Terror reign of the untouchables

Whichever way the Damilola Taylor trial had gone, the real story behind the quartet of boys who the court decided did not kill him remains the same.

Today they are back strutting the streets they have terrorised for years, testimony to the two twisted pillars of modern life - the spread of evil cultivated by broken, fatherless homes and the abject feebleness of the law.

If Damilola's parents can draw any consolation from their agony, it is that his death and the feverish official activity which followed has shone a searchlight on how little the law does to protect the decent from the vicious, and how much to protect the vicious from justice.

What the Old Bailey jury were not allowed to know, for example, was that all four of the boys have appeared on serious charges in crown courts and, as yesterday, walked free each time.

Six months before Damilola was killed in November 2000, three of the four boys accused of his murder faced the Old Bailey accused with two others of indecently assaulting two 12-year- old girls.

The five were then aged between 12 and 14 and the judge protectively ruled it was a mistake to try them there.

There were several witnesses yet, even before hearing them, the Common Serjeant Judge Neil Denison threw the case out, saying he was 'unhappy about these five children being tried at the Old Bailey'.

One has to wonder if the judge had any thoughts about what his decision could mean for the assaulted girls, or if anyone had made him aware that in throwing out the case the threats and intimidation the girls and their families had suffered before the trial would be so intensified that they and their families would have to move.

Note that - they, not their torturers, would have to move. But for the moment let us concentrate on the swaggering bunch who plagued the estate where Damilola died. The jagged end of a smashed beer bottle was shoved into his leg and twisted across his femoral artery and a marble pushed into his throat to stifle his screams.

All, of course, are too young to be identified, but the gang has terrorised the estate for five years, mugging children for their pocket money, committing assaults, making a mockery of a criminal justice system which appears totally incapable of dealing with them.

Are they from broken homes? Of course. Are witnesses to their crimes too frightened to give evidence against them? Naturally. Are legal-aid lawyers available to extricate them from trouble? Always.

Today the silent cheer that went up when the four were arrested and charged has died in the throats of those who fear their return to join the estimated 1,000 youths in the area described as 'rootless and potentially dangerous'.

The first to be cleared was a 17-year-old known as Boy C. He was found not guilty on February 27 when the judge ruled inadmissible the evidence of the prosecution's 'star' witness, a girl of 14.

Then, on March 28, the youngest of the four, 15-year-old Boy D, was cleared - this time on the judge's direction. And so to yesterday when the jury allowed the 16-year- old brothers, Boys A and B, to stroll out of Court 12 followed by their doting mother. The restrictions of the Children's and Young Person's Act mean that none of them can be identified because of an order by the judge. So what are we allowed to reveal about the four?

Boys A & B

Let us start with the brothers who have built a reputation so fearsome that police compare them to the young Krays, targeting the weak and young.

Boys A and B were born in Britain of Mediterranean immigrant parents, whose father left them when they were toddlers. Little of their villainy has been reported.

'People are too scared of them,' says an officer who has known the family for years. 'No one wants to give evidence against them. The risks are so great because these boys are made of stainless steel. They are small, tough, and use violence with ease.'

Just like the infamous Ronnie and Reggie Kray, in the eyes of their mother they can do no wrong. 'My boys have never been rude to anyone' she says with sad-eyed maternal-concern. 'The only people they will ever swear at is the police if they stop them for something.'

In fact the brothers have been in trouble since the age of ten. Both are thought to have run a 'protection racket' bullying younger boys into mugging for them.

Their previous convictions include thefts and taking cars. One was fined £50 for assaulting a police officer, while his brother was convicted six times of various offences in the year of Damilola's death.

Crucially, however, the punishments they received are the predictable mix of 'supervision orders', 'action plans' and requirements to visit 'attendance centres'.

Their father, a kebab shop assistant and former fabric cutter, walked out on them when they were two. Their mother, a part-time waitress who has three other children, says they 'missed their daddy so much they used to wander around looking for him'.

By secondary school their behaviour was so disruptive that their mother was asked to sit with them in class. It didn't help because, she says, 'I couldn't be there all the time.' Eventually they were split up and sent to separate schools. That didn't help either.

Both played truant and it was not long before they could be seen among a gang of up to a dozen, all from broken homes, wandering the estate looking for trouble and for victims.

The pair were stealing mopeds and mobile phones, stripping the pocket money from young children and on one occasion ripping a pair of trainers from a boy, leaving him barefoot and crying.

A neighbour recalls how they stole a pink Barbie bike she had bought for her five-year-old daughter. She marched round to claim it back, only to be confronted by their mother who, she says, claimed she had bought the bike for them.

'Think of it,' she says now. 'A pink Barbie bike for her two tough boys. But I had to accept it. What else could I do?'

As they got older and bigger, so the brothers became more dangerous and the fear of them grew. The sexual assault on the two girls occurred, say the victims, when they saw a gang beating up a young boy.

Among them were the youngest of the Damilola accused and the two brothers. After the attack they shouted: 'You can't touch us, we're the untouchables'.

Less than a fortnight before Damilola was killed the two brothers were accused of taking part in a raid on a flat on the estate.

Their victim was a boy of 11, whom they had previously bullied and whose family flat they burst into and ransacked. Police were called and from that moment the family insist they were subjected to a campaign of terror.

'For months we didn't have any glass in our windows because they were continually being smashed,' says the boy's mother.

'They would knock on the door and when I came out they would shout, "Tell your son he is dead".'

The brothers were eventually charged with burglary and intimidating a witness and committed for trial at Inner London Crown Court. They pleaded not guilty and the trial was set for May 2001, but once again they walked free.

