These are the surprising faces of three geezers who some of the most notorious mobsters, hitmen, arms dealers, narcos,
and money launderers relied on to keep them safe. From fugitive Irish super-cartel patriarch Christy
Kinahan, to International hitman Christopher Hughes — with a rogues gallery of gangsters,
traffickers, gun runners, and bagmen in between — they all trusted these three with their lives.
Or at least with their freedom. The trio had a prized gangland specialty, a hugely important
one. You see them at work on it here, caught on hidden cameras. They're ploddngly tricking
governments into issuing perfectly clean, genuine, authorized passports bearing the
photos of villains on the run, but in other people's names, allowing them to travel the
world doing dirty deeds while avoiding arrest. The Mob Reporter here with the story of the rise
and fall of a criminal enterprise in Britain, with a sharply bureaucratic edge; old-timer
specialists supplying the gold standard in bogus identification. That's fraudulently
obtained genuine passports. I've got surveillance video! I've got wire taps! Let me tell you about it.
Meet Anthony Beard, 61, from Sydenham, London. He is the crooked passport king; the brains of
the organization. Long ago, Beard figured out a sneaky way to get a real passport legitimately
issued for almost anyone — in the name of a real clean person but with the photo of someone
else, who isn't so clean. He boasted he's been doing it for 20 years. But for Beard to expand
into the richer clientele of gangland's elite, he needed help. Meet Christopher Zietek, 67, of London.
Zietek was the black market salesman, the broker between Beard and the gangsters. He is the hard
man of this lot, with street cred and underworld contacts. Under his former name of Christopher
McCormack, he was an enforcer in one of London's biggest crime groups, known as the Adams Family.
Zietek's association with the Adams Family was a powerful calling card in Europe's underworld. But
he needed a henchman. Meet Alan Thompson, 72, of Sutton, Surrey. He was Zietek's lackey. Or
henchman, because what's the point of being all gangster if you don't have a henchman. Thompson
was his chauffeur, driving Zietek to meet clients, delivering passports, and doing other legwork.
It's a mouthful, but fraudulently obtained genuine passports are simply authentic passports issued by
a government when the passport office is duped by false information. They look and feel legit
because they are legit. They're the real deal, not doctored up by switching photos or changing
names, like you see in the movies, or printing counterfeits. These days those can be spotted
in seconds. No, Beard figured out that to get bogus legitimate British passports requires legitimate
British citizens to apply to renew their old ones. Renewals of expiring passports don't
require an in-person interview like getting a new one does, allowing a window for fraud.
The passport gang just needed identity donors — people willing to let them hijack their names.
They scoured shelters and rehab centers offering small amounts of cash to vulnerable winos, drug
addicts, and men down on their luck who were reasonable look-a-likes for their gangland clients.
The gang then attached photos of the gangland client with the passport application being
made in the donor's name. There was a side hustle in Latvian passports and talk of
Irish passports too. Clients paid up to twenty thousand British pounds for one. That's about 25,000
U.S. dollars. And what kind of clients were they serving? One of the world's most wanted
for starters: Irish crime boss Christy Kinahan, the alleged patriarch of the Kinahan cartel. He bought
one, police said. I suspect that was before the U.S. government put a five million dollar bounty
on Kinahan. With the luck of the Irish, though, Kinahan managed to avoid the downfall that
eventually hit many of the passport gang's clients. The scheme was discovered in 2017
and Britain's National Crime Agency launched a significant covert operation. Beard was caught on
hidden camera several times, deep in the drudgery of his paper chase. "Come back in 20 minutes? About that, yeah. You're an angel."
Here he is in Snappy Snaps — that's a photo printing business in England —
arranging for passport photos.
He was also caught recruiting donors and meeting clients. You see those scenes playing here.
Beard was also recorded calling His Majesty's Passport Office, pretending to be the applicant trying
to hurry things along. It seems some of his clients were impatient, and who can blame
them — they had places not to be. Here's one of Beard's calls: "Good afternoon, thank you for calling Her Majesty's Passport Office
You're speaking with Shelly, how can I help you. Yeah I want to check the progress of my passport...
What's your registry number, do you have one? Yes, I do. It's 1-0-2 0-7-7-4 5-0.
And just confirm your first and last name for me. It's Christopher Lloyd. That's it.
Yeah, it's still with exams at the moment, still going through checks. Yeah. Right, is there nothing is...
because it's coming up to three weeks next week, right..." Meanwhile, wire taps were slipped
into Zietek's home, where they picked up their slang and code words: "paper" for applications, "books" for
passports, and "smudges" for passport photos. From then on, the game was up. And this is perhaps the
most remarkable part of the story. The geezers who gangsters once relied on, suddenly became their
biggest liability. Penetrating the passport gang revealed to police the fake names and
real passport numbers the clients were using. The NCA placed covert international alerts for them.
Christopher Hughes was wanted for assassinating Dutch crime writer Martin Kok in Amsterdam in
2016. Here is the fraudulently obtained genuine Latvian passport he bought from the gang.
Zietek paid a woman he knew well to deliver it to him in Portugal, wrapped up to make it look like
a Christmas present. But by then, the cops were all over them. Once the woman checked in her bag for
her flight, police secretly retrieved the passport, found Zietek's DNA on it, and put it back. The woman
delivered it to Hughes in a hotel in Portugal. He was later arrested in a hotel in Italy. He has
since been convicted and is serving a life sentence. Paul Scott, a member of Scotland's top-of-the-food-
chain crime gang, was on the run in 2018 using one of the gang's passports, while most of the rest of
his gang were on trial for this hyperactive glut of crime. When Scott checked into a hotel in Spain,
his passport secretly tripped the alarm in England. He was arrested, extradited, and is now in prison.
Similar scenes of unexpected and inexplicable arrests played out
around the world. Fugitives were bagged across Europe, in Dubai, Australia, Thailand, and Brazil.
Jordan Owens was wanted for murder after a gang shooting in Glasgow in 2017. He fled
Britain using a passport from the gang. This one: a genuine United Kingdom passport with
Owens' photo but someone else's name. He was nabbed when the passport gang unraveled. He
was arrested in Lisbon and recently given a life sentence. There were others. More than a
hundred passports went out. "Subject detained, premises clear. Okay." Members of the passport
gang themselves were arrested in October 2021. This is Zietek's arrest. There were 24 originally
arrested, but the number was whittled down, including four acquitted at trial. The three
passport geezers were sentenced this week. Zietek, the hard man, got eight years in prison.
Beard, the brain, got six — a gift for pleading guilty. And Thompson, the gopher, got three.
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