EXCLUSIVE The Essex farm at the centre of an international car smuggling ring: How remote spot by the M25 is linked to London's car crime epidemic.. and its dark past as a hotbed for organised crime

Daily Mail​

5 days ago

Like many farms, Baldwins in south Essex is reached by winding lanes and surrounded by green fields.
But the similarities end there.
Tucked away in an area of green belt just inside the M25, Baldwins Farm consists of a small cluster of bungalows surrounded by a sprawling, ramshackle industrial estate covered in shipping containers and the skeletons of old cars mined for scrap.
While it's not the sort of place folk would venture unless they needed to, this strange spot - and what happens there - has long been a subject of whispered conversations among locals.
Baldwins Farm has now attracted wider attention after a documentary that aired recently on national TV placed the site right at the centre of an international car smuggling ring.
But as MailOnline can reveal, this is far from the first time it has been linked to organised crime.
In fact, the site has been a hotbed of gang activity stretching as far back as the 1980s.
From drug smuggling to gun dealing, Baldwins Farm has seen it all...
The recent documentary the featured Baldwins Farm began with an Audi A4 that was stolen from a driveway in North London on March 15. Unbeknownst to the thieves, it had been fitted with a hidden tracker by the car leasing company.
This tracker showed the Audi moving east towards the borough of Enfield before switching off. Then, days later, it woke up 30 miles away in a patch of woodland in Baldwins Farm.
It later emerged that the tracker was not transmitting, possibly due to GPS jamming or blocking equipment. Five weeks later, it suddenly reappeared in Kaunas, Lithuania, and was tracked to a business in the outskirts of the city called Baltic Car Trade.
A team from Channel 4's Dispatches filmed police raiding on the property, but instead of finding a blue Audi A4, all that was left of the vehicle was a bunch of wires. The car, like many stolen off British streets, had been torn apart.
Their extraordinary investigation revealed how organised gangs of criminals are stealing thousands of cars each year to then ship abroad as parts destined for scrap yards in the Middle East and Africa.
They reported that at least two other stolen cars with trackers had ended up at Baldwins Farm, in a part of the farm known as the 'Lithuanian end'.
According to one active car thief who spoke to the programme, Lithuania is a common destination for cars taken in Britain by criminals who use gadgets to exploit their keyless entry systems.
Neil Thomas, a former police officer who works for a private track and recovery service for stolen vehicles, was unsurprised Baldwins Farm had been used to store them.
'The access in and out is quite restricted, it's quite close to London, quite close to the docks, so if you are exporting vehicles geographically it's a really good location,' he said.
Essex Police said they could not obtain a warrant to recover the car because it's tracker was not giving a precise reading.
Baldwins Farm - which MailOnline visited last week - is certainly unusual: there is only one road in and out of it in the form of a dusty track, and the whole site is bristling with CCTV cameras.
While much of it is difficult to see from the road, drone images show dozens of parked vehicles, row-after-row of shipping containers, piles of scrap metal and a smattering of garages and bungalows.
Dispatches identified a man called Martin Clark as the director of the company that owns the lease to the part of Baldwins Farm that the car was found on.
In 2007, he was jailed for six years for his part in a £4million car theft ring.
The team tracked him down to a large detached house in Essex with several luxury cars, including a Bentley parked on the driveway behind a fence.
Asked by journalist Matt Shea he was aware his site on Baldwins Farm was being used to store stolen cars, Mr Clark replied: 'F*** off'.
This is far from the first time stolen cars have been found at Baldwins Farm, with Essex Police conducting a raid in 2020 that recovered three Range Rovers and a Land Rover Discovery.
Some of the vehicles were already in the process of being broken down for parts, while others were mere shells - with the chassis and wheels virtually the only elements remaining.
Essex Police carried out a raid on Baldwins Farm in 2020 that recovered three Range Rovers and a Land Rover Discovery. Some of the vehicles had already been completely stripped
There are plenty of legitimate businesses renting units at Baldwins Farm, including window companies, car repairers, and a cement business run by the Bromley family, which owns three gated-off bungalows and owns much of the land.
However, it has long attracted a less wholesome clientele in the form of organised criminals - who have had a presence there stretching back decades.
Like many semi-rural parts of Essex, Baldwins Farm saw an influx of criminals from the East End during the 1970s and 1980s, with gangsters finding it useful to have a site near London with good transport links that was still relatively isolated with plenty of land.
Dave McKelvey, a retired Met Police DCI, has carried out numerous arrests at the site from as far back as 1989, and told MailOnline it had long been linked to drugs, firearms and stolen vehicles.
