Weird businesses/ shops in your area which may be fronts for other activities

[23 Daves]

I'm absolutely positive we've had a thread about this before on here, but I can't find it, and in any case it's a bottomless pit of interest for me.  Everywhere I've ever lived has contained at least one building or shop nearby which locals are absolutely convinced is a "front" for other criminal activities.  In Portsmouth we had the novelty phone shop on Victoria Road North, which stood next door to a newsagents and no other stores whatsoever, and never seemed to be open.  In Stoke Newington the Vacuum Cleaner Repair Shop seemed to be commonly mentioned, since it seemed to occupy a prime bit of retail space, and nobody could think of anybody who would be able to make a sustainable living solely out of vacuum cleaner repairs.  And so on.

In Walthamstow, I walk past this company every day on my walk to the station, and their whole building always seems to be deader than a dodo:

http://www.lessenergy.co.uk/NELEEAC_home.htm

In the photos on their website you can't really see their entrance sign, but it has crooked letters like "Sunshine Desserts".  It doesn't appear to have any pictures or posters outside promoting the "good work" they do to passers-by, which such an organisation would ordinarily push to kingdom come.  Over the years, I've heard theories put forward that it's a front for the MI5 who are investigating local Muslim terrorists, and a tax-loss scam.  My wife is particularly suspicious, since she used to work in the field of carbon emissions and environmental controls, and never once heard their name put forward in any of the London-based projects she was involved with. 

To make matters stranger, last night I was walking past their offices at about midnight, and I could see the flickering of lights in one of the top floor rooms, and the sound of a small-scale party.  Some of the windows appear to have net curtains in them as well, very unusual for an office space (though they could of course be renting certain parts of the building out as residential space). 

There probably is absolutely nothing odd going on here at all, and it probably genuinely is a bona-fide (if obviously low key) business, but the rumour-mongering has been a source of continual entertainment for me over the years. 

So... what are your examples?  Is it just local silliness and rumour-mongering, or have you found out stuff which completely proves they're dodgy businesses? 

[falafel]

Is this just a test to see how long it is before someone mentions Stormfront?

Because it wasn't very long.

[vrailaine]

I remember nearly a whole street of wig shops in Paris, all selling much the same cheap looking wigs. Looked odd.

[Phil_A]

Oh, I've seen a few of these. In one of the smaller suburbs round our way, there's a corner shop that always has it's shutters down during the day, and yet there's still vans and cars in the parking space outside. And it's been like that for fifteen years at least.

[23 Daves]

Oh, I've seen a few of these. In one of the smaller suburbs round our way, there's a corner shop that always has it's shutters down during the day, and yet there's still vans and cars in the parking space outside. And it's been like that for fifteen years at least.

An innocent explanation for this would be that somebody is using it as a goods storage space or cash and carry for perfectly legal items - that's definitely the case with one "empty" store local to me, because every so often the shutters are up and the store is filled with burly Asian men shifting cardboard boxes of crisps and crates of Coke (no, the soft drink kind, you fool!) around. 

There was one corner store on the street I lived in on Stamford Hill which seemed to open for a few months, then close again for another six, then open again for a few months, etc, on some weird seasonal cycle.  I later found out that the family who owned the store outright were continually trying and failing to find new ways of making it profitable.  It was a tiny space, barely the size of a small living room, and apparently just not conducive to turning a profit, but for whatever reason they never seemed compelled to give up completely. 

[Small Man Big Horse]

There's a shop in Queen's Park, near Kilburn, that claims to repair phones, and has some for sale. Which doesn't sound that dodgy I guess, until I went in there one day and noticed that they only had 10 phones, and the rest of the shop is a big empty space. So I've suspected for a long old time now that something's not quite right there.

There's also a couple of internet cafe's with only 10 or so PC's in them, which are only half full most of the time, and I've never been able to work out how they can be cost effective...

[Pepotamo1985]

I'll post more later as I'm in a rush - but banging thread.

There was a shop in Balham (in the days before B'ham became a tarty hub of wine bars, yummy mummies, yuppies and their cretinous ugg booted offspring and no one would pay for advertising in the tube station) that always used to mystify me - it was a TV and visual electronics shop that was ALWAYS shut; doors elaborately locked and rusted metal protector grates in front of the windows. The lights were off, but one television facing the window was perpetually on, with the screen showing what looked like a paused time ident. I would go past it twice a day on the way to and back from school, at about 9:00 and 3:00 every day, and it was never, ever open. Maybe it opened for a couple of hours at lunchtime?

