Max Daly retreads the Murder Mile.
Ten days before he was gunned down after leaving a pool party in Essex in the summer of 2020, Robert Powell posted a photo, most likely from the early 1990s, on his Instagram account, subtitled ‘Once upon a time’. It shows him with another young man, side-by-side, leaning against a convertible car. Under the photo, seemingly ripped down the middle between them and stuck back together, Powell had typed: ‘Once apon a time we where good friends then the snakes got in the way of our friendship and we turned into the worst enemy’s. This is a pic to show you how things where. So if you didn’t know you know now.’
How things were, in reality, was a pivotal time in London’s street gang world, an era in which these two men would rise to become feared underworld figures, looming large over the city during the 1990s and 2000s. It was a time of crack-spliff raves and gun executions; when high-profile gangs vied for cash, dominance and respect; and when a road in the now-gentrified Clapton neighbourhood of Hackney, a borough in north London, was so rife with gunfire it became known as ‘Murder Mile’.
In the photo, with one arm resting on Powell’s shoulder, is Mark Lambie, who was head of the Tottenham Mandem (TMD), a powerful gang from the Broadwater Farm estate just north of Hackney. Aged 14, Lambie was acquitted of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. He was subsequently linked to a string of shootings, drug deals, robberies, torture and kidnappings. He was known on the streets as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ due to his ruthlessness, and was rumoured to possess ‘juju powers’ which rendered him immortal. Lambie’s underworld rise saw his influence reach across north and west London. To the dozens of detectives working on Operation Trident – a police strategy set up at the time to tackle the rise in ‘black-on-black’ gun crime – Lambie was known as ‘Prominent Nominal One’, their top target.
And next to Lambie, bottle of champagne in hand, is Powell. Powell’s reputation, too, was so potent he’d become a near-mythical figure in London’s street crime world. Nicknamed ‘Fox’ due to his elusiveness and cunning, he led Love of Money (LOM), a gang from Hackney which specialised in robbing other dealers for their drugs and cash. They were notorious for kidnapping, torturing and shooting their victims. Because these victims were drug dealers, most of these brutal crimes went unreported.
Powell’s still-active Instagram account, @fox2up2down, offers up snapshots of this time. Alongside the photo of him and Lambie, there are pictures of Powell hanging with his gang at parties, posing in front of cars, and snapshots of his family. One photo, labelled ‘L.O.M.’ and subtitled ‘the three Amigos’, shows Powell standing ahead of two lieutenants, dressed in baggy 1990s suits, in front of a white convertible sports car. Powell’s posts are littered with comments about ‘Hackney legends’ and ‘OGs’, but also with ‘RIP’s.
Little is known about why Powell and Lambie became enemies. Their feud is rumoured to have sparked several killings, including the murder of one of Powell’s most treasured associates, Kenny Rowe, aged 27, while parked up in a BMW in Clapton in 1997. A few days later, Clifford Angol, who shot Rowe, was himself executed while sitting in Lambie’s BMW parked outside the Warwick Castle pub on Portobello Road. Whatever the initial cause of their separation, neither Powell or Lambie was willing, or able, to harm the other.
It was a trigger-happy time which sparked record numbers of gun homicides, not just in London but across England and Wales. A new breed of street gang, centering around Hackney, Tottenham, Harlesden and Brixton, sought to maximise profits from Britain’s rocketing crack cocaine trade, using familial connections with Jamaican Yardies to import and sell drugs to a rapidly expanding market of crack and heroin users in cities such as London, Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham. They were joined by others, including rival Turkish and Kurdish gangs, also based in north London, who vied for control of the heroin trade. Reputation and respect were at a premium, and firearms quickly became the weapon of choice. For Yardies operating in Jamaica, guns were a regular way of doing business, so domestic gangs, mindful of being outgunned, followed suit. Home Office data shows gun murders recorded by the Metropolitan Police spiked from an average of 20 a year at the start of the 1990s to a peak of 43 between April 2001-March 2002, before falling to an average of around 12 a year in the 2020s.
‘If you played with us we would shoot you,’ remembers Gwenton Sloley, a former LOM member who ran for Hackney mayor in 2022. We meet at a Caffè Nero in Croydon, a part of London favoured by former gangsters wanting to disentangle themselves from their old turf. These days Sloley is a co-founder of the London Gang Exit programme, which helps young people avoid gang life. But 20 years ago he was deep in it himself.
