© Bran Symondson

It's getting late. It's 10pm, and under the streetlights near Marble Arch, buses -circle the fountains as a man from Westminster Council is doing his best - as -politely as he is able - to persuade a group of Romanian Gypsies to get the hell out of his neighbourhood.

I'm sitting watching the official from a grass slope with Marius and Ioanna, two young Roma - to use their proper name - who've been -sleeping rough in London for a few months. Ioanna is rather beautiful and wearing a headscarf. She makes money cleaning cafés in the West End, she says, enough to send £50 or £70 a month back to Romania. Marius has been having a tougher time. He came in the winter, after construction work dried up in Milan, and he's been squatting with another man in an empty house up the road in Marylebone. He is wearing a heavy, white Dolce & Gabbana-style sweater that says "Delicious & Gorgeous" on it. Marius gives long, lyrical shrugs when I ask him questions. "There are good people between us," he says. "But we are all considered thieves."

The man from the council - his name is Nik Ward - has a translator with him, turning his words into Romanian, but he's enunciating in English anyway, as if by force of -emphasis alone he can break through the separation of -centuries. "We don't think it's OK for you to live on the streets," he says. "Hmm? It's not good. It's not good for your bodies. It's not good for your heads."

There are about 30 Gypsies around Marble Arch tonight, and they are standing round with all their junk - the -suitcases, the plastic stools, the beer bottles, the House Of Fraser bags, the KFC wrappers, the -accordion - which has been driving the council crazy for 18 months now. "We must stop you guys from begging and sleeping on the streets, and going into bars," says Ward. "How are we going to do that?"

Some of the Roma relent. A few of the older ones, some obviously ill, get into a van to go to a shelter for the night. But the rest just let Ward talk. Marius is eating a McFlurry. Costas, sitting next to him, carefully spits on the grass. Ioanna leans over to me. "Can you help me build a house?" She is 23, pregnant, and wants to have the child in Britain. Ward is still talking. "We can't help you, until you start paying your taxes..."

You'll be seeing a lot more of us in the future. We're going to beg, do whatever we can to escape (Manix, Romanian Gypsy)

Courtesy of the ever-expanding European Union, the UK, and London, are finally waking up to one of Europe's biggest embarrassments: that after the better part of a thousand years, our continent still does not know how to live at peace with its largest ethnic minority. The Roma started to arrive in Greece, mysteriously, from India, some time after the tenth century - the last ancient migration from Asia. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, their population in the EU is estimated at anywhere between six and 12 million people. Everywhere they are impoverished and unemployed; and most of us know next to nothing about them.

Sure, we've had some Gypsies in this country for a long time.

The first band arrived in 1505. In 1554, they were given a month to leave, or they would face execution. A few dared to stay - even fewer survived - and became the UK's small traveller community, who number in the tens of thousands today. It's not been a happy story but with the exception of the odd high-profile eviction, or reality-TV show, it rarely punctures the national imagination either.

That is about to change. The Gypsies around Marble Arch are Romanian, and from -1 January 2014 all Romanian and Bulgarian citizens will be entitled to live and work in the UK. Romania has Europe's largest population of Roma (confusingly, the words "Roma" and "Romania" have nothing to do with one another): somewhere between two and three million people. The British tabloids, reflecting a fear of another wave of immigration from eastern Europe, have used images of the band in Marble Arch as the first sign of the influx to come. What will happen when the last -barriers to these countries come down?

The British tabloids have used images of the band of Roma Gypsies in Marble Arch as the first sign of the influx to come, reflecting a fear of another wave of immigration from Eastern Europe

The truth is that we don't know. It's hard enough to predict what the majority of Bulgarians and Romanians are going to do, and the Gypsies are the shadow inside that puzzle. Wary of perceived racism, European -governments and police forces tend not to collect data on particular ethnic groups. The Roma are careful about declaring their -identity, too. Having a high profile has never helped them in the past. Huge numbers were killed during the Holocaust, and in the summer of 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy was -condemned by the Pope and the UN when he snapped and ordered the bulldozing of at least 50 Roma camps and the deportation of -thousands from the edge of French cities.

