Episode 12 Filthy Rotten Scoundrels

A never-ending war is being waged across Britain

to clean up our towns and countryside...

I find it bad cos it's giving my home town a bad reputation.

Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible.

We should be proud of the area we live in.

..from the tons of cigarette butts, dogs' mess and household rubbish,

to mountains of tyres and skip-loads of builders' waste.

Littering and waste is something we're finding is increasing year on year.

Seagulls come down, rip open the bags, and they're scattered everywhere.

We're on the front line of the clear-up and the fight-back

with the dedicated teams tracking down the rogues

and putting the Great back into Britain.

It may harm your defence if you fail to mention, when questioned,

something which you later rely on in court.

On today's programme, our filth-fighter meets a kindred spirit

equally up in arms out on rubbish patrol.

You get people just putting their household rubbish down here.

You get fly-tipping down here. But you can see, it's not looking great.

And the incredible chain of evidence that proves this van

had dumped this rubbish. Busted!

The road was completely blocked by the material that fell off.

We do know that the last vehicle to come up the hill

was the vehicle that dumped the rubbish.

Welcome to the world of Filthy Rotten Scoundrels.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding

to meet Mr Hugh O'Donnell. This citizen wins the dubious honour

of being crowned Britain's most serious environmental criminal.

A man has been jailed for four years for dumping waste

and for money laundering, in the biggest case ever brought

by the Environment Agency. Thousands of tons of building waste

was dumped at illegal sites, including one near Reading

the size of five football pitches.

In June this year, the royally rotten scoundrel

landed himself the longest-ever prison sentence

for a waste-related crime. O'Donnell had netted a huge amount of money

by charging people to tip tons of construction waste

at his unauthorised landfill site in Berkshire.

Shame on you, Mr O'Donnell, and your ill-gotten gains!

This particular case did not just involve waste crime.

It involved an awful lot of money, over £5 million.

It also involved stolen vehicles, a loaded firearm,

and it has taken a team of people several years

to get to the bottom of this.

We noticed this big ugly fence going up

that you couldn't see through.

We were aware that things were going on in there,

because we could see smoke from fires billowing out every night.

He turned this site into the equivalent of a World War I war zone.

O'Donnell, along with two associates,

Robert Evans and Peter Lavelle, were responsible for setting up

a vast illegal waste-processing operation.

To have something as big as this on our doorstep

was quite an amazing thing to find out.

We actually gathered 9,000 pieces of evidence.

We also took over 250 witness statements.

This is the story of the UK's filthiest, rottenest scoundrel.

Sally Coble is a senior manager with the Environment Agency.

That's the government body which tracks down those responsible

for the country's most serious environmental crimes.

Her team has been on O'Donnell's case for years.

He first started out as a licensed waste contractor,

but he soon fell foul of the law.

Here at this now-abandoned site at Theale in Berkshire,

Sally's team first discovered vital clues

about what O'Donnell had been getting up to in 2002 and 2003.

When this site was in operation,

he was bringing skip-loads of waste in here,

sorting it, and some of it was sent away for recycling.

Other parts were left on the site here.

O'Donnell originally had the necessary permissions

to sort waste here, but it shouldn't have remained on site.

We had many reports of waste that shouldn't have been brought here

being brought here and being burnt on site

rather than recycled or sent away for landfill.

It quickly became clear to Sally's team

that they were dealing with a man who had a burning ambition

when it came to waste. If he set fire to the lot,

he wouldn't have to pay anyone to dispose of it properly -

more money in his pocket, and a way of undercutting his rivals.

To dispose of it in a legitimate manner would cost money,

and so he was able to supply people with skips

at a much cheaper price than the other operators in the area.

Which in turn meant more and more rubbish coming his way.

O'Donnell's penchant for pyromania,

burning everything from building materials to plastic,

didn't help the locals. They had to breathe their way

through the scoundrel's smoke and soot.

But what O'Donnell did next must have taken their breath away.

