The torture and rape of a woman by a hammer-wielding South London drug dealer has been described as ‘evil’ by a judge. Serge Izapango, 42, was jailed for 20 years at Woolwich Crown Court on Friday (May 16) after pleading guilty to rape, two counts of grievous bodily harm, and controlling an coercive conduct in relation to three separate women, plus three Class A drug offences.
Prosecutor Alisdair Smith said: “The counts arise out of the defendant’s activities as a drug dealer. To run that business for profit he exploited other people. Those he chose to exploit were people with significant problems of their own, because they had personal health difficulties, or because they were older and not able to protect themselves. The Crown says he was in the habit of taking advantage of women who became caught up with him.”
Izapango, of Sangley Road in Catford, Lewisham, appeared in a dark suit and striped shirt as Judge Ruth Downing handed down an extended sentence, comprising of 15 years in custody and another five on extended license.
Turning to Izapango, whose family members wept in the public gallery, Judge Downing said: “You are capable of losing your temper and inflicting significant violence on those who cross you or owe you money… I hope if you have demons within you from your childhood, or whatever, you can address them in a way which does not bring you into conflict with the law again.”
The court heard how Izapango met one victim through her former partner in 2020, using the name ‘Michael’ as an alias. After giving birth to a child, the woman went to Malta to visit her mother, who noticed a number of injuries caused by the defendant. When the victim’s father became involved in stopping her drug use in the UK, he noticed Izapango maintained control over her by supplying the drugs and ‘making physical demands’.
When the victim was interviewed by police, she said things began romantically but then she had sex with Izapango for drugs and he took control of her life, taking her passport away so she could not escape. In a second interview, she told of two incidents that put her in Lewisham Hospital, including a time when he threw her out of the car, knocked her to the ground, and kicked her in the head.
According to her father, who spoke in court, Izapango would boast about knowing how to dissolve bodies in acid, and told her he was lacing her drugs with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate, estimated to be 80 times more potent than morphine. When police eventually seized heroin from his industrial lock-up, it was found to contain protonitazene, an even stronger opiate.
On one occasion she got into her dad’s car with two black eyes and said ‘Michael’ had punched her and told her ‘Ask your dad what he thinks of that’, the victim’s father said, adding that this made him fear his daughter would be killed, or he would get ‘jumped’ by Izapango in the street at any moment. “I remember that part of my life in ongoing horror,” he added.
‘The beatings just get worse’
Another woman who became involved with Izapango was a crack cocaine user who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had also recently become a mother. She was rescued after making a 999 call from Izpango’s drug base – a shipping container in Commonwealth Studios near Woolwich Dockyard – where she was taken overnight, kicked and punched, and hit with a bottle and claw hammer, apparently over a drug debt.
When police arrived in January last year, Izpango tried to escape but gave up when he realised there was a helicopter circling overhead. The woman who was rescued had a swollen lip, back pain, and a liver injury. There, officers also found another woman, who claimed she watched Izapango ‘digging’ the other woman with a screwdriver, and was forced to clean up blood from the torture.
Speaking about Izapango’s assaults on her, the second woman said: “I tried and it’s just made it worse. The beatings just get worse every time I try to escape. [When I gave up trying to escape] in that sense it was a little bit better because [the beatings were] not so often.”
‘Particularly violent’
During the raid, police discovered 7g of cocaine and 57g of heroin, the latter worth around £7,700 street value. A CCTV trawl of three months worth of footage revealed 78 visits to the container in that period, with ‘drug dealing activity’. Speaking to a probation officer, Izapango, who has previous convictions for robbery and supplying Class As, confessed he has worked dishonestly for the last 15 years.
More concerningly, however, police discovered CCTV footage of Izapango’s attack on the third woman, which showed him beating her with the claw hammer for 15-minutes followed by oral rape. After a 15-minute break, the ‘fear’ and ‘considerable force’ of the beating ensured the terrified woman would submit to Izapango when he asked her to pleasure him, said Mr Smith.
The footage was so harrowing that the press and members of the public were prevented from viewing the clip, which was viewed by the judge in chambers. Mr Smith said the rape was ‘particularly violent’, adding: “It was clear she did not want to do what she did.”
‘Talk about the banality of evil’
Defence counsel Oliver Cook said Izapango described his own crimes as ‘hideous’, and knew he faced a long sentence. “He is penitent. He is trying to understand what led him to behave in this way and he is trying to do his best to address that, which he has done,” explained the barrister.
Mr Cook also revealed Izapango’s difficult upbringing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it is claimed he witnessed the death of his father and other family members. Not seeking to excuse, but rather explain, Mr Cook added: “The court may think that brutalised childhood may have contributed to that offending behaviour.”
Judge Downing interjected early in the mitigation, however, taking issue with Izapango’s character references in light of the disturbing video she had just been shown.
“Talk about the banality of evil, but the banality of violence is equally there,” said the judge, “Without wishing to sound facetious, if they had to find one word to describe this man – it would be ‘selfless’, ‘deeply caring’, ‘family man’, that ‘it was inexplicable with how he got caught up in something like this’ – is wholly inappropriate.
“[This is] a man who beat a woman with a bottle and hammer, and called her to give him oral sex. He’s a selfless family man and someone you go to for advice? Maybe you are going to advise he’s a Jekyll and Hyde character, maybe you are…”
Responding to Izpango’s ‘remorse’, she added: “The first time he apologised is when he knows he’s got a prison sentence and he goes to the writer of the probation report.”
‘Sobering and upsetting’
In her sentencing remarks, Judge Downing said: “The defendant plainly shows to woman an utter disregard for their wellbeing, their safety, and them as people really.
“I took the opportunity to view the CCTV footage and it is a sobering and upsetting vision of behaviour of a grown man to a woman already in his thrall by reason of drug dealing and addiction. In a second of that video, the way in which he behaves: the sudden rage, the beating, pummelling, the sudden disengagement, the restarting from nothing, and, may I say, the offensive way, having worked up a muck and sweat from assaulting this woman, the sitting down then coming to the act of oral sex.”
Though she accepted his childhood difficulties, the judge said it was hard to give much weight to them as the violence had not followed him to England.
Praising the ‘diligent’ police investigation into his dealing activities, Judge Downing said ‘the drugs run through this’ as they kept the women in Izapango’s control. “The defendant is a drug dealer and he defends his business in the violent way that he does,” she said, adding Izapango showed ‘no care or comfort’ to those he attacked.
The sentence means Izapango will serve at least 10 years in custody, before serving the rest of the 15 years on license, plus another five years on extended license due to his dangerousness. He is also entered on the sex offenders register indefinitely. Court documents show in March this year, the Crown applied to freeze crypto assets in Izapango’s name worth more than £44,000.
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