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As a result, firm evidence about the Roma is often lost in the broader march of statistics about European nationalities as a whole. Earlier this year, the Home Office -commissioned a 60-page report about the likely impact of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving in the UK after 2014. The section on the Roma, who number around three million in the two -countries, ran to two paragraphs.

So they are, for most of us, largely abstract people. Until they turn up in your -neighbourhood. On an electric-blue morning, I turn into Bryanston Square, a few streets north of Marble Arch. It's like the opening of Mrs Dalloway here. White stucco mansions overlook a private, green rectangle of lawn. Removal men are unloading furniture wrapped in brown paper. A woman, with her personal trainer, -stretches under the trees. A taxi driver is asleep in his cab.

Sharon Walvin manages 40 flats in the streets around the square, working from a -basement office on its northern side. The first she knew about the new Gypsy presence was when a tenant reported that two friends had been mugged walking up the street to supper. That was last autumn. Since then, Walvin's office has been burgled twice and she's been dreaming of ways to stop the Roma from climbing into the square's enclosed garden each night to sleep and shit in the bushes. This morning, two men had to be kicked off the basement steps of number 29. "We all feel very safe here," says Walvin. "Or we did." She doesn't like working late on her own any more, and is afraid to approach the Gypsies when she sees them. "They stand their own," she says. "I'm sure they could sort me out."

Marylebone and Mayfair might be wealthy, but it's not old-fashioned England. All of Walvin's tenants are foreign. Her parents came from British Guiana in 1959. People know about immigration here, the trade-offs of hard work and -cultural integration - and the Gypsies in the square are unsettling precisely because they don't seem interested in that. "They are -different to us," says Walvin. "They are not here for that reason." She's not convinced they are simply desperate either. They look well fed. She thinks they go through the bins, looking for people's credit-card information to sell. "I hesitate to say this, but they've got this sort of feral, -pack-like approach. This is the way they live. This is their life."

The police have been watching the Roma on Marble Arch since the very first few arrived, in November 2011. There was talk at the time that they turned up with maps, suggesting that the spot had been carefully chosen. One of Marble Arch's many advantages is that it gives on to Edgware Road, which is popular with tourists from the Middle East, who find it hard not to give to begging Muslims. (The Roma women disguise themselves with headscarves.) Ever since, officers have wondered about the level of organisation within the group, and whether it is connected with more serious crimes, such as human trafficking or childprostitution. Hierarchical networks of beggars and street thieves - run by Gypsies, for Gypsies - have been on the rise in big European cities for the last decade: in Rome, in Milan, in Paris, in Madrid. London is a logical next target.

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Having spent day after day with the Gypsies this summer, I find they are never more than a few hours from their next visit from the police or their next arrest for begging. Marius calls out the only English words he knows - "Relax!" and "Hello, boys!" - as the officers pull on blue latex gloves and start photographing and going through the group's possessions. Romanian nationals (the numbers are not broken down by ethnicity) were responsible for half the begging and a third of the pickpocket -offences in London last year, and one afternoon, as he searches the group, a plain-clothes cop says to me, "It's like anything: you've got your foot -soldiers and then your guys on top. If you prove yourself, you move up.

That's how it works."

Chief inspector Louise Puddefoot, who runs Operation Chefornak, the Metropolitan Police's attempt to get a handle on the Roma in the West End, says that after the best part of two years, her team is still trying to figure out exactly what they're up against.

There can be dozens of small groups of Gypsies on Oxford Street and in Mayfair and Marylebone on any given day. Some commute in from Walthamstow and Redbridge to beg and run scams. It's not clear whether they are linked to the group at Marble Arch, whether some of the Roma are here against their will, or if anyone is in charge. "We don't know, is the answer," says Puddefoot, in her office on Savile Row. "The money is going somewhere, put it that way. When people get arrested, it's very rare that we find the proceeds of their day's work."

When I ask the Roma myself, the stories never add up. The men and women at Marble Arch always insist they met each other -coincidentally in London, but almost all of them turn out to be from the same, relatively small corner of northeastern Romania, around a city called Botosani. They say they have no money, but the police impounded £3,000 from the group on 11 April this year. Their explanations for the money are vague: Marius says the cash was wired from Romania, to pay for tickets home, and produces a receipt from a money transfer shop in Botosani for £1,190. But it is dated 24 January 2013, before he turned up in London, and before the group are supposed to have met each other.

