Bradford-based gang burgled homes in 'lucrative trade'

Fourteen people, including five Bradford men, were involved in the “extremely lucrative” criminal trade which involved them stealing cars such as BMWs and Range Rovers, forging documents and registration plates, and selling the cars on to unsuspecting customers.

Matthew Holmes, of Bradford, ran the gang which targeted homes with expensive cars parked on their driveways, a three-day sentencing hearing at Leeds Crown Court was told.

The gang carried out a five-month crime spree in which they burgled homes in Ilkley, Bingley, Cleckheaton, Leeds, Wetherby and York.

Four other Bradford men, brothers Dean and John Doyle, Nicholas Tidswell and Francis Lupton were among burglars who stole cars after taking car keys during a series of raids in North and East Yorkshire, as well as in the Blackpool area.

Holmes, 29, was described as a “professional criminal” who had previously served a three-year jail term for conspiracy to supply firearms.

The former soldier, who was dismissed from the Army for taking drugs, took part in at least 11 burglaries with the gang between July and November 2009. He took vehicles totalling up to £232,000.

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the court Holmes was “involved in all the substantive offences which make up this conspiracy.”

Judge Paul Hoffman said the burglaries must have been “terrifying” for the victims, who were often asleep in their beds when the men raided their homes.

Meanwhile, the Doyle brothers, both described in court as “career criminals”, Lupton and Tidswell were carrying out a “major crime spree” on the Lancashire coast, police said.

During the first week of July, 2009, they stayed at a hotel and a guest house in Blackpool and stole a BMW valued at £30,000 and a £33,000 Range Rover and Land Rover Discovery from towns nearby.

A disposable camera was found in a dumped car they had used to get to one of the burglaries. It showed the burglars enjoying “a pleasure trip, with the business they were there for,” said Mr Sandiford.

Holmes and the Doyle brothers would then sell the expensive vehicles to Nevada Smith, a 29-year-old man from the travelling community.

He was the “hub of the wheel” that crossed over two different burglary teams and the middle man responsible for changing the identification of the stolen vehicles, Judge Hoffman said.

Smith, 29, had obtained vehicle registration documents from the DVLA and was in contact with Barnsley-based forger, Gary Swinden, who produced convincing documents and cloned number plates, which were fitted to the cars.

Holmes’s burglary team included Anthony Jackson, Craig Stanley and Arthur Gaskin, who persuaded another man, Anthony Nolan, to sign a tenancy agreement under the alias “Tom Smith” for a lock-up garage in Rotherham.

It was there that the cloned number plates were fitted and the cars were given false documentation.

Another industrial unit in Huddersfield, rented by 22-year-old Manzoor Akhtar, was also used as “an old fashioned chop shop,” to cut other stolen cars into parts which were then sold on, said Mr Sandiford. Police estimated that cars with a total value of about £4m were stolen.

The crime gang were eventually brought to justice during a three-day police operation across six police forces, code named Operation Yankee, which saw 24 arrests in April this year.

When police raided Smith’s caravan they discovered a stash of £100,000 behind a bathroom panel, ammunition and blank vehicle log books.

Details of many of the cloned licence plates and log books were discovered on a memory stick at the Barnsley business Swinden ran with his partner Victoria Laws.

Following the end of the gang’s sentencing yesterday, West Yorkshire Police Detective Chief Inspector Lisa Atkinson, who was the senior investigating officer for Operation Yankee, said: “These sentences reflect the true scale of this highly-organised and highly-sophisticated criminal gang. £4 million worth of vehicles have been stolen and later sold as a result of the actions of this gang.

“Matthew Holmes was the head of the gang stealing vehicles to order, and Nevada Smith operating as the middle man, was able to sell stolen vehicles on a huge scale, through the criminal cloning of licence plates and forged documentation supplied by Gary Swinden.

“In effect, they were running an extremely lucrative business, selling on stolen vehicles to unsuspecting purchasers, who lost their money once the true identity of the cars was revealed.”