‘Love of Money wasn’t involved in tit-for-tat murders or gang warfare, because no one wanted to mess with us. We were a robbery gang. We were a bunch of Omars [the character from HBO’s The Wire who robbed drug dealers], but without the homosexuality.’ LOM recruited members from across London, from areas such as Brixton, Tottenham and Waltham Forest, says Sloley. ‘Fox had charisma. He could make you forget that you were enemies. For him it was “let’s just make money”, and a lot of people would put money over rivalry.’
With many of the gang’s other senior members either locked up or ruined by crack addiction, Powell took leadership of LOM. The previous boss, Colin Brown, a convicted bank robber from Clapton who did not sanction robbing Hackney people even though Powell had been doing it for years, was shot dead. According to Sloley, when Powell took over, he ramped-up the LOM brand. He encouraged associates, and in some cases their families, to get LOM inked on their hands, most often between the thumb and forefinger, or on their necks, to show their loyalty. ‘Like a marriage, till death do us part,’ says Sloley.
On the streets, Powell and the Love of Money gang were notorious. But there are only a smattering of mentions of their crimes on public record. Most of what happened is stored in the memories of those survivors who rode with Powell, or were chased down by him.
One former member of the London Fields Boys (LFB), a rival to LOM at the time, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, lost several close friends to gun murders in the early 2000s. He recalls being free to deal heroin on the streets of Hackney – until he heard rumours that Powell and other LOM members were soon to be released from jail.
‘Love of Money was ruthless. After Fox came out of jail, they were always onto us. I don’t know if I want to say the word evil, but they struck fear into us. People got tortured, they got burned with kettles and irons, they got taken away, kidnapped… if Love of Money came for the money and drugs, they left with the money and drugs. If you saw Fox, you ran.’
Another drug dealer who sold crack and heroin as a young man in Hackney over the 1990s and 2000s, and who does not want to be identified because he still sells cocaine, remembers that LOM was a bigger threat than the police. ‘They had a dark red Toyota Space Cruiser and they used to drag people in there to kidnap them. They’d be smoking crack. Anyone saw that Space Cruiser, they’d run. They had guns and chains. They were like a military operation – they used whistles, like soldiers. They chased people around our estate with guns. Fox was always robbing people, because he was a bully.’
In the early 2000s, London street gangs were making serious profit from robbing dealers and selling on stashes, but they weren’t all just spending it as they went – some were wily enough to hide it. One Hackney gang member had safety deposit boxes in Selfridges stuffed with 24 Rolex watches worth £283,000, and jewellery worth £228,000. This treasure trove was discovered in 2002 after police stopped a BMW, and found the boot stuffed with expensive Selfridges items including a pair of Gucci baby shoes. ‘I didn’t expect that ever from a Hackney gang,’ says DS Peter Lansdown, a former Trident detective speaking for the first time about the case since 2005. ‘It was a surprise to see real asset wealth staying in London, because it usually went to Jamaica.’
It was Lansdown who was tasked by Operation Trident with taking down Lambie, who was ‘a clever criminal with 12 people working immediately around him who had total control over his gang’, according to the detective. Making charges stick was an ‘immense job’, he says, because most of the time witnesses, rival members and his victims were too scared to give evidence against him. Lambie was put under 24-hour surveillance. ‘People thought his juju powers meant he could not be seen in the hours of daylight, but that’s because he slept all day.’ In the end it was two Jamaican drug dealers, who Lambie had tied up and attacked with a hammer and boiling water, that gave evidence against him, resulting in a 12-year sentence in 2002.
London’s gang warfare had, by that point, been pushed on to the national stage, owing to what Lansdown describes as Trident’s ‘nemesis’ at the time: a war between Hackney’s LFB and the TMD – led by Lambie – from Tottenham, which spilled out into a rash of public gun executions concentrated on a particular stretch of road in Hackney.
Between 2000 and 2002 there were 16 gangland shootings, including eight murders, on a mile-long section of Lower and Upper Clapton Road, the main route running between south Hackney and Tottenham. These were often brazen attacks in front of crowds of people, sometimes carried out by assassins on motorbikes.
In one incident in June 2000, LFB member Meneliek ‘Mena’ Robinson, 20, was ambushed as he was driving along Upper Clapton Road in his red BMW. He was hard-stopped by two men on a motorbike, while another motorbike drew up alongside him. A gunman jumped off and fired three shots through the windscreen. As Robinson tried to crawl away, the killer, who has never been found, walked up to him and shot him in the head.
In 2001, Corey Wright, 20, and Wayne Henry, 19, also LFB members, were shot in front of crowds of clubbers while sitting in their BMW, which veered out of control down Lower Clapton Road before hitting three pedestrians, a Nissan Micra and a night bus. The incident prompted the nickname ‘Murder Mile’ in a report in the next day’s Observer. The nightclub outside which the two men were shot was called Chimes: the scene of multiple gun murders around the turn of the millennium, including that of 16-year-old schoolboy GuyDance Dacres, shot in 1997 in a killing that sparked the TMD-LFB feud. Today, Chimes is now the Clapton Hart, the clichéd ideal of a trendy gastropub, serving up Bollinger and Moving Mountains burgers.
