Folds Hill was once a small rural village. Mentioned in the Domesday Book, this place is the home of Lady Godiva, the wife of an aristocrat who is said to have rode naked through the nearby city of Coventry on a gray horse to highlight the plight of the local poor. It was my hometown.
Today, Fallshill is a seedy, multicultural suburb of vast modern Coventry in the West Midlands. Divided in two by Falls Hill Road, it is lined with drab houses, cheap clothing stores, kebab takeaways, fried chicken joints and 'Turkish' barbershops.
Police statistics say the area is notorious for violence, sex crimes and shoplifting. A sting occurs. Also a gunfight. It has the second highest crime rate in the city. Only black Mercedes and Range Rovers are parked, many with darkened windows, indicating that there is money here. And obviously there's a lot of money.
A Palestinian flag flies from a tall pole outside the largest store on Falls Hill's Main Street, a furniture store filled with identical cream-colored sofas.
Next door to the furniture store is a Turkish-style barbershop, and over the past few years a number of barbershops have opened on Falls Hill Road. There are nearly identical facilities on the same side, a 1-minute walk away.
The same thing happens further down the street, with five similar barbershops clustered together in one section.
Not far from Falls Hill, also in the north end of Coventry, is another place that has seen better days.
Dating back to the 12th century, Far Gosford Street is one of the West Midlands' oldest streets. It still houses 14 historic buildings and 10 barbershops offering a variety of grooming services.
If you look at a map of Coventry, you'll see that there are around 120 barbershops in the city, but that's not all. When the Mail visited seaside resorts in Kent, the Chilterns commuter belt in Buckinghamshire and one of England's most beautiful Regency spa towns, we found out how the spread of Turkish barbershops is influencing them all. I understand. There is also one on the Isle of Man, a tax haven off the Lancashire coast.
Proliferating: Barbershop in Fallshill, Coventry. There is no suggestion that these shops are involved in any fraudulent activity
Hewa Rahinpour, 30, and a group of his fellow Iranian Kurds were arrested on suspicion of bringing 10,000 migrants from the French coast to Dover in small boats.
Hewa Rahimpour, from Ilford, was detained in east London. He was later extradited to Belgium where he was tried.
In Hezlemere, a village on the outskirts of High Wycombe, I found three Turkish-style saloons clustered around a central roundabout. Late Wednesday afternoon, the shops were empty but brightly lit and several barbers were passing the time looking at their cell phones.
It must be emphasized that the vast majority of barbers are legitimate and there is no suggestion that these barbers are involved in any wrongdoing. But one might wonder how so many people are surviving in the current economic climate.
A similar situation existed along the Kent coast. There were dozens of ethnic barbershops, some crowded, but many with no customers in sight. One writer from the Folkestone and Hythe area recently said on social media: How do they keep going?
In fact, the internet is full of reports of new salons opening up. One post said: “There are 19 on Liverpool Road in Eccles (Greater Manchester).” “Lost counting at 27 in Lincoln,” another added. “There are 11 'Turkish' barbershops in Plymouth within about 300 yards,” a third claimed.
According to the Local Data Company, a national retail information provider, there are now 18,624 barbershops open in the UK, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2018. According to National Hair and Beauty, at least 665 stores opened last year alone. Foundation.
So what explains this unusual spike in crimpers?
Police have long warned that some barbershops are being used as hubs for criminal gangs to traffic drugs and launder money from illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel.
Kurdish and Albanian gangs, who tend to control the boat racket in the Straits, are reportedly leading several seedy salons, posing as genuine Turkish barbers.
They are replacing car washes and nail salons as cash-only businesses suspected of “fueling” organized crime gangs operating in the UK.
Albanian Gul Wali Jabarkel, 33, was charged with using his barber shop in Colindale, north London, as a base for a smuggling racket.
Boss Crew Barbers owner Tarek Namouz was sentenced to 12 years in prison last year for sending £11,000 to Syria to “purchase arms and explosives” to be used against Assad's government forces. I received it.
The more dubious activities of the barbershop came to the attention of the National Crime Agency (NCA), or Britain's FBI, in 2022 with the arrest of the ringleader of Channel's massive human smuggling ring.
Hewa Rahimpour, 30, and a group of fellow Iranian Kurds were arrested on suspicion of bringing 10,000 migrants to Dover from the French coast in small boats.
