At the time he was freed from four years in slavery at a McDonald’s near Cambridge, Roman Landa had earned his tormentors more than £90,000. “It wasn’t easy just to run away,” he says, when I ask the obvious question. “They had taken my passport and locked it inside a safe. I didn’t speak English and was afraid to go to the police. They said they would kill me if I tried to escape.”
Landa, a 45-year-old from the Czech Republic, is speaking to me via an interpreter at a secret location in the UK, and he is crying. We take a break while he goes for a smoke. His nerves are shot, his future uncertain, his bravery unfathomable. Because while “freed”, he is not truly free. He could be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. Landa is one of a group of at least 16 trafficked men and women forced to work at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Caxton, Cambridgeshire, a car wash in north London and two pitta bread factories in north London and Hertfordshire, for up to 100 hours a week, while their Czech traffickers lived in luxury, bought designer clothes and drove fancy cars — all from wages stolen from their victims over a seven-year period. Police estimate the traffickers made up to £400,000 a year from the operation.
Landa’s enslavement came to an end in 2019 following a tip-off from the Czech police to the modern slavery unit of the Metropolitan Police. “The tip-off came from a girl who had been first trafficked from the Czech Republic by the gang in 2012 when she was just 17,” says Detective Constable James Kelly of the Met’s modern slavery unit. “She had escaped and told Czech police what was happening in Cambridge and London. Twice before she had run home to her mother. And each time her mother sold her back to the OCG [organised crime gang] for about £100.”
The girl, whose identity is being kept secret for her own safety, had been brought up in a children’s home away from her mother, with whom she had a “bad relationship”, according to Kelly. How it got to the point of such abject cruelty is not clear. Before her first escape, aided by an emergency passport issued by the Czech embassy in London, the gang had the girl working at one of the pitta bread factories. When they got her back, they put her to work at a car wash, and after her second escape they forced her into prostitution.
“The OCG treated their victims as commodities,” Kelly says. “They called them ‘horses’ and had no regard whatsoever for their welfare. One of the victims was shot in the leg with an air rifle for being disobedient and was hospitalised, but she didn’t speak English and so the gang lied and told her that doctors had said if she stayed in hospital her leg would have to be amputated. Fearing that, she checked herself out — and they put her back to work. The pellet is still in there and she has mobility problems. These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with.”
After lengthy delays because of Covid and the 2022 barristers’ strike, the gang were handed prison sentences in December 2023 at Cambridge crown court and October last year at Southwark crown court in London. The results of the 2023 hearing could not be reported until the one in 2024 was complete. The gang members were found guilty on a number of charges including holding a person in slavery or servitude, arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to exploitation, and fraud by false representation.
The gang leader Zdenek Drevenak, 38, from Karlovy Vary, a spa town near the border with Germany, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. His brother, Ernest, 46, was given 12 and a half years. Ernest’s girlfriend, Veronika Bubencikova, 46, received ten and a half years. Their fellow gang members Jiri Cernohous, 49, and Martin Slovjak, 47, were sentenced to nine and four years respectively. Zdenek’s girlfriend, Monika Daducova, 44, is awaiting sentencing. They will all serve their time in the UK.
“I am glad they’re finally in jail, but that won’t get back the years they took from me,” Landa says. “They are pigs and they don’t care about anyone but themselves. All they care about is money, money, money.”
The Met officers say they were horrified by what they found and where they found it — how was it possible that a franchise of a multinational organisation such as McDonald’s could be employing slaves in 21st-century Britain?
The Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2015, defines slavery as: “The recruitment, movement, harbouring or receiving of children, women or men through the use of force, coercion, abuse of vulnerability, deception or other means for the purpose of exploitation.” It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Globally, the International Labour Organisation says there are 27.6 million people in enforced labour. Nobody knows exactly how many people are suffering as slaves in the UK, but Justice and Care, a charity that works with police to free and support victims, puts the number at about 100,000. It has supported 641 “survivors” since 2019. Of those, 54 per cent were men and 45 per cent women. Most had been forced into labour or sex work, but also into domestic servitude, criminal activity and, in one case, attempted organ harvesting.