The Tottenham-Hackney feud was sometimes vocalised in songs made by two community music collectives, Mashtown and Northstar, which had links with LFB and TMD respectively. The latter promoted south London hip hop group So Solid Crew, who had a string of top ten hits in the early 2000s and launched the career of Ashley Walters, who later played a leading role in Hackney crime drama, Top Boy.
Despite the fear of LFB and TMD, and their distrust of institutional racism within the Met Police in the wake of the damning Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, London’s black community was being urged by police and community leaders to turn the gunmen in. So the Met called on Michael Fuller, who later became Britain’s first black chief constable, to oversee Operation Trident. Fuller set up a team of advisers from the community – such as the activist Lee Jasper, a harsh police critic – to help him. Fuller says that he knew that to stem the gun murders and convict the leaders, he had to break down the wall of fear and silence protecting them.
‘I had to convince the black community that this wasn’t just a PR exercise,’ says Fuller. ‘I didn’t want to alienate them with a massive stop-and-search operation. I’d seen those fail when I was working in Brixton.’ In 2000 he chose Chimes to launch Trident’s ‘Stop the Shooting’ advertising campaign, which called for anonymous telephone tip-offs from the public. ‘The intelligence we got was so good. People would tell us things like ‘his girlfriend is the one who carries the gun, and she hides it in the park each night’.
Amid the murders, homebuyers were wondering whether they should get in on the property boom in Clapton. By the early 2000s, the gentrification of Hackney, led by those who found Islington too pricey, was gathering pace. A 2003 Sunday Times article headlined ‘Life on the front line: Lovely cheap houses, shame about the crime rate’ asked: ‘Is it mad to buy in the capital’s danger hot spots?’ It went on: ‘It is no exaggeration to say [Murder Mile] is controlled by Yardie gangsters’, but ‘property prices are a bargain, if you discount the shootings’.
Since then, money has washed into Clapton, because to buy a home there now, you have to have lots of it. In three decades, the average house price in E5 has risen seven-fold from £100,000 to £700,000. While Hackney has not exactly turned into a white enclave – the borough is still as ethnically diverse as it was 20 years ago – the gap between its haves and have-nots has widened.
Steven Gowen, a gangs research analyst with over two decades of experience in Hackney, says gang members ‘can see the wealth around them’, but that their world is mostly a hidden landscape, separate from Hackney’s gentrified one. Occasionally, however, these worlds still collide.
In 2020, a fashion student was paralysed after being shot in the neck outside a pub in Broadway Market by gang members targeting rivals filming a drill video. Regardless of Hackney’s new face, street murders are still racking up. Operation Trident, watered down to cover general gang activity instead of just homicides, did reduce gun crime, but the tit-for-tat killings never stopped – their methods just changed.
‘In the Murder Mile era, the retribution was very targeted,’ says Gowen. ‘Now it’s a lot more random. It’s a mindset of ‘anyone can get it’. It’s not about drug turf wars – this is a comforting lie. The motive is to build up your reputation by violating and hurting people.’ The target has widened because, unlike the Murder Mile era, anyone seen with a member of a gang is now seen as guilty by association, and is therefore a legitimate target.
Murder Mile was not the peak for gang murders in Hackney, it just happened to involve public shootings. A list of homicides linked to the ongoing beef between south Hackney and Tottenham gangs shows the peaks and troughs getting more, not less, deadly.
Nowadays, killings are more likely to happen in side streets with knives and machetes. Instead of public performance, now it’s an online performance, on the digital street. Gowen says today there is extra pressure to take swift revenge, to save face and to notch up names on your blade. On social media and in rap songs, friends and mothers of the dead are mocked, people boast about specific murders and there are updated ‘scoreboards’ listing street killings.
Gowen has two maps of Hackney that show the fragmentation of the area’s gang scene. The first shows the state of play in the mid-1990s, with four distinctive Hackney gangs – the ‘old school gangs associated with robberies and guns’ – Stamford Hill, the Rowdy Bunch, the Hackney Boys and LOM. The next map shows the situation in the present day. Apart from Stamford Hill, the old gangs have gone and been replaced by 18 gangs – a claustrophobic space crammed with ever more violent, nihilistic and younger splinter groups, each with complex affiliations and beefs. However, their street presence has receded. Now they go online to get noticed, to brag, shame rivals and make money via credit card fraud.