'Baldwins Farm was always a hotbed for major criminals,' he said.
'We arrested gangster Tony Dulieu for running a chop shop, where stolen car parts were split up, and running an amphetamine factory.'
Essex Police were well aware of shady goings on at Baldwins Farm and put together a 14-month undercover investigation that looked into its owners - the Bromleys - and their associates, who were selling cocaine and firearms from the site and the Stone's Throw pub in South Ockendon.
Named Operation Portwing, undercover officers struck up a relationship with the gang and were regularly sold drugs and offered guns.
Family matriarch Linda Bromley was convicted of drug supply, but spared jail in 2007.
A year earlier her husband David Bromley, who died aged 76 in 2022, and their son, Simon Bromley, 55, were jailed for three years and eight years respectively for cocaine supply offences, with the latter also convicted of firearms supply.
The site also attracted the attention of police 2002 following the mysterious death of Lee Balkwell, 33, whose body was found wedged between the chassis and drum of a cement mixer.
Simon Bromley had said the pair were each using electric Kango drills and spades to chip dried cement from inside the drum with an electric light until about 1am, when he left the drum and got into the cab with the intention of slowly rotating it.
He said it spun more quickly than expected and Lee must have been ejected via a side hatch before becoming wedged where he was found.
David called 999 and paramedics and police arrived on the scene. Despite the highly unusual circumstances, Simon was not initially arrested and given time to change his clothes.
No charges followed, but Lee Balkwell's father would not drop the case and, after a series of reviews, it was reopened in 2010 and in November 2012 four members of the Bromley family and another man were arrested.
Simon was charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and failing to ensure the health and safety of Les, as his employer. He was cleared of the manslaughter charge, but found guilty of the lesser offence.
During the police investigation, a significant cannabis grow was found at Baldwins Farm and Bromley. Simon admitted to cultivating cannabis offences and was jailed for three years.
He has never spoken to the media about Mr Balkwell's death, but in 2012 David gave the family's only interview, in which he insisted it was an accident and his death had deeply affected them all.
Over the following years, as Mr Balkwell's father continued his campaign for answers, Baldwins Farm remained of interest to the authorities due to repeated claims the site was being used to hide stolen cars and illegally burn waste.
In 2009 and 2010, raids discovered stolen cars and evidence of rubbish, including electricals, being illegally shipped to Africa.
During a raid in October 2016, police, the Environment Agency, HMRC, and immigration enforcement discovered more than 900 stolen gas bottles worth £50,000.
The following July, the Environment Agency secured a £120,000 fine against a company called PCS Recycling for illegal waste tipping and storage at Baldwins Farm and another site.
As recently as April last year, police and environmental officials enforced a 'restriction order' to stop illegal waste dumping and burning on the farm.
Despite the long association between Baldwins Farm and organised crime, the younger generation of Bromleys who now run the site insist they are doing everything in their power to clean it up.
This graphic shows which brands are statistically most at risk of being stolen
Simon Bromley's 29-year-old son, Jake, insisted that whatever his father or grandmother Linda did in the past have nothing to do with how Baldwin's Farm is run now.
'My grandad has died and my nan is very ill at the moment,' he told MailOnline.
'I fitted windows for eight years and I've come down to Baldwin's Farm to help my nan. That land they are on about [in the Dispatches programme] has been transferred to me.
'That stolen Audi has nothing to do with us and we have nothing to do with the land where the Lithuanians are.'
Referring to Martin Clark, who Dispatches reported as holding the lease to the land that the stolen Audi was tracked to, he said: 'We rent land to Martin. He has a contract until 2026 and then we will review that. We do not like how he has run it down there.'
Jake said that he and his 25-year-old beautician sister, Lily Tiger, were trying to make a legitimate living and feared negative publicity could drive away future clients.
'I'm a legitimate man who's worked hard his whole life. I worked fitting windows for over ten years and my sister is a make-up artist and runs her business here,' he said.
'My sister and I are both young. What happened years ago was not great, but as time has gone on we both have strong heads on us.'
In February this year, Jake and Lily Tiger were both made directors of the new company Baldwins Farm Limited, which says it was established for the letting and operating of own or leased real estate.
A family family friend also insisted the younger generation of Bromleys would have been unaware of any illegal goings on.
'Nobody has told them about the TV programme - they have no idea about stolen cars, they [the criminals] will have to get off the site,' the friend said.
For local law enforcement, for whom Baldwins Farm has been a major headache for decades, this would be the dream outcome.