Betting for How Long Itll Take Before Back in Jail Again
O northward its last full day of trading, the Ladbrokes betting shop in Morden, south-w London, stayed open until x at dark. Information technology was Friday 24 May 2013, the outset of i of those spring-summer weekends for which the schedules of global sport combine to throw up a overabundance of events that can exist gambled on. A European football final, a super-middleweight championship fight, a Grand Prix, high-season horse races, a golf game tournament. The director of the Morden Ladbrokes, a 55-twelvemonth-old Londoner named Andrew Iacovou, sat backside his shop's counter with a computer, a scroll printer, a coin tray and, beside his knees, a safe – waiting to accept bets.
A balding and naturally slight man who spent his costless hours in the gym, Iacovou had worked for Ladbrokes for more than 20 years. Serenity merely non unconfident and well liked by his regular customers, he was one of the company'due south 15,500 employees, around 11,000 of whom worked in Ladbrokes' 2,200 shops. Iacovou had run a Ladbrokes in Wimbledon, a Ladbrokes in Earlsfield and another Ladbrokes in Morden before moving to his current branch, a glass-fronted shop adjacent to a supermarket, but across the A24 from Morden tube. For more than ii decades with the business firm, he had seen through changes to the staff uniform (tomato plant-red polo shirts, now) as well equally a series of dispiriting adjustments to his daily workload. In the 1990s, when Iacovou beginning met his married woman, Anita, then a Mail service Part employee, he worked at the Wimbledon branch. Information technology shut to customers at 5.30pm and Iacovou would close down the premises by 6pm, set up to walk Anita home.
His Morden co-operative, in 2013, was open seven days a calendar week, from viii.30am or 9am until 10pm. Iacovou mostly worked five of those days, sometimes half dozen, often from start to finish. For some hours in the afternoon he would be joined at the till by an assistant, a cashier who helped him process handwritten bets that came in over the counter. Otherwise, Iacovou manned the shop solitary, relying on his regulars for company. They were more often than not male person, more often than not retired, often on their manner to or from the nearby Ganley'south pub.
There was a rosy-faced man in his 60s, called Michael, who saturday at a shop kiosk and frowned at length over his spread-out betting slips, ruminating before committing to a twenty-four hours's wagers. In that location was a taxi driver, Alan the Taxi, who parked in the rank outside and came in to bet the occasional £5 on football. A fellow cabbie, John the Taxi, didn't gamble, but he came in and out to employ the loo. Both drivers brought with them takeaway coffees for Iacovou, who could not leave the shop unless his cashier was at that place. The branch had a regular named Ray, who bet horses, and Kistensamy, who bet horses, and Bill, who only bet dogs. There was a relative newcomer, Shafique Aarij, a man in his 20s with pocked skin who had drawn attending to himself by combing his pilus, nervously, whenever he played on 1 of the store'due south electronic gambling machines.
That Friday, Aarij complained to the director nearly a trouble with i of these machines. Iacovou had to come up out from behind his counter to see what was incorrect. It was one of dozens of menial but mounting tasks he had to see to: filling the coupon trays; scissoring out class guides from the Racing Post and arranging them on magnetic display boards; alternating posters in the street-facing windows; managing customers who approached his till holding winning slips (and those who came anyhow, as losers, to moan); monitoring the amount of money in the money tray, in the till, and in the rubber; monitoring the door, in case someone too immature or besides unsavoury-looking should try to enter; monitoring the shop's 4 gambling machines, in example any of them should break down, the colours on the faux casino games plough funny or the scale on the touchscreens slip out of sync. At the cease of the twenty-four hour period these machines had to be laboriously emptied of takings and the shop otherwise shut downwards. Though Iacovou's branch closed to customers at 10, that dark he did not get back to his dwelling in Cheam until midnight. He was exhausted, his wife recalled, and he slept in his compatible.
In the morning, Iacovou took the omnibus dorsum to the Morden co-operative, arriving at around 8am, in time to meet a colleague from another Ladbrokes who had come to collect a set of spare keys. The pair chatted briefly. There had been a time when they might have been rostered to spend Sat together in the store, but no longer. Iacovou was not expecting his cashier to arrive until subsequently lunch. The managers said goodbye to each other and Iacovou began to prepare for merchandise, turning on the machines and checking that each of their money and note slots were functioning properly. He put up pages from the Racing Post and took out cleaning products to tidy his counter surface area. The posters in the street-facing window that morning said "Win", "Complimentary BET", "Guaranteed", "Debit cards accepted". Iacovou opened a locked door that separated the shop floor from his service area and saturday downward at his till. As it turned 8.30am, he pressed a button to unseal the shop'southward magnetically locked front door, and was open up for business.
The first customer was Shafique Aarij. That forenoon he was carrying a shoulder pocketbook. He went to one of the gambling machines. As had happened the day before, Aarij signalled to Iacovou that at that place was a trouble with his car. The managing director stood upwards and started to unlock the door beside his counter. As soon as the latch was turned, Aarij pushed in. He grabbed Iacovou around the cervix. The two men struggled. Aarij took a claw hammer from his handbag and struck Iacovou over the caput with it. He struck again, and once again, and then he turned his attention to the safe.
2. A function of British life
It is a rare British loftier street that has not come to be kitted out, today, in the colours of the bookmakers. In every town, on every retail row, the routine sweep of bank and salon and shrunken supermarket will be studded at near mathematical intervals by the red of a Ladbrokes storefront or the blueish and yellow of a William Colina, likely as well by the bluish of a Coral, the blueish and red of a Betfred, the stake greenish of a Stan James or the clover-leaf shade of a Paddy Power. In total, at that place are around 9,000 licensed betting shops in the UK, around one-half of those operated past Ladbrokes and William Loma. The ii corporations are neat and bitter rivals, tracing a contempt for one another back to the 1930s. Difficult equally it is to credit now, both companies one time shared a snotty attitude about the idea of bookmakers having shops.
