ITALY HAD THE MAFIA. WE HAVE THE BIRADERI.
Italy put the Mafia itself on trial. England has spent over thirty years trying its best to avoid trying the men and doing everything possible to ignore the organised crime group they belong to. My latest series goes where no one in the United Kingdom has been before. It puts the biraderi on trial. And it goes further.
At 5.58pm on 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone was at the wheel of his own car on the A29 motorway, driving from Punta Raisi airport into Palermo, home for the weekend from Rome, when the road under his convoy exploded. The explosives had been packed into a drainage tunnel beneath the carriageway and detonated by remote control from a hillside as the cars passed over it. The lead car was thrown off the motorway, and the three officers of his escort inside it, Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro, were killed instantly. Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge, died of their injuries.
Fifty-seven days later a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, Palermo, killed his closest colleague, Paolo Borsellino, and five officers of his escort.
Four months before Capaci, on 30 January 1992, Italy's highest court had upheld the case Falcone had spent a decade building. Inside that case was an offence England has never had.
THE CHARGE
In 1982, Italy made membership of a mafia-type association a crime. Falcone and the Palermo anti-mafia pool built the maxi-trial on that offence, alongside the murders, the extortion and the heroin. They proved not only what individual mafiosi had done but what Cosa Nostra was.
The convictions held at Italy's highest court. Cosa Nostra answered with the bombs, and its bosses were later convicted of ordering both.
ENGLAND, THE SAME YEARS
The rape gangs that Greater Manchester Police now investigates under Operation Edison was running in Rusholme through the 1990s, while the maxi-trial sat. Operation Earby covers Rochdale and Oldham from 1997, the years Italy spent convicting the men who bombed the motorway.
In September 2003, Victoria Agoglia died in Manchester. She was fifteen and had been in the care of Manchester City Council since she was eight. She died after a fifty-year-old man injected her with heroin. In the two years before her death she was threatened, assaulted, returned to her unit intoxicated, alleged rape and sexual assault requiring medical attention, and told her social worker that an older man was injecting her with heroin. None of it produced a child protection investigation.
Two months later and forty miles away, on 1 November 2003, Charlene Downes disappeared from Blackpool town centre. She was fourteen. Police believe she was one of a number of girls sexually exploited in the town, and that she was murdered within hours of the last sighting. Two men were tried in 2007. The jury could not reach a verdict, the retrial collapsed after grave doubts were raised about the evidence, and the police watchdog found the investigating team guilty of a "strategic and tactical failure" in managing its own material. A £100,000 reward stands unclaimed.
Sicily buried its magistrates with state honours and convicted the men who ordered their murders. In England, one girl was buried at fifteen. The other, fourteen, has never been found. Nobody has been convicted for what was done to either.
TWO ROOMS
To try the association, Italy built a courtroom of reinforced concrete and bullet-proof glass against the wall of the Ucciardone prison, because no existing courtroom could hold 475 defendants and none was safe enough. The case ran six years through three levels of judgment. It ended with 338 convictions, 2,665 years of imprisonment, life sentences for 19 bosses, and a final ruling that settled what Italy had refused for a century. The association existed. It was proved in law.
Victoria's death produced a police operation, Operation Augusta. On 22 April 2005, the day it closed, a gold group met at Manchester Town Hall with council officers and communications staff present, and press strategies were discussed. The police watchdog could not establish who took the decision to close the operation, or why.
One state built a room to put the organisation itself on trial. The other held a meeting to close the file and, fourteen years later, neither the police nor the council could produce the minutes.
ENGLAND CHARGES THE ACTS
In Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, Huddersfield and Oxford, the trials were joint trials, multiple defendants, men convicted of rape and trafficking against several children over years, conspiracy counts alongside the substantive offences.
A conspiracy is an agreement to commit particular crimes, proved against the particular men who made it. Convict every man in the agreement and the network that recruited them, protected them and replaced them stands untouched, because it was never what the indictment described.
In 2015 Parliament made it an offence to take part in an organised crime group's crimes. It carries five years, and it needs the crimes. To convict a man you must prove serious offences and prove his hand in them. No provable crime, no case.
