Category: Uncategorized

Mark Thomas: Debt Collector
Channel 4
22 October, 2003

Saddam’s gone but the debt he ran up while in power remains. Iraq’s foreign debt stands at $383 billion, roughly $16,700 for every man, woman and child. With the average Iraqi wage at just $150 per year, it would take them 150 years to pay off their share. So Mark Thomas decides to help pay off the debt by trying to raise money from the people and companies who have profited from Iraq. Setting off on a series of stunts to highlight the country’s plight (repossessing an Iraqi-owned bank and attempting to sell it to traders in the City of London; hijacking a busload of arms dealers and asking for donations), Mark does his bit to reduce the balance and also reveals how Saddam’s debt is now, with the IMF’s help, going to be swapped for Iraq’s vital assets. All of which means that the very companies that profited under the original regime now stand to cash in again. (C4 Press.)

Producer: Adrian Gatton
Director: Martin Herring
Executive Producer: Stephen Phelps

Watch here:

Human trafficker’s last days of freedom
Channel 4 News
29 June, 2003

An investigation into Little Sister Ping, the Chinese Snakehead smuggler. Her gang organised the notorious shipment of Chinese illegal immigrants to Dover in which 58 immigrants were suffocated in the back of a lorry carrying tomatoes. This film includes exclusive access to the Dutch police phone taps of Sister Ping’s conversations, and secret filming in Rotterdam.

Script:

“I dream I’m returning to China and I am being arrested by the police. I am always having nightmares.”

These are the words of Sister Ping who was jailed in the Netherlands last week for smuggling people from China into Britain.

It was her gang that was responsible for the ill-fated operation in which 58 people suffocated while hidden in a truck bringing a cargo of tomatoes through Dover.

But what emerged from the trial was the sheer scale of Sister Ping’s human trafficking. It’s estimated that she could have been responsible for more than a quarter of all Chinese illegal immigration into Britain.

Adrian Gatton gained exclusive access to the police phone taps of Sister Ping and reports now on how she made, and lost, a fortune trading in misery of others …

Read the rest of the script here.

Reporter: Adrian Gatton
Director: Rob Lemkin

How to Rob a Bank (Part 2)
Channel 4
17 March 2003

A carefully researched, two-part series exploring the history of organised crime and armed robbery, in particular the “golden age” of “across the pavement artists” who flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.

When British banks and their security advisors developed the burglar-proof safe in the 1950s, they unwittingly created the era of the organised bank robber. How To Rob A Bank tells the story of the tit-for-tat war of technology and psychology that followed.

The 1960s saw the birth of the “project crime” – sophisticated and increasingly violent attacks on the banks, their staff and their money. We trace the robbers’ pursuit of cash from safe-cracking through to hold-ups in the banking halls and the military-like assaults on cash in transit. The banks fought back, turning each branch into a fortress and protecting their staff with screens and cameras. Sometimes this made things worse – one cashier was killed by flying fragments of the security glass meant to protect her. But the cameras did the trick – as the first man ever arrested on the evidence of a British bank camera recalls.

As the banks developed better ways of deterring professional robbers from targeting their branches, the villains instead perfected their assaults on cash in transit trucks. Bernie Kahn, of the Chainsaw Gang, tells how his men defied the banks by attacking an armoured van with specialist cutting gear. The van makers fought back, inventing airlocks and interlocking doors which further delayed the villains’ getting their hands on the loot. Other inventions tried to render the cash too difficult to steal – from octopus arms which shot out of the cash bag making it hard to carry (a flop) to armoured bags which ruined cash by dyeing it red when tampered with (a great success).

In the end, though, it was intelligence-led policing and the willingness of the police to fight fire with fire by arming officers which had a profound effect on the career criminals’ desire to keep attacking the banks’ money.

The programmes include interviews with police, villains, security specialists and the inventors who pioneered new security systems.

Associate Producers: Adrian Gatton; James Oliver
Series Consultant: Paul Lashmar
Director: Jonathan Jones
Exec Producers: Steve Boulton