We'd heard on the grapevine that he was having an event

for Bonfire Night,

and lo and behold, the night before Bonfire Night,

there was this enormous bonfire here.

And when Sally says "enormous", she really means it.

The flames were so high, and the smoke from it drifted across

over towards the M4 that's in that direction.

Unbelievably, the police were forced to close the motorway,

which was a mile away from O'Donnell's so-called bonfire.

His actions were starting to have serious consequences for a lot of people.

And then the Environment Agency discovered something a bit fishy

about the lorries coming and going from the site.

Take a close look at this number plate.

OK. Let's continue our journey, and here's another of his lorries.

And, hello! It's got exactly the same registration plate.

Using false plates seemed to be just another weapon

in O'Donnell's expanding and dodgy arsenal.

And it became clear to the investigators

that this case was much more sinister

than just your average shady waste collector.

In 2004, O'Donnell was fined £10,000 for burning rubbish

and abusing his waste-management licence.

It was then revoked. Now, you'd think that would be enough

to stop the man. But oh, no. He just carried on regardless.

The next year he got a whopping £36,000 fine

for his failure to stop operating.

That's a fair old whack in anyone's game,

but it still wasn't enough to stop O'Donnell,

so he was banged up, sentenced to six months in prison.

But it didn't take a hair off him.

He was not going to take any notice of us.

He was going to flout the regulations wherever he could,

because he knew he could make an awful lot of money out of it.

Later in the programme, find out how O'Donnell went from bad to worse...

All the time that he was in prison, he was planning

where he would operate in the future.

..how his illegal burning struck fear into local residents...

We thought, "What's on fire? How big is it going to get?"

..and how he secretly acquired a new piece of land

where he caused utter devastation.

To some, a job title with the word "enforcement" in it

sounds like a harsh and bureaucratic busybody rushing around

slapping fines on the unfortunate and undeserving

and saying, "It's more than my job's worth."

But you'd be wrong, and here in Lewisham in South London,

there's someone who's the perfect example

of everything that's positive about a little judicious arm-twisting -

Peter Adams, head of fly-tipping enforcement.

It's a constant battle. It's a war.

It's a war to stop this fly-tipping happening.

I love that. I love the excitement.

I love getting out and dealing with these problems.

That's why I love doing this job.

Now, there's a man with passion. And he's also a man with courage,

because this is what he's up against.

And the locals are fed up.

These sort of problems, fly-tipping and rubbish,

it brings down the whole sort of sense of pride in the area.

There's bins all along here, and they just drop their litter. They can't be bothered.

It disgusts me that people get away with dumping their rubbish,

whereas normal people have to pay for it

or take it to the correct places.

Case one today - a back alley

where people are just dumping anything and everything.

And here's a lady who's as passionate as Peter

about keeping the place clean and tidy.

You get people just putting their household rubbish down here,

you get fly-tipping down here...

At the moment, actually, saying, it's not too bad.

-It's not good, though, is it?

-It's not looking great.

And you're right there. It's looking rubbish.

We used to have a lot more bins as well,

cos where I live, we don't have our own wheelie bins,

because obviously they get stolen.

Come again? Free wheelie bins stolen?

That's extraordinary.

We'll have a look. I'll send a team to see what bins should be here.

On a daily basis, we have people coming along

from all over the estate, and they put their household rubbish here.

They just fly-tip here, and we have a bad problem with the foxes.

At the moment there's not been any rodents,

but it will happen, especially in the summer,

because it really smells, as well.

Urgh! Rancid, rotting food? Just what you don't want.

But there's a problem. The alleyway is private land,

so the council doesn't collect the rubbish from here.

I've come out many a time and said to the actual dustbin-lorry man,

"Oh, look, we've got lots of rubbish there,"

-and he says, "They're not our bins."

-No, they're not.

So they can't...

They're only protecting tax-payer and council-tax-payers' money.

-They can't do other people's freebies for them, really.

-No.

-It costs an awful lot of money now to get rid of rubbish.

-Yeah.

But Peter's not the kind of man to give up and walk away - oh, no.