Rahimpour, who entered the UK illegally and was granted asylum after claiming he had suffered “political oppression” in his home country, was arrested by police as he drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes.
Rahimpour, a former barber, went into the hairstyling business in Camden, north London, a few years ago because his gang had made off with £13m in cash at the crossroads and needed to clean it up somehow.
He was extradited from the UK to stand trial in Belgium last year and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for human trafficking.
A second high-profile trial has revealed that 33-year-old Albanian Gul Wali Jabarker used his barbershop in Colindale, north London, as a smuggling hub and was involved in the transport of trucks bringing migrants to London. He was charged with attempting to recruit a driver. Britain was hidden in the cargo.
Jabalkhel fled to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2020 after realizing he was being watched by police. A year later, two of his colleagues at London Gateway Services were arrested after handing over £7,500 in trade proceeds, hiring one of the same truck drivers he used to smuggle migrants to Britain. It happened when I was about to go back. He was arrested for possessing an M1 and charged with money laundering.
Both men claimed the money was for hairdressing supplies, but authorities knew this was false because they monitored their cellphones and text messages.
Mr Jabalkhel was found guilty along with three others after a trial at Kingston Crown Court two years ago for his role in what the NCA described as “a ruthless operation at a time when humans were nothing more than objects to be profited from”. Ta.
Money laundering salons have also been linked to terrorism. Tarek Namouz, owner of West London sniper Boss Crew Barbers, was charged with sending £11,000 to Syria last year to “purchase arms and explosives” to be used against Assad's government forces. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
While awaiting trial on remand, the barber, who lived above a salon in Hammersmith, told a prison visitor that he had actually paid £25,000 to Islamic State supporters he had been funding. He boasted that he had succeeded in pulling him out.
So, how exactly does a barbershop scam work?
The purpose of money laundering is to make it appear that large sums of cash generated by criminal activity came from a legitimate source, in this case a barbershop.
As long as a business is in operation and recognized by the tax office as a going concern, it doesn't matter how much revenue it generates.
What matters is how much taxable income is declared to HMRC, and therefore how much cash is laundered.
“They reported to HMRC that three or four men were beheading five animals an hour, doing it 12 hours a day for a price of X, when in fact it was empty. Or they will charge a fraction of X per customer,” said the accountant, who specializes in the retail industry. he told the Mail. “It means illegal cash turns into legal income.”
Detective Superintendent Charlotte Tucker of Wiltshire Police, a national expert on the proliferation of fake barbershops, recently said: 'Shops offering haircuts at really low prices can be a red flag that they are run by a criminal organization. There is,” he said. Everyone loves a bargain, and if it's too good to be true, it probably is. ”
Ali Hassan Ali, a former Scotland Yard police officer, has observed the same phenomenon. “Since the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a boom in barbershop openings,” he said. “Many of these have thousands of pounds worth of equipment but no customers.
“While in many cases the stores will be involved in legitimate business, there is strong reason to believe that some stores, particularly those owned by Turks and Albanians, are connected to organized crime. ”This could be smuggling people or drugs. ”
Most local planning laws allow anyone to open a hair cutting shop. Sedley, an unassuming town of around 12,000 people between Wolverhampton and Dudley in the West Midlands, had so many barbers (21) that two years ago a local salon owner He himself requested that the city council regulate the number of barbers, but failed.
The legitimate origins of Turkish barbershops in Britain lie in the large community of Turkish immigrants, where barbering became a highly respected profession in the 16th century.
Formal barbershops, an extension of coffeehouses, served as lively forums for public discussion. Given their central place in Ottoman life, salons were controlled by the state and could and did punish citizens who insulted barbers. Even today, barbers have a high status in Turkish society.
But in Britain it is becoming increasingly clear that some of the famous “Turkish” barbers are not just the barbers they seem.
Another aspect of this exploding number is a rather alarming health concern.
Mike Taylor, who runs a hairdressing academy in Dorset, claims customers are being infected with skin infections such as ringworm at the “cheap, dirty and unqualified barbershops that litter the high street”. .
He insists it's time for the government to introduce strict new rules regulating what goes on inside salons.
But as we've seen, some barbers aren't happy about increased scrutiny.