It is an occupational hazard, according to Clive Osborne. Once inside prison, Mr Bigs do not have a change of heart. “We know that they carry on their activities, like Norman Stanley Fletcher in Porridge,” he says. Most of the Mr Bigs put away by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) efforts, he admits, are still running their businesses.

As a result, Osborne — who is Legal Adviser to Soca — cannot just happily notch up a success each time the agency’s work results in a conviction. Instead, his 50-strong legal department, which in turn services the 4,500 staff in Soca spread over 90 sites including 140 agents based overseas, has to focus on intelligence-based strategies to disrupt criminal empires.

One way is to seize criminals’ assets: “We do know that losing money is a lot more hurtful than going to prison, which for some people can be a badge of honour. So the agency is concentrating on intelligence disruption — a new direction for us, a new focus.”

The traditional law-enforcement tool of prosecution remains important, he says, because if the Mr Bigs of organised crime are not put away “people would lose confidence in the criminal justice system”.

“But whether it’s really effective [on its own] in reducing the harm organised crime causes if these people are still running business from prison . . . is the question.”

Osborne, a diminutive twinkly character, sits like a spider at the heart of the Soca empire. The agency is still little known: partly because its work (much of it covert) is shrouded in secrecy; partly because public relations have been low profile; and partly, too, because it is relatively new.

Soca came into being in April 2006 when it was set up as Britain’s answer to the FBI, aimed at taking on the £40 billion organised crime industry. The idea was to use surveillance techniques from counter-terrorism to destroy criminal networks and seize criminals’ assets. It has come under fire for losing its way, being bogged down in red tape and over-cautious.

Osborne, 53, insists that it is too soon to judge its record. Much of the work, he says, does not show instant results. “Because we put such a premium on intelligence, people did not see the \ results they expected. If your goal, in addition to putting people way, is snaring the criminal enterprise, that can take longer to work through.”

There were 276 UK convictions arising from Soca cases in 2007-08 although that does not include local police force cases it may have helped with nor convictions secured abroad. Unlike the Serious Fraud Office, it does not prosecute its own: they are handled by the Crown Prosecution Service or Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office. In March this year 80 per cent of its open cases were less than 18 months old.

Another factor is that Soca was formed from three organisations with different backgrounds and cultures: the National Criminal Intelligence Service and National Crime Squad, with 1,000 staff from HM Customs & Excise who dealt with drug enforcement, and 100 immigration staff.

Only a handful of in-house lawyers came too, so Osborne, a Whitehall career barrister who from 2001-05 was deputy legal adviser at the Home Office, had the brief of creating a legal department from scratch. “Much of the work of the NCIS had been outsourced so it was not providing the kind of service that a government legal department would normally do.”

He brought in people with skills in employment and procurement (IT was needed for the reporting regime under money-laundering laws), in data protection and international law. Soca has liaison officers abroad, for example in Afghanistan and Colombia.

In April a new tranche of work and lawyers arrived when Soca took on the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA). Osborne and two deputies, with 33 lawyers and 21 paralegals (35 came from the ARA) now have a workload spanning asset recovery, civil cases, proceeds of crime, covert policing, employment and procurement. He has initiated a recruitment drive as part of a plan to bring more work in-house and make savings (his budget is £3 million of Soca’s £400 million for 2008-09). Several key posts are soon to be advertised: a mix of private/public sector skills will help, as would experience in assets recovery.

This, after the merger with the ARA, has a strong focus: it began as a tool to tackle terrorists, but is now used chiefly to disrupt organised crime. Osborne wants his lawyers to do more work in magistrates’ courts under the Proceeds of Crime Act, for instance, to seize assets: sums seized rose from £3.3 million in 2006-07 in 70 cases to £8 million in 136 cases in 2007-08 — an increase of 142 per cent.

With an armoury of legal weapons, penetrating the infrastructure of crime is how he sees the role. “We can’t think that our job is finished when the keys turn in the prison lock. What we are dealing with is serious acquisitive crime — the basis for which is money.”

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