Posted on 01/22/2012 7:43:10 PM PST by Stoat
Victims of the £1million crimes carried out by Thomas Curtis, 29, and his gang last night voiced fury at the display in Elm, Cambs, which includes a replica ATM and a Post Office sign.
Friends and relatives "honoured" the robber by leaving rose-edged tributes at the grave that recall his trail of violent crime.
Dad-of-two Curtis was jailed for his part in a year-long spree which saw his gun-toting gang steal and damage property worth £1million.
He was freed after five years of a 12-year sentence, but was found hanged in his cell this month, 11 days after he was locked up again for breaching conditions of his release.
Mourners sent tributes to the cemetery in Elm aboard FIVE pick-up trucks — sparking outrage among the gang's victims.
Charlotte Mackie, 40, who works in an Essex pub where the mob took an ATM, said: "It's sick. It's fair enough that they want to remember him — but this is almost bragging about how good a criminal he was.
"I can't see why they'd make a statement honouring the bad things he did."
Among the tributes are a life-size cashpoint — complete with a "bank message" on its screen, a floral replica can of tax-dodging red diesel, a £20 note, booze bottles, a giant cigarette pack — and even a Post Office sign.
Curtis and his six-strong gang carried out dozens of raids on post offices and shops across East Anglia — arming themselves with sawn-off shotguns, baseball bats, pickaxe handles and sledgehammers. Clad in balaclavas, they stole a host of vehicles to smash into cash machines and shop fronts — terrifying both store staff and customers.
Another shop worker, based in Cambridgeshire, said: "Seeing his crimes glorified is a disgrace and will upset a lot of people."
Mike Rivers, 65, whose son was hit with a pickaxe handle by the thugs during a 2004 raid, said: "These people are delusional if they think this is a fitting memorial. It's sad."
A total of 32 robberies, 67 cashpoint thefts, 42 smash-and-grabs and 126 vehicle thefts were linked to the gang, who at one point carried out up to three raids a day.
Curtis and five others were jailed for a total of 74 years after admitting conspiracy to commit armed robbery, conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary and burglary at Ipswich Crown Court in 2006. Judge David Goodin said the gang had planned their raids with "paramilitary precision" and struck terror into victims and witnesses.
Elm Parish Council chairman Coun John Brand said they would not remove the tributes unless the local community complained.
Curtis's family have claimed he died after medication was taken from him when he arrived at Norwich Prison last month.
The Prison Service is probing the circumstances of his death.
Translation: "If I stick my neck out and remove all of this, the "family" and friends of this thug will firebomb my house and murder my family"
*****************************************
This "display" reminds me of the funerals and gravesite tributes given to Mexican and South/Central American drug cartel kingpins and crime syndicate bosses as well as Eastern European organized crime funerals, where everyone is terrified of them and so nobody publicly objects to these elaborate glorifications of their crimes.
One naturally wonders if this thug's "family" and friends would be so terriblty cocky if Great Britain allowed the "common" people to effectively defend themselves from criminal thugs to the same degree as American citizens are able. It's not so easy to terrorize an entire community when the community can shoot you in the head.
“Thought you might be interested” Ping.
Could somebody maybe add a dummy of the fellow hanging himself? That might lend a perspective.
Oh, and I took these silly “tributes” at first to be intended as ironic — looks like the items thus iconified got their symbolic revenge upon him, it seems to me. If it’s really “you go, guy” then yeah, it should be cleaned up like so much litter. Maybe the flowers can be “repurposed” in the process.
Little gas ... little matches - problem solved.
I am interested and thank you for remembering me, I hope you and your family had a very nice Christmas and a good new year and hope all is well with you and your family.
I have family sadly which would praise the likes of this bozo and know full well from where I come from that he would be regarded as a good person.
That in itself shows how pathetic society has become back in England.
People today or many of them regard ripping off people as a good thing and I only hope that it does not wage itself into here.
When I look back at what I left and how my kids are today then I know I made the right decision.
You're quite welcome, and I could hardly forget a thoughtful, insightful and gracious Gent such as yourself, the sort who makes Free Republic a site that I come back to year after year :-)
I hope you and your family had a very nice Christmas and a good new year and hope all is well with you and your family.
We did thank you and I hope that the same is true for you and yours :-) No major problems here....I can always complain but all complaining does to is cause a person to be labeled a complainer ;-)
I have family sadly which would praise the likes of this bozo and know full well from where I come from that he would be regarded as a good person.
