Cliff Hobbs was a Premier Division South London armed robber from Bermondsey, known in the underworld as Mumbles. He was jailed for the 1984 BBC payroll heist, broke out of a prison van at gunpoint in 2003, and was hunted across Europe before his capture in Spain. Then, deep inside the prison system, he did something nobody expected. He helped halve the violence.
It began on the morning of 10 June 2003, outside Inner London Crown Court. A routine prisoner transfer. Ten inmates sat in a Securicor van, and two of the names stood out. Cliff Hobbs and Noel Cunningham. Just after nine, as the van waited at the gate, two armed men made their move. One was dressed as a postman. The other was heavy set and calm, flanking him. They were not there to deliver letters.
The Securicor driver got out to open the gates and was set upon. Witnesses in a nearby social security office said the men were yelling at the guard to open the door. He said he could not unlock the hatch that held the prisoners, and when he refused he was shot in the back of the knee. A key was then produced. Armed officers raced to the scene and a police helicopter was scrambled, but Hobbs, Cunningham and a third man escaped and fled with the gunmen. They ran through Newington Gardens, once the site of public hangings, and into a residential road where police believe a getaway bike was waiting. The other seven prisoners stayed in the van, terrified, before being taken into court.
Detective Superintendent Mick Allen of the Flying Squad called the breakout audacious. It appeared, he said, to be a sophisticated and organised escape. He stressed that the people involved were very dangerous, and that if Hobbs and Cunningham wanted access to firearms, they could get it. These were not petty criminals. They were organised, connected and professional. Yet years later, from deep within the prison system, this former top-table South London villain would help build something far more powerful than his criminal past ever was.
The Boys from the Blue
To understand Cliff Hobbs you have to look at where he came from. The tough, bricked estates of Bermondsey. A working-class battleground where opportunity was scarce and reputation meant everything. In those parts, armed robbery was not just a temptation. For some it felt like the only way out, a rite of passage carved in concrete.
Cliff and his mates grew up in abject poverty. Hand-me-downs, empty cupboards, and a world that did not expect much from them. The sticking plaster that held together his cracked glasses said more than words ever could, a quiet badge of hardship worn without complaint. What they did have was a fascination with the faces who, in their eyes, had made it. Men who had climbed out of the gutter, not by degree or inheritance but through grit, fearlessness and firepower. The Boys From The Blue. A long line of local faces who swapped dead-end jobs for heists and armed hold-ups. Men who tried to escape their surroundings with a sawn-off shotgun instead of a schoolbook.
Cliff’s nickname, Mumbles, came from the way he spoke, slurred and almost reluctant. According to old school friends, a scaffolding collapse when he was a boy left him badly injured and impaired his speech. It also made the academic route near impossible. He was not unintelligent, far from it, but school was not built for kids like him. A life of crime felt inevitable, and when he took his first steps into it, it suited him. If academia had rejected Mumbles, the streets welcomed him with open arms. Armed robbery came naturally. He was strategic, calm under pressure and totally committed. By the time the 1980s arrived, Cliff Hobbs had become one of the most wanted faces on Scotland Yard’s radar, a high-profile South London villain playing in the Premier Division of the underworld.
The BBC payroll heist
In March 1984 a meticulously planned quarter of a million pound security van ambush played out on the doorstep of one of Britain’s most secure institutions, the BBC headquarters in Portland Place. Unlike most armed raids of the era, this one came with an unexpected twist. It was caught in full motion on hidden police cameras, turning a real-life heist into what one barrister called the real thing on film.
The security van, operated by Centurion Security, was making a routine delivery of wages to Broadcasting House when two robbers rushed the guards. One, dressed as a chauffeur, approached with a revolver in hand. What the raiders did not know was that detectives were already in position, armed and tipped off. Within seconds they pounced. The footage, later shown to the Old Bailey jury, showed the robbery unfold in real time. It was no reconstruction. As one prosecutor bluntly put it, it was the real thing.
Four men stood accused. Among them were Clifford Hobbs, Andrew Koritsas, Martin Winter and Terence Evans, alleged to have conspired with Dennis Sutton, a crooked security guard who had supplied key details of the van’s movements. Sutton was the linchpin. He admitted feeding the gang inside knowledge, and without him the operation might have been impossible. Hobbs, who had allegedly rushed in to help hold up the van, was chased and tackled by an off-duty police officer and former rugby player, Ian Duncan. He was found with a loaded revolver in his waistband. The claim later made in court was that Hobbs assumed the firearms were imitations, and that no force or fear was intended. Evans and Hobbs had also been seen scouting the area beforehand, watching earlier deliveries and mapping the drop-off from an A to Z, a sign of how carefully the whole scheme was choreographed.
As the case unfolded, another twist emerged. The jury convicted the men of conspiracy to steal but cleared them of conspiracy to rob. Because of Sutton’s role on the inside, the crime was ultimately classed as a theft rather than a robbery. The sentences were still harsh. Hobbs received twelve years, Koritsas eleven, and Sutton, the guard turned informant, was jailed for five. There was one final surprise. Even with the case played out on camera, one juror found the men not guilty. It did not change the result, but accusations of jury nobbling were whispered.