“It’s everywhere — in sex work, cannabis farms, the care sector, construction, agriculture, hospitality, nail bars, fishing, car washes, clothing manufacture — anywhere where money can be made from the labour of other human beings,” says Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy, head of the Met’s modern slavery unit. “OCGs usually prey on the vulnerable and the desperate. They are promised work or a better life in the country to which they are trafficked, but then their papers are taken away, they are told they must work off a fee for their passage and they are charged for accommodation, food, even ‘security’, which is all taken from their wages.”
The Czech traffickers followed this modus operandi to the letter. “All the slaves say their passports were taken from them and they lived in constant fear of physical violence,” Furphy says. “One was threatened with a hot iron to the face. Another was strung up and battered with sticks until he wet himself.”
Roman Landa’s nightmare began in the summer of 2015. Suffering from drug addiction, he had been homeless in Karlovy Vary for three years before being approached by a woman who said she could get him to England, where there would be a job for him. She was one of a number of “spotters” employed by Zdenek Drevenak, the muscle-bound gang leader, to find vulnerable people to exploit. Police say these spotters were paid as little as £40 when they identified a target.
“I had nothing to look forward to except a cold winter on the streets,” says Landa, who describes himself and his captors as Gypsy. “I thought anything would be better than that, so I said yes. I could get off the streets, earn some money, get a roof over my head. It seemed like a good opportunity.”
He was put on a bus at Pilsen, in the west of the Czech Republic, by Zdenek and sent to London, where his brother, Ernest, was waiting for him. He was then driven to Cambridge and put in a room at Ernest’s house with five others. Later they were moved to a scruffy mobile home on a caravan site in Caldecote, south Cambridgeshire. “It was very cold and there was no heating or water,” Landa says. “We did at least all have a bed and sometimes I was allowed to have a shower at Ernest’s house. But outside of work we did nothing. We kept to ourselves.”
All six were working at the Caxton McDonald’s, a franchise that was run at the time by Claude Abi-Gerges, a Cambridge-born businessman, now 53.About 80 per cent of McDonald’s restaurants are run by franchisees, who pay the company 8 to 18 per cent of their annual turnover in rents, plus other fees for equipment, marketing and so on.
Ernest Drevenak’s girlfriend, Veronika, filled in Landa’s application forms for the job and, in common with the gang’s other slaves, sat in on his interview with a manager. Neither the interviewer, who did not speak Czech, nor Landa, who did not speak English, could be sure she was interpreting accurately. “She kept all the forms and paperwork, so we didn’t even know how much we were supposed to be earning,” Landa says.
Astonishingly, nobody at the McDonald’s raised any questions when the wages of all six employees were paid into Ernest Drevenak’s bank account. Later the conspirators had the wages of all the slaves paid into an account in Landa’s name — but it never stayed there for long. According to the police it was transferred to Drevenak’s account “within minutes”.
Neither, it seems, did anyone who worked at the drive-thru express surprise that the Czech workers all had the same address, didn’t speak English and “volunteered” for unfeasibly long hours. “We were working at least 12 hours a day, six days a week,” says Landa, who worked at the back of the restaurant making burgers. “We were all very tired and would do nothing but sleep when we weren’t working.”
I asked McDonald’s why the workers at the Caxton branch were allowed to work such punishing hours when the legal maximum under the EU working time directive (to which the UK is still a party) was 48 hours. The company did not respond.
Landa explains how the gang controlled his money. “When they first set up a bank account for me [before funds were redirected to Drevenak’s account], Ernest would drive me to the bank and tell me to memorise a sentence in English, such as, ‘I would like to withdraw £900,’ and I would get the money and he would take it. I was really afraid of him. He would give me small amounts — £40 for myself and £100 for enough petrol for two weeks, because it was my job to drive the others to work. He said he would look after the rest of my money for me. But I never saw it. At the beginning I would say to myself, ‘I haven’t got much money, but at least I’m no longer on the streets.’ Then after a while it would hurt — I’d be working so hard for so little, while they were buying gold jewellery and enjoying life. But I was too scared to say anything. If I did, Ernest would pick me up and beat me.”
