The V-Team: How It All Began

How The Varisto Ent Team Came to Be

Buck Thursday

May 06, 2026

Let me tell you the story of how the name came to be the “big V” that had previously carried a reference to a homosexual relationship and how everything unfolded from there.

When we were young men, around twenty or twenty-one, we were living in London and working for Herbert, Mr. Capelli, whose story I tell in my book “Buck VS the Machine”.

Herbert was a close friend of Terry, and at the time we had no idea that Terry and his associates were known as the Adams Family or A-Team, one of the most significant crime syndicates in Britain. We understood, at least in broad terms, what a Crime Syndicate was: an organised, Conspiratorial group operating outside the law, working against the established order and engaged in illegal and illicit activities.

Because Herbert was so close to Terry, and because we were working for them, we began to idolise these men even though our direct relationship with them was limited. I had only met Terry once. My steadiest connection to that world was through Andy, whom I knew well and worked with regularly. Herbert was my other link. Beyond that, our network extended to a few people from Turkey, a girl living in Paris, and a Turkish (Armenian Actually) affiliate of Terry’s who had also been based in Paris before relocating to the south of England, near Plymouth.

We admired these men enormously. They were constantly in the spotlight, in the newspapers, on the television news. We were young and we fantasised about being like Terry and his brothers, like the Adams family. What we didn’t understand then was that we were small pawns. We were what we called, in our own language, kabo kabo, essentially drivers and couriers.

Our work was physical and logistical. We drove vehicles, swapped number plates, and transported building materials: cement powder, adhesives, laminates and related supplies. The routes we covered were extensive. From southern Spain, Seville, Dos Hermanas, Tarifa, we would drive north through the Pyrenees, passing through what is now the city of Biarritz, through Las Rosas, and into France. From there we would continue through Antibes and Nice and into Italy, exchanging vehicles and plates in Milan before heading to the Swiss border, crossing through customs and international police controls, and then entering Germany. That was what we called the San Bernardino Route.

The alternative was the Fréjus route: from northern Italy through Milan, then Lyon, Dijon, Paris, and on to Calais, then across to Dover. We had a warehouse in Ramsgate where we would stop to swap plates before taking the A7 up through Tooting Broadway and Clapham into London, delivering the cement and building materials to their destination. When the route took us through Germany, we would stop in Hanover and Amsterdam to collect additional cargo, and we had a base in Bijlmer Ganzenhoef, near the Amsterdam Arena where we picked up strips of adhesive tape and other construction supplies. Then it was back through Germany and the Netherlands to Calais, across by ferry or, when it was running and the price of around £700 was manageable, through the Channel Tunnel by train.

Once in England, everything came back through Ramsgate. We would swap the plates and drive the van into London. Our main dispatch points were in Camden Town and Kentish Town, and there was another unloading location in Dalston, on Greenwood Road a place I suspect you all know. That spot was mainly used for goods destined for people organising parties: the Spiral Tribe and others who were running the so-called illegal raves of the era.

It had all begun even earlier, when we were around seventeen. We used to take the train to London on forged tickets, backpacks loaded with construction material, glues, laminates, adhesives, cement. We slept at the EuroTower and a few other places, including a spot near Victoria Station. We were also bringing in gardening equipment: seeds, plants, supplies for people who were growing things. That was the very beginning of it all.

Years later, when the Adams family became famous under the label of the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate widely known in the press as the A-Team I was around twenty-eight or twenty-nine. As a joke, we started calling ourselves the V-Team. That was around 2001, and it was the moment the Varisto Group was born. I decided to formalise the name: we were the V-Team, the Varisto Team.

In a way, I owe that identity to the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate of Islington, because it was their notoriety that gave us the idea. But we are not a crime syndicate. Fortunately, we never became one. We are simply a group of literate, influential, high-achieving people working across different fields, who collaborate by mutual agreement to create business opportunities, generate income, and build a meaningful presence in society.

I cannot name the people who belong to the Varisto Team there are many, and most of them are senior figures in multinational corporations. They are not young. But they share one distinctive trait: every single one of them loves music, makes music, writes, or is passionate about art and literature. That is the thread that binds us.

We are, you might say, the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate of entertainment and content creation

Buck Thursday

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