Safer Cumbria

Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking

April 2019 Update

Second man arrested on modern slavery offences in Carlisle News and Star 16th April 2019

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), supported by Cumbria Police, arrested a 53-year-old man in Carlisle on suspicion of Modern Slavery offences today.

A second man has been arrested on suspicion of modern slavery offences after a man was found living in a shed for 40 years in Carlisle.

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), supported by Cumbria Police arrested the 53 year old man in the north of the city this morning.

He is currently in custody being questioned.

Investigators previously released a 79-year-old British man under investigation after rescuing the worker from a six-foot shed he was believed to have been living in all his adult life.

The potential victim, who is a 58-year-old British man, has been receiving specialist support over the last six months.

GLAA Senior Investigating Officer Martin Plimmer said: “Our priority since we made the initial arrest has been to ensure that the potential victim has been given all the necessary help and support. This was clearly the right thing to do.

Alongside this, we have ensured that all lines of enquiry have been thoroughly and objectively explored which has resulted in today’s arrest. I would again like to thank my team for their utmost professionalism and dedication in what is a challenging case.

If anyone who is reading this has any information, however small, plese contact us. You will be spoke to in full confidence and could provide us with crucial evidence.

Detective Chief Inspector Helen Harkins of North Cumbria Crime and Safeguarding Team, said: “Cumbria Police are working closely with the GLAA to ensure all lines of enquiry are explored.”

“We have assisted with the arrests and will continue to support the GLAA investigation in any way we can.”

Anyone with information on this investigation should get in touch with the GLAA’s intelligence team on 0800 4320804 or email intelligence@gla.gov.uk

Police shut down factory after discovering 15 suspected ‘modern slavery’ victimsIndependent – 14th April 2019

Police have shut down a factory in the West Midlands after identifying 15 suspected victims of labour exploitation and human trafficking.

West Midlands Police and Sandwell Council officials used a Modern Slavery warrant to swoop on the warehouse in Smethwick following tip-offs about illegal practices.

Around 60 workers were interviewed at the site and their identities checked to help establish if they were being exploited

One child was found to be working at the premises and has since been safeguarded by Children’s Services until their age and parent or guardian can be identified.

The factory’s owners face fines up to £20,000 for each worker found to be a victim of employment violations.

Police said 10 people arrested over “immigration matters” following the 10 April raid, but a spokesperson said the force could not comment further as the investigation had been handed over to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

The premises was also found to be using electricity diverted from the grid.

Twenty-nine people in van on M5 in Devon 'are Vietnamese'13 April 2019 BBC News

The 29 people found in the back of a van stopped by police on the M5 are thought to be Vietnamese, officials say.

Devon and Cornwall Police arrested four men aged 55 to 72 after being called to Newlyn, Cornwall, on Friday after people were seen getting into the back of a van from a boat.

The van was stopped near Collompton in Devon at about 09:00 BST.

Police said a mix of men, women and children were among the 29 people.

A force spokesman said: “They currently remain in a specially created centre where they are being taken care of.”

The four men arrested on suspicion of immigration and modern slavery offences including human trafficking were a 72 year old and a 55 year old from Lancashire and a 63 year old and a 62 year old from Kent.

Police said they had gained custody extensions on all four suspects, who remain in custody awaiting further questions.

Caught in the net: As top junior tennis star is jailed for three years for his part in a county lines drug dealing gang, is there a more devastating example of a promising life so needlessly wasted?

Nemiah Fletchman had previously won the prestigious Didsbury Men's Open  Along with Akeen Fatinikun and Cade Steven Higson he sold crack and heroin  The trio had made business cards which advertised a 'drugs line' phone

number

By Paul Bracchi for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:59, 29 April 2019 | Updated: 01:09, 29 April 2019

Nemiah Fletchman was affectionately known as ‘Tennis-saurus’ when he was little, for two reasons. The first was that Nemiah had almost reached his adult height of 6ft 3in before he was barely out of short trousers; the other was obvious to anyone who saw him in action on the rundown tennis courts near his home in Manchester’s Moss Side.

What a serve the young man had. Timed at 120 mph, he blew opponents away. Even in this football-mad city, everyone knew Nemiah was something special.

His family received financial backing — to the tune of £100,000 — from Wayne Rooney’s agent Paul Stretford, whose Cheshire-based agency is committed to helping grassroots sport in the area.

By 16, Nemiah was ranked in the top ten in his age group in Britain. In a Sunday newspaper profile of him at the time, his coach tipped him for Wimbledon, likening his prodigy to the legendary Pete Sampras and big-hitting Argentinian star Juan Martin del Potro.

