When a group of workmen with liveried vans and wearing hi-vis jackets moved into Wellesley Road in Middlesbrough, no one gave them a second thought.
Residents in the town were accustomed to roadworks being a common sight, so the barriers and cones set up didn’t cause much concern among them.
However, things took a turn when it became apparent that despite looking professional, the workers seemed clueless about what they were supposed to do.
One morning, while digging into the electricity lines by the road, the residents were alarmed by a series of small explosions. A fire quickly broke out, leading to the workers hastily throwing their equipment into their van and hastily driving away, leaving the fire to spread along the pavement.
For years, this bizarre episode remained nothing more than a curious anecdote for mystified locals. Unbeknown to them, however, it would soon become central to an unprecedented police investigation into an extraordinary international crime network led by Albanian gangsters.
And earlier this month it finally came to its conclusion, revealing that these hi-vis squads were not honest labourers but were, in fact, hardened criminals fuelling the supply of millions of pounds worth of illicit drugs.
Under the guise of a legitimate company, their mission was to dig up pavements and rewire electricity supplies into cannabis farms run by their Albanian overlords.
In an astonishing operation spanning at least four years, 32 police force areas and 100 cannabis farms, they siphoned off electricity worth millions of pounds to power the production of £21million worth of weed.
On March 7, eight men, all of them from the North West, were sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court, where they were handed a combined 32 years in prison.
But as the Mail can reveal today, their audacious scheme was simply a dramatic escalation of a well-worn tactic employed by Albanian mobsters for years.
It is a story that underlines the iron grip that criminals from the Balkan country now have over the illicit drug trade in Britain.
And worryingly, these men – the real masterminds behind The Great Mains Robbery – remain very much at large.
On the surface, Ross McGinn, from Huyton in Merseyside, and Andrew Roberts, from Wigan, were respectable family businessmen. Registered on Companies House as directors of Elev8 Civils & Utilities Ltd, both maintained polished LinkedIn profiles to promote their business.
‘Civils’ is civil engineering shorthand for installation or maintenance of public utilities such as drainage, telecoms, electricity and gas networks.
Alongside photos of apparently legitimate work, McGinn, 33, wrote: ‘If we can help you with any civils work from fibre to utilities in the northwest we have lads ready with full digging kits etc all accreditations.’
In another post he said it had ‘been a busy week of callouts for the Elev8 team, digging out and locating faults’.
Funnily enough, there is no mention of almost blowing up a terraced street in Middlesbrough back in April 2022.
But it is fair to say that, up until then, their work had gone comparatively smoothly.
The team would drive company vans to various locations across the country, from Portsmouth to Newcastle, before spending up to ten hours a day digging up roads and ‘fixing’ faulty lines.
For the most part, Elev8 went unnoticed. But as time went on, they began to get careless.
A few months after the Middlesbrough dig, McGinn and Roberts took their men across the border to Bangor, in North Wales, where they began work excavating the high street outside a former clothes shop.
Again, locals noticed nothing untoward at first. But it was not long before the frequent comings and goings at the former Ethel Austin clothing store began to arouse suspicion.
In 2022, the same year Elev8 were digging in Middlesbrough and North Wales, a surge in Albanians crossing the Channel provided a ready supply of illegal workers for ruthless drug gangs running the illicit cannabis trade.
Aided by their booming labour supply, these Albanian overlords had begun to displace the Vietnamese as the main suppliers of the drug in Britain. Many had switched from cocaine to cannabis, in part because it can be produced here without the need for risky transportation across international borders.
But low risk doesn’t mean it can’t be high reward – Britons consume 240 tons of weed worth £2.4billion a year.
Of the 12,685 Albanians who reached the UK in small boats in 2022, many were skilled in the ‘hydroponic’ technology required to grow the plants indoors.
Forced to work in squalid conditions – often to pay off the cost of their journey into the UK – these ‘soldiers’ would be coached to say when arrested that they were victims of human trafficking, thereby preventing their deportation.
But as one Albanian source told the Daily Mail, gangs have also been paying for electricians to be shipped over on tourist visas.
Once in the UK, they carry out a few quick-and-easy jobs rewiring power supplies at cannabis farms so that they go undetected by meters – saving the criminals huge sums and hiding the abnormally high power usage that’s a tell-tale sign for police.
The tradesmen then return to Albania, healthily remunerated for their ‘holidays’.
As recently as January, a qualified Albanian electrician was arrested during a raid on cannabis factories in Wales that were found to have plants worth more than £1.5million. At one of the farms, a former travel agent in Chepstow, police found that the electricity meter had been bypassed.
Back on Bangor High Street, Elev8’s unnerving presence had caused locals to alert the authorities. After carrying out further enquiries, North Wales Police raided the premises on January 30, 2023.
To their amazement, officers discovered a large-scale cannabis farm worth about £1.2million – as well as two Albanian men cowering in the corner, both of whom claimed to have been trafficked into the country to tend the 1,000 plants inside.
A utility company confirmed the power source in the building, which had extensive modifications, had been illegally abstracted from the street. At this stage, however, there was nothing to identify the culprits.