"I don't recall it would exist very nice," said Mr William Hill, founder of William Hill, in 1956, "to run into at every street corner a betting shop." At that place was never a Mr Ladbrokes; the visitor was named for a country business firm where its founders trained horses in the 1880s. Upwardly to the 1960s it reckoned itself also posh for street-level trade. Bookmakers at the time operated under licence but at racetracks, or took bets from private customers by post or phone. Profits made in this way were undermined by a thriving black market in illegal street betting. Before the tonnes of lurid acrylic got hoisted into place on store fronts nationwide, British bookmaking had as its nearly visible identifier a lonely human or boy, waiting with a satchel of money on any street corner that had a selection of escape routes.
Betting shops were legalised in 1961. A year afterwards, the Times audited the state, describing the first bookmakers' shops, and reporting on the genteel (a "clean, sky-blue parlour") too as the already run-down (a "seedy, litter-strewn room containing listless youths sucking pencils"). All had windows that were blacked out, at authorities insistence, to discourage loitering. An employee known as a "marker" would stand up by a blackboard, shut to a telephone or afterwards a loudspeaker that broadcast racing commentary, chalking up results. Another employee, called a "settler", calculated odds in their head. Cashiers took in money and sometimes gave it out. Customers could not drink in betting shops, only they could smoke. These were bolt-holes, very often in the backstreets, stuffy only social, somewhere to be.
And they were popular, particularly with working-class men. One time Ladbrokes and William Hill could not ignore the potential profits any longer, they began to open up branches, or take over existing ones, and from the mid-1960s on, the two companies' spread was rapid and ambitious. Between them they absorbed dozens of smaller now-forgotten firms – Solomons & Flanagan, JJ Simonds, Ken Munden, Fred Parkinson.
William Hill had 100 shops by 1970, and Ladbrokes more than than 400. "They are part of British life at present," said Hill not long before he died. His company was bought by Sears Holdings Express in 1971, and then traded on once again through a number of conglomerates. Both William Hill and Ladbrokes became PLCs, floated on the stock market. They had 1,000 shops each, then ii,000. Wooden writing benches, pencilled over with decades' worth of redundant figuring, were removed from branches and replaced past plasticky kiosks. Instead of pencils came that icon of the modern betting shop, the gratuitous pen: stubby, flat edged, much-chucked in frustration, apparently of limitless supply.
Regulation changes in the 1980s immune TVs to be installed in shops, bringing in races and results direct from horse and greyhound tracks. (That killed the role of the fast-chalking "markers".) Cashiers, in the 1990s, got networked computers. (Thus the "settlers" also became redundant.) Plinky, pound-at-a-time fruit machines came in and then, around the turn of the millennium, the first modern gambling machines – "fixed-odds betting terminals", or FOBTs (pronounced fobtees), offering a digitised version of roulette as well as other arcade-manner games that could be gambled on. The major bookmakers also launched and invested in dotcom operations, but they were not particularly light-footed about it, and their profits were eaten into past an online-but service named Betfair that empowered its customers to act as bookies themselves, setting odds and taking bets from one another. Takings cruel.
At around the same time, betting on the industry's totemic sports, equus caballus racing and greyhound racing, dropped away. Staff observed that a younger generation of gambler had come to meet track racing as jargon-heavy, too favourable to those with specialist knowledge – dad'south fancy – and they preferred to bet on football game instead. Broadly speaking, there was less profit for bookmakers there: in football, unlike in a 15- or 30-rider horse race, only one side could fail to win. Takings roughshod further. A new slice of legislation, the 2005 Gambling Human activity, had enforced a limit of four FOBTs per betting store. The coin fed into these four machines became e'er more important to each store'due south viability.
Like characters in a certain type of sci-fi film, veteran staff now speak of a happier time – "earlier the machines". FOBTs, when they came, were accepting of much larger sums than the fruit machines that preceded them. Up to £100 could be fed in and gambled every twenty seconds, an amount afterwards curbed, under changing government regulations, to £fifty every twenty seconds. Losers lost faster, and losing became an identifiably scratchier thing. Staff explained: the customer who backed a as well-slow horse or a crap dog might afterwards rails at fate or the gods, or even the employees behind their counters. But they could not plausibly merits to have been cheated. Machine players brought with them a new paranoia. FOBTs are fixed, thus the name – stock-still-odds betting terminals. Over time they volition pay dorsum to customers 97.4% of the money that is put into them. However, information technology became a common matter for staff to exist defendant of rigging equipment, of dialling upwards losing streaks, of modulating people's electronic luck.
Many shop workers I spoke to had stories about looking on, impotent, as the machines under their charge were angrily destroyed past the customers who had been playing them. Worse, somehow, was when a motorcar was calmly destroyed. The deputy manager of a William Hill in Hull said: "You but sentry, in that location's nothing else to exercise. It'south normal. It's normal for people to smash up the shop." (A representative of William Hill said this was "rare".) A adult female working at an Oxfordshire Ladbrokes told me she had watched all four FOBTs in her shop go wrecked by a man swinging a stool; by the side by side twenty-four hours'southward trade, she said, her ruined machines had all been replaced. Co-ordinate to figures I have seen, the number of incidents of damage to machines in Ladbrokes branches rose steadily between 2010 and 2015.
A senior figure at Ladbrokes during this period became increasingly concerned by the state of affairs at shop-level "getting light-headed, getting crazy". They told me information technology was their belief that with the introduction of the machines, betting shops had more or less become "mini casinos". And how many casinos, they asked, got past without bouncers to cope with aggrieved gamblers? How many were run past individuals on their own?
3. Work alone, or don't work
Even after the markers were made redundant by Television set, and the settlers run off by desktop computers, it was rare for employees to piece of work in their betting shops alone; until information technology wasn't. While staff at William Hill were told by company bosses, oftentimes and emphatically, that they would not be asked to man branches by themselves at dark, Ladbrokes began to draw up what information technology called a "single-scheduling" policy in 2010. The policy meant that, subject to certain conditions, including a risk assessment of private branches and a tick-box check of employee competence, shops could be run past i person for periods of the day and night. In fact, in the majority of shops, there would exist a mandatory number of hours during which there could but be one person rostered to work.
