence that we're going to get.

So, it's all down to catching the law-breakers in the act.

Still to come...the moment of truth arrives as it looks like the officers' hunch was right.

The vehicle in fact has now turned up at York Way to deposit some more tyres.

As the police swoop in to make the arrests, it's clear that these men are seriously hardened criminals.

This is a racket. It's organised crime.

There's nothing else to say.

They might have got an arrest, but will these men go down for their outrageous crimes?

And in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside,

officers are investigating two illegal dumps on farmland.

This has created a huge problem for us now.

This field now, it would have to be ripped up and re-seeded, and we'll start again with it.

He knew nothing of what was going on with these fly-tips,

but our next case is one that beggars belief.

Somebody actually planned to have more than 20 lorry-loads of waste dumped on their land.

Ever get that sinking feeling?

Well, that's precisely how officers

at Blackburn with Darwen Council felt when they came across this site...

Thousands upon thousands of broken ceramic sinks, dumped in their beautiful Lancashire countryside.

The council received complaints from local residents about the activities that were going on.

And when we came to investigate, we saw there was actually

a sea of sinks, standing out, shiny, glazed, white.

It was a shocking blot on the landscape in this picturesque corner of north-west England

and one that Senior Fly-tipping Enforcement Officer Simon Robinson will never forget.

The visual appearance when my officers got here was that

it was literally like a glacier, shining in the sunlight.

It would have been visible to anybody overlooking the site.

You can see we're in a rural location.

People do live in farms in the surrounding hills,

and it would have stood out for miles.

Here we can see some larger pieces, and this is perhaps more representative

of the sort of stuff that was dumped.

And literally it was tons and tons and tons of broken sink.

And what's extraordinary is that this is private land,

and the sea of sinks was dumped here with the landowner's blessing.

The landowner wanted to produce a hardstanding, to park his vehicles.

He made an arrangement to bring broken Belfast sinks

from a nearby factory onto the land to produce the hardstanding.

The dump began in February 2007 and took several months to build up.

This was 22 tipper loads.

This was a considerable amount of waste. I mean, several tens of tons, I should imagine.

And up to a depth of two to three feet deep.

It extended up to here.

Viewing it from this point,

it went all the way back and just presented a sea of white...

glazed enamel.

It was the sheer scale of the dump that beggars belief.

But the council wasn't going to let the people responsible get away with it.

The manufacturer was prosecuted for failure in duty of care,

because they had no control over where their waste had been taken to.

The gentleman who brought the waste on the land was prosecuted

for transporting waste without the benefit of a waste management licence and for also tipping the waste.

And the landowner was prosecuted for allowing waste to be dumped

on his land without the benefit of a waste management licence.

The landowner and contractor were fined a couple of hundred pounds each,

but it was the sink manufacturer that came off worse.

They were slapped with a fine of more than £4,500, and that brought to an end

an investigation that won't be forgotten for some time to come.

To us, that was an unusual case. At that time, it was high profile.

We've certainly seen nothing like it.

Now, it's one thing knowing and allowing waste to be dumped on your land,

but in Charnwood in Leicestershire, it's a very different story for farmer Eddie Kirk.

Scoundrels have dumped on his land not once but twice,

and it's costing him more than cash out of his pocket.

Wires, screws, nails, bits of rusty metal - when they're consumed by the cow in the winter,

it will almost inevitably mean the death of the cow.

Officers have found evidence hidden amongst the fly-tips, and it's given them some crucial leads.

There's an invoice from a company in Leicester.

But it's not just farmer Eddie who's affected by the outrageous countryside fly-tippers.

Locals like Gaye Pepper and Robert Dews have also had enough of the people wrecking where they live.

These people out in the countryside are making our lives pretty miserable,

giving us lots of headaches. And they're not doing the countryside any good whatsoever.

Gaye is a local landowner, who's suffered first-hand from these filthy rotten scoundrels.

She's seen it all.