What is clear is that the people sleeping rough and begging in one of Britain's richest -neighbourhoods are marked by the poverty and the exclusion of the lives they have lived. They say they want jobs and one evening I ask four Roma girls in their early twenties, and a burly young man, called Florin, about their hopes for their new lives in the UK. They are excited, and could be immigrants from -anywhere in the world, but only one in four Roma children finish school in Romania, and their ambitions turn out to be strangely simple. Florin wants to sweep the streets. The girls want to clean hotels. "Don't give me a computer," one says. "I'll hurt myself."

© Bran Symondson

Intrigued yet also somewhat suspicious, that night I ask Marius if I can go back to Romania and meet his family in Botosani. He gives one of his shrugs. He says he's thinking of giving up on London anyway. "We don't have anything to hide," he says. "We don't have a palace." He gives me his mother's phone number, and goes to find somewhere to sleep.

We find Marius' mother and brother on the side of the road.

They've come down to the middle of Hlipiceni, a village on the edge of the hills about 30 miles southeast of Botosani, to flag down the car. I think Iliana, Marius' mother, is in her mid-fifties, until I find out she is 39. Daniel, meanwhile, is 17 and dressed for a day out at a Monte-Carlo beach club: crisp shorts, V-neck golf sweater, flat cap, white loafers. It's just after three o'clock on a weekday afternoon in one of the poorest parts of rural Romania. Geese are walking down the middle of the road.

Marius' family live in a two-room house perched on a small, triangular plot. It is tidy, and painted pink and yellow. The only trace of the family's old Gypsy life - they were travelling musicians a couple of generations back - are a few images of bears on blankets, and a photograph of Marius' dead father, laid out in his fedora. When communism arrived in 1945, like most Romanian Roma, they became farm labourers and worked in the local collective. Since 1991, they have eked out a living as hired hands, growing a few onions in the garden. Sometimes, Daniel makes 15-20 Romanian Lei (about £3 or £4) unloading a lorry in the village, but every piece of family expenditure is an obstacle. It's summer, and they are wondering how they will get together 300 Lei (about £60) to buy wood for winter. "It is impossible for us," says Iliana. "There are days when we don't have money for bread." She speaks quietly. Every few minutes, she is drowned out by a horse and cart going past on the road.

At times it seems like the loudest thing in the room is the pregnant belly of Daniel's 15-year-old wife, Maria. Another mouth to feed. Daniel will go on the road soon, like his brother. "It is our only chance," says Maria. "He cannot help me from here."

Hierarchical networks of beggars and street thieves - run by Gypsies, for Gypsies - have been on the rise in big European cities for the last decade. London is a logical next target

A lot of Romanians are poor. The average income is less than £6,000 per year, and closer to £4,000 in places such as Botosani.

Across the country, however, Gypsies tend to be even poorer than their neighbours. "Where a Romanian is nearly dead," as the saying goes, "a Roma will be already burned."

People disagree about whether Gypsies really have different needs to the rest of the population, though. Marking them out for special treatment can just lead to other problems. Marius' family are convinced, however, that their -situation is a result of their history. Some of the oldest records of the Roma in Romania are from near Botosani, from the 14th century. (The name "Romania", by the way, comes from the Romans. "Roma" probably comes from the "Rom" or "Dom", a travelling underclass in India.) The strange wanderers from Asia were slaves for five centuries in Romania, traded between monasteries and local lords like pots and pans: a girl for two copper bowls; a lame one for a jar of honey.

When they were freed, in 1863, the Gypsies of eastern Europe began their second great migration, after their explorations of the Middle Ages, before being settled under communism. Most Roma in Romania refer to this period fondly now. They had houses, and jobs.

In the chaos of the Nineties, though, they slipped back to the bottom of the pile. Farms and businesses that had been seized by the state reverted to their former private owners, and Gypsies were squeezed out again. "The land was given back to the people," says Iliana. "We have nothing."