Single-manning, as staff started to phone call it, was trialled and and then expanded around Ladbrokes' betting shops between 2011 and 2013. People at all levels of the company told me they were in no doubt as to why it was introduced. "It was a cost-cutting exercise," said an area director who was and so in accuse of fifteen branches in the s-east. A senior person in Ladbrokes' retail department at the time told me: "They recognised there were considerable savings to be made. Why double-human being a shop betwixt 10am and 1pm, or after 6pm, when information technology'southward quiet?"
Another well-placed source inside Ladbrokes at the time said they believed that past reducing staff from 2 to 1 in more than 2,000 shops, the visitor saved approximately £15m a year. The Mirror reported that between 2009 and 2011, Ladbrokes' annual wage pecker dropped past a tertiary. (Ladbrokes said this was a result of cuts in staffing at all levels, not specifically on store floors.)
At store level, a choice: work on your own, or risk your job. An area manager who worked in the north and oversaw the running of more than lx branches told the 200-odd employees under his accuse: "We can either shut this amount of shops and make this amount of people redundant, or we can single-man." The surface area manager remembered "a lot of emotion. A lot of staff felt information technology wasn't rubber." (Ladbrokes acknowledged that "some of our employees have strong opinions on working alone" and said information technology encouraged feedback.)
Though most shops would still be able to budget for a 2nd employee – a cashier on minimum wage – during the busier afternoon horse-racing hours, most Ladbrokes' store staff could at present await to work lone before midday and afterward 6pm. At first, those who agreed to single-man were paid extra – something like an additional 40p an 60 minutes. (The hourly pay for branch managers, who are known internally at Ladbrokes as client service managers, varies by area and historic period. In 2016, for a 23-year-onetime in the Wirral, it is £eight.51 per 60 minutes.) A source inside Ladbrokes' head office at the fourth dimension pointed out that the additional coin was soon stopped.
Internal Ladbrokes sources spoke candidly to me on the status that I not use their names. So did nearly of the dozens of betting shop workers I consulted for this story. Entering branches around the Great britain, and introducing myself as a reporter, I became used to a singular response: behind the counter their eyes would flick, instinctively, to the nearest CCTV camera.
Employees said they feared the sack if they complained in public forums about their working atmospheric condition. A Ladbrokes branch manager in Wales said that, when she posted a comment on Facebook in reference to the attack on Andrew Iacovou in Morden, she was contacted inside xx minutes by the firm's London office and told to delete it or she would enter a disciplinary process. A Ladbrokes employee in Birmingham reported the same. Many of the part-time-working students and other junior staff I interviewed insisted they did not expect to be in their jobs for always, that a pervasive industry gloom would soon flush them out – but that they needed adept references, so could their names exist left out of my story? I met working parents, working parents-to-be, second-generation staff who worked in branches with their parents, and other employees who could not risk dismissal, so asked to speak anonymously.
But they spoke. The area manager in the due north recalled his shame at telling staff who were unnerved past single-manning in its early phase that they were really in no extra danger. Back then, said the area manager, "I supported the company line, telling my staff: 'We need to practise this.'" He told any staff who felt unsafe working alone that "if at that place is a robbery, as long equally yous hand over all the money, it'due south unlikely the robbers will do anything to you. You're probably at no more risk of a robbery on your ain than you are with two people." A senior effigy at Ladbrokes told me that, from the introduction of single-manning in 2010 until the end of 2014, the company kept no figures recording whether a branch was single- or double-manned at the time of a criminal incident.
For a fourth dimension, said the surface area managing director in the n, single-manning "seemed pretty innocuous". Persuading his staff became easier when other major betting chains started to single-man. Employees at Betfred, Stan James, Coral and Paddy Ability told me they were all asked to work in their shops alone on a frequent basis. "For a while information technology did work fine," said the surface area director. "And then Andrew Iacovou happened."
4. The Morden branch
Andrew and Anita Iacovou first met inside a Ladbrokes. It was a Sat in Apr 1995, K National weekend. Anita had put an each-manner bet on a equus caballus chosen Party Politics. "Intuition," she said. When her equus caballus finished second, she took her ticket to Iacovou, who was working behind the counter. They started talking. Iacovou was 37 and had grown up not far away, in Due south Norwood. His father was Greek and his mother English. Anita was 34, second-generation Indian, with dark hair that she tied back in a knot. Iacovou must accept been distracted, chatting, because he shorted Anita on her winnings. When she went back to check – £33, wasn't it? – Iacovou asked her out. They married in 1999 and later had 2 sons.
In 2005, the family moved to a flat in Cheam. For five years, until 2010, Iacovou worked at a Ladbrokes a walk abroad, on Tudor Drive. So he was moved to the branch near Morden tube. "He told me he didn't experience condom at that place," Anita recalled. Twice, during Iacovou'southward evening shifts, the windows of his co-operative were cleaved by vandals. Anita's brother, Anil Punjabi, sometimes drove Anita and her sons to pick him upwards later on work. Simply after a while, Punjabi recalled, Iacovou asked him not to bring the family on these trips, fearing they would be vulnerable in the car exterior.
The sensation of safety is not a difficult currency; it cannot be passed around in token form. The Morden Ladbrokes had CCTV cameras inside it, a steel-framed front door with a magnetic lock, a latch-lock on the door between the shop floor and the service area, and an employee panic button nether the counter. As dozens of store employees pointed out to me, notwithstanding, it is even so possible to experience unsafe in the centre of a fortress like this, especially at night, peculiarly when unaccompanied.
The deputy managing director of a Betfred in Sussex was working on her own when 1 night she was threatened with rape by a frustrated car gambler. "He told me: 'You'd similar information technology.' I think thinking: 'In that location'south nowhere I tin can run.'" The Betfred deputy rang the constabulary that night, and again the following night, and again the night afterward that, because the aforementioned man kept returning to the shop as soon every bit her assistant cashier left for the evening. For a while she took anti-anxiety medication, she said, to be able to keep working, and and then she resigned. A female person Ladbrokes worker in Oxfordshire recalled being told by a customer: "I'yard going to come up back at x o'clock, when yous shut, and take you lot." She was 19. Employees, particularly women – of whom the betting-shop industry has an unusually high number, around fifty% in branches – told me they had often asked husbands or friends to sit in shops with them on evenings they were rostered to piece of work alone.