On one occasion a drunken Ernest punched Landa, splitting his lip, because he wouldn’t have a drink with him. Another time he beat Landa because he wanted to turn down a promotion at the McDonald’s — why would he want it when he wouldn’t be seeing the money? Drevenak forced him to take it because it meant more money for the OCG.
Detective Sergeant Chris Acourt of Cambridgeshire police’s modern slavery unit says the victims felt they had nowhere to run. “It was like being held with invisible handcuffs or invisible chains,” he says. “They could come and go from their address as they pleased. They went to and from work, but the exploiters knew they had nowhere else to go. They didn’t speak English. They didn’t know how to engage with the authorities here. More often than not, exploiters say, ‘The police are in our pocket. If you go to them, they’ll just bring you back to us. And if you do that, we’ll mete out some punishment for doing it. We will harm you or your families.’ ”
I approached Claude Abi-Gerges, who was the franchisee of the Caxton McDonald’s when the gang first began putting its victims to work there in 2012, for an interview. He did not respond. He sold the franchise in 2016, three years before the slavery ring was exposed, and went on to set up Capital Arches Group (CAG), of which he is managing director. CAG now has more than 30 McDonald’s franchises in the London area. The company’s latest accounts record a turnover of almost £163 million and a gross profit of £108 million.
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The Caxton franchise has been owned since 2016 by Ahmet Mustafa, 55. His business, AFA Restaurants, was awarded its 19th McDonald’s franchise last September in Chelmsford, Essex. The company reported a turnover of more than £72 million in its last accounts. In a statement issued after the trial, McDonald’s said Mustafa knew nothing of the criminal activity and had only been “exposed to the full depth of these horrific, complex and sophisticated crimes” while co-operating with the police in its investigation.
I asked McDonald’s how many franchises had been granted to Abi-Gerges and Mustafa since October 2019, when the slavery operation was uncovered. It refused to say. It said it had commissioned an independent review of work practices in October 2019 “to detect and deter potential risks” from modern slavery. It also said it was working with the modern slavery charity Unseen to ensure nothing like this happens again on its premises.
“We care deeply about the welfare of every single one of the 168,000 people working at McDonald’s and franchisee-owned restaurants across the UK and Ireland,” the company said. “With our franchisees, we will play our part alongside government, NGOs and wider society to help combat the evils of modern slavery.”
I asked whether McDonald’s had been in direct contact with any of the victims, or had apologised for what happened to them. The company did not comment. The slaves I spoke to say they have not received an apology or been contacted by either McDonald’s or the franchisees.
Whenever business slowed at the Caxton McDonald’s, the gang had an insurance policy. Some slaves were moved from Ernest’s property in Cambridgeshire to Zdenek’s in Enfield, north London. There they were put to work at pitta bread factories in Tottenham and Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire — owned by the now defunct Speciality Flatbreads — which supplied Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Waitrose and M&S.
One of these people was Alex (not his real name), 54, a labourer from Karlovy Vary. It was 2018 and he was depressed and vulnerable, having recently gone through a relationship break-up, when Zdenek promised him a job in England. He began working at the Caxton McDonald’s, “from 10am to 10pm, six days a week”. As usual, Veronika Bubencikova had seen to his job application and attended his interview.
“I had two to three hours of training in hygiene and safety, was given a uniform and started work the next day,” he says. “At first I didn’t mind the hours because I thought that eventually there would be good money for me. Ernest would give me £20 to £40 a week and said he was saving the rest for me.” In 2018 a McDonald’s crew member aged over 25 was earning about £10 an hour. In Alex’s case that would have equated to about £720 a week.
After four months he was sent to work at the bread factory, staying at Zdenek’s house in Durants Road, Enfield, with eight other slaves. The gang member Slovjak was the inside man at the factory, filling in application forms and attending interviews.
“I was working 12 hours a day cleaning a big manufacturing hall, the dough machines and picking up dough from the floor,” Alex says. “It was very heavy work and I was tired and cold. I would work from 6pm to 6am, six days a week, but I wasn’t being given my wages. About a month after I started I realised I was being manipulated. They were putting my money into a safe, but I couldn’t say anything as I was scared that Zdenek would beat me up.”