[Catalogue Trousers]

There's a very odd butcher's 5 minutes down the road from me. Most days, the blinds are down: on the rare occasions that they go up, there is indeed a lovely, sparkling, pristine butcher's shop interior - but no sign of any meat, unless one counts the posters of choice cuts on the walls. The staff are proper butcher's shop-looking staff, every so often something purporting to be a meat delivery van turns up outside - yet I've never once seen it properly open and selling meat.

Either it's the front for a crack cocaine operation, or more sinisterly Hilary Briss is alive and well and living in central Bristol.

[Rowlands]

Ah we have something exactly like this in the town where I sometimes live. A butcher's always inhabited by some scary biker dudes who just give you a look when you enter that tells you to fuck off before they pop a cap in your arse or whatever it is they say.

Money laundering, apparently.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

There's a massage parlour you can see on the train into Sheffield that's so obviously a brothel, the sign may as well be in inverted commas.

[Mr Colossal]

what I notice about the internet cafes and some hairdressers around here is that they're often exentions of kebab shop businesses. I see nobody else in them, or ever using them, yet theyre perpetually open and always seem to have a few boys from behind the counter of the local kebab shops going in and out.     I guess its easy to suggest theyre a laundering front,  but foreigners often have a better handle on running businesses than us westerners where society conditions us that sucesss is based on 'going it alone'- wheras they recognise the value in sticking together... So it probably makes perfect sense when theres a large overseas population as they can 'beat the system' , maintain a greater presence and ensure future jobs.  You also dont know how theyre living, or just how computer literate members of their family are, so its probably easier if one of them just owns an internet cafe which is used more as a 'social hub' /community center as they always seem to have those overseas phone card adverts in the window.... they probably make a perfect front for their heroin smuggling operations too!


and edit:  those sketchy electronics shops that are rarely open usually are as dodgy as they look.  there was quite a few around here growing up called vague things like 'satellite systems' or 'satellite SHOP' and one day duing the holidays,  pretty late in its run in, tired that all of my mates were coming away from the market with 5 copied import games for a tenner- I decided having paid full whack for about 40 games myself I had 'earned the right' to get my playstation chipped and  figured that this seedy run down shop looked like the kind of place that might do it.  So I lumped my playstation in a bag and cycled over.  I was really nervous when I walked in, as the shop wasnt 'open plan' was more like a dusty workshop with brown carpets and looked completely empty save for a few carboard advertisement stands, and you had to turn a corner and walk through another doorway (with no door) where there was just this big guy sat behind a high counter with a cup of coffee reading a paper who looked evidently pissed off that he actually had a customer.  "Do you chip playstations?" I asked.  "lets look at it". he spat our abruptly. I openened my bag,  he pointed to the power cable on the back- which was an orginal '3 prong thingy' model rather than the reworked slim lead because id paid something rediculous for one of the original model packages, when they were now £99- and said "thats a bit old, whats wrong with it?" thinking it was already broke and I was trying to stitch him up.   I said "nothing, it still works fine" which seemed to be enough for him as he said "that'll be £30, it'll be done by tomorrow".  He didnt ask for the money so I just left,  I was so scared of the place and was even thinking id somehow been robbed of my playstation myself, because I had no evidence other than this guys word- I got my dad, who I hadnt even told yet and was now pissed off, to go pick it up the day after. Whats even weirder is the shop was shut when he went. My dad could see someone moving around inside so had to knock,  and when they answered the door, the shop was actually closed and it was just some builder who was 'doing repairs'.  The builder had to ring the owner up, he then went into the back and came out with my playstation, and took the money off my dad, who also marks it as one of the weirdest transactions of his life.



they probably run a nice trade in virgin media boxes and stolen phones now.   (in fact I know several corner shops, one is an actual spar, where the owners buy stolen phones as plenty people have seen people unloading whole bagfuls onto the counter in there, like it was the most ordinary behaviour in the world!)

[Lfbarfe]

To make matters stranger, last night I was walking past their offices at about midnight, and I could see the flickering of lights in one of the top floor rooms, and the sound of a small-scale party.  Some of the windows appear to have net curtains in them as well, very unusual for an office space (though they could of course be renting certain parts of the building out as residential space). 

The nets might support the MI5 idea. Possibly blast netting?

Money laundering operations tend to use businesses with no actual stock. Suntan parlours are a favourite. With the butcher, they have to account for chops. In a tanb shop, they can say "Yeah we did 85 Brazilians this week". Who's going to know?

