The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman

Terry Ball runs elaborate mollusc-based tax avoidance schemes that are costing London councils millions of pounds. Yet when London Centric tracks him down, an even stranger story emerges.

It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti 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 cheerfully 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, against all indications to the contrary, a farm, and therefore exempt from paying taxes.

Boxes of snails at a tax avoidance operation run by Ball in a Marylebone office block, which was raided by Westminster council last week.

“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.

Ball in his office with financial demands from Westminster council for back taxes on snail farms.

We’re drinking with “Joseph”, a snail farm employee. An hour earlier I’d seen him 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 currently 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.

“Joseph”, who speaks with an unusual Italian-Lancastrian accent, turns out to be a man called Giuseppe from Naples. In a very matter-of-fact manner Giuseppe explains how he previously spent four years inside prison because a former friend, a convicted mafia murderer, turned into an informant and helped the Italian authorities convict his former criminal colleagues.

Ball says he has employed Giuseppe to look after his tax-dodging snails as a thank you. Giuseppe once warned him not to travel to Italy, at a time when the snail magnate might have been prosecuted due to the confessions of the same informant.

Three hours earlier I knew none of this. I’d turned up unannounced at Ball’s snail farm HQ with a faint hope that I might catch a glimpse of the man behind one of the most brazen tax dodges I’d ever encountered in the capital. It’s just the latest part of London Centric’s ongoing investigations into the financial scams taking place in plain sight across London.

Illustration by Carly A-F, commissioned by London Centric.

Standing by the concrete snail statues that guard the security gate outside the snail farm, I’d expected to be told to piss off. Instead, I was met by Giuseppe, who phoned his boss.

Seemingly intrigued by a journalist who had travelled 250 miles from London to stand in the rain without an appointment, I was told to come back an hour later for the first ever interview with Ball, a man whose photo didn’t even appear online until now.

Over the ensuing hours, Ball makes confession after confession about his attempts to outwit the taxman with increasingly elaborate plans, his decades-long links to the Naples underworld, and how at this very moment there are buildings across London where he is deploying his unique snail-breeding method in a bid to cheat exasperated local councils out of millions of pounds.

“I’m turning 80 next month and I haven’t got jack shit in my name. What are they going to do?” Ball tells me with a chuckle, when asked if he’s worried about prosecution. “You can’t take nothing off nothing. They’ve stopped torturing people.”

The old man is proudly committed to spending his remaining years on this earth finding innovative ways to get revenge on the “bastard” authorities who he feels screwed him over in the past: “I just do it for devilment. I do it just to get away with it.”

None of this, it is fair to say, is normal. But almost nothing about this story is — especially what happens next.

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