Certain branches in certain areas were from the beginning deemed too unsafe to be single-manned. The neighbourhood around Andrew Iacovou's Morden shop was non judged by Ladbrokes' risk-assessment squad to present any special danger. Role of the way Ladbrokes decided this was by considering unpleasant incidents that had already taken identify inside a shop. It rated such incidents past degree. Verbal corruption from a client was a "level one"; physical abuse a "level two"; physical abuse that resulted in hospitalisation a "level three". Suffer enough twos or threes and head office would take a shop off the single-manning list, at least for a curt while. Andrew Iacovou'south Morden co-operative had not had plenty level twos or level threes.
Anita worried for her husband. You did not accept to search especially hard for stories about violence in British betting shops at the fourth dimension. A machete robbery at a Betfred in Ashton-in-Makerfield in March 2013. A human being who had entered a Ladbrokes in Southampton in April 2013, and leapt over the counter with a kitchen knife. Betwixt them, the Iacovous had an arrangement: Andrew would telephone call Anita from his store, usually at about 8.30am, when he would have settled in, and then again at intervals through the day. On Sabbatum 25 May, Anita did non receive the expected call. She rang the shop and got no answer. She continued to call.
Trying to piece of work out what had happened later, police force investigators rewatched CCTV footage recorded in the shop. They saw Shafique Aarij struggle with Iacovou behind the counter. This was at 8.33am. They saw Aarij striking Iacovou with a hammer, multiple times. Blood spotted his face up, and he wiped at it. Within minutes of the attack Aarij had left the store. Examining the shop'due south safe, constabulary saw that its handle had received a hammer blow, but had remained locked. They knew from shop records that £296.86 had disappeared from the till. Aarij must have taken this when he fled, at effectually 8.35am.
8.45am. 9am. 9.15am. For between 45 minutes and an hour, nobody outside the Morden branch was aware that annihilation unusual had happened within. Andrew Iacovou lay in such a way behind his counter that he could not exist seen from the shop floor. Customers came and went. Someone played on ane of the machines. Eventually Kistensamy, i of the regulars, approached the counter and saw a body. He ran to the supermarket next door and raised the warning. An ambulance came. Iacovou was pronounced dead by paramedics at 10.28am.
five. "A tough year"
From branch to branch, rumours of a murder spread. Staff at a William Hill in Glasgow heard that an employee had been stabbed. At a Coral in Hemel Hempstead it was said that someone had been shot. In a Facebook group for industry professionals (the group is chosen "I No Longer Fearfulness Hell, I've Worked in a Betting Store" and has over 14,000 members) Iacovou was discussed within hours of his death. "What happened? Robbery gone wrong? Was he unmarried-manning?" The suggestion that Iacovou had lain undiscovered for so long was peculiarly distressing to people. This was i of their swell fears.
In the Facebook grouping, a give-and-take most possible strike action led nowhere. A hopeless, gravedigger humour prepare in instead. "If you're unmarried-manning and something happens," someone asked, "who will call for help?" Someone replied: "Ghostbusters." Members discussed the wild inconsistency with which glass security screens were installed in shops, many premises going without ("Show me one banking company that doesn't have them for cash transactions"). They compared notes about how easily a magnetically sealed front door could be forced past a determined intruder ("I counterbalance 11 stone and … "). They remembered the erstwhile days ("I started in '94 … habitation past five.30pm in the wintertime") and exchanged grim warnings about the future ("Next time it could be any one of y'all"). I especially sad rumour nearly Iacovou spread between them: that earlier he died, the manager had been able to printing the panic alarm beneath his counter, and that this alarm, while it had registered at Ladbrokes' central security office, had somehow gone unanswered.
I was told by well-placed sources that this rumour was accurate. When the alarm registered at Ladbrokes' security office, a live CCTV feed from the store was checked by a control room operator; just the operator saw only Aarij, not Iacovou. The operator also saw the cleaning materials that Iacovou had put out on his service area. It was causeless that Aarij was a cleaner who must have pressed the panic push button by mistake. (A Ladbrokes spokesperson said that after this killing, "changes were made with regard to how our security control room responds to incidents".)
In Cheam, Anita Iacovou heard nothing all morning. At 2pm, police force visited her at the flat. Ladbrokes' security chief came too, as did a second Ladbrokes' representative. Anita was asked to pace in to her chamber to speak with a policewoman. Anita said, instinctively: "He'due south in the hospital." The policewoman said no, Andrew was dead. Anita said, "You lot're joking," and the policewoman said no. The two children were at home. Anita called them into the room to tell them what had happened. There is not a lot more than she can remember of the afternoon. She knows she turned to the 2 Ladbrokes representatives, in the family living room, and asked: why was he ever left there alone?
Aarij, 21, was found by police five days afterward, hiding at a friend'southward home in east London. When interviewed at Sutton police station, Aarij accepted that he had gone to the betting store in Morden that morning to steal coin. That he had armed himself with a hammer beforehand. That he knew there was likely to be just ane person on duty. When police force asked why he had killed Iacovou, Aarij told them: "When the siren was ringing I got scared and I became upset and then I was not in my senses." Law charged Aarij with murder. At trial in November 2013 he was found guilty. In January 2014 he was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 26 years.
Ladbrokes paid a modest sum to Anita Iacovou and her family unit. (A well-placed source put it at £140,000.) Ladbrokes also launched a JustGiving page in Iacovou'southward retentiveness, kicking off donations with £10,000. The company paid for Iacovou's funeral, in July 2013. During Aarij's murder trial, Ladbrokes arranged for taxis to take Anita and her family to and from court. In its December written report for shareholders, the company described 2013 every bit "a tough year". Fragile mention was fabricated of the murder. It was called "a random violent assail".
