'Vlad the Impaler', a prison officer and a cowardly thug amongst those jailed in Greater Manchester this week
09.09.2023 - 17:25
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
A Salford crime lord known as 'Vlad the Impaler' is among those to be jailed in Greater Manchester this week.
Nathan Vanden arranged gangland hits across Greater Manchester from his bolthole in the Netherlands.
Also locked up this week was a prison officer who kissed an inmate before smuggling drugs into jail for him.
Prison terms are handed out to the most serious offenders each week. And Manchester Evening News reporters are on the press bench each day to cover these cases.
A Salford crime lord directed underworld hits from hundreds of miles away in the Netherlands. A shooting and a raid on a family home were carried out on the orders of Nathan Vanden, who had fled from his native Greater Manchester after arousing the suspicion of the authorities.
Using the aliases 'Machiavelli' and 'Vlad the Impaler', he plotted a shooting at a house in Whitefield, Bury, and a proposed attack at the home in Salford. Prosecutors said that Vanden, 33, originally from Leigh, paid criminal associates to 'carry out attacks upon targets of his choosing', using the EncroChat network as a cloak of anonymity.
But messages he sent on the encrypted communications network came back to haunt him after it was cracked by European law enforcement in 2020. "The prosecution would say that by this time, he was the head of a crime group operating in Salford, and had a number of trusted lieutenants under him," prosecutor Andrew Ford KC said.
"He had money available, he would barter online for criminal jobs to be done, for people to be attacked and his co-accused would be paid." As he was jailed for more than two decades, a judge labelled Vanden a ‘professional gangster’ and gave him an extended prison sentence for public protection.
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