He's a solution man, a clean-up man, a case-closed kind of man -

just the sort of man we all love.

There's an awful lot of businesses down here.

-They might have the red bags.

-These business, and that one bin.

There's a bit of work to do here, I think, for myself,

so I'll be making further visits until we can sort that out.

-OK. That's fantastic.

-Thank you very much.

-Have a nice day.

-Thank you.

Ah, Peter, you're definitely making friends out on the beat.

I do get angry, because when I've seen people dumping rubbish,

I say to them, "Have you not got a wheelie bin of your own?"

At the end of the day, we've got to live here,

and the smell and everything, it gets really disgusting,

and it doesn't make you feel good. The other residents aren't happy about it either.

To make life better for the local residents,

Peter's determined to crack down on the businesses

who are skimping on rubbish collection.

There seems to not be very many trade waste bins in the area.

Effectively, if they're not paying for a trade waste bin,

and they dump it in the rear alley behind their shop,

that is fly-tipping.

If these businesses don't have trade-waste arrangements

or can't prove to me that they have, I'll serve some notices on them.

If they then fail to respond to me

with how they've got rid of their trade waste

over the last year, I can then offer them a fixed-penalty notice

or I can take them to court.

Fighting talk, Peter! And he's not a man afraid to carry out a threat.

We'll be back on the beat with him later,

when he turns into a one-man evidence-gathering machine.

It's not a local address. A receipt from one of the large companies.

Another little piece there. A bit of a bank statement here.

I've got somebody's business card.

Remember Hugh O'Donnell? This scoundrel had set himself up

as a trash tycoon in Berkshire,

running a large waste-management site

where he illegally burned rubbish.

He was fined a total of £46,000 for his bad behaviour,

and had his waste-management licence revoked,

but he kept on burning anyway,

and was eventually sentenced to six months in prison.

He was not going to take any notice of us.

He was going to flout the regulations wherever he could,

because he knew he could make an awful lot of money out of it.

By 2007, this king of the rubbish rogues

was out of prison and as dangerous as ever.

Whilst Mr O'Donnell was in prison,

he was making arrangements for what was going to happen

in the future. This was a person that was calculating,

and had planned how he was going to deceive us.

The Environment Agency had no idea that, rather than going legit,

O'Donnell had already bought a new 12-acre site

for £140,000,

using an obscure Panamanian company called IMF.

This land was just six miles from his original operation

on the edge of the historic village of Aldermaston.

Jean Chapman's garden is right next door to the site.

We used to have a lovely walk over the back, through the woods.

It was an old gravel workings, but it was all left to go natural,

and there was lots of wild plants and flowers.

All quite pleasant, really.

O'Donnell's IMF site contained a beautiful wetland area

and large patches of woods and grassland.

So, why did he choose this place?

He doesn't strike me as your typical nature-lover.

Clive Verr, who works on a nearby industrial estate,

has his own theory.

The selection of the site was very clever

because it's not visible from the road.

Nobody really realised what was going on,

because it was invisible from the local community.

But for some reason, O'Donnell wanted even more privacy.

We noticed this big ugly fence going up

that you couldn't see through, and it just got bigger and bigger.

This fence seemed to go further and further round.

It was quite a fence - in fact, over eight feet high.

It completely surrounded the 12-acre site.

Anyone would think that O'Donnell was a man with something to hide.

'He also put up signage to intimidate anybody

'who was going to enter, including the Environment Agency staff.'

Charming, I must say!

We were very concerned about what was going on. On bank holidays,

we'd see vast amounts of lorry traffic going in and out,

so we knew that stuff was being dumped in there.

But the big mystery was what all this stuff actually was.

Lorries would arrive loaded with skips

full of what looked like waste from construction sites,

and they all left completely empty.

And remember, O'Donnell didn't have any kind of environmental permit

to dispose of waste here or anywhere else.

Nobody knew what was going into the ground.

It was like a reverse landfill, almost.

It's a nice flat area, and it was being built up,

and nobody seemed to be able to stop it.

