The North London Firm Nobody in Britain Will Talk About – HT
You know the craze. You know the Richardsons. You probably know Kenneth Noi, the Brinks Matt Fence, who put a knife into a stranger at a road rage stop on the M25. Here’s a name you almost certainly don’t know. Terrence George Adams, born October 18th, 1954 in Barnesbury, Islington.
The eldest of 11 children of an Irish Catholic lorry driver. For roughly 20 years, the Metropolitan Police, NY5, Customs, and the Inland Revenue, believed Terry Adams was the most powerful organized criminal in Britain. They believed his brother Paty was personally connected to as many as 25 killings.
They believed the family controlled cocaine, ecstasy, and cannabis flowing into London on a scale the craze could not have imagined in their most ambitious daydream. And for almost the entire run of those 20 years, British newspapers, British juries, and most British viewers had no idea any of this was happening.
That’s not an accident. That’s the story. I want to start somewhere specific. December 2013, lunchtime on St. John Street, Clerkenwell. A man called Paul Tieran is shot in the chest at close range with a45 caliber handgun. The shooter walks away. Tieran survives barely and spends a month in hospital. Police know who shot him.
They have witnesses. They have guns. They have the geography. They have everything. What they do not have and never will have is Tieran. Because when officers come to his hospital bed and ask him to identify the man who put a bullet through his lung, Tyranninan refuses. He tells them on the record that being called a grass would hurt more than being shot.
A few weeks later, when police searched the flat of the man they believe pulled the trigger, Patrick Daniel John Adams, known to everyone in North London as Paty. They find a handwritten note. The note is from Tieran. He wrote it after the shooting, before the trial, from his own hand. And what it says is this.
Pat, I ain’t no f in grass. G could have stopped all this by telling the truth. I’ve always been there for both of you, but no one is ever there for me. We are men. Face me. The truth will hurt. Read that again. The man who has just been shot in the chest is writing to the man who shot him, asking for a face-to-face conversation, apologizing almost.
That note is the question this entire video is going to spend the next 40 minutes trying to answer. Because the note isn’t just one frightened man covering for one shooter. It’s the operating system of a family that ran North London for 30 years. And once you understand how that note got written, you understand why almost nobody outside specialist policing circles has ever heard their name.
To get there, we have to rewind to Barnesbury in the 1960s. The Adams parents were George, a lorry driver, and Florence, known as Flo, a homemaker, 11 children, Irish Catholic, working class. The kind of family that in 1960s something Islington was indistinguishable from a thousand others on the same streets. Most of those 11 children grew up, worked legitimate jobs, and never appeared in a police file.
The ones who didn’t were Terry, Paty, and the youngest of the three, Tommy. The brothers came of age running protection on market stalls in Chapel Market and Camden. Small-scale extortion, cash threats. By the mid 1970s, Paty had already done his first serious time, 7 years for armed robbery when he was barely into his 20s.
By the early 1980s, the Flying Squad was making the old school armed cash and transit robbery a worse and worse bet. So, the brothers did what every smart London firm did in the mid80s. They got out of robbery and into drugs. And here’s the foreshadowing anchor. I want you to hold on to the Hateng Garden jeweler who would later become their financial adviser who would be shot four times in the head on a residential street in North Finchley on a winter afternoon in 1998.
Was already in business in Haten Garden by the time the brothers were running market stalls. His name was Si Nome. Remember it? We’ll come back to him. By the late 1980s, the Adams operation looked nothing like a London firm in the Cray sense. It wasn’t a gang. It was a structure.
The independent newspaper in 1998 would describe it as a kind of corporate organog. And the description has stuck because nobody who has actually studied the family has come up with a better one. Terry was the chairman. Tommy was the chief financial officer. Paty was the head of enforcement. Terry especially had no interest in being a cray.
He didn’t go to nightclubs. He wasn’t photographed by David Bailey. He didn’t drink with Lord Booby. He had retired from frontline crime by the time he was 35. The prosecution would later say so in open court, and he had spent the next decade and a half collecting 19th century mice and porcelain figurines, Tiffany Silver, etchings by Henry Moore, liner cuts by Picasso.
