How 25 murders, drug cartels and £200m made Adams family Britain’s most notorious gang and more dangerous than the Krays

Also known as the A-team or Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate, the brothers amassed a £200million fortune through their brutal trade of murder, extortion, robbery and drug trafficking – which saw one victim allegedly buried in the concrete under the Millennium Dome.

Run by three brothers, Terry, Patrick ‘Patsy' and Tommy Adams, their organisation iss said to be behind at least 25 murders.

This week, the gang’s ‘Godfather’ Terry hit the headlines again after being sentenced to a year in prison for failure to pay court costs – but swerved jail after paying the £50,000 bill today.

Here, we look back at the terrifying crimes carried out by the A-Team, and how they managed to get away with them for so long.

Opening up victims like a 'bag of crisps'

The first of 11 children born to an Irish Catholic lorry driver and his wife, Terry, who likes to now be known as Terrance, had a tough upbringing growing up on Islington’s Barnsbury council Estate.

He and his brothers started out in crime by extorting money from local market stallholders with threats of violence. They moved on to armed robbery and their empire began to grow.

Terry, 64, was the brains behind the operation, Patsy, 63, the enforcer, and Tommy, 60, was the money man.

Notoriously violent, the A-Team’s signature ‘hit’ was the ‘two up’, in which the gunman rode pillion on a motorcycle.

Underworld rivals were given short shrift, with anyone who opposed the gang being kneecapped or “opened up like a bag of crisps”.

As one insider alleged: “If you were doing a job and you had the Adams family behind you, even just the name, it meant no one was going to f**k about with you, everyone would know they were going to get paid and everything would go as smoothly as possible.”

'They cut him in half with a samurai sword'

The A-Team were linked to the 1991 shooting of gangland veteran, “Mad” Frankie Fraser, who was blasted in the head outside a London club – though they were never convicted.

Frankie, a former henchman for gangster twins Reginald and Ronald Kray, was lucky to survive, but refused to tell the police what had happened or why – even though he lost part of his mouth in the shooting.

One of the unsolved killings with which they have been linked to is that of former British high jump champion Claude Moseley, who was working for them as a drug dealer in the late 1980s.

Moseley came to be suspected of profit skimming by the brothers, and a family enforcer called Gilbert Wynter allegedly cut Moseley in half with a samurai sword in 1994.

Wynter stood trial for murder but was acquitted when the chief prosecution witness refused to give evidence.

Wynter himself then disappeared and was rumoured to have been encased in concrete somewhere under the Millennium Dome in 1998.

The Jigsaw Murderer

Jigsaw murderer Stephen Marshall – who was jailed for life in 2010 for chopping up a colleague and disposed the body parts of across Hertfordshire and Leicestershire – also boasted of "taking care of situations" for the Adams family, with police believing he had cut up at least four other bodies in the past.

Some victims lived to tell the tale, including a Mayfair businessman, who, after losing the Adams £1.5million in a bad deal, was left so badly injured after being given a “kicking” that his nose and ear were left hanging off.

Yet the gang seemed to wear such violent acts as a badge of pride.

In a bugged conversation at Terry’s home, recorded after years of failed attempts to bring him to justice, he allegedly boasts to a friend about how he dealt with a row over cash. He said: "100 grand it was, Dan, or 80 grand, and I went crack.

"On my baby's life, Dan, his kneecap came right out there…all white Dan, all bone and white…”

'He comes with a pedigree'

Part of the ways the mafia-style gang made money was by owning clubs in North London and commissioning armed robberies from which they took a cut.

Drugs also became a big part of their crime portfolio and links were established with Colombian cartels. During the height of their power in the late 1980s, they were said to be in charge of most of the cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine coming into London.

As prosecutor Andrew Mitchell QC said at Terry’s 2007 trial: ‘They are the most feared and revered organised criminals.

“He comes with a pedigree, as one of a family whose name had a currency all of its own in the underworld.”

However, a life of crime paid well.

Terry’s vast wealth allowed him and former EastEnders actress wife Ruth, 58, to fly first-class around the world, stay in the most exclusive hotels and buy top-of-the-range watches, jewellery, fast motorbikes and private education for his beloved daughter.

When police finally arrested him in 2003 and raided his £2million North London home, they found more than £50,000 in cash stuffed into a shoebox, along with more than £500,000 of paintings and antiques – many stolen.

The Mill Hill mansion, which they were forced to sell for £1.6million to pay off the court case, also boasted an enormous painting of Al Pacino in the Godfather film, a character greatly admired by Terry.

Considering himself ‘above the law’, like the Queen, he never carried cash and left financial dealings to third parties – making it almost impossible to bring him to justice.

For decades, the Adams family seemed to be untouchable, with reports they had corrupt police officers and politicians on their payroll.

But their ruthless criminal network was finally brought down as a result of money laundering and financial crime legislation – similar to the tax case which snared American mobster Al Capone.

Terry, who is also godfather to James Stunt, ex of F1 heiress Petra Ecclestone, was jailed for seven years in 2007 and ordered to pay £750,000 for money laundering after a ten-year, £10million investigation into his finances after MI5 bugged his home.
He was released in June 2010, but was briefly recalled to prison in August 2011 for breaching his licence.

He had paid back £720,000 in 2017 to avoid being sent to jail but is now facing another year behind bars after failing to pay a £50,000 court bill — claiming poverty.

In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, he said he was now living a London council flat with actress wife Ruth, and could only afford to pay £15-a-week of the remaining balance.

He told the court: “I am living on handouts. I will pay as much as I could now. I can afford to pay what I do now, 10 to 15 pounds a week. That's what I can afford.’

But District Judge Michael Snow rejected this, saying he had led him on a ‘merry dance’, after hearing about regular meals out at expensive restaurants, trips to the opera and exclusive spa club memberships. However, he added that he can be released immediately if he pays up.

His other brothers are also behind bars. Tommy was charged in 19867 but later cleared at trial of alleged involvement in laundering the proceeds of the £26million Brink’s-Mat gold bullion heist at London Heathrow, was jailed for seven years in 2017 after he was convicted of laundering nearly £250,000.

Patsy was jailed for nine years for shooting Paul Tiernan, once a member of their inner circle, in the chest in Islington, north London, in December 2013 with a .45 calibre gun after suspecting him of being a police “grass”. He had served previous sentences for armed robbery in the 1970s and having firearms and ammunition in a public place in the 1980s.

But even while Terry was behind bars, the legacy of fear continued.
Today, police still believe there is a lot the Adams family have done which they have got away with.

As one former detective who spent years pursuing Terry and the others says: ‘There’s a lot of stuff we know he’s done that he’s managed to get away with. It’s unlikely he’ll ever go down for any of it.’

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