A children's playground, builders' rubbish, bathrooms...

any kind of thing. Bags of rubbish.

People are very good at dropping off four or five bags in bin-liners.

It's not just the big heaps. It's the tiny ones as well.

It's a lifelong headache. If you're a farmer, fly-tipping seems to be part of the farm, which it shouldn't be.

On behalf of Gaye, Robert and all the residents

of Leicestershire, the Enviro Con investigation team has been busy.

They've tracked down a man related to one of the fly-tips on farmer Eddie's land.

Today, he's coming in to be formally interviewed by officer Kevin Vamplough.

By the type of waste that we're finding in this particular case,

it's not a point that he can deny.

It was relating to his business, of which he's the sole owner, the sole manager.

There was paperwork relating to both his name and his business's name.

So it's a case of for him to explain to me as to how that's happened.

There are laws relating to your duty of care of your waste,

and obviously this gentleman's had a duty of care of his waste.

This interview's basically to see whether he's discharged that duty in the correct manner.

The man declined to be filmed.

50 minutes later, it's all over, and it looks like there's still a lot more work to do on this case.

Some of the waste is his. It can be traced back to him.

But...

he has a reason as to why he's not the person responsible and knows nothing about it,

which we'll follow up. He's provided some records that we need to look at in detail

regarding the transfer of his waste, and only time will tell whether he can

assist us far enough to see what, if anything, he's done wrong. He may have done nothing wrong.

It looks to me like there's still a long way to go

before Charnwood's Enviro team can firmly shut the door on farmer Eddie's fly-tipping case.

These are busy times for the environment officers.

Chris has been alerted to another outrageous fly-tip.

This one, a pile of wood, has just been dumped by the side of the road.

It's all about collecting evidence for Chris, and you have to be careful.

People look at it and think it's dead easy to go through, but you've got to be really wary.

Pick that plank up and quite easily put a nail through your hand.

The large pieces of wood suggest this pile of rubbish could have once been a shed or an outbuilding.

But will it hold any clues to its owner?

Sometimes you get delivery addresses, notes on the cardboard boxes.

It looks like there might be nothing there,

but without really opening it up and checking,

you won't know.

Chris leaves no piece of wood unturned, and there's certainly plenty of it.

These flytippers take the biscuit.

They just treat...

Society with contempt, really.

There's no excuse for it.

And as I say, anybody that does this

is going to have no regard for anybody's safety really.

It doesn't look like Chris is having any joy with finding evidence in this lot,

so it now needs to be cleared up by Charnwood's contractors

at the taxpayer's cost.

But there's no rest for the council's number one enforcer,

Chris has another case to investigate.

Is it just coincidence? Or could the same person be responsible for all these fresh dumps?

We have not had a large amount of items tipped in this area

for a long time.

And then suddenly, to get two quite large flytips

in a space of five, six days, is unusual.

Chris and fellow enviro-enforcer Kevin Vamplough are desperate

to get to the bottom of these illegal flytips.

It was Kevin that originally picked up on the case.

This whole area which has now been disturbed,

you can see the glass still there, little bits of glass glistening,

and onto the road out to about this sort of level,

was where the fly-tip was, cos you can see it covered quite a big area.

The fact that the waste weighed roughly 7.5 tonnes

would suggest that it's come straight off the back of a vehicle.

And the way it was piled, it wasn't hand thrown off.

It would have been tipped straight off the back of a lorry.

Because it was all quite neat, in one big, neat pile.

There's two sets of tyre marks, tyre tracks coming in,

which would suggest that it's been driven in either way,

tipped and then driven away from.

Before the tip was cleared away, Kevin managed to find a crucial clue

hidden in the fly-tip.

Could this help them in their investigation?

We found an address, which is very unusual in construction-type flytips,

to find these items. That's where we're going to go now,

we'll have a look at the address, try and find out who the owner is.

Chris and Kevin are straight onto their lead.