And things were about to get a whole lot worse.

Wherever O'Donnell was concerned,

there was never any smoke without fire.

A couple of times we actually could see the bonfires -

they were quite big - that were burning.

You could see the smoke. We could actually see the red glow as well.

A red glow? Sounds like an alien invasion.

In reality it was just O'Donnell up to his old tricks again.

To save himself a bit of cash disposing of waste legitimately,

he was blatantly flouting the law and torching vast quantities of rubbish.

We didn't feel very safe when we saw an orange glow down there.

We thought, "What's on fire? How big is it going to get?"

And you don't know how far these things are going to spread

and how quickly, so it's not very pleasant

to see something like that. It can be quite frightening.

I'm not surprised. Can you imagine living next door to all of this?

"Neighbour from hell" doesn't quite cover it.

The time had come for the locals to channel their inner Miss Marples

and find out what on Earth was going on.

But just how were they going to get to see over those fences?

My husband's fortunate to have a friend with a small plane,

so my husband and his friend went up in it,

and took photographs from the air of the site.

Suddenly they had a clear view of what was going on,

and they couldn't believe their eyes. What a state!

O'Donnell had really gone to town,

dumping tons and tons of all kinds of rubbish.

For want of a better word, I was gobsmacked.

I had no idea that it was quite as vast as it was,

and it was just a mess, one big mess.

And closer inspection gave our very own detective

and idea of the kinds of waste this scoundrel was collecting

at the site.

There was what looked like asbestos, old paint cans, oil drums...

..bottles, jars, pans, paper, card - you name it,

it seemed to be there.

Enough was enough. Sally Coble and her team

had to put a final stop to O'Donnell once and for all.

There was only one thing for it - an undercover operation.

They set up surveillance cameras,

but even these experienced investigators

couldn't believe the evidence.

The surveillance footage that we shot

shows that there were not only skips being brought in,

there were 20-ton lorries depositing their loads

of what looked like soil and construction waste.

O'Donnell's filthy rubbish tip would be a scandal anywhere,

but unbelievably, he'd sited it right next door to a country park.

David Shirt is chairman of Aldermaston Parish Council.

We do our best to encourage wildlife in the park.

If you look up there you can see bat boxes.

We've got them dotted throughout the woodland area.

We're really lucky to have such a tremendous recreation facility

within the parish - English nature at its finest.

It really is. But O'Donnell was filling the land right next door

with all kinds of dangerous materials,

and what's particularly scandalous is that waste water from the site

was draining right into the streams and lakes

that are vital to the park's ecosystem,

home to some of England's rarest species of dragonfly.

One of the key things about this site is its diversity.

We not only have the lakes, but we also have the ancient woodland

across there.

As concerns about O'Donnell's site grew,

the Environment Agency took a leaf out of Jean's book

and decided to track what was going on from the air.

And what their photos reveal is absolutely shocking.

I've got some pictures of the site here,

showing what it looked like in 2006.

You can see that there was a lot of trees in the middle,

and a wetland area.

This is where they were tipping out waste,

and sorting it and burning it.

This is where he's sorting out construction materials.

If we move from November 2006 to a year later,

November 2007, you can see that quite a lot of the trees are gone

from this area, and the wetland area has been completely filled in.

We then move on to 2009,

and you may think this isn't the same site.

It's been landfilled to two, three, four metres

across the whole site. No trees, no wetland remains.

It's carnage on an environmental level.

This is unbelievable. In just three years,

O'Donnell had totally devastated 12 acres of English countryside,

turning it into a filthy wasteland.

Coming up, discover how Sally's team raided the site,

uncovered the staggering scale of his deception,

and finally brought the biggest weasel of waste to justice.

Let's escape the grime of O'Donnell scrapyard

and take a stroll down Watery Lane on the outskirts of Preston.

Ah, smell that fresh air! Hear the birds in the trees!

Look at that beautiful...

junk. Typical!

A quiet country lane with no passing traffic,

and someone comes along to destroy the neighbourhood.

