Shortly after 9am one morning in May 2003, a prison van carrying ten men pulled up outside Inner London Crown Court in Southwark. Two armed men stepped out of a nearby park, one of them dressed as a postman with a Royal Mail bag. A guard who would not hand over the key to the cells was shot in the back of the knee. Within seconds the gang had what they came for: two particular prisoners, one of them Clifford Hobbs. Scotland Yard called them extremely dangerous and told the public not to approach.
Mumbles
Hobbs grew up in poverty on the estates of Bermondsey, in hand-me-downs, with sticking plaster holding his glasses together. A scaffolding collapse as a boy left him injured and slurring his words, which gave him his nickname, Mumbles, and made school a closed door. The faces who had escaped the estates with sawn-off shotguns were the men he looked up to. Armed robbery came naturally to him: he was strategic, calm under pressure and committed. By the 1980s he was one of the most wanted villains in South London, playing in the premier division of the underworld.
Broadcasting House
In March 1984 a gang ambushed a security van delivering £250,000 in wages to the BBC's Broadcasting House in Portland Place. The detectives were already waiting, tipped off, and hidden police cameras filmed the whole thing. "It is the real thing," the prosecutor told the Old Bailey jury. Hobbs was tackled by an off-duty police officer and found with a loaded revolver in his waistband. Because a security guard had been feeding the gang inside information, the jury convicted on conspiracy to steal rather than robbery. Hobbs got 12 years.
On the run
In the late 1990s, when a big drug smuggler turned informant and began giving up everyone he knew, Hobbs left the country. He spent time in Barbados and Venezuela. When his mother fell ill he came home, by way of Disneyland Paris and a train full of families.
After the 2003 escape he went through the south of France, Portugal and Guyana before surfacing on the Costa del Crime. In 2007 he was arrested in Malaga, betrayed by a friend. Britain sent a private jet with an armed escort and kept the landing site secret. On the flight, Hobbs told an officer he knew where they were landing, and named the airfield used for his old friend Kenneth Noye. He was right, and the plane was diverted to Biggin Hill.
One Postcode
He was sentenced for the firearm and the escape, with the old conspiracy sentence on top: 18 years. As a Category A prisoner in Belmarsh, he watched young men from rival postcode gangs stabbing each other on the wings. With the reformed smuggler Andrew Pritchard, he took a plan to the prison: mentors who knew the gang world, separate wings, and mediation between the main men from each area. It was called One Postcode, and violence on the wings dropped by half.
After his release, Hobbs was barred from going back inside to mentor, held by the same kind of legacy sentence rules that keep hundreds of reformed men on licence. The film ends on that contradiction: the man trusted to calm Britain's most dangerous wings is not allowed to finish the work.