[Milo]

I'm convinced that a computer shop near where I work is for money laundering or tax evasion, at least. They always offer discounts for cash and the other week when I bought a forty quid power supply off them I checked my walletand only had thirty quid cash. iwhen I tried to put it on my card he insisted on taking the thirty cash and putting the remainder on the card. It seemed suspect.

[23 Daves]

The last time we had a thread like this I'm sure somebody mentioned a store in Hackney (or was it Dalston?) which they knew for a fact used to be used as a front for drug deals.  They knew this purely because they'd bought some drugs there once!

Similarly, at least ten years ago there used to be a bogus taxi rank in Soho which sold people "in the know" cannabis.  Anybody who went in there for a cab was simply told that there were none available at the moment, and wouldn't be for the foreseeable.  It was right in the heart of the West End of London, on a fairly busy street, and I remain amazed they were active without any apparent problems. 

A friend of mine actually took me there once, and the cannabis was good stuff.  However, the exchange he had with the man who worked there was priceless.
"Er, just a thought..." he said, "you don't happen to do a few taxis on the side, do you?"
"No boss," said the man glaring at him, believing that he may be taking the piss.
"It's just we need to get to South London, and if you did..."
"No boss," he repeated, smiling at my friend as if he were an idiot, and probably regretting the fact he hadn't sold him wood shavings. 

I can't remember where the hell this outlet was based in case anyone is curious, and after ten years I'm fairly sure it will have been closed down (or the owners would otherwise have moved on by now).

[23 Daves]

For London-based users, the Derelict London website has tons of explanations for seemingly dodgy businesses here:  http://www.derelictlondon.com/shops.htm

LATIMER ROAD - MALS FISH AND CHIP SHOP

This shop has been closed for just over 20 years but it is still sitting here like a time capsule as Mal's son cleans it every Monday. When open it served fish and chips wrapped in newspaper & according to one person who wrote to Derelict London it had the best fish and chips in London.

BOWES PARK
This menswear shop has a fully stocked window display but it looks like the shop simply closed one day several years ago and unexpectedly didnt open the next day.

Gary cook writes: "the gentleman concerned is George D Moore, he is still alive and kicking but only opens once or twice a month, this is due to some kind of council tax rebate; if he keeps stock in the window he gets some sort of discount as he still lives upstairs. I remember as a child going to the local chippy about 10 doors down and on my way back eating my 6d (2 1/2 pence) worth of chips, i would stand and stare at his motorised revolving cufflink stand that was always in the front window with the cheap stones reflecting in the shop lights,its not there any more, it must have given up the ghost, however he has not, he must be about 75- 80 now , a mad nostalgic friend of mine always trys to buy a shirt or a pair of underpants to give him some trade but is always turned away, so much for supporting your local store eh!. "

PADDINGTON GREEN - DEANS AUDIO
This electrical shop appears to be abandoned - there is "brand new" stock in the window but it appears to have been there for years untouched and the price tags have faded and the pollution of the Edgware Rd has added an extra grime to the window. The owner obviously hasn't bothered opening up since his Sainsbury windfall......

I found this article in the Observer: "Businessman Michael Dean has received £3m and is in line for up to £7m more. He may be Britain's luckiest small businessman for he was in the right place when Sainsbury's property development team came knocking. The supermarket decided it had to speculate to accumulate, and Dean's property was the gamble it took. It was prepared to bet almost £10m on a run-down, four-storey corner shop with flats above in the belief that it would unlock access to central London's last superstore development. As a public planning inquiry showed, it may prove to have been an expensive flutter. "

So there's at least one electronics store in London which isn't a dodgy front, it just happens to be owned by a very jammy git.

[Zero Gravitas]

They're all being used to build Killdozers! In a carefully synchronized event next month the concrete and steel terrors will burst forth through the dusty frontages and wreak havoc!

[tisonlyme]

There is a Thai massage place on one of the main streets in Cork City.Apparently it's a brothel .

[Zero Gravitas]

A friend of mine used to go to a thai massage place for waxing, I never fully believed her.

[imitationleather]

London is full of massage parlours and each and every one of them is a brothel. I lived next door to one a few years ago and men would keep ringing our buzzer by mistake. Look in the back of any local newspaper and you'll see ads for them which basically only just stop short of saying "Come here and pay some money and you can have sex!"

