IN the leafy Hertfordshire countryside sits a mansion sprawling across a large estate.

Looking like the home of any successful businessperson, it hides a completely different story.

Who is David Hunt?

Born in Canning Town, London, David Hunt is alleged to be the man behind a vast criminal empire.

Hunt was born in 1961 in a cramped council house on an estate in East London.

The youngest of 13 children, he claimed his Christian parents brought him up to embrace a strong work ethic.

After leaving school at 16, he became an amateur boxer and quickly earned a reputation as a ferocious fighter.

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Hunt lives in a plush seven-bedroom mansion, complete with swimming pool, tennis courts and gym on the border of Essex and Hertfordshire.

Who are The Hunt Syndicate?

Operation Tiberius was a police investigation into crime groups in North and East London that led to them stumbling upon the The Hunt Syndicate.

The report alleges that the group, headed by David Hunt, had managed to evade prosecution for some time through a network that utilised corrupt police contacts and the intimidation of witnesses.

In 2006, a scrapyard in the London Docklands area was searched for stolen goods along with a nearby facility which led police to stumble upon 42 containers which were reported to have the fruits of 18 lorry thefts and a commercial burglary inside.

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Despite overwhelming evidence, the case collapsed, much to the annoyance of the team leading the investigation.

UK’s most notorious gangsters and criminals

• Notorious prisoner Charlie Bronson
• The Kray Twins from London's East End
• Former gangster Marvin Herbert
• Ex-armed robber Vic Dark
• Former gangland enforcer Brian Cockerill
• Notorious British criminal Carlton Leach
• Paul Sykes – known as Britain's hardest prisoner
• Kevin Lane – given a life sentence for murder
• Convicted murderer Tony Argent
• Former drug-smuggler Chet Sandhu
• Fearless UK hardman Lee Duffy
• Career criminal Curtis Warren
• Gangleader Charlie Richardson
• A-Team leader Terry Adams

Why is David Hunt known as the 'Long Fella'?

Hunt is known in gangland circles as "Long Fella" due to his height of 6ft 5 inches.

He became a close friend and associate of Reggie Kray, visiting him in prison in 2000 just prior to his death. 

However, Hunt himself would go on to say the visits had nothing to do with him being involved in the criminal underworld and he visited Kray only a couple of times.

It is said that Hunt himself in the mid-Eighties joined a gang called the Snipers who were involved in lorry hijackings in Essex and East London.

Their reputation for violent crime meant that some were called on to act as muscle for more established criminals.

Hunt was ambitious, a police report in 1985 noted how he was "moving up the ladder" and overseeing the crimes the gang carried out.

As a result of the leaked documents from the police investigation, Hunt filed a libel case against a newspaper but the five-week trial found that his claims that he was just a businessman who had been wrongly accused of criminal links were unfounded.

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The newspaper’s defence was simple — the article was a responsible piece of journalism that was accurate and, most importantly, in the public interest.

At the end of the libel case, the judge found that the article'sclaims about Hunt being a criminal boss were accurate.

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