The fact that people come and dump stuff up round here, it annoys me,

because it's a nice area, and there's kids about,

and they get messed in with the rubbish - dog muck, barbed wire,

glass, asbestos, carpets, everything. It's just ridiculous.

There is a lot of mess, and it puts people off.

They don't want to come down. When you get down here, it's lovely.

It's easier to dump it, not pay for it and have to get certificates

for the skips, and it's just easier to come down

and drop it in the middle of the night and drive away.

But we get left with it all.

Back in the early hours of a spring morning in April,

the locals got left with quite a lot.

Local waste-enforcement officer Paul Cookson

was yet again called out to witness...

-A trail of destruction.

-Thank you, Paul.

The material is strewn along quite a long distance,

about 20, 30 yards, so it's not been dumped in one lot.

It's been dumped off a moving vehicle by the looks of things,

and it consisted of what we might call refurbishment material,

that some house had been under repair or decoration, refurbishment,

and it's painfully clear that the road is completely blocked.

Impossible for any vehicle to get past that.

It was a staggering amount of rubbish,

dropped at speed, using a classic manoeuvre.

I call it the fly-tipper's flip. Tip up the back of your truck

and put your foot down.

Now, we know that he did it in one fluid motion.

It wasn't as if he stopped and dumped it off.

It was spread along probably about 20 to 30 yards, metres,

of this road, starting off quite thin,

but then as it came along,

it then started to slip more and more and more,

so the suggestion is that he's lifted his tailgate up

and allowed more and more of it to slide off.

Now, this rascal thought he was being clever.

He thought that he'd never get caught on this remote road,

-but he was acting out of...

-Sheer, utter laziness.

And he stood no chance against this most cunning,

most forensic, most relentless of investigators on his case.

Oh - or the eye witness.

On the morning of this incident,

he'd actually seen a vehicle coming along the road,

and he was suspicious of why they would be in this area

at that time, loaded with waste.

He let the vehicle drive up the hill, and then went to have a look,

and lo and behold, he found the road was completely blocked with material.

That's all it takes - a reliable witness.

Oh, and a bit of CCTV camera magic.

Sorry, but could this fly-tipper have picked a worse road

for his dirty deed? It's turning into a bit of a farce.

Fortunately for us, the local housing estate

is rife with CCTV cameras, and one camera in particular

is situated right at the exit of this road,

so we were able to go to the CCTV company

and ask them to view the footage,

and, fortunate for us,

at exactly the right time that we were given,

the vehicle is seen coming out of the road.

Gotcha!

So the witness at the bottom described a blue Ford Transit,

heavily laded with building waste.

The chap does come out onto a main road,

through a housing estate, with the tailgate down,

and he's still dropping rubbish as he drives along.

Hang on, Paul. How can you be sure that this van dropped that rubbish?

The road was completely blocked by the material that fell off,

so we do know that the last vehicle to come up the hill

was the vehicle that dumped the rubbish.

That's it! Your witness.

But Paul's forensic mind hasn't finished its great machinations yet.

Hold on, Your Honour. There's one more moment of brilliance

still to come.

Curiously enough, on me viewing that footage,

it became apparent to me very quickly that I already knew this vehicle.

This van had got stuck in the mud on a housing estate.

Paul had been called out, and Paul being Paul,

he'd taken some photos - you know, just for the record.

I already knew of this vehicle

as being used by a registered waste carrier.

That means he had a name and address.

This fly-tipper is about to be swatted.

Paul hauled him in for an interview,

charged him with one count of fly-tipping,

and before long, he was up in court.

He appeared at Preston Magistrates Court initially.

They took a dim view of the incident,

and the matter was referred to the Crown Court.

A dim view indeed.

Only the most serious offences are referred up to the Crown Court

for sentencing. He was given three months' imprisonment,

suspended for two years, and he was ordered to pay £240

towards the council's clean-up costs.

This fly-tipper was finished.

The result of him being prosecuted, obviously,

I think he's learnt his lesson. He's lost his business,

he's on a suspended sentence,

and seriously affected his lifestyle,

all because he decided he'd dump half his load in a country lane.