What the fuck is a "massage parlour" anyway? It's like a "male sauna". What could that be apart from a big room full of men having hot sex?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Every one of them? Have you thought of writing a Good Brothel Guide? You really ought to turn this knowledge into hard sexy cash.

[imitationleather]

Well I guess there are places you actually can go to for an actual massage (there are in Seinfeld and The IT Crowd, so I guess there's a chance they're real), but on the whole massage parlours all look so seedy and horrible that you can't really envisage going in to one and coming out relaxed unless an ejaculation was involved in the process that goes on behind those closed doors.

[rudi]

I remember nearly a whole street of wig shops in Paris, all selling much the same cheap looking wigs.

As I recall, they've congregated there as there's hardly any rent toupee.

[Saucer51]

If i ever saw anything that might hint at anti-crime or anti-terrorism activity, I'd keen schtum out of a sense of civic duty.

[23 Daves]

If i ever saw anything that might hint at anti-crime or anti-terrorism activity, I'd keen schtum out of a sense of civic duty.

I don't genuinely believe that the building I mentioned at the start of this thread is an MI5 front.  I believe that other people believe it, but I personally suspect that it's some kind of elaborate tax-loss exercise (which the environmental industry attracts a wide number of cases of, or so I'm led to understand).

I'm sure that if security forces wanted to set up a base in East London, they'd come up with something a bit more subtle and less suspicious looking, something which wouldn't cause urban legends to spread about its use.  They'd certainly come up with a better website than that particularly threadbare looking one I linked to above.  Otherwise my faith in the secret service is utterly shot to fuck.  You'd think at least one of them would know some Java coding, after all...

[hoverdonkey]

Worcester Park's entire high street appears to be shops of this nature.

There are at least five of those shops which have plastic tubs stacked up outside that sell everythng, but nothing you ever need. There are also a disproportionate number of charity shops. I don't know how any shop there stays in business - no one seems to shop there, sitting as it does equidistant between Sutton and Kingston.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Every one of them? Have you thought of writing a Good Brothel Guide? You really ought to turn this knowledge into hard sexy cash.

You've been beaten to it: http://www.mccoysguide.com/massage-parlour-guide.php

[imitationleather]

I'M NEVER BUYING THEIR CRISPS AGAIN.

[Little Hoover]

Not so a much a shop, but a house just off Leicester Square had a small sign on the door advertising exotic models or something like that, with the door ajar. This just seemed so blatant I had to wander if I was the mad one for reading anything into it. Maybe it's not there anymore but it seemed  odd to me that such an overt prositution buisness was running in such a busy, heavily policed area. Maybe I'm just naive.

[23 Daves]

Not so a much a shop, but a house just off Leicester Square had a small sign on the door advertising exotic models or something like that, with the door ajar. This just seemed so blatant I had to wander if I was the mad one for reading anything into it. Maybe it's not there anymore but it seemed  odd to me that such an overt prositution buisness was running in such a busy, heavily policed area. Maybe I'm just naive.

In Soho, there used to be one (if not more) of these "houses" in every street.  The council are trying to clamp down on them, and a lot have been demolished over the last few years (Pimps tend not to be very good at maintaining old Victorian buildings, apparently), but I was in Soho only yesterday and there are still quite a few left.  As for how it continues, not sure, but unlike the war on drugs, the war on prostitution in Britain seems to have been given up as a lost cause.  A lot of these "massage parlours" and "Exotic Model" agencies are exactly what you suspect they are, and the police almost certainly know about them.  As for why they don't do anything about the situation, I dunno.  Ask them.  The way it always works on "Taggart" and "The Bill" is 'the girls' tip them off about other crime, and are therefore 'useful'.  The reality is probably that it's just not very high on the agenda of a busy urban police force, and it's better to know about what the Pimps are doing and keep them where they can be watched than to force them completely underground. 

A lot of Soho was also apparently gangster controlled until very recently, so a lot of these businesses may be more bother to take on than they're really worth.  But I'm speculating here.

[Icehaven]

There's a shop at the end of my street in Birmingham which, after being empty for about 3 years, appeared to be becoming some kind of loans/property management business. A very lavish but cryptic sign appeared offering indeterminate financial assistance in relation to property, the interior was decorated in a very modern style with impressive desks and huge black leather chairs, and then nothing. It's just sat like that for months and months, and it's never been open once. I guess it's probably just a victim of the current climate and blah, and if you were going to do something dodgy you wouldn't make it look quite so obvious, but it'd hardly reassuring for anyone looking to use such a service, they can't even get their own office off the ground.