POLICE are hailing a major victo-ry in the fight against car crime in the South - after a family who carried out dozens of breakins at beau-ty spots were jailed for three years.

Brothers David, Lenny and Wilfred Wells and their sister Carol Greenough, nephew Robert Willett and Wilfred's son, Wilfred junior, have each been found guilty of conspiracy to steal from cars between 1994 and 1997.

The group, from addresses in Southampton and Salisbury, were jailed in two separate court cases at Winchester Crown Court following linked investigations code-named Operation Otto and Operation Bismarck. At its height 20 officers worked on the case.

To date at least 53 crimes have been linked to the unemployed group.

During the trials it emerged the gang, usually working in teams, would sit in their own cars at beauty spots waiting for dog walkers and ramblers to park up before striking.

Sometimes they would use binoculars and find a spot overlooking car parks where they could size up their targets from a distance.

They would take cash and valuables but hardly ever leave traces of their crimes. In one instance a woman who put her hand-bag in her boot and locked it found it was stolen when she later went to a supermarket.

The thieves had taken it in the matter of seconds as she got into the car and then re-locked the boot after them.

No fingerprints were found, there was no other forensic evidence and none of the gang ever confessed. Only evidence by their scores of victims who had spotted them acting suspiciously and noted licence plate numbers led to their hefty jail terms.

And it emerged the gang, described by detectives as some of the most professional car thieves ever seen in the South, were so good at getting in and out of vehicles without leav-ing a trace that most people didn't realise they had been burgled.

The gang even devised their own tools to get into cars.

Practically no vehicle, no matter what its security, was immune, detectives said.

Detective Constable Ian Jones, who worked on the long-running investigation from 1996 when it was instigated, said: "They knew cars very well indeed. They could get into practically 99 per cent of cars on the road today.

"They would pose as a couple or as gardeners, they would even take some other young kids along for a day trip. "On a bad day they would make £500 in cash while on a good day they could steal as much as £3,000.''

Apart from Hampshire they struck in Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, North and South Devon, West Sussex, Surrey, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire.

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.