‘Gwen’ woke early on Saturday morning and rushed downstairs to check on the potted sunflower and tomato plants she’d grown from seedlings to sell at her school fair that afternoon.
The nine-year-old loved her private school in a posh part of south-west London. She had good friends there and love on tap at home from her mum and maternal grandmother - three generations of women under one roof, plus enough pets to start a small city farm.
It was 21 June 2003 and the girl with a bright future and a boy band song on her lips was about to be ripped from that happy life into the maelstrom of murderous London gangsters.
An assassin was coming to the school fair to kill a man she barely knew, so Scotland Yard detectives whipped her into the Witness Protection Programme.
It wasn’t the regular Programme, but a secret unit within the anti-corruption squad. The gangster who’d sent the assassin had bent cops in his pocket.
Gwen grew up thinking there was a permanent and real threat to her family. Only in 2021, at the age of 27, did she discover that Scotland Yard had stolen her childhood.
The 18 years spent as a protected witness were unnecessary. She could have returned to her happy life, finished school and would now be a vet.
But the police put its needs and reputation before the rights of an innocent child. A child who grew up to become an anxious young woman plagued by guilt and worthlessness that on really dark days she takes out on herself.
A former Scotland Yard witness protection officer briefed on the case said:
“I could write a book on what the police did wrong. What happened to Gwen is horrendous. Witness protection is a real dirty game even without any corruption.”
This is a story of a girl interrupted. A girl ghosted from friends during her formative years. A girl disconnected and plugged into isolation and fear.
It is also a story about misogyny in the police. The same misogyny that allowed undercover officers to deceive women into sexual relationships in pursuit of ‘subversives’, also saw as disposable the lives of a girl, her mother and grandmother in pursuit of a gangster.
Gwen is now fighting back. By bringing a landmark legal case against Scotland Yard she hopes to ensure the rights of children forced into the Witness Protection Programme are protected from their point of entry.
The Upsetter has investigated this troubling case for the last decade. Legal proceedings are reaching a crucial stage at a time when Scotland Yard is in special measures and has been found to be institutionally corrupt and misogynist.
Under Metropolitan police commissioner Mark Rowley it remains a force in denial, intent on defending the reputation of a mafia of the mediocre who so badly failed Londoners and a little girl.
Here’s what happened.
Baker Boy
Gwen’s mum, ‘Angela’, was determined her daughter would go to private school because her own experience in the state system had been cold and unremarkable.
Working as a booker for a model agency, by 2003 Angela had built a modest property portfolio during London’s housing bubble. The rental income was enough for the 38-year-old to cover her daughter’s private school fees without any help from Gwen’s dad.
Angela could have had her pick of men, but went for ‘Paul’, a mechanic turned bad boy who unfortunately wasn’t good at being bad. She liked Paul’s big family and his down to earth manner compared to the media ponces she was used to dating.
Two years into their relationship, Gwen was born in 1994. For the first four years, Paul was present. But by 2003, the nine-year-old had seen little of her dad. She thought he was working abroad for the family’s common good.
In truth, Angela and Paul had split up in 2001 and he was in prison - again. Paul was one of the many beguiled by the easy money and buzz of the drug game, a game in which he was more cannon fodder than soldier.
He also quickly found himself in debt to one of the UK’s leading crime families, the Adams brothers from Islington in north London. The story of how that happened is a short but necessary detour before returning to the momentous day of the school fair.
Five years earlier, in 1998, the story goes that Paul was looking after about £100,000 worth of their cannabis, but it had rotted in his care. He alighted on what he thought was a workable plan to avoid owing a massive drug debt to an unforgiving crime family.
Paul loaded the rotten dope onto a van which he crashed into a wall, getting himself nicked and a prison sentence. By ‘taking his lumps’ and keeping quiet he hoped the Adams brothers would accept the loss as a risk of doing business.
They didn’t and wanted £250,000. Threats had been made to Gwen and his niece, he told Angela.
To pay off the drug debt, Paul got his parents to sign over their family home and asked Angela to remortgage her mother’s house for £50,000 and do a dodgy re-mortgage on one of her rental properties for another £100,000.
She did it, grudgingly and out of fear. But on his release from prison two years later, Paul repaid her by going on cocaine binges and coming home smelling of lap dancer grind.
Although much better at looking after engines than drugs, Paul nevertheless returned to the game. This time he was working for a new boss, Andy Baker, an up-and-coming gangster who had split from the Adams crime family orbit.
Before long, Paul was nicked again couriering ecstasy pills up the M4. He lost his liberty in 2001. He also lost Angela.
While doing his time, Paul had to deal with a confiscation of assets court order associated with the recent conviction. He informed Angela that her remaining properties, which previously she had been forced to put in their joint names, would be at risk.
It took Angela time to unravel what was happening in the background. Even now some of it remains opaque. But one thing is clear, behind it all was the malevolent figure of Andy Baker.
The villain had risen without much trace in London’s underworld. Baker made his first mark in the early 90s as an apprentice to Gilbert ‘the stick’ Wynter, a feared enforcer for the Adams crime family, who provided door security to Chelsea nightclubs popular with the young royals crowd.
Baker was fancied for Wynter’s disappearance in 1998 and months later the murder of another key figure in the Adams crime family’s operation, their moneyman Solly Nahome.
The Upsetter and Alon Aviram have written extensively about these events in the series The Cornerman for The Bristol Cable, a city where Baker also operated when not in London.
The gangster was so named for taking a ‘corner’ or sum of money from the graft of others. A Met intelligence report said Baker and his associates had:
“a history of violence and suspected involvement in large scale cocaine supply and obtaining money by menaces. He is also believed to be concerned in offences of murder and firearms.”
After Paul’s release in May 2003, Baker organised for a financial adviser to help liquidate some of Angela’s assets, supposedly to pay off the confiscation of assets order made by the court.
Enter ‘Douglas’, an outwardly respectable 49-year-old businessman from a Scottish family of note. He had been a big bucks lawyer before his conviction for large scale mortgage fraud.
On his release from prison in 1993, Douglas enjoyed the frisson of hanging out with gangsters who used his legal knowledge for property and business deals. He also ran his own legitimate businesses: a music agency and nightclubs, which is how he met Gilbert Wynter and Andy Baker.
Baker liked to boast about his role in Wynter’s murder, Douglas told The Upsetter. The gangster, he said, liked playing mind games and indulged in dangerous bravado, acting as if the Adams brothers couldn’t touch him.
Certainly, the-up-and-coming gangster grew a successful business protecting nightclubs across the country once Wynter had disappeared. The enforcer’s body has never been found.
The Letter
After several meetings with Angela, Douglas spotted a legal flaw in the confiscation of assets order. As Paul was a drug courier, and not a trafficker, there was no legal right to confiscate any assets.
By now, Douglas had started courting Angela. He wasn’t the sort of man she usually went for, but she found the struck off lawyer funny, charming and felt he had her interests at heart.
For his part, Douglas suspected Baker and Paul were using the order to rinse the remaining property portfolio Angela had built as an inheritance for Gwen.