We've got an address that...

Some evidence that relates to an address on this street

and we're just going to find out why that address is there

and take it from there.

This is where the adrenaline kicks in.

No matter how many times they've done this before,

they never know who or what lies behind a door.

Typical!

There's no-one at home.

But Chris and Kevin aren't giving up that quickly.

And begin house-to-house enquiries.

-Hi.

-Hi.

-I'm from Charnwood Borough Council, right,

making some enquiries about your neighbours next door.

-You know...

-Next door?

-Yeah, are they having any building work done?

-Yeah, they're working.

-Are they?

-I'll have a look if someone's there now.

Are we able to have a look through here as well?

Just to see if we can have a look at the back? Is that OK?

-Hold on a minute.

-All right then. Thank you.

The neighbour can't help Chris and Kevin with their enquiries,

so they decide to leave a note

asking the house owner to get in touch with them.

It looks like this is a dead end for the time being.

In fact, after they visit the property,

Chris and Kevin found out that the person who they thought lived there has long since moved out.

So that address has now been discounted from their investigations.

It looks like a dead end for the time being.

But you can be sure the officers won't let the suspect get away with it.

The person whose address this is was later eliminated from Chris's investigations.

Both this case and the fly-tips on farmer Eddie's land are still ongoing.

For local resident Robert Dews, who's a volunteer for the Campaign to Protect Rural England,

he's had enough of this kind of flytipping.

Well, it is very sad,

but it's difficult to know what you can do about it.

Other than education.

I mean, it's just people failing to go to the tip

and backing up where they can't be seen.

There's very little chance that they would be caught

and it's just causing the farmers and the countryside a grave problem.

Local resident Gaye Pepper feels that we're all responsible

for keeping our environment clean and green.

I think it's God's land.

We look after it and it's up to the general public

to think that way and do the same.

And not make it hard for us to do.

Because that's what we're doing.

It's a very tough job that faces our Leicestershire enviro-enforcers,

but one thing's for sure, they'll never stop

till they catch the criminals ruining our green and pleasant land.

Back in North London,

and enviro-crime hot shots from Islington Council

are getting closer and closer to catching the tyre-tippers

terrorising their patch.

I'm confident he will definitely come back to the one he's partially filled up.

And if we do see him here,

that would be an immediate bells out to everybody.

It's early morning at Islington HQ,

and Tim Troon has been following the escapades of the villains' van

that they fitted with a hidden tracking device.

And we can see the vehicle's been parked up for a number of hours.

Now, the good thing for us is the vehicle's been parked up overnight,

so it would indicate that it may well be full of tyres.

Cos he left the location in Islington yesterday

around three o'clock.

So it's quite possible that he's used the vehicle

to fill up with tyres and that is going to return back to York Way this morning to deposit those tyres.

An abandoned warehouse in York Way in London's King's Cross

has already been hit by tyre-tippers.

It's half full, so Tim's convinced they'll go back to fill it up.

.Who's of African descent...

He briefs his eco-crime fighting team on the latest.

OK, good morning, gentlemen.

Today's target is Malcolm Regan.

He's been flytipping, as you well know, tyres all over the place in the borough.

Him and his gang's going to be targeted through direct surveillance today.

At York Way yesterday,

this actual pound is located on the Camden side

who we're liaising with and actually working in conjunction with as well.

Now the idea of today's targeted surveillance

is to follow Regan and the gang to identify where tyres have been picked up from.

Once he's returned back to York Way, what we're going to actually dos

is await for him to start tipping the tyres.

We've got police with us today as well.

Hopefully, they will make an arrest.

We will interview him at the police station,

pending a prosecution under the EPA And Clean Environment Act.

But Tim needs to get irrefutable evidence.

I need primarily to see the tyres coming off of this vehicle

onto that land.

There are 600-1,000 tyres there now. There's very limited space,

so by his movements which are known to me on previous sites,

he will fill up a site and disappear and find another one.