The area manager in the north recalled: "The thinking was we sell information technology as a one-in-a-million anomaly that can never happen again." A senior figure at Ladbrokes at the fourth dimension confirmed this. "Those were conversations that were beingness had at senior level. It was taken as: 'The shell doesn't land in the same place twice.'" Another senior effigy at Ladbrokes at the time said: "There was a naivety."
Shortly afterward Morden, an internal investigation was launched, and Ladbrokes' single-scheduling policy found to be adequate. When a new branch opened in the Leicester area that year, it was added, similar hundreds of others, to the list of Ladbrokes that could exist run past one person. In early 2014, a woman in her 20s was interviewed for a chore at the co-operative. A court later imposed restrictions on the reporting of this woman's proper name – she would come to be known internally at the visitor every bit Miss X.
During her interview, Miss X asked about the possibility of the store being robbed. Weren't betting shops targeted all the time?
"They just desire the coin," Miss X was told. "Hand the money over and everything will be fine."
She got the job.
half dozen. The ascension of the machines
Keen to plow up new markets, bookmakers not long ago started offering odds on the chancellor'southward spring Upkeep. What color would George Osborne's necktie exist? How many times would the phrase "Labour's economic mess" be used? Really, though, nobody in the betting globe can look forrad to the bound, when chancellors generally shake downward this manufacture with indecent rigour. Betting firms take for some years paid an unusually high rate of tax – more than than £1bn annually. Between 2011 and 2015 the operating profit before tax of Ladbrokes' retail arm fell from £152.3m to £116.1m, and its tax obligations in that period only went upward. When Osborne's 2014 Budget raised the duty on takings from FOBTs from 20 to 25%, it was reckoned to cost the industry something like an extra £70m a yr. At the time, a Ladbrokes spokesperson complained: "The pips are squeaking."
And yet, these hundreds of branches of Ladbrokes, all those William Hills and Paddy Powers and Betfreds – they were everywhere, around Birmingham's Bullring, up and downward Aberdeen's Spousal relationship Street, Cardiff-wide, packed into London's boroughs. In a decade when the high street has come out strongly in favour of thrift and convenience, betting shops accept clung on as an unlikely modernistic super-presence. Of course, they are not much use to the thrifty. Merely they're not particularly convenient either – placing a bet is a transaction far more easily accomplished invisibly, online, than in a cloth shop, where you'll likely bruise in over a rug of abandoned bet slips (these boxy, overbright spaces ever tend to look equally if a major parade has just passed through) and in that climate of tension and boredom, biro out a prediction longhand. Win, and you'll take to go dorsum. If y'all mislay your niggling receipt, write it off.
They would once have been as densely packed as pubs, stopped at with the religious regularity of churches, taut with etiquette, similar a public library – but walk into one of United kingdom's 9,000 betting shops in 2016 and y'all will rarely find information technology total or fifty-fifty decorated. Who are all the shops for? Usually men. Their expressions often sullen. There's a William Hill in Hull in which, by unspoken agreement, Turks stick to one side of the shop and Kurds to the other. In one Ladbrokes in Sheffield, the white, Asian, eastern European and Somali customers mix well. Privately, informally, staff divide the modern class of betting-shop punter into two wide groups: the Older Gentlemen (in for the horses) and the Auto Gamblers. At Andrew Iacovou'south branch in Morden, there was an elderly regular from the Due west Indies, known to the others as Rocky, who didn't gamble on either horses or the machines. He just seemed to desire a place to be, and often cleaned up the discarded betting slips to help out.
Bookmakers buy lots of television advertising time to promote gambling through their websites and mobile-telephone apps, while their vast estates of retail outlets go just about unmentioned. Betting shops can seem marginal places today, even through the eyes of those who run them. Yet as pubs vanish, churches vanish, libraries vanish, the marginalised have not vanished.
Walking around near Morden tube, three years after Iacovou's murder, I wondered if I would be able to observe any of his sometime customers. I before long realised that I only had to speak to men on the street – those who looked to exist of retirement age and who looked to be doing zero in detail. They all knew Iacovou'south Ladbrokes. They had dispersed, since his death, to the Paddy Power a few hundred metres away, to the Stan James across the road, to the Ladbrokes on Tudor Bulldoze, to the William Loma further along the A24.
Who are all these shops for? Better to ask what they're for. When the Labour government in 2005 made law a maximum of four FOBTs per betting shop, it had meant to limit peoples' exposure to the machines. Four ought to be enough. But a betting house such equally Ladbrokes volition retain but about £2 from every £100 spent on its FOBTs. The machines are profitable only on a loftier-volume/low-margin basis; that is to say, after factoring spend on staffing, real estate, and renting the machines (well-nigh of which are endemic by third-party companies), there's no money in them unless they're played widely and played ofttimes.
An unintended effect of the 2005 Gambling Act may have been to encourage bookmakers to open more shops, and to move existing shops from the back streets to more visible parts of cities and towns. Locals in Swell Yarmouth recently campaigned to end a ninth betting store opening in the town centre. Last yr, residents of Thornton Heath tried to resist a 14th betting shop opening inside a unmarried postal district. In 2010, on Birmingham'due south Stephenson Street, a Ladbrokes opened side by side door to a Ladbrokes. At that place are 26 branches of William Hill in greater Hull, and when I asked why, a spokesman explained information technology was "to cater to local demand". (The Clan of British Bookmakers, or ABB, the industry body that represents the major bondage, said that the overall number of betting shops has really decreased in contempo years, and added: "Over 60% of existing betting shops have been trading from the same location for over 20 years.")
Afterwards 2005, bookmakers began to open their shops earlier in the morning time and afterwards at night. According to the ABB, this was to circulate and take bets on evening sporting events. But senior manufacture employees told me that information technology was to create actress hours of machine use – a feeling shared on shop floors. "4 walls around the FOBTs," was how i director described her branch. "We're chaperones for the machines these days," said another director, "anybody knows that."