Tragic - a career destroyed because of...

-One stupid moment in his life.

-Well put, Paul.

We're back on patrol with the lovely Peter Adams

in Lewisham in South London. He's an enforcement officer

who pounds the pavements persuading litter louts and rubbish rogues

to clean up their act. And he's got his work cut out for him!

Case two today, private land...

..that's been used by any old Tom, Dick or Harry

as a free rubbish dump,

leaving the innocent landowner responsible for clearing it all up.

We've tried to work with the landowner

to get them to remove the problem from their land.

It's quite considerable for the owner. We do sympathise.

But we have to take action. This is quite a horrible sight

for people living round here. It's a detriment to the amenity.

It may cause rats and other similar problems to that,

which is not acceptable in modern England.

Quite right, Peter. This is hardly the kind of shoddy mess

we expect in this day and age.

Peter's been working to get this cleared up for a while.

The council's put signs up warning off fly-tippers,

and to give the landowner his due,

he's tried his best to make the site inaccessible.

Sadly, according to the law, it's still his problem.

We've progressed this matter with a formal notice on the landowner

to clear the land. They haven't complied, unfortunately, with that,

so we've had to take the matter to court,

and the landowner's been found guilty of not clearing the land.

The next stage is, unfortunately, the council will have to remove

this rubbish on this land themselves, and then re-charge the landowner.

An estimate is around £3,000.

£3,000 to clear up after the tippers!

Case three - a report of a problem on a residential road.

Somebody's put some rubbish out onto the street,

which is fly-tipping.

It's unsightly, but it's hardly the crime of the century.

But Peter's no jobsworth. He's an understanding man,

and he does the decent thing.

We've got a recycling bin. All this is recyclable,

the whole lot. So it'll be very easy.

I'll just put it back in the recycling bin.

At least there's one problem sorted.

You see? I told you Peter's a man with a heart of gold.

Case three closed.

I've just spotted something quite nasty in here on the pavement.

It's actually a cigarette lighter, but it's actually a knife as well,

an object which is obviously not appropriate to be left on the street.

Could be used for something a bit nastier later.

So I'm going to take that back to the office

and have it disposed of properly in a sharps box.

Hang on. I didn't even have time to open that case before you closed it.

So, case four - potentially saving a child

from becoming another dreadful statistic.

I hope somebody feels ashamed that they've left that on the street,

for children, probably, to get hold of.

But I've removed it from the street.

That's made my day, just that one little thing.

So...it continues on.

He's great, isn't he? Really dedicated to his job,

and to making Lewisham a better place to live for everyone.

Right! Case number five.

What we have here is a nasty little bit of fly-tipping,

very opportunistic. We've got some garages here,

so it's an open forecourt,

and people have just fly-tipped. We've got all sorts here.

We've got garden waste, we've got faecal matter there...

Urgh! Oh, don't kick it, Peter!

Maybe a wild animal.

Um, some building materials that have been just dumped here,

including boxes, for kitchen units perhaps,

some tiling...

some packaging from various companies...

Unfortunately the local residents are now stuck with this problem,

because, er... because it's right opposite them.

This might look like a load of old rubbish to me and you,

but to Peter, this is a mass of evidence.

Just watch him go.

Not a local address. We've got a phone number on there, even.

A receipt from one of the large companies.

Another little piece there. A bit of a bank statement here.

I've got somebody's business card, a few more names and addresses here.

Bank account details on there, unfortunately. A local address.

Some more bank statements.

Haven't people heard about identity theft or shredders?

And then a telephone number, so I can ring you directly.

I'll bag this up

and put it for use as evidence.

Well, there sure is enough of it. That was pretty impressive work.

People don't seem to care at the moment,

regarding the dumping of rubbish.

It's part of our job to enforce that, to push that across to them,

advise them, educate them,

enforce via the courts if we need to.

You tell 'em, Peter! Right, what are we up to now?