The supergrass
Michael Michael, a former hairdresser and unqualified accountant, became a target for customs detectives in January 1998 when the agency launched Operation Draft. He had been identified as part of a drug ring based at an industrial estate in Hertfordshire, smuggling cannabis and cocaine into the country using cars, a coach nicknamed the Fun Bus, and a tanker. When officers arrested him that April, Michael was wearing body armour and brandishing a gun. Inside the property they found eight hundred thousand pounds in cash and several tonnes of drugs with an estimated street value of more than eleven million pounds. They also found a ledger in which Michael had documented every transaction, and among those named was Mickey Green, nicknamed The Pimpernel and widely regarded as one of the country’s most notorious criminals.
Michael, it turned out, was already working as an informant for Scotland Yard. He was said to be paying his handler up to ten thousand pounds a week in return for information of great value to his own criminal enterprise, and claimed the officer turned a blind eye to the smuggling. Across 250 debriefing interviews he gave up everyone. He informed on criminal associates, and even on his own mother, accusing her of laundering money for him. Among those said to be financially linked to Michael was Clifford Hobbs. Once word reached Hobbs of the betrayal, he was gone, and he knew he needed to keep out of reach of the customs officers and police who would be hunting him. He allegedly used complex passport fraud to stay under the radar, spending time in Barbados and Venezuela to stay a step ahead.
The investigative journalist Michael Gillard covered the case in his hard-hitting book The Untouchables, a forensic record of corruption and injustice in Scotland Yard. Gillard wrote that Michael had told his handlers a man named Chris McCormack approached him to arrange a safe house, and that McCormack and Cliff Hobbs were targeting a man named Hector Harvey for assassination. Harvey, Gillard writes, was a professional criminal who, like Michael, secretly worked as an informant for the Flying Squad. One morning, as Harvey pulled back a tarpaulin from his motorbike, he spotted a device wired to detonate and narrowly avoided death. Neither McCormack nor Hobbs was ever charged over the attempted bombing, but the episode offers a window into the level of betrayal running through the ranks.
Mickey Green was eventually arrested and charged, with Michael Michael as the crown’s star witness. His credibility collapsed in court when it emerged that his handlers had allowed him to keep a million pounds of his criminal earnings, and the case fell apart. In 2001 Michael was sentenced to six years. He never returned to his luxury Hertfordshire home. Instead he vanished into witness protection, this time under official cover with a new identity and the full protection of the state. For Hobbs, the collapse of the Green case brought some relief, but he stayed abroad for several more months. When he finally came back it was personal. His mother had fallen ill, and he wanted to help care for her. His route home was both clever and oddly comical. Still anxious about arrest, he travelled to Disneyland Paris and boarded a train straight into London, reasoning that fewer checks and plenty of families made it ideal cover for a fugitive trying to slip under the radar.
On the run, and the last laugh
After the prison van ambush of 2003, Hobbs was due in court over a one and a quarter million pound armed theft conspiracy in Brixton, a high-level plot involving serious money, alleged firearms and a wider network. Once he and Cunningham were pulled from the van, they vanished within seconds. A third man, Troy Peters, would later turn himself in. A witness from Bermondsey, Joey Bond, described the moment he heard the gun go, saw two men running, and came back to find the guard rolling on the ground covered in blood. Scotland Yard described both escapees as extremely dangerous and urged the public not to approach.
The tabloids claimed Hobbs had gone to ground in Spain. The truth was more global. He first slipped the net through the south of France, Portugal and Guyana, and only later surfaced in Spain, blending in among the British underworld expats along the Costa del Crime. While authorities hunted him across continents, whispers in criminal circles suggested he had not gone quiet at all, and that he was allegedly involved in tobacco smuggling while on the run.
By 2007, in Malaga, Hobbs was finally tracked down and arrested, betrayed by a friend. His capture was a major coup, and after the last escape the authorities were taking no chances. This would be no budget extradition on a commercial flight. They secured a private Learjet with an armed escort, high-level logistics and classified flight details. Nobody wanted a repeat, and most importantly nobody was supposed to know where they were landing. Officials were so wary that Hobbs might have inside contacts that they kept the destination secret from almost everyone.
Hobbs had not forgotten how the game worked. Calm as you like, he turned to one of the officers and suggested he already knew the landing location. He named it, the same undisclosed airfield that had been used years earlier to extradite his old friend Kenny Noye. He was bang on. Panic swept through the escort, and in a mid-air scramble they were forced to divert the aircraft to Biggin Hill instead. It cost time, money and plenty of stress, and all Hobbs had done was suggest an airfield. There was no breakout and no team waiting. Just a final, cheeky reminder to the system that he still understood how it worked. It would prove to be a turning point in his life.