7. The Ladbrokes experience
When I questioned the ABB about unmarried-manning and other working conditions in betting shops, a spokesman pointed out that those who work in petrol stations and newsagents often do so solitary. Other industry sources said that lorry drivers and taxi drivers worked solo, too. The comparisons were not unfair, but they did not take total account of the nature of betting shops, or their peculiar presence. Known to exist everywhere, known to accept cash. As probable as not staffed by a woman, more probable than not staffed lonely. They were often near pubs, nightclubs, takeaways, cab ranks. They stayed open tardily. E'er since the extension of opening hours, branch workers told me, they had been more than likely to have to deal with customers who were drunk or on drugs. They besides told me almost the other sort of hard customer: the not-customer, bewildered, unstable, otherwise drastic, drifting in because they could not reliably expect to idle anywhere else during unsociable hours without existence ushered on.
An employee of Ladbrokes in Birmingham, Harry Vale, was taken ashamed in 2013 to be asked by his expanse manager to commencement ownership food and potable for people who came into his shop. Not just gratis cups of tea simply full meals, from McDonald'due south or Greggs. "We had a ringbinder with their favourites written down," Vale said, calculation that the free nutrient initiative, dreamed up in 2013 and introduced in multiple branches around the Midlands, did non seem to him the wisest organisation when information technology came to the event of vulnerable or unstable people hanging around in betting shops. Merely, so, Vale was pretty new to the business at the time, and a great many industry conventions tin seem baffling to the uninitiated.
For instance, there is "banking", an manufacture-wide do by which betting-shop staff are asked to accept excess cash out of their safes then travel, often with thousands of pounds hidden about their person, to deposit it at the nearest banking company or Post Function. ("We're only supposed to accept £five,000 at a time," said a branch worker in Oxfordshire, calculation that she had once taken as much as £9,000 on a single trip, distributing information technology about herself in different pockets.)
And then in that location was "the Ladbrokes Experience", a company initiative launched in 2013, not long after the Morden murder, that would accept Ladbrokes staff come out from behind their locked counters and collaborate with customers. "Nosotros had to become to our teams and brief this," recalled the area manager in the north, "after Andrew Iacovou. That they had to be on the shop floor at all times. That the merely time they were immune to stay behind the counter was if they felt they had a very specific threat."
Mia Whitaker, 21 that yr, was working in a Ladbrokes in the Moor area of Sheffield. She had good reason to desire to stay behind her counter, her own Ladbrokes experience having been fabricated horrible by two regulars, young taxi drivers, who came in to play the FOBTs or to watch sport. When Whitaker passed them on the shop floor, she recalled, "they would try to touch my bum and my chest". They offered taunting comments and gestures, coming in at night and when she was alone in the branch.
Whitaker complained to her line manager, and later to Ladbrokes' central security office. (Ladbrokes told the Guardian: "If an employee raises concerns, we would investigate and where necessary take action.") The security office sent a trespass order to Whitaker'southward shop, meant for the two men, simply when it arrived by post Whitaker said none of her colleagues would nowadays information technology. Her manager suggested instead that he accept a placidity discussion with the drivers – they were regular customers. Whitaker didn't have the nerve to present the trespass order herself. The taxi drivers knew what her hours were, and where her bus stop was. Then for more a year after that, until Whitaker left the job, the men kept coming into their local betting shop, where they could expect to play the machines, or to watch the evening darts, and to harass the 21-year-old who was nominally in charge.
Looking dorsum on this subsequently, subsequently a flavor of independent and uncontained chaos in the betting shops, Whitaker would have reason to be relieved that things only went so far.
8. The wild westward
One weekend, the manager of a Ladbrokes in Scotland was robbed past two men while she was solitary in her branch. She later described the experience. "I had a hammer," she said. "One had a screwdriver. One of them pinned me in a corner with a hammer to a higher place my head, while the other one emptied the till. To me it felt like hours. I was thinking: 'I'm not getting home from here.' I thought of the man in London. I idea: 'They're taking me out in a box today.' I thought: 'I'm never going home.'"
In June 2013, a month subsequently Andrew Iacovou'due south killing, a Ladbrokes in Cardiff was robbed by two men, one conveying what constabulary described every bit "a small axe". In July, a Ladbrokes in Newcastle was robbed by a man with a seven-inch vegetable knife. In Baronial, a Coral employee in Ewell, Surrey, was robbed in their branch past two men, claiming to be armed. In September, thieves threatened to "chop upward" a Coral employee in his branch in Gorton, Manchester. They stole money and a plug-in phone.
Branch workers around the land described to me a feeling during this flow that they were being kept out on the store floor as a hindrance, but no real impediment, to incident; on display like scarecrows, and nigh as formidable a deterrent. "Pleasure doing business with y'all," a thief who robbed a William Hill in Whitstable in 2013 told staff on his way out. A member of a gang that robbed a Ladbrokes in Darlington in September that year returned to the same shop, the same solar day, to claim the £134 he had won on a FOBT while casing the joint. The aforementioned calendar month, a man robbed a Ladbrokes in Welwyn Garden Urban center past walking in with a bottle wrapped in wires and tape and telling the woman staffing the shop it was a flop. She hid behind a door while the thief put the bundle on the counter and left with £500. After the bomb squad had been and gone, and the thief traced and arrested, it transpired he was out on licence for some other robbery, of another Ladbrokes, with another lone-working employee, in 2010.
"It had become like the wild west," said a senior figure within Ladbrokes at the time. "Robberies with shotguns. Staff and customers getting browbeaten up. People getting hospitalised. We were getting staff coming back to work [after incidents] with PTSD. They were shell-shocked." The Morden killing had already confirmed in this employee the opinion that nobody was realistically condom to piece of work lone in betting shops. "But I was non allowed that view. I said [to my superiors]: 'This is non good.' I said: 'This is wrong.' But I was not immune that view. So you make your noises and you get on with your job."
Others made noises. A petition, launched online, "to make it compulsory for high-street bookmakers to have two members of staff nowadays during opening hours", gathered 3,824 signatures by November 2013. Nothing inverse, and people got on with their jobs.
