The real life Del Boy

When Derrick "Del Boy" Davies moved into his smart new Essex home, it seemed that - like his namesake in Only Fools and Horses - he'd finally achieved his dream of becoming a millionaire.

All the trappings of newfound wealth were there - a £300,000 ranch house complete with stables and office, a string of cars bearing "DEL" number plates, the five-acre garden with statues and fountain, plus two big dogs and a 24-hour CCTV system to guard it all.

Noting his ex-boxer's face and barrow-boy accent, his new neighbours couldn't work it out. Was he a National Lottery winner? No, they were told, he was a "just a market trader" from London who'd built up a successful business.

As a subsequent raid on his house proved, however, there was more - or rather less - to Del Boy's enterprises than met the eye. Yes, he did run a multi million-pound empire supplying designer merchandise from Southend to Reading. The catch was that everything he sold was fake.

Snaresbrook Crown Court heard how Davies, 38, masterminded one of the biggest counterfeiting operations ever uncovered in the UK, which may have netted £1million a year.

The "highly sophisticated" scam saw him set up a factory in the East End complete with computerised sewing machinery that could copy virtually any designer logo, from Nike to Tommy Hilfiger, to Chanel No 19. The fake logos were stuck on cheap £2-a-time bulk-bought garments - complete with fake labels, packaging, bar codes and price tags - and sold by the thousand at vast profit.

Other sidelines included watches, perfume, bags, and £21-a-bottle Millennium Lancome champagne (in reality £2-a-bottle German white wine). Bulging contacts books, meanwhile, showed the extent of Davies's shady business dealings: from Steve the Shirts and Mick the Labels through to Frank the Packaging and Midnight Mick (sunglasses) - not to mention Big Brian, London Brian, Whiteknuckle Brian and Brian the Perfumes.

"The scale of the operation was flabbergasting," said Trading Standards officer Allan Sharpe. He reckons Davies was a major player in the "snide" trade, attracting ever more criminals because of the high profits and relatively low penalties. Sharpe and his colleagues also believe they are increasingly at risk as they come up against members of organised crime rather than the " harmless" wideboys of yore.

So which was Davies? To his neighbours, he was strictly a Del Boy of the Fools and Horses school - affable, and able to mysteriously acquire bizarre items, such as a pair of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, which, according to gossip, turned up not long after a group of them escaped from an Essex farm. (They proved disastrous as pets, it seems, eating the leather in the back seat of his Range Rover.)

However, the Evening Standard-can reveal that Davies and his family are well-known to police and Customs as well as Trading Standards. Last year, the day before he was due to face trial over the counterfeiting charges, Davies fled to Spain after hearing the prosecution planned to claim that he had earned up to £25 million from his enterprises. He is believed to have stayed at the family apartments on Majorca, where he, his father James, and brother Mickey have lived it up for a number of years.

Three years ago both James and Mickey Davies were arrested during a major Customs and Excise investigation into an alleged cross-Channel drink smuggling ring, involving duty fraud of up to £20 million. Mickey was accused of the smuggling, while James was accused of laundering £ 18 million in suitcases full of cash from his north London home. While investigators could never tie the smuggling, counterfeiting or laundering together, they believed the Davieses were an example of a "modern day London crime family" - avoiding violence and concentrating on "victimless" rackets.

Proving it, though, was a different matter. Charges against Mickey were dropped, while his father offered the remarkable claim that the entire £18 million he was accused of laundering was won at the bookies. Customs disputed this, calling evidence from the Jockey Club's Racing Intelligence section - the "bookies M15" who monitor notably successful gamblers. He claimed Jimmy Davies lost nearly as much as he won. But whatever his fortunes on the track, Jimmy's luck with the jury held out - they acquitted him.

Mr Davies senior, a former greengrocer, insists his most exotic transactions have been "shifting fruit and veg". He added: "All these investigations have been a load of b******s - Customs just never bother checking their information properly.

"Derrick has been done for a bit of copy gear, and Trading Standards added a few zeros onto the amount they think he's earned. If people want to buy this stuff, it's up to them - there are much worse crimes."

Drugs, presumably, being one of them. Derrick Davies became the first Briton ever to have extradition proceedings brought against him on trading standards offences, but was eventually arrested last August during a Drug Squad operation back in Essex. No charges were brought, but for the counterfeiting offences it was a different matter. Two weeks ago he was jailed for a total of four years.

Investigators now hope to get a court order to confiscate Davies's assets. They will, however, have to take care exactly which bits of his personal fortune are real and which aren't.

"His wife used to carry a Louis Vuitton handbag," said one source. "We thought straightaway - is that a fake?"