UK’s most evil family made slaves ‘fight for fun & dig own graves’ in filthy caravan pits as they enjoyed life of luxury
LIVING in squalid, filthy caravans and surviving on scraps of leftover food, they endured a life of terror.
Beaten and threatened with death, vulnerable victims of Britain’s most evil family were forced to work around the clock as their slave masters lived a life of luxury.
The Rooney family – travellers worth an astonishing £4million – enjoyed holidays to Barbados, Australia, Egypt and Mexico, drove high-performance BMWs, underwent cosmetic surgery and spa days and even shelled out on Manchester United soccer school sessions.
Their lavish lifestyle was earned off the backs of 18 slaves forced to labour for their businesses, repairing properties and tarmacking drives.
Police originally identified as many as 60 potential victims – with one told to dig his own grave if he didn’t sign a bogus work contract.
Eleven members of the twisted family were jailed in 2017 with sentences totalling 79 years.
It emerged this week that one of the Rooneys’ victims – held for almost 26 years – waited so long for compensation that his captors had been freed from jail.
His family successfully sued the Government for £352,000 for denying him adequate compensation.
Fifteen victims have died without ever seeing a penny of compensation.
Details of the case have thrown the UK’s human trafficking problems back into the spotlight, with at least 100,000 victims enslaved in the country.
Now, an ex-British Army intelligence officer and church minister who helped six men escape the Rooneys through a homeless church project in Lincoln has compared the family to warlords.
Retired Rev Jeremy Cullimore, who served during the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995, told how the family recruited ‘enforcers’ to beat captives – and would force slaves to fight each other for entertainment.
Rev Cullimore, who was put under police protection for a year while the case went through court in 2017, said: “The conditions they were living in and they way they were treated was on a par with the Omarska and Manajaca camps in Bosnia where prisoners were starved and appallingly, badly treated.
“They would arrange for their slaves to fight each other for entertainment. One man had his teeth knocked out when hit by a breeze block.
“I had a conversation with a man who had been stabbed and left by the roadside because they felt he had not served them as well as he might have.
“One of the worst people I came across while serving in Bosnia was a man who got his thrills, not by causing pain to other people, but by getting other people to cause the pain and I mean pain.
“He was getting them to tie people to logs and put them through sawmills. The Rooneys got that sort of pleasure out of controlling other people to do their work for them.”
The retired Reverend, who used his Army skills to persuade victims to talk to police through a food project at his church, said the Rooneys had aspirations to become a major criminal gang.
He told us: “What they did was really all about the exercise of power as a turn-on. The Rooneys would wander around Lincoln, getting things for free and so on because (they’d think) ‘I’m a Rooney, I’m different, I’m special.
“There was this aura of threat about them and they were quite capable of doing serious damage.
“I heard they had aspirations and engaged with other criminal organisations with a name to build a bigger and better empire.”
The Rooneys hand-picked vulnerable victims with addictions and, in many cases, learning difficulties and forced them to work around the clock.
They targeted people living on the streets and in hostels and shelters, offering employment for food and accommodation.
Labourers were forced to live in shabby, dirty caravans or in stables next to dog kennels, with little or no access to basics such at hearing, water and toilets at the Rooneys’ traveller camps in the hamlet village of Drisney Nook, on the Lincs-Notts border and at Washingborough, just outside Lincoln.
Some were forced to squat in woodland, while electricity was ‘dangerously’ tapped from a nearby pylon.
The sister of one man told how her brother – who won his compensation case this week – had his teeth smashed with a concrete block and was forced to dig his own grave.
She told how John Rooney, 38, made him sign a bogus work contract after digging a hole.
She said: “My brother said to him ‘how much further do you want me to dig down? And he (John) said ‘keep digging’ and at the end of the conversation said to him, ‘If you don’t sign this contract, that’s where you’re going, in that hole.”
‘Merciless’ thugs
Jailing the gang, Judge Timothy Spencer QC said the Rooneys were “chilling in their mercilessness.”
The family wore Rolex watches and lived in ‘immaculate gleaming’ homes while their captives lived in dilapidated caravans and were taken to jobs in blacked-out vans with no idea where they were going.
The Sun has seen a Lincolnshire County Council safeguarding review into the scandal which details the heart-wrenching experience of the Rooneys’ slaves.
One man, called ‘Fred’, spent 15 years living in a caravan with boarded-up windows with no water or toilet.
He told report authors he wanted to escape but was always “watched and followed” by the Rooneys who even went with him to collect his benefits.
He said: “I got belted no end of times – they used to use fists or a hammer.”
Fred, in his sixties with mild learning difficulties, was paid £20 a day on just two occasions but was otherwise paid in cigarettes or bought fish and chips.
Married couple ‘Charlie M and Janet’ were befriended by the Rooneys and signed over their £60,000 house to the family, who convinced them to move on to one of their sites.
Janet, who had a mental illness, was under the care of a social worker and a psychiatric nurse who regularly visited her caravan and claimed to have raised concerns.
The report said the local authority safeguarding adult team had no records of her referrals.
The authors, who said police identified a staggering 60 potential victims, said there were “missed opportunities” in saving the victims.
King & queen of crime
The slaves, aged 18 to 63, were freed after raids by Lincolnshire Police and the National Crime Agency in 2014.
Martin Rooney Senior, 64, and Bridget Rooney, 62, were described as the ‘patriarch and matriarch’ of the enterprise.