In Feb 2014, the Labour MP for Islwyn, Chris Evans, raised the thing in a Westminster debate. Evans had once been a low-level betting shop employee himself. He proposed that the regime might consider legislation to insist that staff in shops be equipped with panic alarms, so that they could at least call for help if they got into trouble. The Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies, responded first, voicing concerns well-nigh "putting too much obligation on betting shops". (Davies has more than than once been accused by newspapers of receiving personal benefits from links to the gambling industry – allegations he has denied.) Davies said that "we could end upwards, not with single-manned betting shops, only with no betting shops, and nobody in work". Evans said: "All I am looking for is elementary, common-sense, cheap things … "
The debate puttered out.
March 2014: a Stan James in Oxford, 1 armed robber saying to the other, of a alone-working employee made to kneel on the floor, "Shoot him. Shoot him." April 2014: a Paddy Power in Cheshunt, robbed past armed men in balaclavas on 1000 National Sabbatum. July 2014: a Ladbrokes in Leyland, Lancashire, a female employee locked in the toilet while the store was robbed of £ii,500. September 2014: a William Loma in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, a man carrying a piece of metallic pipage. October 2014: a Coral in Glasgow, a man conveying a piece of paper. "I don't want to hurt you, but give me the money, I've got a knife," Kenneth Duncan wrote on a betting slip that he handed to xx-year-old Bister Johnstone. "I'm 5ft 6in. I wait my historic period," Johnstone told me. "I call back the guy noticed a young girl on her own in the store and saw it equally a perfect opportunity." Duncan fabricated off with £375. Johnstone could not sleep for months afterwards, and eventually entered therapy.
Spokespeople for the bookmakers were ofttimes careful to stress to the public, later such robberies, that non much money was kept in whatever one location. "It is never as much every bit people call up," said a Coral spokesperson, afterwards the 2013 robbery in Ewell. There were strict limits on the amount of greenbacks kept in branches – not more than than £2,000 in a Ladbrokes, that effigy varying slightly from chain to chain. Limits were strictly enforced – thus the compulsion for employees to pad themselves with cash mid-shift and scurry to the nearest bank – though branch workers questioned at times just what these limits were in place to protect. It must have been with express relief, for instance, that bottom-rung staff at William Hill read in a recent brochure for shareholders that the company had managed to reduce the average amount of cash lost during robberies – downwardly something like £fourscore per raid on the year.
9. "I can't believe I'm alive"
Subsequently years of proud disobedience, in 2014 William Hill informed its staff that they would now be asked to work lonely in their shops during the evening. A spokesman told me: "Every bit the over-the-counter function of the business declined, and costs and taxes increased, it made sense to operate to the right level of staffing." A Hull-based deputy director recalled: "We were told over fancy sandwiches in a hotel."
William Loma described staff reaction equally "mixed". To the deputy manager and her colleagues, the move felt like a stunning reversal. The policy was rolled out across 2-thirds of William Hill's shops. By October 2014, executives at the company felt warmly enough towards unmarried-manning to defend information technology from possible regulation. In a consultation with the regime'south Gambling Commission about betting shop licence weather, William Hill stated it would exist "an undue and unjustifiable interference for regulators to dictate staffing levels" in betting shops. The deputy director of a William Hill in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, had not long before been released from infirmary, his face unrecognisably hobbling and his lung punctured after an attack by two machine gamblers who would not leave when he tried to close up his shop. He had been alone. "The blame for this criminal act should lay firmly with the perpetrators," a William Hill spokesman told me, adding: "It would be incorrect to use this example to make a point on solitary working by and large."
That spring, the Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, Tom Restriction, invited representatives from Ladbrokes to his Westminster part. One of Brake'south constituents had raised concerns about the manufacture's response, or lack of it, to Iacovou'south death. The trio of Ladbrokes reps huddled with Brake around a tabular array at Portcullis House and explained a possible new safe initiative. Special software would be installed on betting store computers, Brake was told, programmed to alert Ladbrokes' fundamental security office if staff did not apply their mouse or keyboard for 45 minutes. In the coming together the MP asked the representatives if they would consider more substantial measures, such as abandoning unmarried-manning. Brake recalled being told no: "The finances didn't stack up."
The mouse-movement initiative was "a nonsense", a senior figure within Ladbrokes at the fourth dimension admitted. "A lot of things can happen to someone in 45 minutes." (It was never implemented.)
Multiple sources suggested that more tangible measures were being considered, such every bit portable panic alarms. Too equally being equipped with a push to contact Ladbrokes' central security function, the alarms contained motion sensors. Lie flat for more than than 15 seconds and an alarm would be triggered. In theory, no staff fellow member wearing an alarm would suffer Iacovou'south fate of prolonged not-discovery. Devices were distributed to about half the company's shops in 2014 and 2015, at showtime to the locations deemed well-nigh at risk of violent incident. Miss X's Ladbrokes, in the Leicester area, was non amongst those branches to go alarms.
She was working the evening shift on Friday v June 2015. Information technology was a quiet night. TVs in the store broadcast strange equus caballus racing and a tennis match on clay at the French Open, simply there were no customers in to risk on it. Miss Ten whiled away the time behind the counter on her phone. At eight.58pm, a little more than an hour before endmost, a regular she recognised called Vijay Singh came into the shop and started playing on the machines. He wore a black T-shirt and faded jeans, and had his dark hair spiked with gel. Singh played for about 25 minutes, gambling and losing around £400.
At 9.24pm, he signalled to Miss X that there was something incorrect with his motorcar. Miss X opened the locked door that secured her service expanse from the shop floor, and checked the auto. She found no fault. She returned behind her counter and picked up her phone. Minutes after, Singh once again said in that location was a problem with his machine. This time, when Miss Ten emerged, he grabbed her by the wrists. Singh pushed her backwards through the service area and forced her into a bath at the rear of the building.
Twenty minutes passed.
At 9.49pm, Singh emerged from the rear of the store with blood on his jeans. On his mode towards the exit, he tried to open the till backside the counter, but could not. Instead he picked upwardly a bag of loose coins and left.
Some other xx minutes passed.
Nobody was aware that there had been an attack in the branch until Miss X regained consciousness, at around 10.10pm, and dialled 999 herself. Hiding in the bathroom, she told the dispatch controller she had been beaten, throttled, threatened with murder and sexually assaulted. Her nose was cleaved and her cervix was fractured.
