Innocent woman shot in the chest. Student dragged into an alley by two men. And assassins sticking shotguns through the letterbox... GUY ADAMS reveals how Cardiff has become overrun with gangs and addicts - and crack cocaine war behind it
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Two young men stride across a small park and approach the front door of a red-brick house in Pontprennau, a residential neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of Cardiff.
It’s 7.30pm on a Saturday in June and the warm aroma of summer barbecues drifts on the breeze.
This is not a social visit, however. The duo, who are dressed entirely in black, are wearing balaclavas. One of them is brandishing a double-barrelled shotgun.
What happens next is caught on CCTV. As the taller of the two films on his phone, the smaller calmly pokes the barrels of the weapon through the letterbox. Then he pulls the trigger, twice.
A 15-year-old boy is in the property looking after his younger brother. He’s just walked downstairs to make a cup of tea.
At hospital, doctors find 30 pellets in his leg, some as deep as 5cm. The boy is ‘pale, alert, talking and scared’. Were it not for a cage behind the letterbox, which took the full force of the shots, he’d most likely be dead.
In court a few days ago, prosecutors told how the sort of gangland shooting you might expect in a Martin Scorsese movie had instead played out in broad daylight, on a normally sleepy cul-de-sac named Clos Y Ffynnon.
The ‘reckless act of violence’ marked the latest chapter in a vicious drugs war involving unpaid debts owed to an organised crime syndicate in Bristol, they said. Its intended target had been an elder relative of the innocent teenage victim.
Turkish immigrant Efekan Karahan, pictured, shot a 15-year-old boy by poking the gun through his letterbox in a quiet cul-de-sac in Cardiff
18-year-old Efekan Karahan (left) was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison for the shooting, while his accomplice, 21-year-old Ashley Corbin (right), got six
The gunman, 18-year-old Turkish immigrant Efekan Karahan, got eight years and four months in prison. His accomplice, 21-year-old Ashley Corbin, was sentenced to six.
In days gone by, such incidents would be front-page news. But in modern-day Cardiff, gun-toting drug gangs are terrifyingly commonplace.
In fact, Karahan and Corbin aren’t the only would-be doorstep assassins operating in the Welsh capital to be convicted in the past month.
Neither, as it happens, was their attack the most shocking.
That title goes to an incident involving Marcus Huntley, a drug dealer from St Mellons, roughly a mile from Clos Y Ffynnon. In late January, he and four accomplices were found guilty of the cold-blooded murder of Joanne Penney, who was shot at point-blank range last March.
Ms Penney, 40, had recently split up with her boyfriend and was temporarily staying at a friend’s property in Talbot Green. It was Sunday evening, and she’d been cooking bacon and eggs when she heard a knock at the door. Two women could be seen outside.
When she went to let the women in, Huntley emerged from the shadows, took out a handgun and fired a single shot into her chest. The trio then calmly walked to a waiting car and drove off.
In court, prosecutors told how this shocking shooting was the result of a feud between two rival gangs who have been flooding South Wales with crack cocaine. One, for which Huntley was the local distributor, is the ‘Rico OCG’, headquartered in Leicester. The other is run by Cardiff-based kingpin Daniel ‘Jimmy’ Joseph.
Joanne Penney was staying with a friend in Talbot Green when she answered the door and was killed by a single shot in her chest at point-blank range
Drug dealer Marcus Huntley, who was part of a Leicester-based gang that distributed crack cocaine, murdered Joanne Penney in Wales last March
The murder weapon and ammunition used to shoot Joanne Penney in a meticulously planned attack were recovered by police
Joseph’s gang was believed to be using the house in Talbot Green as a crack den. Huntley, who with other local members of the ‘Rico’ group had recently been violently assaulted by Joseph’s foot soldiers, had decided to shoot whoever answered the door of the property, by way of revenge. Ms Penney, who had no connection with either group, was an innocent victim.
The court heard how a convoy of two vehicles had travelled to Cardiff from Leicester to carry out the meticulously planned attack.
On the outskirts of the city, they stopped at a branch of McDonald’s. There, the group who were going to the crime scene handed their mobile phones to an accomplice, who made a series of calls while the shooting was being carried out, in an effort to cover their tracks. Huntley and his accomplices will be sentenced at a later date.
These cases are symptomatic of a wider malaise: before Christmas, Cardiff found itself named and shamed as the home to the most crime-ridden student neighbourhood in Britain.
Cathays, a district just north of the city centre, topped the ‘Most Dangerous’ list in a study of crime rates examining the areas around the country’s 160 universities and higher-education colleges.
Each year, a staggering 32.5 crimes per 100 residents occur there, the study found. And of the 6,495 crimes committed there in the past 12 months, almost a third (31 per cent) were categorised as either violent or sexual.
The mostly middle-class students who inhabit the area are, needless to say, not to blame. Instead they tend to be victims, acting as a sort of magnet drawing criminals in from the city’s outer suburbs.
Those who spoke to the Mail this week reported routinely witnessing sexual assaults, street robberies and drug dealers going about their business in broad daylight. One, a final-year medical student called Olivia, said she had been the victim of sexual assaults twice in the past three years.
Before Christmas, Cardiff was shamefully named the most crime-ridden student neighbourhood in Britain. Pictured, police in Cardiff last December
The first was in a bar, which has since closed, on a busy Saturday night, where a man pushed himself up behind her and groped her. The second occurred as she walked home alone after a night out. ‘It was dark and late, but I hadn’t got enough money for an Uber and my shared house was just round the corner,’ she recalled.