That is the hole. The man who delivers the votes, holds the money and hands down the protection commits no crime you can name. He rapes nobody and moves nothing. English law has no charge for him. The Biraderi remain protected.
Italy wrote the opposite law. The organisation itself was the crime, so the prosecution never had to tie a man to a murder or a shipment, only to the organisation. The financiers, the fixers and the men who controlled votes went down with the killers. That is how the maxi-trial convicted men who never touched a single act.
England can convict the men who commit the crimes. It has no law for the biraderi these men commit their crimes under.
The biraderi is not Cosa Nostra. It has no commission, no initiation, no war with the state. It does not need them.
KINSHIP IS THE COVER
Nobody is born into what I am describing. Descent is the cover. Participation is the offence. Votes are delivered in blocs, office is held through the votes, protection is handed down from the office, and the rape and trafficking of children is carried on under the protection. The enforcement is not a gun. It is exclusion, from standing, from marriage, from business, from belonging, and it leaves no paper and no bodies.
At the 2012 Rochdale trial, one victim told Liverpool Crown Court she had been made to have sex with up to five men in a day, at least four times a week, in flats where other men were lined up waiting. Another described twenty men in one night. Eleven men stood trial. Nine were convicted. Thousands escaped.
Greater Manchester alone has 59 live multi-victim, multi-offender investigations. 714 identified victims and survivors. 1,099 lines of enquiry against potential suspects. A national inquiry was formally set up in April 2026, and its first local investigations are Oldham, Bradford and Keighley, and London. Manchester is not among them.
The biraderi has never been on trial in England.
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THE PRICE
Charlotte Tetley survived the Rochdale gang. She did not escape it.
Her inquest heard she had suffered "significant sexual abuse". Her abuser returned to Rochdale a free man. In 2023 she moved out of the town. It was still the victim who fled. She told doctors she was suicidal, and she was removed from a hospital inpatient bed list before a mental health review. On 24 September 2024, aged 33, she died on the railway. The coroner has issued a report to prevent future deaths.
EIGHT YEARS
I have spent eight years exposing the biraderi and it's infiltration of the UK. Of how, like the Mafia, it has infiltrated every area of civic life and the rape gangs are just one layer of how dangerous this organised crime group has become to our way of life.
I have been arrested and prosecution attempted repeatedly for what I have done. It does not matter that every attempt to imprison me failed. It matters that they attempted it.
Staff reporter
I was referred to the CPS under a joint police and council operation whose referrals, the force later admitted, contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all. A man who boasted about sending scouts to follow me was convicted twice for what he did to me. My arrest was reported in the mainstream press. His convictions never were. When another man came after me and was handed a conditional caution instead of being put before a court, I took the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester to the High Court, and in May 2026 I won. The court found the caution unlawful from the outset.
This is the cost of naming it. In the eight years I have done this, it is becoming difficult to separate where the Labour Party ends and the Biraderi begin.
This series ends with two trials.
This series ends with two trials.
The first is of the biraderi and the men inside it, and that needs Parliament to create the offence England has never had.
The second is the trial I have demanded for years, Nuremberg-style rape gang trials for the politicians, the officials and the police officers who protected it, and for every one of those who facilitated the cover-up. This includes the Prime Minister. Nuremberg convicted the men who never touched a victim. I am as interested in them as I am in those that lined up to take their turn raping little White girls.
The title of this series is an association never before made. Now watch what I do to demonstrate why even the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom tried to stop me.
For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.
Now the harder fight begins.
Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.
As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.
Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.
Three boroughs of ten were reviewed. Seven were never looked at. His own review team asked for the minutes of the meeting that closed down an investigation into 97 identified suspects, was told they could not be found, and accepted it. Operation Hexagon ran under his mayoralty and his policing powers, and he has never answered a single question about it.
Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.
At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.
That is why this campaign cannot slow down now. Which is why I need your help to be able to continue.
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Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison. Even if there is only the smallest chance of this happening, isn't it worth your support?
Raja Miah MBE