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Robbery ‘too risky for me’
Defendant denies nine street attacks
A CAREER criminal has told jurors that he ran a clearing house for youth crime in Camden, but never went out and robbed himself.
Kevin Anthony Nevers, 41, admitted that he operated a crime ring of teenagers who committed robberies and burglaries, but denied he had anything to do with nine attacks on women near their homes in Hampstead and Belsize Park,
“Robbery is something that you get a substantial sentence for,” he told Snaresbrook Crown Court. “I don’t take that sort of risk. I have moved on to another level.
“I deal with a lot of young guys around Camden. They go out, maybe do burglaries, they do robberies. I don’t know what they do, sometimes the posties or whatever.”
Asked by Henry Grunwald, QC, for the defence, why he remained involved in crime, he answered: “I have to survive.”
In the course of 12 months, nine women in Haverstock Hill, Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage and Hampstead were attacked from behind by a man who stole gold and platinum rings worth a total of £68,000, the court has heard.
The women, mainly American citizens living in the Hampstead area, were all grabbed round the throat in quiet streets as they returned home from shopping trips to Hampstead High Street.
Two were pregnant, while five had young children with them when they were robbed.
Nevers, who was jailed for seven years for a robbery in Hampstead in 2000, used his contacts with jewellers in Hatton Garden to “fence” the goods from the women he robbed, the prosecution has alleged.
But this week Nevers said he had always denied the 2000 robbery, which has been cited by the prosecution as an example of his mode of operation, and accused police of planting his DNA at the scene. “I absolutely did not commit that robbery... My assertion is that they put my blood there,” he told the court.
Nevers added that he had incurred the wrath of detectives by exposing a police informant with whom he had had a knife fight in 1997.
Nevers, from Harringay, denies nine counts of robbery.
The trial continues. |
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