The “Southern Housing” brand is now a broken face on a rotting and diseased criminal corpse. It’s not its former self, and is now collapsing under its own weight.
However, this dying monster was once held up as an example of “how to do it” in the UK criminal world, as one housing crook put it to me. I had been looking into similar criminal activity on a housing estate in Oxford at the same time.
In actual fact, it’s been a pain in the backside here for many years. It’s led to a feeling of dissatisfaction in Police forces. It’s resulted in no small amount of unrest and misery in many communities.
Utter ground zero
The events that I had so far seen then culminated in a visit to an office in Reading. I knew it had been earmarked by the outfit as a payments centre, but this was a noble term for a bad operation.
It was in use as an office by a legitimate business by day, and at night random people turned up to use it as a base for money handling, and processing payments online.
The staff at their “Head Office” often turned debits into cash. It was also delivered to the building near the town centre. It was collected by secret couriers to take to criminal street gangs in Canterbury, Liverpool, and Manchester.
The bad and ugly
The people I spoke to were characters with gross attitudes that fitted stealing any owned housing they could get their hands on, and forcing renters to pay on top of their own to “Southern Housing” for the protection of their lives.
It was clear some Local Authority staff were in on it too, and a few were seen collecting cash from the premises at night on a number of occasions. It looked like a sordid, horribly corrupt affair.
The local Police that had been involved were mistreated by the criminals that felt they had the upper hand because they had hundreds of thousands of pounds on the premises each and every night.
Low marginal gains
It was a surprise, therefore, to learn that this disturbing effort was only marginally profitable. A few of them even quipped they had needed a loan for Christmas. It didn’t pay off the presents they had brought.
It was a similar story in Bristol where I had found many of their associates. They were also in dire straits financially, and had loans to their name and creditors following them here, there, everywhere.
It was a frequent sight to see them fighting to get into cars to drive off. It showed that crime doesn’t pay even if huge amounts are involved. It also shows ulterior motives drive people to do it in the first place.