Waiting for officers to arrive, she said to the controller: "I'm and so scared." She said: "He was on the machines. I recall he lost a lot of money." She said: "I'm in and so much hurting … I'm bleeding so much … I tin can't believe I'one thousand live."
The controller asked if there was everyone else in the shop with her.
"No, I'one thousand agape not."
One-half a 2nd's pause. "You're just working at that place on your own, are yous?"
"Yeah."
10. A judge's verdict
It was the week leading up to another Grand National weekend, in April 2016, when I visited Anita Iacovou in Cheam. Her youngest son answered the door. Anita apologised for not existence able to stand; she was suffering from a medical condition that made mobility hard. Beside her in her chair in the front room she had packets of boxed medicine, a pile of letters and a tabloid newspaper, turned to the runners and riders for the big race. Anita said she was still fond of betting shops, and that she had been downwardly the route to the nearest one that forenoon. Reaching for the tabloid, she pointed out her pick for the Grand National: number eight, an outsider with odds of 40/1 chosen On His Own.
The Morden Ladbrokes where her husband worked had not reopened since the day of his decease. Sheets of stake plastic had been put up in the windows where the posters had once been. Anita knew what had happened in that other Ladbrokes in the Leicester area in the summertime of 2015 – the Daily Mail had telephoned her afterwards to ask her stance. She had followed developments in the Midlands since then, with pity and even some guilt. Anita recalled that, at her husband's funeral in July 2013, she had asked the priest to speak a few words virtually the fact of Andrew working alone when he died. Senior figures from Ladbrokes were in attendance that day. At that place was a definite thickening of the atmosphere, guests recalled, when the priest sermonised virtually the value of coin confronting the value of a homo life. The family expected something substantial would change after, and when it didn't, and then the assail on Miss X happened, Anita said that Andrew's death had been denied its only possible positive outcome.
As we spoke in her front room, Ladbrokes was well-nigh to stage its spring AGM. Without knowing it, Anita had been on a list of possible "problem attendees" at these gatherings ever since 2013. Co-ordinate to a source, information technology had been feared that she would show up, request awkward questions; but actually Anita's fight was quieter than that. She only wanted to feel that her husband's death had meant something.
William Hill continues to single-man its shops. A spokesman told me the company was "continually monitoring" the situation, but information technology was "very unlikely" they would all be dual-manned again. Betfred, Coral, Paddy Power and Stan James continue to single-homo. Ladbrokes, in the weeks after the set on in the Leicester area, quietly suspended single-manning in surrounding shops, but information technology was soon reinstated.
The company's CEO, Jim Mullen, decided last twelvemonth that unmarried-scheduling would become voluntary for staff working afterwards 7pm. This opt-out policy would be extended gradually beyond the Ladbrokes' estate and extra staff hired, employees were told. They could look information technology in every branch by January 2016. In January 2016, the date for completion was pushed back to Oct 2016. Scepticism had already set in backside counters about that word "voluntary". Some had already tried to opt out of single-manning, they told me, and had been pressured into reconsidering. "Threatened with being relocated," a manager in n Wales reported. "It's a option that doesn't actually seem similar a choice," said a director in Edinburgh. (Ladbrokes said: "We would never tolerate victimisation of an employee for raising a concern of whatsoever nature.")
Vijay Singh was arrested on seven June 2015, ii days after his attack on Miss Ten. He was in hiding at his brother-in-police force's house, where bloody jeans were found stuffed in a cabinet. When Singh's brother-in-law was interviewed by police, he disclosed that the first matter Singh had said after coming out of Ladbrokes on the night of the attack was: "I've but killed somebody." Only later did Singh learn Miss X had survived the ordeal. When he was brought to trial at Stafford crown court in May 2016, charged with attempted murder, sexual assault by penetration, and theft, Miss 10 testified for the prosecution.
The trial lasted just over ii weeks – ample fourth dimension for more incidents to occur. In Manchester, police force pursued an eastern European human who had spent "several hours" playing a FOBT in a city-heart Ladbrokes, waiting for the manager to be left alone, before pulling a knife. In Ware, a meaning Ladbrokes employee was robbed in her store. Meanwhile, in Stafford, at the finish of a draining trial, the jury in the case was sent out to deliberate.
They were gone for hours. The court's public gallery emptied, and a representative from Ladbrokes, who for days had been transcribing the events of the trial on a laptop, went for his dejeuner. I walked to the nearest betting shop – a Ladbrokes on Stafford's main shopping parade, next to an off-licence and below a solicitor'south office. At the dorsum of the branch, behind the counter, a young employee read a newspaper. He had a chunky plastic panic alarm clipped awkwardly to the collar of his red polo shirt. On the shop floor, an old man waited for the two o'clock at Kempton. By the door were the four FOBTs, one taken upwardly past a middle-anile human playing a puzzle game called The Heaven'southward The Limit, another taken past a thirtysomething playing roulette. The other machines were idle, their high-definition screens programmed to flash through routine announcements: ads for the games that might be played on them, and bald warnings nearly the risks of playing these games incautiously. 1 car flashed a message, black-on-cherry-red, that told customers not to gamble when upset. The other said in capital letters: "STAY IN CONTROL."
Afterwards 5 hours' deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict. Singh was guilty. Judge Michael Chambers, presiding, described the crimes as "horrendous" and said that Singh could expect "substantial imprisonment". Preparing to dismiss the jury, Chambers thanked them for their time and said that, equally he was sure they would hold, ane aspect of the case had been especially troubling. How, Chambers wondered aloud, could Ladbrokes e'er have allowed a young woman to be working on her own that nighttime? The judge called it "foreseeable" that someone like Singh would take advantage of such a situation. "In my view," Chambers said, "Ladbrokes' actions in this example tin can be viewed equally extremely negligent."
The approximate so turned from the jury to expect at the public gallery, where the Ladbrokes representative sabbatum backside a laptop. "I hope," the judge said, slowly and clearly, "you will tape that." The representative typed.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/31/big-gamble-dangerous-british-betting-shops