Equally important as his skills and strength on court was the example his mother, Elvereen, set off-court. She raised Nemiah and his five brothers and five sisters — yes, 11 children — singlehandedly, after her husband died during a routine heart operation some years ago.

Nemiah Fletchman was affectionately known as “Tennis-saurus” when he was little, pictured at 16.

Locals remember her clearing away drug addicts’ needles and syringes from Alexandra Park, where Nemiah practised, so he and his siblings and other children could play safely.

Her prodigiously talented son, who attended St Peter’s Roman Catholic High School, was ‘grounded’ and ‘totally focused on tennis’, according to those who knew the family.

So you could — perhaps should — have been reading about him on the sports pages of newspapers today. But a future that promised so much ended not on the hallowed turf of SW19, but in the dock of Carlisle Crown Court last week, when Nemiah Fletchman, now aged 19, was jailed for joining a ‘county lines’ drugs gang.

He and two other 19-year-olds, arrested in March, admitted planning to flood the streets of Carlisle with heroin and crack cocaine. They will spend the next three years in a young offenders’ institution. ‘Your sporting career is in ruins and your family must be distraught,’ the judge told Fletchman, who sat with his head bowed as he was sentenced.

Few could argue with the punishment. Yet, at the same time, anyone who is familiar with the curse of county lines — the focus of an ongoing campaign by this newspaper — would also find it hard to disagree with his barrister who described in court how his young client had also ‘very much been exploited’.

Vulnerable teenagers, often in the care system, are used as ‘mules’ to transport drugs from ‘saturated’ major cities to relatively ‘untapped’ provincial towns, where there are vast profits to be made, especially from cocaine and heroin.

Nemiah Fletchman, 19, of south Manchester, who has been jailed for three years after pleading guilty to possession of crack cocaine and heroin with intent to supply.

Mobile phones, the so-called county lines, are circulated in the targeted towns and drugs ordered in the same way you would ring for a pizza.

‘Foot soldiers’, such as Fletchman, are disposable in the gang hierarchy — after all, they are the ones who deal directly with ‘customers’, which means there is precious little chance of the main players ever being caught.

Nemiah Fletchman admittedly wasn’t in the care system. He was desperate, though, and had got into financial difficulty during his first year at Manchester Metropolitan University, running up debts on his credit card and struggling to pay for a car he had just bought, the court heard. County lines offered him a way out.

One person, in particular, aside from his mother, was left stunned by his imprisonment. Simon Roberts was once Nemiah’s mentor — the coach who had said he reminded him of Sampras, the seven-time Wimbledon champion.

‘Oh my God,’ were his first words when we broke the news to him. ‘I had no idea,’ continued Mr Roberts, who spoke to us from Dubai, where he now coaches tennis. ‘I haven’t seen Nemiah for a while.’

Mr Roberts, in his mid-30s, has known Nemiah since he was 15, and trained him when he turned 16 and was beginning really to fulfil his potential.

In fact, he was still playing regularly for the Holcombe Brook Sports Club in Bury, Greater Manchester, a widely respected training ground for elite youngsters, up until last summer

‘It’s a real shame,’ he said. ‘He was doing so well. He was a rising star, definitely. He moved so well around the court for a big guy. He had the serve and a really good forehand, too. He also had the right mentality.’

Mr Roberts added: ‘He always worked and trained hard to be as good as he could be. Nemiah was also a really nice, down-to-earth lad who had his head screwed on. He was the very last person you’d think would get involved in something like this.

‘He was from such a nice family. His siblings also played tennis and they enjoyed each other’s success.

‘Their mum was the driving force. She used to take them everywhere for matches. She had plans for all the kids to do well at tennis. She was such a good influence.’

Elvereen’s daughter Jhonayah represented Great Britain when she was 12, while another son, Moezze, was selected for special coaching at Manchester Regional Tennis Centre. The family’s background in Moss Side, a neighbourhood scarred by gang violence and gun crime back in the Eighties and Nineties, was even compared — in one newspaper article — with that of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, who were brought up in the notorious Los Angeles suburb of Compton.

Nemiah was an outstanding all-round athlete. He also excelled at basketball (he towered above everyone else) and made the county badminton team when he was ten.

But tennis was his passion. One photograph online epitomises that early promise and youthful excitement: he is pictured, beaming, standing next to a logo for the Wimbledon Championships.