A financier called David McKenzie, who we’ll meet properly in a few minutes, would later describe meeting Terry in his Milh Hill mansion, surrounded by these objects, and tell a court the impression was of a man who looked, and I quote, like a cross between Liberace and Peter Stringfellow. What does it tell you about a country when its most powerful organized crime family is also the one most of its citizens have never heard of? Hold that question.
We’ll come back to it. Tommy was the dealmaker. He’s the one who, according to police intelligence, opened the channels with Colombian cocaine suppliers and was alleged to have negotiated an $80 million credit line from a cartel. An allegation, I should say plainly, that has never been tested in court. Tommy is also the brother whose name first surfaces in court records in 1985 when he was tried alongside Kenneth Noi for handling the proceeds of the Brinks Mat gold robbery.
He was acquitted. Noi was not. Most of the gold from that robbery, 26 million pounds of bullion stolen from a Heathrow warehouse in 1983 was never recovered. Winsley Clarkson, the British crime writer who has spent more time on this material than almost anyone alive, has written that most British gold jewelry made after 1983 may contain Brinks matte metal.
The smelter allegedly was Sulli Nome. If you watched my video on the diamond trade in Antworp, you already know the global jewelry industry is the most efficient cash laundering machine the legal economy ever invented. What that video didn’t get into was what happens when one of those Haten Garden diamond merchants becomes the personal financial adviser to the most feared family in London.
Nah home ran a front company called of all things [ __ ] Galore. The name was a joke. The function was not. The function was to convert the family’s cash into stones, into bullion, into property, into anything that wouldn’t trip a bank’s compliance system. And we know all of this because in the mid 1990s, the Metropolitan Police working with customs in a section of M A5 recently given a remmit over serious organized crime planted a listening device in the [ __ ] Galore office.
That bug, and this is the first crack in the wall, mysteriously went dead before it could record anything useful. Officers running the operation suspected then and now that someone inside the Met had tipped Nahome off. I’ll come back to that. Hold it. Paty, meanwhile, was the brother with the body count.
The Independent reported in 2001 that Paty was quote regarded as one of the most violent organized crime figures in Great Britain. He was a suspect in at least 25 organized crime related deaths over a three-year period in the early 90s, allegedly using motorcycle assassins, a hit squad of riders on small displacement bikes who would pull alongside a target’s car or doorstep, fire, and disappear into traffic.
Now, before I get into the killings themselves, I want to say something about that number because it gets repeated everywhere. You’ll see it written as 25 murders. You’ll see it written as 100. I have seen on more than one corner of the internet the claim that the Adams family is connected to 200 killings.
That last figure does not exist in any serious source I can find. It appears to be a confusion in the comments and content mill ecosystem between the family’s alleged 200 million pound wealth and a body count. I want to be careful here. The number that police have actually stood behind off the record in conversations with journalists like Paul Lashmar at the Independent and Duncan Campbell at the Guardian is somewhere between 23 and 25, not 200.
And this is the part that matters. No Adam’s brother has ever been convicted of murder. Not one. Every single killing I’m about to describe, every single one is either officially unsolved or ended in an acquitt. The gap between what police believe and what courts have proven is in itself the documentary you are watching.
Let me walk you through what we do know. July 1991, outside the Turnmills nightclub in Clerken. Frankie Fraser, 68 years old, the former Richardson enforcer, the man who supposedly pulled out a rival’s teeth with pliers in the 1960s, is shot in the head at close range. Part of his mouth is shot away. He survives. The standard account in true crime literature names Paty Adams as the suspect.
Frasier himself, when he could finally speak, denied it. He told reporters he believed the shooter was a rogue police officer. He refused to cooperate with the investigation. Asked why, he said. And this is one of the most British sentences ever spoken. If you play by the sword, you’ve got to expect the sword as well. If you’re still here for this one, a subscribe genuinely helps.
