Staring out from multiple videos on YouTube is a figure in a menacing Phantom Of The Opera-style mask.
Behind the persona is drill rapper Cassiel Wuta-Ofei. There is a reason why, beyond sheer bravado, his face is hidden.
Back in 2014, when Wuta-Ofei was in his late teens, he was slapped with a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) banning him from performing for two years because, the police said, his lyrics glamourised crime.
‘Youngins [youths] shoot when I say … click clack that mac [Mac-10 sub-machine gun]’, was a line from one of his ‘songs’ that went viral.
Wuta-Ofei got around the ban by rapping incognito and calling himself LD. In 2021, he was released from his sixth jail sentence — the most recent for drug dealing — when he was picked up at the prison gates by a Rolls-Royce.
Chris Kaba was not the martyr portrayed by his family and certain Labour politicians
Staring out from multiple videos on YouTube is a figure in a menacing Phantom Of The Opera-style mask. Behind the persona is drill rapper Cassiel Wuta-Ofei
Justice for Chris Kaba protesters gather outside the Old Bailey after Sergeant Martyn Blake’s not guilty verdict
Old habits die hard, however. Wuta-Ofei still wears the same mask when he makes drill videos even though, at the moment at least, he is not barred from doing so.
Why are you reading about him today? It is because the rap outfit he helped found all those years ago — he was widely acknowledged to be the de facto leader — was called 67 (pronounced ‘six seven’). It still is.
It is also a criminal gang, we now know, whose 50 or so known members, according to a police intelligence report, are ’embedded in a culture of drug supply, serious violence, firearms and knife possession’.
Chris Kaba used to be one of them. Kaba, 24, was not the martyr portrayed by his family and certain Labour politicians —even after police marksman Martyn Blake was cleared of his murder this week they persisted with that narrative — but a cold-blooded gangster with a history of violence.
He was fatally shot two years ago only after his Audi Q8, a getaway car in a gang-related attack a few days earlier, failed to stop in Streatham, south London.
Sergeant Blake and his family had to go into hiding and face a lifetime under threat, after a £10,000 bounty was put on his head in revenge for Kaba’s death.
Far from an innocent victim of racist police brutality, Kaba epitomised a ruthless new generation who now make up the ranks of Brixton-based 67.
They run parts of their south London fiefdom ‘like they own it’, to quote residents and businesses we spoke to in the aftermath of the Chris Kaba controversy, administering street beatings and operating protection rackets.
The most shocking thing about all this is that 67’s ‘reign of terror’ (the description of locals), accompanied by tit-for-tat shootings and stabbings, has become endemic not just in London, but in cities across Britain.
The story of 67, however, does not begin with Chris Kaba but with Wuta-Ofei, now in his early 30s, and five childhood friends from Brixton Hill who came together in around 2012 to showcase a genre of hip hop music characterised by dark, violent lyrics, often inspired by real events, which had emerged in Chicago.
Few could have predicted the infamy that lay ahead.
In 2022, Deliveroo rider Guilherme Messias da Silva, who had moved to the UK from Brazil two years earlier, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time
Kaba was actually a leading member of one of south London ’s most notorious gangs , who had been involved in a nightclub shooting just days before his death
Chris Kaba (pictured) was shot by Sergeant Martyn Blake through the windscreen of an Audi
The 67 name is derived from a fleeting, previous incarnation, when they were the On Sight Gang, the letters O and S being 6 and 7 respectively on a phone keypad. His entourage began calling him LD, he recounted in a magazine interview, because they thought he looked like a character in the critically acclaimed film, City Of God, about the growth of organised crime in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.
The videos they produced, monetised on social media platforms and championed by BBC Radio One DJ Tim Westwood, were a sensation but attracted the attention of the police. Shows were shut down, tours cancelled, and material removed from YouTube.
In 2016, at the height of their notoriety with Wuta-Ofei — the man in the mask — 67 were nominated for the Best Newcomer at the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) Awards.
Not long afterwards, they were featured on the BBC’s Newsnight programme where they were introduced as ‘the biggest band in the UK drill scene’ who were ‘giving rare access to their lives’.
The ten-minute report posed the question: ‘Does drill music glamourise and encourage violence? Or are the artists just expressing, through music, the experience of many young people growing up in difficult city environments?’
Viewers were taken on a tour of the New Park Road area of their neighbourhood against a backdrop of spiralling gun and knife crime in the capital.
At this point, Wuta-Ofei already had previous convictions for possession of crack cocaine and heroin with intent to supply and had been caught with a knife when the car he was in was stopped by police near Brixton Hill.
On camera, he insisted that he and his friends had left their criminal pasts behind them.
‘It doesn’t just affect you when you go to jail,’ said the rapper, one of six siblings brought up by their mother and grandmother.
‘It affects other people. That’s what you learn. Once you go to jail you start learning life’s a bit more like chess. You’ve got to play every move right. Everyone learns by their mistakes round here.’ But the following year, in 2019, he was jailed for four and half years for his part in a major county lines drug operation supplying crack cocaine and heroin (again) from London to Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.