Living conditions at Durants Road were terrible. The victims were monitored by CCTV, while gang members split them up and slept in their rooms to prevent the prisoners from talking among themselves. “Up to four of the victims were living in a shell of a shed in the backyard,” says Kelly, the investigating detective constable. “There was no heating, no running water, no toilet. The roof was leaking, so the OCG just threw a crude blue tarpaulin over it, weighed down by gym weights.”
The charity Justice and Care, which went on to help the survivors, said one had lost a finger in machinery at one of the bread factories but was forced back to work within days. Meanwhile gang members were enjoying the good life, eating out, buying expensive clothes and gloating over their wealth. At the Enfield house police found a Versace dinner service including knives and forks that cost £100 each. One December, Zdenek — who enjoyed holidays in Turkey, Germany and the Czech Republic — decorated a Christmas tree with £20 notes.
“One of the women was being used as a full-time domestic worker,” Kelly says. “She would be on her hands and knees cleaning and having to look at all that money, too scared to touch any of it.”
Dame Sara Thornton, the UK’s independent anti-slavery commissioner from 2019 to 2022, says the McDonald’s franchise and Speciality Flatbreads missed glaring red flags when they were sucked into the Czech gang’s slavery operation.
“People’s application forms being completed on their behalf, traffickers sitting in on an interview, multiple wages being paid into one bank account, correspondence going to one email account — these all scream that something is wrong,” she says. “This was in 2019, so there might have been some improvements since then, but I think this is a wake-up call to both the supermarkets buying bread products from the factory and to McDonald’s, which is a massive international company.”
All the supermarkets supplied by Speciality Flatbreads ended their ties with the company in the wake of the slavery scandal. Sainsbury’s had already switched its supplier in 2016. They had all conducted surveys of the factories, but failed to spot the slavery operation. The flatbread company went into administration in 2022. The supermarkets say they are working hard to identify and eradicate modern slavery from their supply lines through regular inspections, audits and training.
Andrew Charalambous, managing director of Speciality Flatbreads, did not respond to a request for an interview, made through the administrators of his company. However, after the court case he told the BBC that he had supported police and prosecutors, adding that the company had been “thoroughly audited by top law firms” and “everything we were doing was legal From our perspective we didn’t break the law in any way. Having said that, yes, maybe there were certain telltale signs but that would have been for the HR department who were dealing with it on the front line.”
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When they were freed by police, there was no cheering on the part of the victims; mostly they were confused, exhausted and scared. Some co-operated with the investigation immediately, but others were too frightened. Alex had already run away without his passport and was living on the streets of Edmonton, north London. For a time he lived in a tent in a patch of woodland — he doesn’t know where. When a fellow rough sleeper saw a media report about the gang’s arrest and told Alex, he went to the police to offer evidence and to ask if they could retrieve his passport. “I was happy when they were arrested,” he says. “I didn’t want them free to do to other people what they did to me.”
Landa says he felt relieved, but also afraid. “I thought I might have been in trouble with the police because the money was being paid into my bank account,” he says. “But I decided to co-operate with them from the start.” Acourt, the detective sergeant from Cambridgeshire police, says Landa needn’t have worried — he was regarded as a victim from the outset and never as a suspect.
Following the arrests, Justice and Care was on hand with one of 11 trained “victim navigators” it funds nationwide to provide a bridge between the enslaved and the police. “When victim navigators are involved, 94 per cent of victims go on to help the police with their investigations,” says Debi Lloyd, head of the charity’s counter-trafficking operations. “When they are not, that falls to about 44 per cent, usually because they are frightened and too scared to talk.”
“They’re really struggling with being able to trust people,” says Rose — not her real name — the victim navigator in this case. “They’re finding it difficult to get into work and are suffering from the effects of having been exploited for so long. One of them is homeless and refusing all support. One went back to the Czech Republic and couldn’t handle being around people because he didn’t feel he could trust anyone. He got himself a tent and went to live in the woods. He was found dead recently.”
As for Roman Landa, he is living quietly at a shelter in the UK with another of the slaves. The pair had to move from another town when their address was accidentally divulged to defence lawyers during a court hearing. They suspect they may never settle.
“The family who did this to us is big, and we’re afraid of bumping into one of them one day,” Landa says. “I think I’ll always be afraid of that. So I’m free, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have peace of mind.”