I would already safely say he's found his next site at which he's going to leave tyres.

So time is the essence.

Hopefully, an arrest can be made today.

Hopefully, we can bring this to a conclusion and move on with the prosecution.

And it's all systems go for the final scene of Operation Tyre-tippers to play out.

Tim's received the call he was waiting for

and it looks like the tyre-tippers have fallen for the bait,

hook, line and sinker.

I believe now that the vehicle is full of tyres,

I've just had a phone call from my colleague in York Way

indicating that the vehicle, in fact, has now turned up at York Way

to deposit some more tyres.

I've asked my colleague to approach with caution,

not to go near any of the gang members to video what he can.

I'm hoping that the police will attend.

And that they will be arrested,

and then we can start the process of interviewing at the police station.

It all seems to be coming together.

Every detail is crucial in this kind of sting operation.

There's the vehicle on the right hand side.

There's Regan.

What I'm going to do is just pull up here,

and just observe.

All Tim and his crew can do now is wait.

They need to see the men physically dumping the tyres before they call the police.

The timing of this is critical.

Here we go.

MOBILE RINGS We on?

Did you actually... Were they taking wheels out of the vehicle?

Right, OK, mate. If you come round and meet me round the front in Vale Royal. Cheers, bye.

Neil's just phoned me to say that he's witnessed them taking tyres out of the vehicle.

He thinks that they've spotted him.

The police have been called.

So hopefully, what we can do is secure an arrest.

SIREN

Right on cue, the police are here.

But they're having problems identifying the ring leader.

The police have actually spoken to our friend

and they're making some preliminary enquiries.

It's absolute mayhem here, but the gang has been cornered.

The police have got one man.

And next it's the ring leader.

And he clearly doesn't like our cameras capturing his arrest.

Finally, tyre-tipper number three is cuffed and taken away.

And Kenny is one happy man.

Now his team has finally nabbed the group

that's been wreaking havoc on his patch.

We've got the three people that we've been following in custody.

We're going to question them now about all of the offences

we're aware they've committed. It's been a really good result.

Yup, you can say that again, Kenny.

Just look at the thousands of tyres they've tipped here, it's shocking.

But catching the men has given Kenny an insight into how they operate.

We know that the vehicle was empty last night.

So we know that these have been collected during the course of yesterday and today.

And the van has already been half emptied.

So they've already dumped off half of the stuff they've collected.

It looks as if they're using this to stockpile tyres

and what we think has been happening

is that they go around and collect tyres from tyre dealers or wherever,

they're bringing the van back here to unload the tyres

and then overnight they're taking tyres out from this storage pile

and then dumping them around.

We've now found that we've got another 100 tyres dumped in one of our parks in Islington.

So this is a racket.

It's organised crime, there's nothing else to say.

The men have been charging garages to take their tyres away.

but instead of recycling them, as is legally required,

they're pocketing the cash and dumping the tyres instead.

And just before the team are about to call it a day,

Kenny makes an alarming discovery.

Lucky, I think it's a fake.

Probably need to tell the police that that's there.

He quickly realises the gun is in fact a replica, and a lighter.

But nevertheless, if that was pointing at you,

would you chance it?

For the Islington enforcement team, it's been a good day all round.

I think it shows really that if you put effort in to what you're doing,

you can get the result that you're after.

The most important thing is this gang now will not be flytipping tyres

in Islington or anywhere else in Central London for a while.

In July 2010, three men pleaded guilty to all environmental charges against them.

One of them got an eight-month custodial sentence

and the two others, three-month suspended sentences

plus they both received 120 hours' community service

and curfew conditions.

They were also ordered to pay costs.

While these men got nailed for their crimes,

in Leicestershire the cases of fly tipping are still being investigated

by Chris and his fellow enviro-enforcers,

who are determined to bring the culprits to justice.

Join us next time for more Filthy, Rotten Scoundrels.

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