"Slash them up good and proper mate": The Greater Manchester crime lord going by the name 'Vlad the Impaler' who has been arranging gangland hits from a secret bolthole hundreds of miles away

A Salford crime lord directed underworld hits from hundreds of miles away in the Netherlands. A shooting and a raid on a family home were carried out on the orders of Nathan Vanden, who had fled from his native Greater Manchester after arousing the suspicion of the authorities.

Using the aliases 'Machiavelli' and 'Vlad the Impaler', he plotted a shooting at a house in Whitefield, Bury, and a proposed attack at the home in Salford. Prosecutors said that Vanden, 33, originally from Leigh, paid criminal associates to 'carry out attacks upon targets of his choosing', using the EncroChat network as a cloak of anonymity.

But messages he sent on the encrypted communications network came back to haunt him after it was cracked by European law enforcement in 2020. "The prosecution would say that by this time, he was the head of a crime group operating in Salford, and had a number of trusted lieutenants under him," prosecutor Andrew Ford KC said.

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"He had money available, he would barter online for criminal jobs to be done, for people to be attacked and his co-accused would be paid." As he was jailed for more than two decades, a judge labelled Vanden a ‘professional gangster’ and gave him an extended prison sentence for public protection.

Manchester Crown Court heard how a gunman opened fire at a house in Whitefield at about 1.35am on Tuesday, February 2020. No-one was hurt. Aaron Gray pulled the trigger, with Dominic Hughes, an associate of Vanden, acting as the go-between and 'custodian' of the Glock gun which was used in the incident.

Police were able to recover messages shared between Vanden in the Netherlands, and Hughes in