Redemption: One Postcode
Clifford Hobbs was sentenced to twelve years for possession of a firearm and six years for the prison escape, to run concurrently, with a further six years for conspiracy to steal ordered to run consecutively. That brought the total to an eighteen-year indeterminate sentence, and the indeterminate part would prove crucial later. By the mid-2000s the postcode gang feuds tearing through London’s streets were bleeding into the dispersal system, the highest security wings of Britain’s prisons. Stabbings, beatings and power plays became part of daily life, and young men were trapped in a cycle of violence that did not pause at the prison gates.
Hobbs, once a headline name for a high-profile jailbreak, was now serving time as a Double A Category prisoner, the top tier reserved for lifers and escape risks. In HMP Belmarsh he crossed paths with Andrew Pritchard, one of London’s most infamous drug smugglers, who in 2003 had been caught up in the notorious cocaine and coconuts case. By the time the two men became acquainted, both had changed. The thrill of crime had faded, and they found themselves asking deeper questions about what came next and what kind of legacy they would leave. They also saw what the authorities were struggling to manage, a new generation of inmates loyal to their postcode crews and carrying that same rage into the wings.
Together they came up with a bold proposal. Take the men with real standing inside, not just older cons but respected names, and turn them into mentors. No fake titles and no preaching. Just real talk, one to one, landing to landing. They called it One Postcode, a symbolic gesture to blur the boundaries that fuelled the violence. The message was simple. Inside, survival meant unity, not division. The system said yes, and it needed structure.
Years earlier, while on remand, Pritchard had met a sharp-minded prisoner named David Frederick, known as Freddy. After Pritchard was acquitted and released, he set up Reformed Studios, a fully equipped media and training hub in Essex. Freddy joined him, earned formal qualifications in conflict resolution and mediation, and began delivering accredited courses inside. These were not just lectures but hands-on training, working directly with prison staff to build a new wave of One Postcode mentors, giving them the language and the tools of de-escalation and peer leadership. It was no longer just a concept. It was a curriculum. Outside the walls the project gained traction, backed by respected names like the Bowers brothers from Canning Town’s Peacock Gym, ex-cons turned community leaders who had used boxing to rebuild their lives.
Then came the results. Violence across the dispersal wings dropped by half. There was still tension and still ego, but the script had changed. It was no longer cool to follow the same old pattern. For Hobbs it became a mission. The same energy he once poured into criminal enterprise he now channelled into mentoring. He did not glamorise the past and he did not chase headlines. He got on with the work, quietly and consistently, seeking redemption through action rather than words. Even after his release he stayed the course, focused on steering young men away from the road that had cost him two decades of freedom.
There is a hard postscript. Many of the pioneers behind these programmes have found themselves trapped by a different kind of barrier, built not from prison bars but from policy. Restrictive sentences like Imprisonment for Public Protection, the indeterminate frameworks that still haunt the system, mean men like Hobbs are prohibited from returning to prisons in a mentoring role after release, despite being instrumental in changing the culture while inside. It is a sharp contradiction. Allowed to lead change under the state’s custody, but blocked from continuing that mission as a free man. Charities like the AP Foundation, driven by lived experience and front-line credibility, keep proving that reformed high-level offenders are among our most valuable assets in the fight against youth violence. If we are serious about breaking the cycle, policy has to catch up with reality. Years earlier Hobbs had escaped a prison van at gunpoint. His true escape came much later, when he broke free from the mindset that put him in that van in the first place.
Cliff Hobbs: your questions answered
Who was Cliff Hobbs?
Cliff Hobbs, known as Mumbles, was a Premier Division armed robber from Bermondsey in South London. He was convicted over the 1984 BBC payroll heist, escaped from a prison van in 2003, and later became a respected prison mentor.
What happened in the 2003 Cliff Hobbs prison escape?
On 10 June 2003, outside Inner London Crown Court, an armed gang ambushed a Securicor prison van. One raider was dressed as a postman. A guard was shot in the leg, and Hobbs and Noel Cunningham were freed and escaped. Hobbs was eventually recaptured in Malaga in 2007.
What was the BBC payroll heist?
In March 1984 a gang ambushed a security van delivering wages to the BBC’s Broadcasting House. The raid was caught on hidden police cameras. Hobbs was convicted of conspiracy to steal, not robbery, because of an inside man, and was jailed for twelve years.
What is One Postcode and the AP Foundation?
One Postcode was a prison mentoring scheme Hobbs helped create with Andrew Pritchard to reduce postcode gang violence in high-security wings. Violence across the dispersal system fell by half. The work is now carried on by the AP Foundation.
Where is Cliff Hobbs now?
He has been released but remains under a restrictive indeterminate sentence that bars him from returning to prisons as a mentor. He continues to support the reform work of the AP Foundation from the outside.
About our sources: this account is the result of independent research using publicly available court records, news archives and verified sources, including Michael Gillard’s book The Untouchables. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy and fairness. We contacted the foundation to ask Cliff Hobbs for comment but he could not be reached, and we thank Andrew Pritchard, who allowed us to reference material relating to the AP Foundation’s ongoing rehabilitation work.