Case number six. It's the old "back alley behind some shops" problem,

but this time it's the people who work there who are hopping mad.

They're coming and going from the office all the time,

doing sales and lettings, so sometimes the guys can't get their cars in and out,

and it just causes problems. It's there when it shouldn't be there,

-so it's very annoying.

-It's disgusting,

because we've been told that we have to pay to remove it,

and we're a charity-run shop.

I have turned in here on a Monday morning

and there's been rubbish everywhere down this alleyway,

and it's just dumped during the weekend,

and it's just so frustrating. God forbid

if there was ever any services required,

ie ambulance, fire services - they can't get down here.

Peter to the rescue. Go on, get stuck in!

This is all refuse,

betting slips and newspapers and cigarettes.

This is an opportunistic fly-tipper.

He's dumped sofas, chairs, wood, drawers,

clothing, bottles, paper, glass...

Every conceivable horrible thing has been dumped here

by this fly-tipper.

For this case, Peter had to don his deerstalker

and become detective. It turns out it wasn't the shops

or the council who were responsible for this lane,

but a housing association. They hadn't dumped the rubbish,

but unfortunately it was their responsibility to clean up.

One call from Peter, and as quick as a flash, the rubbish was gone.

Result all around.

We will pursue these people. It's in the public interest.

The public are paying for a team to be in the council

enforcing the removal of rubbish where it's been fly-tipped

by irresponsible and antisocial people,

and it's in everybody's interest that we all act together

and tackle this head-on.

Peter, what would we do without you?

Now, time to find out what happened to that king weasel

of waste management, Hugh O'Donnell.

This scoundrel has succeeded in turning a 12-acre site

of beautiful Berkshire countryside into a vast, desolate wasteland.

He'd made millions from an illegal landfill site,

and caused havoc with his habit of setting fire to any waste

he couldn't bury.

We thought, "What's on fire? How big is it going to get,

and where is it?", basically.

Nobody really realised what was going on,

because it was invisible from the local community.

But O'Donnell's archenemy, Sally Coble,

and her team from the Environment Agency were on his case.

During the course of this investigation,

we've had a number of officers working on this case full-time.

I mean, it was considered the biggest illegal waste site

in the Southeast, so we threw a lot of resources at it.

It was time for Sally and her team

to finally bring this most filthy rotten scoundrel to justice.

But first they needed to gather evidence.

So in 2007, they got a warrant to raid O'Donnell's site

with the police.

"I'm happy that is a strike, strike, strike."

"2-1, can you please move in?"

So, what did they find? Well, prepare yourself for evidence

of some truly disgusting behaviour.

He had been sorting out material

so that he could reclaim what was worth any money,

but any of this kind of material that's just from general skip waste,

he's set fire to. The piles were huge.

There was still some water on the site,

and that had got contaminated from the waste being tipped into it,

so any wildlife that was living in those ponds was long dead.

Most waste had come from the skip businesses.

There were large piles of ash where that material had been burnt.

We found that there was some asbestos.

Asbestos? Is there no depth of dodginess this man won't sink to?

But this toxic material wasn't the only hazard Sally's team discovered.

The Environment Agency found that 65,000 cubic metres of waste

had been dumped there, raising the ground level

by almost four metres in places.

This had potentially deadly implications.

There was electricity lines going across the site,

and the landfill had come within four feet

of an 11,000-volt transformer box,

so somebody could have been electrocuted.

These boxes are deliberately located too high off the ground

to pose a danger to anyone below, but if you raise the ground level

by four metres, what do you expect?

The raid didn't just provide vital evidence

of what O'Donnell had done to the site.

The team also uncovered crucial paperwork

which meant they could piece together a tricky jigsaw puzzle

of how the scoundrel had been operating

and how he attempted to cover his tracks.

It was gobsmacking.

The way Mr O'Donnell operated

was to set up a company,

or get one of his accomplices to set up a company for him,

and they'd operate under that name

until they had to file company accounts,

which they never did, so that company was dissolved.

Meantime, they set up another company.

