A £40 billion underworld economy is dominated by homegrown criminals, with at least 27 “Mr Bigs” running their empires from inside British jails, The Times has learnt.

An intelligence map drawn up by the leading police expert on organised crime identifies more than 1,000 active criminal networks and shows that gangland is still controlled by British families, despite the influx of crime syndicates from Eastern Europe and South-East Asia over the past decade.

In a separate operation, investigators have identified 27 crime bosses running networks from prison cells. Although they are all in jail, Terry Adams, Kenneth Noye, Brian Brendon Wright, Brian Gunn and Curtis Warren are being monitored closely.

Deputy Chief Constable Jon Murphy, of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), told The Times that crime specialists work together to make money through drug deals, robberies and smuggling.

“British gangs are quite unlike the Italian Mafia model or the Turkish groups,” he said. “There are no set ranks, rules and structures. They are more fluid, flexible and opportunist.”

The intelligence picture was built up by Acpo working with the 43 police forces in England and Wales and other bodies. More than 15,000 individuals are said to have been identified as involved in organised crime.London has more than 170 gangs. Some have sophisticated hierarchies; others are little more than street-level groups. In Liverpool, criminal networks are deeply embedded and run by a number of families whose tentacles spread well beyond the city. Merseyside criminals control the drug trade on the South Coast. Manchester has established gangs such as the Longsight Crew and the Gooch Close Gang, while Birmingham has been dealing for years with the rivalry between the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys. Bradford is a centre for money laundering and a major distribution point for heroin by British-Pakistani gangs. Serious crime in Nottingham has been dominated by the Gunn family. Glasgow is the hub for the distribution of firearms in Scotland and the starting point for much of the heroin trade, which spreads as far north as Shetland.

Many foreign gangs active in Britain are based overseas and exploit the 11,000-mile coastline and security weaknesses at sea ports to smuggle drugs, guns and counterfeit goods into the country. Much of the media coverage of gangs has concentrated on turf wars and feuds, but serious criminal activity is focused on making money.

Career criminals prefer to work together when they have common interests. They will form loose coalitions, sharing their specialist skills in pursuit of the highest profit with the least risk.

Mr Murphy said that organised crime was driven by profit. “Some 60 per cent of criminal groups are involved in drug trafficking, but many are multi-commodity organisations,” he said. “If they can traffic drugs they can also smuggle counterfeit goods.

“When the Government took a different approach to cannabis there was a big shift by organised criminals into cannabis. The smuggling routes and methods were the same, the profits were high but the penalties were less.” The declassification of cannabis led to a boom in cannabis farms, controlled largely by Vietnamese syndicates and producing high-strength skunk.

The Acpo intelligence map is being used by all police forces and the Serious Organised Crime Agency to target the most dangerous and prolific gangs.

Most criminal networks specialise in one or two areas, but some diversify and it is understood that one is involved in 14 types of activity.

Mr Murphy said: “We have an identified number of organised crime groups. We believe we know who is doing what and how they are doing it.”

He said that it was the first time that British agencies had looked at criminal groups rather than concentrating on individuals or types of criminality. “We’re now looking at the groups and the networks of groups. They often form loose, amorphous coalitions - coming together for a particular venture, perhaps one group needs a skill which another specialises in.”

A recent investigation in London uncovered an arms deal in which a Lithuanian gang had been trading handguns in return for an introduction to Colombian cocaine contacts. Another inquiry broke up a sex trafficking ring run jointly by Lithuanian, Albanian and Chinese criminals.

Mr Murphy said: “There are Mr Bigs, but the person you start out thinking of as the Mr Big is quite often not. These are people who are flying below the radar and you may not realise who they are for a long time.”

The Acpo team is concerned at the ease with which inmates can obtain mobile phones. “Significant criminal activity is being driven from within prisons,” said Mr Murphy.

All criminal groups are prepared to resort to violence when necessary to commit robberies, enforce protection rackets or secure drug deals. Firearms, which are seen as a tool and a statement of intent, are a priority. Some networks, notably newly arrived groups from Lithuania, have been established to service that demand.

The map is being updated and refined continually to improve the picture and keep track of the rise, fall and varying activities of different groups.

A scoring system is used to identify which groups should be targeted immediately and which can be subjected to intelligence gathering.

Mr Murphy said: “This has given us a greater understanding of the make-up of the criminal world. We know it’s not perfect yet. There is a difference, for example, between what a shire force thinks is serious and organised crime and what a city force thinks.

“What we’re talking about here is a continuum of harm from a poppy field in Kandahar to a burglary on an estate or somebody getting shot here. The two things are linked and we need a consistent policing response.”

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