He was jailed 10 years and nine months while she was given seven years.
Criminal psychologist Naomi Murphy said the violence shown by the Rooney’s could indicate brutality within the family.
She told The Sun: “People who are capable of that kind of action are able to disconnect from the humanity of others. There’s a hardness about them and a sense of possibly enjoyment having this power over other people.
“Typically people develop that when they’ve been quite harshly treated themselves.
“In this particular case they have tormented people over a very long time and I’d say they would have to have had that sort of brutality in their own family background.
“I would expect their own experiences growing up were pretty harsh which would have made it easier to identify with the aggressor, rather than the vulnerable people involved.”
Hidden slaves
More than 100,000 people are believed to be living in enforced slavery in Britain today, Parliament heard last year.
Calls to modern trafficking charity Unseen reveal that calls for help – through their telephone lines and special app – rose by more than 19 per cent in 2023.
The charity recorded 11,700 calls and contacts last year compared to 9,779 in 2022.
In the first quarter of this year, 4,524 potential victims were referred to the Home Office – an increase of nine per cent compared to the last quarter of 2023.
According to the National Crime Agency, Britain’s version of the FBI, UK nationals are the most commonly identified victims, followed by Albanian, Vietnamese, Romanian and Chinese nationals.
Fight for compensation
One of the Rooney family’s victims waited so long for compensation that the family had served their jail sentence by the time he received it.
The man, known as Victim A, was held by the family for a staggering 26 years in a caravan at Drisney Nook, on the Lincolnshire border with Nottinghamshire.
The court offered him just £12,428 under the Proceeds of Crime Act after the Rooneys were told to hand over £1million to the Crown in 2019.
His family decided to sue the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and won £325,000 in government compensation, funded by the taxpayer, which his sister subsequently said would pay for his round-the-clock care.
Fifteen other men held as slaves alongside him passed away before they could claim the same level of compensation.
His sister told the Guardian how she thought her brother was dead after vanishing for decades and was stunned when cops called to say he was alive.
She described her brother, who had mild learning difficulties, as being “easily manipulated” and told how the Rooneys forced him to work 12-hour days, seven-days-a week for 26 years.
She said he was beaten with a rake when he overslept and had his teeth smashed with a concrete slab.
Talking about her brother’s ordeal she said he was asked to sign a bogus work contract by John Rooney.
She said: “That contract would have been out of his understanding. And John Rooney said to him ‘you’re going to work for me for the rest of your life.
“My brother replied, ‘oh, I don’t know about that. Prior to that conversation, John Rooney had actually made him dig a hole. And my brother said to him, ‘how much further do you want me to dig down?’
“And he (John) said ‘keep digging’, and at the end of the conversation he said to my brother ‘If you don’t sign this contract, that’s where you’re going, in that hole.”
Lawyer Jamila Duncan-Bosu, from the Anti-trafficking and Exploitation Unit, charity said victims held captive face difficulty in getting compensation.
She told us: “The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority isn’t fit for purpose when it comes to victims of modern day slavery despite it being incredibly common.
“We have clients waiting up to five or six years for claims to be considered.
“There are many difficulties victims face in demonstrating they meet the CICA scheme rules and should be awarded compensation. A common problem is the two-year time bar on claims.
“To be successful applicants are required to report to police within two years of injury, but if you’re trafficked and beaten up and kept by your traffickers, there’s a gap between injury and reporting to police. They are often told they don’t meet the requirements.
“Nine out of ten victims who make an application themselves are refused and they need legal advice and assistance and, in very many cases, psychological reports to demonstrate they meet CICA scheme rules.
“There are few lawyers who specialise in human trafficking cases. Most victims don’t have money to pay lawyers in the private sector and legal aid can be difficult to secure.”
A government spokesperson said: “This was an awful crime and our thoughts remain with the affected individual and his family.
“The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority provides compensation to people who were injured as a result of a violent crime and has paid out over £165million to victims in 2023/24.
“We recognise that payment can never fully compensate for the injuries suffered but it can often help brave survivors move on with their lives.”
An NCA spokesperson told The Sun: “Offenders target a range of vulnerabilities and there is no one model of exploitation.
“Migrants may be targeted based on a lack of economic opportunity, their immigration status, poor language skills or lack of alternatives.
“UK nationals or people settled here may be targeted based on debts, drug or alcohol dependency, homelessness, or lack of awareness of their rights or alternatives.”
Andrew Wallis, CEO of Unseen, said: “We see all age ranges, all nationalities, men, women and children and I think that speaks to the issue of vulnerability.
“Exploiters are not fussy about what the nationality of an individual is. They don’t mind. THey look at a person purely as a commodity, as a money making machine for them.
“About 60 to 65 per cent of victims in the UK are found in forced labour situations to work for little or no money. We find them in the agricultural sector and distribution, within the hospitality sector, in car washes, nail bars – often hidden in plain sight.
“We also see them in restaurants, takeaways, warehouses, factories.
“Some people are forced into criminality through things like county lines or are forced to beg or shoplift.
“We see victims trapped in trafficking for sexual exploitation which is systematic rape. We also have people in domestic servitude, so in private dwellings, being forced to work with no pay who are not free to leave that situation.
“This is all about making money through the brutal exploitation of human beings.”
If you suspect someone is a victim of human trafficking call the Modern Slavery hotline on 0800 121 700.