Mr Justice Wakefield ordered a not guilty verdict to be returned on the burglary and said it would be an 'abuse of process' for the intimidation case to continue in a crown court. The brothers and their understanding mother - 'they're no angels and they get into trouble and stuff but they would never hurt a fly,' she insists - continued to live undisrupted lives on the estate. Indeed, the same boy whose flat was ransacked says he was mugged at knifepoint by all four of the Damilola accused two weeks before the murder.

One of the brothers is now the father of a girl born 12 months ago to a girl of 15, and his mother adoringly forecasts he will be 'a great dad'. The baby lives with her mother.

The Old Bailey heard claims that he impregnated another, 12-year-old girl who was forced to have an abortion. A third girl, now 16, has been forced to return to Africa in disgrace after she, too, became pregnant to the boy but later miscarried.

After their arrests the pair remained bullish when questioned about Damilola's death. The court heard how they were 'rapping and singing' in the cells.

While on remand in Feltham they began to acquire a 'following' and had to be split up. Plainly full of confidence they threatened officers, one of them even telling one officer: 'I am going to have you when I come out.' What emerged is that when separated the brothers lose some of their swagger. A source said: 'They have this dynamic about them. They feed off each other. But separate them and they are not so tough.'

Boy C

Boy C is the son of an asylum-seeking mother who arrived here with four children from the Congo five years ago, saying her husband had been killed.

He seems to have spent most of his time up until his arrest sleeping on a mattress in the accused brothers' bedroom.

Police say he had 'run wild' since coming to Britain and 'hadn't seen the inside of a school for years'. On at least two occasions he was 'abandoned' by his family and disowned.

The family, who include two sisters and a brother, initially lived on a council estate near the Elephant and Castle in South-East London but after persistent complaints from neighbours about their behaviour they were moved to a North London terrace. The youth's elder sister, who studies at a local college, admits that her brother 'has been in a lot of trouble' but insists he played no part in Damilola's death.

'He would never do anything like that,' she says. 'He has been picked on because he is famous locally for being in trouble. Tony Blair put the pressure on the police to find someone and they picked him.'

After five years in Britain his mother still speaks very little English. Neighbours at their North London address talk of heavy drinking and late-night parties. Police have been called to the address several times.

Despite all this activity, life in North London apparently bored her son, who headed back to Peckham as soon as he could - hence his sleeping on the brothers' floor.

Some who know the family claim his mother, and also the education authorities and social services 'effectively abandoned him to the streets'.

In May last year he and the youngest of the four Damilola accused were acquitted at Inner London Crown Court of wounding a Turkish immigrant and affray.

Amid extraordinary scenes during the case, Boy C had to be physicallyrestrained after attempting to attack a security guard. Almost unprecedented for a juvenile, he was handcuffed in the dock.

Last October he and another friend faced West London Youth Court accused of arson after a fire destroyed computers and office equipment in a Portakabin in Peckham. He and another boy were alleged to have doused the hut with petrol. Both boys were badly burned and treated in hospital.

District Judge Terence English dismissed the case without even hearing the defendants. 'I don't believe the Crown has got to the stage where these two should be put at risk of going into the witness box and hanging themselves,' was his alarming explanation.

While on remand last summer Boy C told a fellow inmate that, after the murder, he was 'out on the rob as they did every night'.

Boy D

Boy D is of mixed race, one of five children each by a different father. He was barely a year old when officers were breaking down the door of the grubby council flat in the Midlands where his mother was living and scooping him out of his cot. His alcoholic mother was out, and anxious neighbours had dialled 999. He was taken into care.

The story of his upbringing is a familiar one on many estates in modern Britain. 'He lacked a father figure,' says a close relative of his mother. 'There were plenty of men in the house but none of them ever took responsibility for him. She would dose him up with cough medicine to get him to sleep.'

One is entitled to wonder just what the social services were doing while this was happening, and why he was allowed to go back to his mother, which he was. When he was four she moved to London and they lived in a hostel for some months before being given a council flat on the estate in Peckham.

'His life was a shambles,' a relative says. 'Even when he was small he was allowed to come and go as he pleased as she drank and took drugs. He could stay out all night - and he did. He needed a bit of discipline, but he didn't get it.'

At 11 he was expelled from school for throwing a chair at a teacher. At 12 he was in the older company of the brothers, running with the gang and appearing at the Old Bailey on the indecent assault charge involving the two young girls which caused considerable controversy on the estate when it was thrown out.

He has a previous conviction for assault. The sentence? Twelve hours at an attendance centre.

The relative adds: 'He doesn't really know his father, has scarcely met his grandparents, and has never known if his mother's going to be drunk or not. What do you expect?'

What one expects are laws tough enough to protect intimidated witnesses and commonsense decisions in court that do not allow technicalities to wipe out a case even before the evidence is heard. What one also expects is for the law to give ordinary citizens a rest from thugs like these.

Today, with the last of the quartet acquitted of Damilola's murder, they are free again, to steal, to mug, to terrorise. Four lawless boys, with hardly a father in sight.

In fact, the brothers' father, who came to Britain from the Mediterranean in the Seventies, reappeared in their lives after reading of their arrest and contacting his ex-wife.

He has a nice semi-detached three-bed house on the outskirts of a small market town in Dorset and has lived on social security since 1990 when, he explains, he developed pains in his arms, neck and back following an accident at work.

With great generosity, he says his sons' lawless lives was 'not my wife's fault - it is the fault of where they were growing up'.

It doesn't occur to him that his departure when they were toddlers added to that corrosive, fatherless environment. And, as with all the absent fathers in this desolate story of our times, it doesn't occur to him to blame himself.

Additional reporting by Tom Rawstorne and Ben Taylor, Daily Mail

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