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EXCLUSIVE: BAFTA-winner Nick Leather is heading inside the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the “most successful law enforcement operation in UK history” for his latest TV project.
Leather has tied with Mood producer Bonafide Films on the as-yet-untitled series, which we are told is in early-stage conversation with potential buyers. Tom Dunbar is producing.
Leather’s drama will reveal the inner workings of the NCA through a story that focuses on the 2020 infiltration of the encrypted phone-system EncroChat, and how it gave the agency a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decimate the criminal underworld. With a ticking clock, a secret to keep hidden and in the face of unprecedented challenges, the NCA ultimately delivered ‘Operation Venetic’, which Leather and the creative team described as the “most successful law enforcement operation in UK history.” There have been more than 3,400 arrests so far including almost 13,300 years of combined sentencing, and it the operation is still ongoing.
Leather has been given what Bonafide described as “extraordinary access” to the NCA and is speaking with the officers who were central to EncroChat’s takedown.
“Spending time within the NCA, digging into this landmark operation and finding out what and who is right at its heart, has been an absolute delight,” said Leather. “This is one of the great success stories of modern policing – how the best of British came together to bring down the worst. And I can’t wait to tell it.”
Leather won a BAFTA for BBC drama Murdered for Being Different, while other credits include Nightsleeper, Mother’s Day and The Control Room. Bonafide is best known for Mood, the BAFTA-winning BBC musical drama series that made a star of Nicôle Lecky. Margery Bone’s BBC Studios-backed indie is also making a feature about Shakespeare’s First Folio from Conclave writer Peter Straughan and a Peter Moffat-penned adaptation of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist.