In 2010, he and his younger brother were chosen to go to Wimbledon as part of the celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of soft drinks company Robinsons’ sponsorship at the tournament, and they met Tim Henman.

Nemiah won the coveted Didsbury Men’s Open while at school and the junior Winter Regional Tour, staged by the Lawn Tennis Association.

‘I’ve always been convinced Nemiah has the potential to go all the way,’ his mother said in an interview three years ago.

He studied sports science at Stockport College before going on to university.

It was around this time, in 2017, that possible clues started appearing on his Facebook page of the dangerous circles into which he had fallen.

He began posting video and audio clips of the rap scene in Manchester, featuring drugs and guns.

One clip of menacing ‘drill’ music — a genre blamed for fuelling bloody turf wars between rival gangs — was uploaded to YouTube by the notorious Manchester-based 7M ‘crew’, showing masked youths making gun gestures outside Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium.

Last year, eight members of 7M were jailed for the brutal murder of a college student who was hacked to death with machetes in Moss Side days after one of the videos was put on YouTube.

There is nothing whatsoever to suggest Nemiah Fletchman was linked to 7M in any way, but there is also nothing, until this point in his life, to suggest he was the kind of teenager who would have interest in their dystopian music, either.

But, 18 months ago, he suffered a head injury in a car crash, Carlisle Crown Court heard, that led to a ‘change in personality’, making him more impulsive and susceptible to peer pressure.

His lawyer said Fletchman, who continued playing after the crash, bitterly regretted being sucked into a Manchester county lines gang to pay off his debts.

It was no coincidence that his accomplices, Akeem Fatinikun and Cade Steven Higson, were in the same position as him: the former was a sole carer for his mother who was attempting to pay off debts not linked to drugs; the latter, a father-to-be and a cannabis user since the age of ten, was attempting to pay off debts, too.

Either way, they were all offered fast cash to solve their problems: it’s always the same story. The trio headed more than 100 miles north to Carlisle, where they forced a frail addict to move out of his flat — a tactic known as ‘cuckooing’ — so they could use it as a base for their drug-pushing operation.

Police investigated after being alerted to suspicious activity at the address in March.

Inside, they found nearly £9,000 worth of Class A drugs — some made up into individual deals — along with weighing scales and ‘business cards’ with the suspected county lines number on them.

Fletchman, Fatinikun (who was armed with two knives and had two mobile phones) and Higson tried to flee, but were immediately apprehended. Of Fletchman’s role in the enterprise, his barrister said: ‘He was there to collect the money and take the money back. That is because he is quite an imposing young man — 6ft 3in tall and extremely well built.’

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has identified more than 720 county lines networks running between London and Wales, London and the West Country and the North West, in such cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, and Cumbria, which gives you an idea of the scale of the phenomenon.

The young drug runners are threatened with violence if they try to leave the fold.

The NCA report County Lines Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply, published two years ago, lists one case in which a victim had his hand severed and both legs broken, while another was warned that his sister, the mother of two small children, would be raped, along with his younger sister, aged 12, when he tried to break away from the gangs.

This is the world in which Nemiah Fletchman, one of the country’s brightest young tennis prospects, found himself. ‘I have known Nemiah since he was around 12 years old,’ said Tom Lemon, head coach at Bury’s Holcombe Club.

‘He was always a nice lad. He has never been anti-social or seemed like he was mixing in the wrong circles. I am very surprised by this.’

Fletchman’s mother and three of his siblings attended Carlisle Crown Court — with a mixture of ‘anguish and despair’ — when he was sentenced last week.

For Mrs Fletchman, it must have been especially painful: after all, she picked up needles and syringes from the tennis courts in Moss Side so that her son could practise.

Now he himself was a convicted drug dealer.

24 April 2019 – Northumbria Police

Four men were arrested after a Gateshead Factory was raided.

An estimated 90 employees were taken to a reception centre to establish if they were the victims of exploitation.

Northumbria Police arrested four men on suspicion of offences under the Modern Slavery Act.

The factory was based on the banks of the River Tyne.

 

Please remember if you see anything suspicious with regards to Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, please contact one of the following numbers…. It might help to save a victim from this awful crime!

Police – Emergency 999 / Non-emergency 101 or online via a 101 Email!

Crimestoppers – leave an anonymous concern on 0800 555 111

Modern Slavery Helpline – 08000 121 700

Take a look at the “Unseen” App you will find it in your smartphone app directory! It shows you lots of Modern Slavery indicators and will advise you who to contact if you need further assistance.