Sally's team worked with the financial investigators

at the Metropolitan Police. They spent hours constructing charts

and diagrams. Just look at how many sham companies

O'Donnell and his accomplices were using!

So Mr O'Donnell used to try and deceive us

and put us off the scent, but it all led back to him.

But O'Donnell wasn't just using fake companies

to carry out his activities. He was using a fake name too.

We've also got a cheque book for a company,

AA Skips Hire.

This company is associated with the name J Kelly Esquire.

As you can see here, John Kelly has signed this cheque,

but on this one we found that Hugh O'Donnell has signed it.

Time to get forensic, so a handwriting expert was called in.

When we had the handwriting analysis done,

we found that John Kelly and Hugh O'Donnell

were the same person, so we think Mr O'Donnell

forgot that he was supposed to be John Kelly

when he was signing some of these cheques,

and this is fantastic evidence.

The master of mayhem was starting to make mistakes.

Because so much of O'Donnell's business was conducted in cash,

it was hard for the investigators to calculate

exactly how much profit this king of waste had made.

But at least £3.8 million was passed between his various dodgy companies

and bank accounts over a period of five years.

£3.8 million! Unbelievable.

Sally's team were then finally able to arrest the man himself,

and wait till you hear what else was discovered.

A gun and over £40,000 in cash were found in his home and car.

So this wasn't just a bit of a dodgy businessman.

This guy was clearly dangerous,

and in 2009, O'Donnell got a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence

for possessing an illegal firearm.

At last the villain had been stopped.

But the Environment Agency weren't going to leave it there.

Oh, no. Their surveyors spent days assessing the materials

and samples taken from the site.

At a whopping cost of £30,000 to the taxpayer,

everything had to be analysed. It was concluded

that as well as the asbestos cement posing a huge risk,

the dumped waste had caused worrying leaching into the groundwater

and produced gases exceeding the safe limits,

presenting a risk to human health,

and, because it's costly and dangerous to remove asbestos,

the damage is now deemed to be permanent.

What a sad state of affairs!

Fortunately the site's now closed,

but unfortunately all the debris, everything, is still there.

We're very pleased, as a local community,

that the activity's finished now.

However, we're left with a 14-acre site

two metres deep, with all sorts of toxic material in there.

I think he's a very selfish man. I'd better not go any further than that.

One man's self-serving and contemptible behaviour

has left a wake of utter devastation for the local community

and their environment.

The good news is that O'Donnell and his two accomplices,

Peter Lavelle and Robert Evans, both got what they deserved.

Lavelle got 18 months for the waste crimes and money laundering,

and Evans got two years for the same offences.

And O'Donnell was sentenced to a total of eight and a half years

in prison. On the day he was released for the gun offence,

he was sentenced to another four years,

the longest term ever for a waste-related crime.

He was put straight back behind bars.

The result was, Hugh O'Donnell got four years

for the acquisition of criminal property -

that's the money-laundering charge - and got a concurrent sentence

of 22 months for the waste offence,

in effect, a four-year sentence for our investigation.

That's on top of four and a half years for the pistol that was found

in the raid that we organised.

This was one of the biggest cases

the Environment Agency had ever undertaken,

and a total of 76 of their staff were involved, including our Sally.

'It was really, really good to get the conviction.'

We're not going to stop unless we've prosecuted these people.

We just knew Mr O'Donnell would not be deterred

by a short prison sentence, so as a result of our investigations,

Mr O'Donnell will serve a term of eight and a half years.

We had got through all the layers of confusion and concealment,

all the false number plates, all the transfers of ownership,

all the false accounts, and the companies that were set up

as a sham. So it is very satisfying,

both because of the conclusion of the investigation

and because of the impact on the illegal-waste world.

So, that's the UK's filthiest, rottenest scoundrel bang to rights.

What an amazing result!

From builders' rubble to household waste

and everything in between, there's a great British army

of enforcers out there working to keep our country tidy.

Join us next time,

when we'll be chasing down more filthy rotten scoundrels.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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