Few areas of London are as synonymous with their local football club as Tottenham and Tottenham Hotspur F.C..
The club’s futuristic £1.2 billion stadium hovers over the district like an alien spaceship which has landed in this crime-ridden spot of north London.
A hundred yards across from Tottenham High Road—the main thoroughfare through Tottenham—is the Stadium Lounge, a bar and restaurant which entertains fans before and after home games.
Two men, linked to a gang called the Tottenham Turks, were convicted of manslaughter on Thursday, and two others were convicted of kidnap or false imprisonment.
But have the police in London got a grip on the Turkish underworld?
One source, an academic who grew up in the Turkish community but chose to remain anonymous because she feared retribution, told The Epoch Times: “Ninety percent of crime in the community is never reported. A lot of it goes under the radar. I feel like the Met has given up on north London.”
Captive Freed as Crowds Watched Premier League Action
On Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022 the Stadium Lounge was out of action.It was being renovated, and the shutters were down as Tottenham Hotspur beat Everton thanks to a penalty from England striker Harry Kane and a second goal from Pierre-Emile Højbjerg.
Just as the game was getting underway, at 5:30 p.m., a 33-year-old Turkish woman was freed by her captors, who had tied her up for almost two days in the toilets of the Stadium Lounge.
Gözde Dalbudak took a taxi to a restaurant in Islington which she remembered, and, after first calling her terrified family in Istanbul, she spilled her ordeal and raised the alarm about Alpergin.
It transpired Alpergin, a popular DJ who had founded the pirate radio station Bizim FM (Our FM), had been abducted along with Ms. Dalbudak as they returned to his home in Oakwood from a date at a fancy restaurant in Mayfair.
Alpergin had been tortured—although the gang may have not intended for him to die—and his body was stripped and dumped unceremoniously near an industrial estate in Loughton, Essex.
He had suffered 94 separate injuries and prosecutor Crispin Aylett, KC, told the jury, “The only mercy, if mercy it be, was that the pathologist considers that Koray Alpergin could not have survived these terrible injuries for very long and certainly not for more than a few hours.”
Roots of Violence in Turkish Community
There have been dozens of killings in north London in the past 25 years linked to disputes within the Turkish and Kurdish communities.In Nov. 2002, a man died in a huge brawl in Green Lanes between the Hackney-based Bombacilar (Bombers) gang and supporters of the Kurdish separatist PKK movement, both of which ran extortion rackets in the area.
The Bombers’ original allegiance was to drugs baron Abdullah Baybasin, but it later fell under the sway of the Armagan family, which was involved in a feud with the Tottenham-based Eren brothers.
The rivalry between the Hackney Turks and the Tottenham Turks has claimed a number of lives, including Ali Armagan in 2012 and Zafer Eren the following year.
A key leader of the Tottenham Turks is Kemal Eren, who is nicknamed Parmaksiz, or “No Fingers” in Turkish, as he has several missing fingers. He survived a shooting in Elbistan, in south-eastern Turkey, in 2012 and remains a fugitive.
Close Links Between Black and Turkish Criminals
In that case, as in the Koray Alpergin case, those receiving orders were from north London’s black community, and many of the underworld hits have been carried out by non-Turkish gunmen.The academic, who cannot be named for their own safety, told The Epoch Times: “They generally hire black guys as hitmen. The Turks avoid getting their hands dirty. Blacks and Turks, the men, are very close in this part of London. They drink and take drugs together, and they hire black guys, paying them with money or drugs.”
Ipek Ozerim, editor of T-Vine, a magazine for the UK Turkish community, knew Alpergin and said when Bizim FM launched in 2005 it was a breath of fresh air for a community which had been used to heavily politicised radio with either a Kurdish separatist or Turkish nationalist agenda.
Ms. Ozerim told The Epoch Times: “He cut through all of that, and you had young people, middle-aged people listening in because it was Turkish pop, it cut out the politics, it was fun. He wouldn’t allow it to be hijacked by any one community. So there was none of the kind of crazy political backdrop that had really defined London Turkish radio.”
She said: “Koray was a guy who loved to work out in the gym, he took care of his appearance. But when I saw him a few weeks before his death he'd lost an awful lot of weight, and not in a healthy way. He gave me a big hug and we chatted and I asked him a few times if he was alright and he said he was, but he didn’t look good.”
Mehmet Korkmaz was Alpergin’s best friend. He said: “He was always really popular. He knew how to talk to people.”
The pair worked together at Bizim FM and socialised a lot together and Mr. Korkmaz said he was due to see Alpergin on the night he was killed, but he was too tired and called it off.
On the Friday morning, Mr. Korkmaz and his wife, unable to raise Alpergin on his phone, borrowed a key from Alpergin’s parents and let themselves into his home in Oakwood.
Mr. Korkmaz told The Epoch Times: “I opened the door, but I thought I might find his body in the house, so I made my wife wait outside. But there was nothing there, only a note on the doorstep from the neighbour. He told us they had found Koray’s wallet and car key on the pavement and had heard a noise the previous night.”
Mr. Korkmaz then notified the police, who launched a missing person investigation, which turned into a murder inquiry when Alpergin’s body was found the next day in Loughton.
On Thursday, Tejean Kennedy, 32, and Ali Kavak, 26, were convicted of kidnap, false imprisonment and manslaughter, while Steffan Gordon, 34, was convicted of false imprisonment—having already pleaded guilty to kidnap—and Samuel Owusu-Opoku, 29, was convicted of kidnap.
Kavak was also convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Another man, Yigit Hurman, 18, had already pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice.
The jury heard two key suspects—Ali Yildirim and Cem Orman—have fled the country and are now fugitives.
Another individual, Talip Guzel, who was linked to the killing of Alpergin, was shot dead 100 yards away from the Stadium Lounge in August 2023. A 23-year-old man has been charged with his murder and awaits trial.
The academic told The Epoch Times: “In the Turkish community a lot of the younger generation are involved in organised crime. There’s a lot of money involved, and it’s very tempting.”
She said: “The Met lacks Turkish and Kurdish officers. Reactive policing is never going to achieve anything. This is never going to stop, for as long as there is a Turkish and black community.”
The leader of Haringey Council, Peray Ahmet, and the leader of Enfield Council, Nesil Caliskan, are both of Turkish Cypriot origin.
The Epoch Times has contacted the Turkish Police Association, which represents Turkish-speaking officers in the Metropolitan Police, but they declined to comment.
The Epoch Times also contacted Peray Ahmet, the leader of Labour-controlled Haringey Council, which is responsible for Tottenham, but she did not respond.
