UK?s largest-ever modern slavery ring smashed

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LONDON: The largest-ever UK modern slavery ring, which forced more than 400 people to work for a pittance while their criminal masters earned £2 million, has been smashed.A three-year police investigation uncovered a well-organised criminal gang led by the Brzezinski family — which preyed on the homeless, ex-prisoners and alcoholics, from Poland. The ring lured and then trafficked vulnerable victims to the UK with the promise of good money, but instead housed them in squalor, and used them as what a judge described as “commodities”.Victims were paid as little as 50p for a day’s labour and in one case a worker was given coffee and a chicken as payment for redecorating a house. Another man had to wash in a canal because he had no other access to water, while one house’s leaky toilet had to be plugged with an old duvet, such was the standard of disrepair.One victim, describing “horrible” living conditions, said: “I would say some homeless people here in the UK live better than I lived after I arrived over here.” Victims were reduced to recycling used cigarette butts off the street, and going to soup kitchens and food banks to get enough to eat.Meanwhile, the gang’s bosses lived the high life off the backs of those they exploited, sporting lavish clothes, and driving luxury cars, including a Bentley. After the end of two trials, it can now be reported how five men and three women, all originally from Poland, exploited their destitute victims for pure “greed”.They have all now been convicted of modern slavery offences and seven of their number, of money laundering. Jurors heard the accounts of more than 90 victims, but it is believed at least 350 more had been through the gang’s hands, who had since either returned to their homeland, could not be traced, or were too scared to come forward.At the end of the second case last month, a jury at Birmingham Crown Court convicted two men, 52-year-old Ignacy Brzezinski, of Beechwood Road, West Bromwich, and Wojciech Nowakowski, 41, of James Turner Street, Birmingham, of modern slavery offences. A third, Jan Sadowski, 26, of Dartmouth Street, West Bromwich, admitted his part on the first day of trial.Sentencing Ignacy to 11 years on Friday, the judge described the “high functioning alcoholic” as having “direct control”, and “living in the nerve centre of the organisation”. Jailing Nowakowski for six-and-a-half years, the judge described him a one-time victim of the conspiracy who had risen to become a “spy and enforcer” for the gang. Father-of-two Sadowski — the only defendant to plead guilty – was jailed for three years for having a “lesser role”.At a previous trial ending in February, leading conspirator Marek Chowanic, along with Ignacy’s cousin, Marek Brzezinski, recruitment consultant Julianna Chodakiewicz, Natalia Zmuda and Justyna Parczewska, the group’s matriarch, were all convicted of their roles. At their sentencing, Judge Stacey said their “degradation” of fellow human beings had been “totally unacceptable”, jailing the five for between 11 and four-and-a-half years. Together the group helped in the targeting and trafficking of people from their Polish homeland, placing them in cramped, rat-infested accommodation in the Black Country and putting them to work on farms, rubbish recycling centres and poultry factories. In some cases, the gang waited outside the front gates of jails in Poland, to approach ex-cons who had just been released.Judge Stacey said the conspiracy, which ran from June 2012 until October 2017, was the “most ambitious, extensive and prolific” modern day slavery network ever uncovered. Investigators believe it is the largest such criminal prosecution of its type in Europe, to date.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/com/cwEr/~4/DWx7SukdE6I

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