The Adam story isn’t on the channel by accident. It’s the kind of story most platforms get nervous about because it makes lawyers nervous. Subscribing tells the algorithm you want more like this. February 1994, Stoke Newington. A former British high jump champion called Claude Mosley is stabbed through the back with a samurai sword.
The man arrested for the killing is the Adams family’s chief enforcer, a man called Gilbert Winter, known on the street as Gilbert the Stick because of a permanent limp. The case goes to the old Bailey in 1995. The key prosecution witness, a man who saw the killing, refuses to testify. He chooses 3 months in prison for contempt of court overtaking the stand.
The judge, Michael Kum, said this in sentencing. It is terrifying that a man who commits a murder of this kind can get away with it because a man refuses to do his duty and give evidence. There is no doubt you are a terrified man. Winter walked out of court, a free man. 3 years later, Winter himself disappeared.
March 1998, his girlfriend’s white Nissan Micra was found abandoned in Spring Gardens, Woodford. He has not been seen since. There is a story and I want to be clear that this is gangland legend never proven, never forensically tested that Winter’s body lies in the foundations of the Millennium Dome, the building we now know as the O2 Arena, which was being poured throughout 1997 and 1998.
A man who was later considered the prime suspect for Winter’s disappearance allegedly told an associate, “He’s in the O2. I put him there. He ain’t never coming back.” I do not know if that’s true. Nobody does. The case is still open. That’s an unresolved thread in this story and I’m leaving it unresolved because the truth is no one outside the few people who actually know is ever going to tell us.
1998 was the worst year. In March, winter vanished. In November, to be exact, on the afternoon of November 27th, Si Nahome left work at his Hatton Garden office, drove home to North Finchley, parked his car on Ardan Road, and walked toward his front door. A man on a black motorcycle pulled up. The pillion passenger fired.
Nahome was shot in the back as he tried to run, then four times in the head as he lay on the pavement. He was 49 years old. The motorbike, a J registration 125cc machine with a yellow stripe, was never recovered. The shooter was never identified. I was going to walk you through the Adams laundering structure next.
The nominee directorships, the Criate Bank accounts, the Sky Consultancy, and Clouds Consultancy companies Terry would later list on his tax returns. But actually, I have to stop and tell you about David McKenzie first because nothing else in this story makes sense without him. McKenzie was a Mayfair financeier, not a Haten Garden jeweler, a respectable city man.
The family had asked him to launder approximately 1.5 million. He had put it into investments. The investments lost the money. He was summoned to Terry Adams Milhill mansion. Terry, by McKenzie’s later sworn testimony, listened politely. Then McKenzie was driven to a house in Islington belonging to John Potter, Terry’s brother-in-law, and there the family’s enforcer, a man called Christopher McCormack, took out a Stanley knife.
I’m going to read this because I want you to hear it the way it was said in court. McKenzie’s nose and left ear were left, quote, hanging by slivers of skin. The tendons in his left wrist were severed. Three of his ribs were broken. McKenzie’s blood was found on McCormick’s jacket. The case went to trial. McKenzie testified.
He described the room. He described Terry. He described McCormick. He gave them the description that would follow Terry Adams for the rest of his life. A cross between Liberace and Peter Stringfellow, immaculately dressed in a long black coat and a white frilly shirt, totally in command. Everybody stood up when he walked in.
The jury acquitted McCormick of everything. One juror, according to a press report at the time, allegedly winked at McCormick in the dock after the verdict. That is what the wall of silence looks like in operation. And here is the part most people miss when they talk about the Adams family.
The wall has three levels and you have to understand all three to understand how a family this powerful stayed invisible for this long. Level one is the street. The Tieran note the winter trial witness chose prison over testifying. McKenzie’s torturer being acquitted by a jury that may or may not have been afraid.
