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Terrance Ellis
Denis Carr |
Jail for robbers who donned police uniforms to raid firms
‘Lynch pins’ given heavy sentences but seven gang members still at large
AT least seven members of a gang who posed as police officers to pull off high-value robberies in Camden remain at large after two received heavy sentences last week.
Terrance Ellis, 44, from Mazenod Avenue, West Hampstead, and Denis Carr, 36, from Enfield, were jailed for their parts in an “organised and professional” gang in which robbers dressed as police officers tricked their way into businesses in Camden Town and Somers Town before tying up staff and robbing them.
Sentencing Ellis at Blackfriars Crown court yesterday (Wednesday), Judge Henry Blacksell, QC, said: “These offences were self-evidently extremely serious, professionally planned and intended to gain huge amounts of money. Why it makes it so serious is it’s difficult enough for society to remain trusting and well protected but it is more difficult when people are preying on that trust.”
The accused were part of a nine-strong crew that handcuffed staff at fibre-optics company Verizon, in St Pancras Way, in December 2007, before stealing equipment worth £2.5million.
The court heard from a security guard, who was told that the ‘police’ were there to deal with teenagers on the business’s roof but only realised too late that the men were impostors.
She was handcuffed and kept with other staff. “I was just really hoping this nightmare would finish,” she said.
Ellis, a professional criminal with a record dating back to his first conviction aged 12, was described as having a “lead role” in the Verizon heist.
He also featured in a robbery at Marigold Health Foods warehouse in Camley Street in September 2008 when he was one of four men dressed as police who handcuffed the warehouse’s manager and told him there had been a report of a firearm on the premises.
Under cover of a search, the robbers raided the cashbox, stealing just £800.
But Ellis dropped a forged warrant card containing his picture at the scene and was arrested in Luton shortly afterwards. Police then discovered that a few months earlier he had been sentenced in his absence to seven years jail for drugs offences in Leeds.
Both Ellis and Carr pleaded guilty to the Verizon robbery and a raid, also posing as police, on an alleged drug address in Bentinck Court, St John’s Wood, last year. Ellis pleaded guilty to the Marigold robbery and Carr to an aggravated burglary in Croydon.
Carr will serve a maximum of nine years. Ellis’s maximum nine-year sentence will begin only when he has served his earlier seven-year sentence.
Police claimed after the sentencing that they had caught the main players in what was clearly a serious gang.
Acting Detective Inspector Raj Mahajan, said: “These two men were the lynch pins in the organisation of these robberies.
“They used police uniforms to con their way into the building, in the process putting the victims they deceived through a traumatic experience.”
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