Very sorry to hear that. This would be in Manchester? A fair distance from the sites of the crimes from this thug in Cambrdgeshire and East Anglia. Would you say that this sort of attitude of openly and publicly glorifying criminality is fairly commonplace in the larger urban areas throughout the U.K. ?
Would you agree with my guess that the Council members are terrified of violent reprisals if they were to publicly object or take it upon themselves to remove these sick "tributes"?
If the law-abiding public is terrified of speaking up against thugs like these, do you think that anything would change if an American-style gun ownership system were made available to decent, law-abiding Brits.....or are there other cultural factors which would cause this sort of insanity to continue?
What do you think the ultimate answers are, or is there no hope for Great Britain?
Somebody on the inside didn’t like him too much.
Maybe somebody should add some rope to the graveside display.
“I have family sadly which would praise the likes of this bozo and know full well from where I come from that he would be regarded as a good person.”
It’s somewhat unfair to extrapolate so much about Britain from a Sun article and the fact that some of your family are unable to judge right from wrong.
I lived in the US for years and saw far more hero worship of criminals than I ever have here, so it’s important to remember what Margaret Thatcher taught us:
“. . . there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”
A pint of petrol spread about that display appropriately, and a match, would seem to solve the problem and send the right message.
GMTA - I posted the above before looking at the comments.
We FReepers are a practical group.
exactly where do you come from and exactly when did you move to America?
I’d love to know because the UK has gone right down, the attitudes has changed to not caring and the days of Maggie have gone, hell most I know want her dead and have said they will drink to celebrate when she goes so exactly where do you come from?
There is no hope at all unless attitudes change IMHO.
There is another freeper called yank in the UK or someting like that and they have said the same as me.
You can’t even walk down the road without some scrote saying”what you looking at>
England has become a very rough place to live and even that freeper has said he had no idea how England was until he lived there.
“exactly where do you come from and exactly when did you move to America?
I’d love to know because the UK has gone right down, the attitudes has changed to not caring and the days of Maggie have gone, hell most I know want her dead and have said they will drink to celebrate when she goes so exactly where do you come from?”
I come from the West Midlands, lived in California from 1998 to 2002 (Huntington Beach to be precise) and now live on the Isle of Wight.
Your ex-pat view of the UK is not one I recognise. There are definitely people who represent your view, but they are a vocal minority, not a representative cross section. I’m pretty sure there are just as many Americans who hate Ronald Reagan, but that doesn’t make me lump all Americans into the same category. Perhaps you lived in a particularly bad part of the UK where socialists thrive and thus, so do benefit scroungers and criminals, but it’s not like that where I live. We’ve got a lot to do after 13 years of socialism but the work has started. I sincerely hope you don’t have a further term of Obamasocialism to put up with. :)
LOL You live in the Isle of Wight, hardly a source or a reflection of England or Britain.
Hell it’s like another country from Manchester, London, Liverpool, Sunderland, Birmingham, Salford, Tamworth, even Portsmouth etc
I told some of my family and mates what you said and they all laughed too, Isle of Wight LOL, yea that’;s really a source of the mainland
It’;s an island where most go to have an holiday, hardly any crime or anything.
Get tot he mainland and go to the cities, go to the burbs
I live in the suburbs of Birmingham. I can walk down the street without people saying ‘what you looking at’. I just did in fact.
I’m excited for you but I’m guessing I;’m younger than you and walking aorund in the day light during business hours of the day for the white collars is one thing and I grew up on the streets of Salford , going to football etc then went into the military.
Once I left I saw the scrotes all over the place, FFS did you even see what happened last year and the riots, tell me how many were stabbed, beaten to a pulp around the bull ring etc, how many were hit with a broken bottle or glass?
Don’;t try and tell me we still have pin strip suits, say jolly old chap because that era has got old and is now lining the post offices for their pensions on a Thursday
You only have to talk to another freeper on here who a yank and now lives in Sunderland who was telling people on here how England really is and it is not some old JOLLY OLD eNGLAND
Why do you only deal in binary opposites? Why is something either jolly olde England of yore, or some kind of apolocyptic wasteland. Truth is it’s neither of these things. I’m wary of yearning for some halcyon days that never existed. Some of Orwell’s descriptions in ‘the road to Wigan pier’ could easily be passed off as today if you didn’t know the context.
Are things brilliant? No, and they never have been.
Are things mind-numbingly awful? No, and they never will be
but the fact remains that society in England has got a lot worse and the disregard for life and property has grown.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.