Frankie Fraser refuses to identify his own wouldbe killer. This is the level most people see and most people understand. People are afraid so they don’t talk. Level two is the institution. And this is the level the story almost never gets told at. In 1999, a CPS clerk, a man called Mark Herbert, who worked inside the Crown Prosecution Service itself, was convicted of selling the Adams family the names of 33 police informants.
The price for 33 people’s lives was £500. The prosecutor, Victor Temple, QC, told the court that the Adams family was quote no stranger to the imposition of serious violence against those who might seek to challenge them, and few could afford to trifle with their wishes. There was a phrase used at Herbert’s trial, attributed to him in connection with what would happen to the named informants that I have not been able to forget.
They will send them flowers, but not possibly for their birthdays. The [ __ ] galore bug going dead, almost certainly because of a tip from inside the Met. A 2002 internal Metropolitan Police intelligence report seen years later by the Bristol Cable that quote captured several detectives offering help to Terry Adams. By the time the joint operation against the family, code name Trinity, run partly by I-5, out of a secret bunker in Hottisden, Hertfordshire, finally produced a conviction.
It had cost an estimated 10 million and run for nearly a decade. Level three is the press, and this is the level I find personally the strangest. Here’s what I find genuinely strange about this story. There is no proper book about the Adams family. Not one. For a country that has produced entire library shelves about the craze, twins who ran a smaller operation for a shorter time and were caught faster. The absence is loud.
There is excellent journalism by Paul Lashmar at the Independent, by Duncan Campbell at the Guardian, by Graeme Mcclagan, at the BBC, by Winsley Clarkson, by Michael Gillard. There are chapters in books on broader subjects. There is no comprehensive account. When Mlagen tried to publish a book called Bent Coppers, which dealt in part with police corruption around the Adams orbit, it took 4 years of liel proceedings to clear publication.
Four years. The case eventually established at the Court of Appeal in October 2007 that the qualified privilege defense in English liel law applied to books for the first time. Caroline Keane, the solicitor who fought it, said afterward, “Ryns is alive and kicking. It is not limited to newspapers. It means all media.
” Why did it take four years to confirm something that elementary? Because British liel law had spent two decades doing exactly what the Adams family wanted it to do. Making journalists hedge, making editors nervous, making publishers settle. The phrase you see again and again in every British news article about the family is the same phrase.
Alleged, linked to, is suspected of, is believed by police to have been involved in. Do you think the journalists actually knew and were afraid to write it or did they genuinely not know? I have a view. I’ll tell you at the end. So, three levels. Witnesses are afraid. Institutions compromised, press constrained.
That is the architecture. That is the corruption mechanism. not bribes and envelopes, but a structural alignment of fear, money, and law that made naming the Adams family in plain English almost impossible for anyone in the country with anything to lose. Which brings us finally to how it ended or, and this is the question we’ll close on, whether it ended at all.
The first crack was Tommy. 1998 he was convicted of conspiracy to import 8 million pounds worth of hashish. He got 7 years. The original confiscation order was an unprecedented 6 million. On appeal it was reduced to 1 million. His wife Andrula paid the million in cash in two briefcases of half a million each 2 days before the deadline.
The second crack and the historic one was Terry. He was arrested at his mansion in Arkley, north of London on April 30th, 2003. Police seized half a million pounds of antiques, £59,000 in cash, and more than £40,000 in jewelry. The case took 4 years to get to court. Terry was bugged in his own house. Bugs in the lounge, the bedroom, and the loft installed under the cover of him ordering a Sky satellite dish in 1997.
The audio ran live to Mind 5 at Tim’s house for 18 months. Inside the operation, the recordings were known as the Goodfella’s tapes. Terry knew about the bugs. His wife Ruth, according to one account, faked sex sounds to mock the listeners. Terry himself on tape said this to his mother. They’ve got listening devices in this house.
I know that. Me and Ruth have a right giggle with them. We give them things to talk about. What he gave them eventually was enough. There’s a passage on those tapes. I’m reading it as it was read in court where Terry described an earlier act of violence. He said, “When I hit someone, I do them damage.