Two years later, in a video filmed from the back of the Rolls-Royce sent to meet him when he was freed from jail, he expressed surprise that he had been found guilty and repeated the claim that 67 were not connected to violence or organised crime. The statement was somewhat undermined by the fact that eight of the 16 people convicted over involvement in the county lines operation were members of 67.
Wuta-Ofei was subject to restrictions even after he was released.
He was banned from certain parts of London, including Lambeth, and prohibited from having an unregistered SIM card — a tool of the trade in the criminal world, and something which will remain in place for eight years.
Yet, back in Brixton, a truly disturbing picture emerges of the 67 gang’s ongoing grip on the area.
Chris Kaba is seen sat inside an Audi Q8 in Streatham, South London, on September 5, 2022
The police bodycam footage from multiple angles shows chaotic scenes as Mr Kaba was shot
‘The police have no power here,’ reveals a corner shop owner in the vicinity of New Park Road, who did not wish to be identified. ‘It is the 67 gang which owns this area.
‘I know of other shops similar to mine who have to pay them protection money. I keep myself away from all that, and they have not asked me, but I have been there when the money exchanges.
‘The 67 gang are the law. If you have a problem, they sort it. If you cross them, you get sorted. Almost every crime or killing here is linked to them.’
One shopkeeper was beaten in the summer, another businessman claimed, for not paying a £500 protection bill. ‘That is the cost,’ he said.
Another suffered the same fate over a debt only a few weeks ago. ‘I have a young son, and we live in a flat,’ said a mother who witnessed the punishment being meted out. ‘I am terrified.’
The 67 gang, described in the police intelligence report mentioned earlier as the most heavily armed in the Borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, has been embroiled in a ‘self-publicised conflict’ with rival groups in a deadly drugs turf war.
One such rival is the neighbouring Claptown gang (‘CT’), based around Clapham High Street, a feud that goes back more than a decade.
In one flashpoint, 67 posted footage of alcohol being poured over streets signs in Clapham as a mark of disrespect. This came after Claptown had made a video disrespecting 67.
This is the never-ending cycle of bloodshed which has existed in parts of London for as long as anyone can remember.
Inevitably, innocent people have become collateral damage because there are no boundaries between gangland Britain and civilised society.
In 2022, Deliveroo rider Guilherme Messias da Silva, who had moved to the UK from Brazil two years earlier, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The 21-year-old died after being knocked off his moped — and flung a considerable distance — by two cars involved in a high-speed chase near Brixton.
One of the drivers, Lamar Scott, 27, immediately jumped from the wreck of his MG and tried to flee the scene on foot but was chased by a gunman from the other vehicle and shot dead in the street.
The shooter has never been caught but the talk in Brixton Hill is that someone from 67 was responsible.
In response to Blake’s acquittal, London Mayor Sadiq Khan issued a statement in which he pointedly said he ‘respected’ the jury’s verdict, but made no mention of Sergeant Blake
The footage shows armed officers running towards Mr Kaba’s car which was hemmed in
A grab from footage issued by the CPS of the initial follow of the Audi driven by Chris Kaba
Scott, son of boxing promoter Dean Whyte, was a drill rapper known as ‘Perm’ and was believed to have had links to the Claptown mob.
In the aftermath of Chris Kaba’s death, he recorded a new track which is said to have ‘dissed’ Kaba. The 67 gang, in this version of events, retaliated.
But it was poor Guilherme Messias da Silva who also paid the ultimate price. ‘It had all the hallmarks of the 67,’ said a local source. ‘That is what everyone here believes.’
The gang has been linked to a string of murders over the years: the stabbings of Dwayne Simpson, 20, in an alleyway in Brixton in 2014 and 18-year-old Cheyon Evans and 17-year-old Yousef Beker in 2019, to name but three.
Sometimes these real-life acts of violence, including murder, are documented on insidious ‘scoreboards’ posted on social media.
Chris Kaba was a ‘core member’ of this world.
As has been reported, just six days before he was killed, he shot a rival gang member at a Notting Hill Carnival afterparty in an east-London nightclub packed with 1,500 revellers.
CCTV captured the moment that Kaba, already wearing a balaclava, spotted his target and pulled up the hood of his top before being passed a bag containing a gun which had been smuggled inside the hangar-style venue in Bethnal Green.
Kaba slipped his hand into a glove, gripped the weapon and opened fire, hitting his target in the leg, then chasing him down the street, firing three more bullets, again hitting him in the leg.
The victim, who survived, was a member of 17 (pronounced one seven). Like the Claptown gang, 17, who operate from Wandsworth Road, were the arch-enemies of 67.
On the day before Kaba’s death, he was suspected of being involved in a drive-by shooting when a shotgun was fired near a primary school in Brixton.
One of the vehicles involved in the incident was the same Audi Q8 he was driving when he was shot by Sergeant Blake.
That shotgun, police believe, is still in the hands of the 67 gang.
‘They have ready access to firearms, manpower, money from drugs, and are committed to violence against those who they take issue with,’ said Patrick Gibbs, KC, who represented the police marksman at his trial at the Old Bailey.
One of them is the unjustly vilified police officer Martyn Blake — a man now living in fear.
Additional reporting Isaac Crowson and Tim Stewart.