‘Halfway home two guys pulled up ahead of me in a car and as I drew level they jumped out and pushed me down an alleyway. They got hold of me and one of them had his hands on my breast.
‘I managed to get one of my arms free and land a heavy punch to his throat. He let go of me immediately and I used a couple of seconds that bought me to run.’
A second student, Dan, who studies music, told how he was beaten up and robbed after a night out with friends.
‘I was jumped by three men, probably in their late teens, who gave me an absolute pasting.
‘They punched and kicked me everywhere and while I was on the ground they snapped my watch from my wrist and went through my pockets, taking my wallet and phone.
‘I staggered back to my nearest friend’s house and he patched me up and took me to hospital in a cab to make sure nothing was broken. I didn’t need stitches but I had cuts, bruises and pain everywhere. I gave a statement to the cops, but of course they were never caught.’
‘You see them, especially at night on street corners and roaming the roads on e-bikes. There is a lot of poverty here, away from the city centre, and there is a growing drug problem that is being fuelled by these robberies and thefts. I’m always seeing drug dealers doing business in the streets around here, often in daylight.’
Shopkeepers voiced similar concerns. One, who has run an off-licence in Cathays for 30 years and who asked not to be named, said: ‘On a daily basis I’m seeing people dealing drugs and smoking cannabis on these streets outside my store. There’s CCTV everywhere but they don’t care.
‘Walk down the street here and I guarantee you’ll smell weed somewhere within 30 seconds.’
It should be stressed that, while pockets of Cardiff do have exceedingly high crime rates, the city as a whole is only the ninth most violent in Britain, according to research by the UK security journal which names Bradford as the country's most dangerous.
With regard to Cathays, South Wales Police Chief Inspector Rya Cowan-Davies said: 'Everyone deserves the right to feel safe where they live, study, and work, and we do everything we can to make sure this happens.
'We have a huge student population in Cardiff with a large majority living in and around the Cathays area. They are an important asset to the city and it is a priority for us that their experience of the city is a positive one. Thanks to the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee implemented last year, we now have an increase in dedicated neighbourhood officers who are patrolling Cathays and the wider Cardiff area every day.'
But behind this tale is a story of social decline and economic deprivation stretching back decades in Cardiff.
Per-capita GDP in Wales is £29,316, almost 30 per cent less than in England, while a quarter of working-age people are economically inactive, roughly 4 per cent more than across the border, according to the ONS.
The most effective route out of poverty is, in theory, education. But the Welsh system, which has been run by Labour for almost three decades, lags behind the rest of the UK by a considerable margin, according to PISA ratings – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s measure of international attainment published every four years.
Behind these tragic tales in Cardiff is a story of social decline and economic deprivation - as Wales's Labour-run education system clearly lags behind the rest of the UK
England, where reforms such as the introduction of academy schools, plus increased testing, have considerably raised standards in recent years, saw its maths ranking climb from 27th in 2009 to 11th in the world in 2022.
For literacy, England climbed from 25th to 13th.
In Wales, where Labour refused to implement such reforms following lobbying from teaching unions, scores fell to their lowest-ever level during the same period.
Whether such data will influence voters, who elect a new Welsh government in May, is anyone’s guess. But the effects of this grim trend can be seen on the ground in Ely, a crime-ridden district of Cardiff two miles from the city centre.
According to research by Fraser Nelson, the former editor of The Spectator, Ely boasts the highest proportion of unemployed benefit claimants in Wales, with as many as 47 per cent of the working-age population claiming welfare.
Last month, nine members of the ‘MJ’ drug gang, which used e-bikes and an encrypted phone network to deliver crack cocaine across Ely, were jailed for a combined total of 45 years.
The group, who’d been active since 2020, behaved with staggering impunity, using social media to film themselves cooking the drugs, brandishing large sums of cash and driving the pot-holed streets in a rented Lamborghini.
What becomes grimly apparent, if you visit the areas where these and other gangs run the streets, is the level to which low-level criminality has become institutionalised.
In Talbot Green, on the estate where Joanne Penney was shot, I saw piles of fly-tipped rubbish, strewn across the pavements.
In Ely, one of the few shops open for business was called The Garden Potter. It (quite legally) sells hydroponics and other equipment that is commonly used to grow marijuana.
The parks of Pontprennau, which is in theory a prosperous neighbourhood home to the country’s only Tesla showroom and one of only seven Waitrose supermarkets in Wales, contained groups of school-age children spending their half-term smoking the drug in broad daylight.
That phenomenon was the subject of an extraordinary debate in the Cardiff City Council chamber at the end of January, where Conservative councillor Callum Davies called for a ‘Public Space Protection Order’ to be issued to combat flagrant drug taking and other anti-social behaviour in the city centre.
Mr Davies spoke of being rudely interrupted during a recent shopping trip where he encountered several groups of drug addicts and drunks on Wharton Street, a stone’s throw from the Millennium Stadium.
‘In the single minute it took me to cross that street, I saw people screaming at the top of their lungs, someone urinating and another person brazenly smoking an illegal substance,’ he said. ‘It was Saturday lunchtime – that’s peak family time in our city centre. It’s not acceptable.’
Residents regarded the city centre as a ‘no-go zone’, he added, saying it ‘has been taken over by selfish, anti-social pot-heads. This drug is smoked without apology in public and without a care for anyone else, including children.’
Implementing the protection order would, he added, help the authorities properly enforce the law. Where drug taking is tolerated, gangland violence will surely follow, Davies argued.
But in the ensuing debate, he was accused by one Liberal Democrat councillor of wanting to create a ‘police state’. They, and every Labour member, voted against the motion. And the crime wave fuelling Cardiff’s doorstep shootings continues.