” There was a geyser that was lying to us on my baby’s life. Stealing a hundred grand it was, or 80 grand, and I went crack on my baby’s life. His kneecap come right out there. All white, all bone. In February 2007 at the Crown Court at Black Friars, Terry Adams pleaded guilty to a single specimen count of conspiracy to conceal the proceeds of criminal conduct.
It was the first conviction of its kind under the proceeds of crime regime. The prosecutor Andrew Mitchell QC told the court, “And this is the line that has followed Terry Adams for the rest of his life. Terry Adams was one of the country’s most feared and revered organized criminals. A hallmark of his career was the ability to keep his evidential distance from any of the violence and other crime from which he undoubtedly profited.
He was sentenced on the 9th of March 2007 to 7 years in prison, a confiscation order of £750,000, a 10-year financial reporting order. And this is the part that almost broke me when I read it. Defense costs of £4,66,5785 recovered against legal aid. He had spent £4.6 million of public money fighting a charge he eventually pleaded guilty to.
Paty fled in 2013 after the Tieran shooting. He was finally arrested in Amsterdam in August 2015. He pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent and was sentenced in December 2016 to 9 years. The judge, his honor judge Christopher Kinch QC, noted that Paty had taken steps to dispose of evidence and made sustained efforts to evade arrest.
Tommy went down again in 2017, 7 years for laundering nearly a quarter of a million pounds exchanged in Marks and Spencer bags at Houston station. His son Shawn got 6 months suspended for using a forged pay slip on a mortgage application. Even the youngest brother, Mickey, who had never previously surfaced in serious organized crime reporting, was jailed in 2018 for 38 months for hiding 300,000 lb of income from HMRC across seven false tax returns, a family, five brothers, four convictions, total prison sentences exceeding
30 years, billions in laundering allegations, 23 3 to 25 killings police off the record believe they were involved in and not one murder conviction. Not one. I want to close on something specific because there is a moment late in this story that I think tells you everything. December 2017, almost a decade after Terry’s conviction, the state has been chasing him for the £700,000 of unpaid confiscation.
He has spent that decade in and out of court claiming he is penniless. In 2014, the high court found him liable for £650,000. He said he didn’t have it. In 2017, a district judge in Weston Super mayor told him to pay or go back to prison for at least 2 and 1/2 years. He paid.
In December 2017, Terry Adams produced approximately £730,000 in full against an order he had spent 10 years saying he could not afford. A source told the Evening Standard he had found it down the back of the sofa and then immediately he tried to gag the press to stop them reporting it. That is the ending. Or rather, that is the question I want to leave you with.
Because if you take the story at face value, the convictions, the sentences, the dismantled syndicate, the broken empire, Terry Adams in 2017 is supposed to be a man at the end of his power. 63 years old, out of prison, out of money, out of relevance. He produced £730,000 in cash and tried to silence a national newspaper.
Where did the money come from? Who told the lawyers to file the gagging order? Who is still answering Terry Adams phone in 2026? I don’t know. Nobody outside a very small circle knows. The Mets public position is that the family’s influence has been declining since 2000. In 2025, Tommy Adams was named not as a defendant, but as an alleged background figure in a 20.
8 8 million pound fiat fraud case at Southern Crown Court in which conspirators on a hotel room recording were heard discussing their fear of quote upsetting the gangster. A few minutes ago, I asked you whether you thought the journalists who knew about this family were afraid or whether they genuinely didn’t know. Here is my answer.
I think most of them genuinely didn’t know. I think the few who did know were afraid. I think the country at large didn’t want to know. And I think the architecture that made all three of those things possible is in some recognizable form still standing. So I’ll ask you instead, where do you think Gilbert Winter actually is? What do you think happened to the money Sally Nahome was hiding offshore? And who do you think wrote the gagging order in December 2017? I’ve laid out what we know.
I want to read what you think in the comments. That note Tieran wrote from his hospital bed to the man who shot him. We are men. Face me. The truth will hurt. For 30 years in North London, nobody did. Nobody faced them. In the truth, most of it never