On the streets of Hackney, Powell and the LOM name are now part of the area’s criminal history. But they still carry weight. While gang names might have changed, Gowen says some of the children of LOM members, boosted by their pedigree, are involved in newer gangs in the area. As for Powell himself, despite moving out of the borough to Grays in Essex, he found it hard, or undesirable, to put clear daylight between himself and the crime world.
In 2017 he was acquitted after being accused of recruiting a gang of masked men to carry out a violent robbery on a family home in Brighton in which children were held at knifepoint. In 2019 he was acquitted again, alongside his son Kodee Powell and friend Stephan ‘Fabulous’ Allen (also known by his stage name Dutchavelli), after they were accused of being involved in a violent robbery on a Kent caravan site in which a man was stabbed and strangled in front of his children. Kodee was, however, given a short sentence for possessing a ‘Rambo-style’ knife, as was Allen of trying to influence a witness.
But Powell wasn’t interested in fading away in suburbia. Unlike Lambie, whose non-existent online presence – a few menacing, scar-faced images – could be down to being in jail for most of the millennium (his most recent conviction was a nine-year sentence in 2019 for cocaine supply), Powell embraced social media. Despite racking up enemies over a long criminal career, he fared better with the Snapchat generation. Powell was part of the management team that saw Dutchavelli, brother of Stefflon Don, hit the big time in 2020. In the opening frames of his music video for Only If You Knew, which has 60 million views, Powell is shown talking to the camera with his trademark baseball cap and gold teeth brace, before picking Dutchavelli up in a limo after a prison release.
At this time Powell, aged 50 and a grandfather, was buzzing. He looked great for his age. From the videos he posted, his palpable joy at Dutchavelli’s success made him look as though he was loving life. He was easing well into the role of éminence grise to a new generation. But, as the music industry party invites rolled in, Powell was being watched.
A team of ‘spotters’ were using Powell’s social media posts to work out where he was going to be and when. But they weren’t working for the police, they were being instructed by a gangster from Powell’s past with a gnawing grudge. In early June, they tracked Powell to a party in Royal Victoria Dock, east London, messaging their boss: ‘That’s where [he] is. Bro, you need to see his social media, he’s advertising himself.’ Soon after, Powell announced he would be going to a party in Roydon, a village in Essex, on the night of 12 June 2020. The day before, he’d called on those who ‘love their colour and love their country to rise up’ and join him at a Black Lives Matter protest planned for central London the next day against the ‘enemy’ Tommy Robinson. He never made it.
In the early hours of Saturday, 13 June, on the outskirts of Roydon, as the UK was just nearing the end of its first COVID-19 lockdown, Powell was walking with his two sons and some friends after leaving an all-night pool party where DJ Tim Westwood had been shooting a video. Suddenly, a car screeched to a halt alongside the group. A masked man stepped out, pointed a Luger semi-automatic pistol at Powell and shot him eight times before speeding off. Powell, hit in the temple and neck, collapsed to the ground while his two sons rushed to help him. As his body was lifted into a car to take him to hospital, Powell’s golden brace, which had been shot out of his mouth, lay on the road. He died from his injuries the following day, and someone posted on @fox2up2down: ‘Today we lost Mr LOM… Fox’s legacy will live on forever. A real legend and a true fighter. Rest easy.’
Four years later, in May 2024, two men were convicted of his murder. Nana Oppong, 43, a violent cocaine trafficker who’d gone on the run after killing Powell, had been caught while trying to enter Morocco in the back of a lorry in 2021. Oppong, who’d organised and carried out Powell’s execution using an Encrochat encrypted phone, had already been tried three times for murder, and acquitted on each occasion.
At the trial for Powell’s murder, the judge reminded the court that the victim, despite being a criminal, deserved justice, because he was also a family man: ‘While Mr Powell had been in trouble with the law, there was another side to him as a loving son, brother, father and grandfather. His loss has devastated and traumatised his family.’ Oppong was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. According to police, Oppong killed Powell due to a ‘grievance’. While it cannot be certain what this grievance was, it is likely that, just as Powell was making a new life for himself in the music world, his violent past came back to bite him.
‘Not everybody you rob is gonna let it slide and not everybody you rob will stay just a drug dealer. Some people become serial killers,’ says Sloley. ‘Sooner or later they’re going to want to even the score, especially if you haven’t publicly apologised to them.’
Powell’s era has been replaced on London’s streets by a newer, more nihilistic type of street violence, far removed from the old-school, Krays-style gangsterism to which Powell and the LOM aspired. Only the claustrophobia remains.
