Kids Company: Gangster who claimed to have gone straight after charity's help to be sentenced for selling guns

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A notorious gangster who claimed to be going straight with the help of the controversial charity Kids Company is to be sentenced for his role in running a profitable underworld armoury.

Aaron Murray – known as “Mad Max” – ran the operation alongside Ishmael Brown, 27, who was in Rochester Prison serving nine years for kidnap.

The pair hired a former Polish special forces soldier to turn collectors’ firearms – including an AK-47 – into working weapons. They also made promotional videos to sell them to London gangs.

Police swooped and arrested Murray during the sale of a handgun to a convicted drug dealer in Newham, east London, in June last year.

The subsequent examination of Murray’s phone and internet records led them back to HMP Rochester, where Brown was “running a successful firearms business from his cell”, Harrow Crown Court was told.

Brown used his girlfriend and mother of his five-year-old son, Caitlin Adams, as a “lieutenant” to travel around the country to collect weapons from antique and military shops and take them to a workshop in Wandsworth, south London, for conversion into a working weapon.

Adams, a former business studies undergraduate, communicated with her boyfriend while he was in prison, at one point sending a picture to his smuggled mobile phone while wearing a mask and posing near naked with an AK-47.

Police also discovered another picture of Murray posing with an AK-47 and retrieved videos of men test-firing the weapons thought to have been used to advertise the guns to potential criminals.

In the first six months of last year, the AK-47 was one of more than 40 guns sourced by the group, said Scotland Yard. Murray targeted the Polish armourer, Bart Pawlowski, as he was frequently drunk and had considerable debts, to carry out the work at his metalwork business. The police have retrieved eight of the guns, but have appealed for help to track down the rest.

The gang sold working guns, including the AK-47, for up to £3,000, said prosecutor Joel Smith. The market in decommissioned weapons is not illegal, but reconverting them into working weapons and trading them carries a maximum life sentence.

Brown, 26, described as the leading light of the plot, was jailed on 22 January for 12 years. Pawlowski, 43, of Wandsworth, south London, received 13 years. Adams, 25, of Lewisham, south-east London, was jailed for 10 years.

Murray, 28, who is having psychiatric treatment in hospital and was convicted of the same offence of conspiracy to transfer prohibited weapons, will be sentenced later.

Murray, a former boxer, told a newspaper in 2014 that he was going straight, and had worked with Kids Company to refine his plans for a gym to help steer young people away from gangs. “Yes, I am Mad Max and I have a notorious reputation. Now I want to be notorious for good,” he said.