Ironically, it was the very branding that had given Elev8 a veneer of legitimacy which ultimately brought the company to the attention of the police.
Reviewing CCTV footage from outside the shop, detectives spotted five men in fluorescent orange jackets working beside a van bearing the company name, with its registration plate visible.
In June 2023, the case was passed to specialist officers at the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, and ‘Operation Spark’ was born.
The van was a slender but invaluable lead and, as detectives began to investigate those involved in Elev8, they realised that one key player, Greg Black, 29, also from Huyton, had been arrested in October 2022 for an unrelated offence and his phone had been seized.
Searching his device they found a WhatsApp group including the other workers, as well as locations, photographs and discussions about various ‘jobs’.
It also led detectives to Scottish Power engineer Colin White, 62, from Wavertree in Liverpool, who they discovered had been stealing from his employer to provide equipment for the group.
Crucially, text messages sent between the gang referred to ‘Albos’. In one exchange, Elev8 director Andrew Roberts, who was referred to within the group as ‘Whiteman’, told another defendant: ‘We going up Monday look again, got set slobs waiting to go in,’ – before a follow-up message corrected ‘slobs’ to ‘Albos’.
The other man queried: ‘U got Albos to go in?’ to which Roberts replied: ‘Yeah mate a good set too, if there any other gaffs get them in there.’
Elev8 were on the payroll of Albanian gangsters.
The case had all the hallmarks of a classic drugs bust, but Operation Spark uncovered activities on an altogether grander scale.
DCI Zoe Russo, who led the case at the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, said she had never seen another one like it. To her knowledge, phoney workmen had never gone so far as to dig up roads in order to rewire mains supplies. But the amount of cannabis being produced by these farms –and therefore the energy consumed – required more invasive work, Russo added.
This was reflected in some of the premises that were turned into illegal drug factories, which included a former hotel, a nightclub, a pub and an empty department store.
Notably, Operation Spark found it was British workers, not Albanian sparkies, carrying out the utilities works in this instance. And to a woefully poor standard.
Graham Roberts – no relation to Andrew Roberts– a 47-year-old cable jointer from Wigan, was responsible for most of it.
Known by the rest of the group as ‘Ganny’, his handiwork with the dangerous high-voltage mains cables was regularly mocked by other members, who referred to ‘Ganny’s f***-ups’ in messages when arranging to rectify whatever mess he had caused.
Indeed, his workmanship was later described by a professional electrical inspector as ‘poor and often dangerous’.
The men themselves were sometimes in the firing line. On one of their phones, police found a shocking image of Andrew Roberts with his face purple and singed from a serious burn to his forehead.
As one Wellesley Road resident told the Mail this week: ‘It would have been fairly convincing if they’d had a clue what they were doing. It’s just lucky no one was killed or badly hurt.’
By February 8 last year, detectives had enough evidence to make arrests, and a series of co-ordinated raids were carried out across northern England.
Alongside McGinn, Andrew and Graham Roberts, and White, groundworkers Michael Ashurst, Lewin Charles, Aiden Doran, Black and Jack Sherry were also detained.
A search of Elev8’s premises in Wigan found diggers, breakers, generators, vans, motorcycles, and cabling. All the men admitted encouraging or assisting the production of cannabis and conspiracy to abstract electricity – apart from White, who admitted conspiracy to steal.
McGinn, on videolink from prison, wiped away tears as he was jailed for five years and four months. Andrew Roberts was sentenced to six years, while Graham Roberts was handed five years and three months.
The others received jail terms of up to three years and nine months, with Sherry’s suspended for 18 months.
Sentencing, Judge David Potter said all the defendants were ‘driven by greed’, adding that they had operated their cynical deception in ‘broad daylight and in plain sight’.
‘No defendant could fail to recognise the scale of the conspiracy,’ he said.
Investigations into their Albanian paymasters are still ongoing – and the exact details of how these working-class men from the North of England came under their auspices.
Both McGinn and Andrew Roberts had deep connections to organised crime. McGinn had served time for supplying cocaine and cannabis and was released in 2016, while Roberts was previously jailed for supplying heroin.
But DCI Russo said another defendant, Luke Whenary, 33, from Stockton-on-Tees, is thought to be the link between the groups.
Whenary was messaging a contact saved on his phone as ‘AW1’ who appeared to be managing people that he described as his ‘cousins’ – the Albanians working inside the cannabis plants, according to prosecutors.
Whenary has pleaded guilty to involvement in this case, but is awaiting sentencing.
Detectives believe Elev8 charged the Albanians a fixed rate for their services, with McGinn and Roberts – who were responsible for liaising with the crime groups – taking a ‘significant portion’ of that. They were not directly involved in setting up the farms.
Typically, the cannabis kingpins never even set foot in Britain, keeping their hands clean while enjoying the fruits of their ill-gotten gains in far-flung places such as Dubai.
It is these Albanian drug lords who are the ultimate prize for Russo and her team, but whose exact whereabouts are as yet unknown.
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