Shell raiser

The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends and a multimillion- pound vendetta against the taxman

- Jim Waterson

IT IS A DRIZZLY OCTOBER AFTERNOON and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti beer with London's leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We're discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.

The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.

His method is simple. First, he sets up shell companies that breed snails in empty office blocks. Then he claims that the office block is legally a farm, and therefore exempt from paying taxes. "They're sexy things," chuckles Ball in a broad Blackburn accent, describing the speed with which two snails can incestuously multiply into dozens of specimens if they're left alone in a box for a few weeks. Snails love group sex and cannibalism, he warns.

As the conversation drifts away from snail breeding, he describes personal connections to a very prominent member of the House of Commons, his years hiding Italian mafia killers while they were on the run, and the potential market for snail salami. Almost everything he tells me seems improbable, yet everything I could later verify checks out. I've got little reason to doubt the rest.

We're drinking with "Joseph", a snail farm employee. I'd seen him earlier using a cleaver to chop up lettuce to feed thousands of the animals. They're then shipped out to premises across the country, including four big snail farms they're running in London. Taking out his phone, Ball shows off pictures of another man, "my mafia boss friend", posing with the legendary Napoli footballer Diego Maradona in the 1980s.