Iliana is sick of being told that Gypsies should try harder to join mainstream society. The family have simply never had the money. Marius left school after two years, at the age of eight;

Daniel at 13. "What are my options?" she asks. "People think we should change, but into what?" Iliana's main concern, she says, is that her house is slipping on its foundations, year by year, into the road below.

Marius, too, preys on her mind. "I am not sure how he is coping," she says. Unlike when he was in Italy, Marius has not been able to send any money home since he arrived in the UK. But Iliana denies strongly that he is part of an organised begging or criminal enterprise. "I told him, 'Just go to beg, do whatever you can to make a living,'" says Iliana. "'But don't steal. We are not that kind of people.'"

It's not as if there isn't a plan to help the Roma in eastern Europe. In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme, which assists some of the poorest people on earth, found that, in terms of illiteracy, infant mortality and malnutrition, "most of the region's Roma endure living conditions closer to those of sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe". Since then, more than €25bn (£21bn) has been made available by the EU to improve their lives.

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The problem is that nothing has changed. In Romania, around a decade on, according to almost every social measurement you can possibly think of - employment, education, income, access to the internet, size of house, frequency of rubbish collection, life expectancy, poverty - Gypsies are worse off. Despite the efforts of international organisations and Roma charities, there is a stubborn, perceptible gap between the two populations.

I am struck, talking to Romanian officials, by how worn out they seem by the problem. Part of that is down to a general, national malaise. Romania has had a tough time during the -economic crisis.

But it is also a country that is emptying itself. Between three to four million Romanians, out of what used to be a population of 22 million, are currently working abroad. (That would be the equivalent of the emigration of ten million people from the UK.) "Everybody who stays is thinking, 'We are the last stupids that remain here,'" a Romanian journalist tells me. "All the clevers went out." In that context, addressing even the most basic social questions can seem overwhelming. Of the €4.5bn (£3.8bn) that Romania has received from the EU in the last six years to help develop the country in all areas, around 90 per cent remains unspent.

And then there are the bloody Gypsies. I rarely get to ask more than a question or two before Romanian officials - mayors, teachers, police officers, councillors - launch into lectures about the Roma "mentality" and how impossible they are to deal with. "I cannot say what they are planning," said the sub--prefect of Botosani, Sebastian Tocariu. "Maybe tomorrow they will go to New York!" There is their dishonesty; their dependency on state hand-outs; their uncontrollable nomadism (a -phenomenon which I found strange to hear about in a country where almost everyone is thinking of moving abroad). But what I'm hearing, I am assured, is not racism. "If we talk bad about them, it's like when you talk about someone who is not as smart as you," a polite female police inspector in Bucharest tries to explain to me one day. "We don't necessarily discriminate against them. You see the difference?

Because they are ours... It is like, 'They are ours!' We don't see them as a completely different kind. And not all of them are bad."

After a while, I get the impression of two communities giving up on each other. I go and see Viorel Achim, a Romanian historian who has studied the Roma's seven centuries in the country. He says he used to be more -optimistic, and dreamt of the rise of a Gypsy middle class, who would set standards of education and prosperity that the rest of their people would follow. "Now," he said, "I think not." Instead, Achim says, the opening borders of the EU are the answer, a way to balance the relative concentration of Roma in eastern Europe, and their scarcity in countries to the north and west. They will fan out across the continent. "This is the third great migration," he says, referring to the waves of Gypsy movement in the 15th and 19th centuries, "and this is just the beginning."

I hear much the same thing, albeit more crudely, in Botosani.

Talking about the Gypsies in Park Lane one day, a councillor in the city basically wishes them good riddance. "This is your time to know them," she says.

That evening I go to a tower block in a neighbourhood of the city known as the Parcul Tineretului, which has become, in recent years, a Roma ghetto. As soon as we get out of the car, we are surrounded by people calling out the names of the places they have been in Europe: Polonia! Germania! Franta! Spania! Italia! There are broken windows and a dirty patch of ground where children are playing. It is getting dark, and we go upstairs with a Roma man called Manix, who is in charge of the building. There are no lights in the corridors, which smell of excrement. If he didn't have his job, Manix says, he'd already be in London. The room fills up with Gypsies of all ages to watch us talk. "You are going to be seeing a lot more of us in the future," says Manix. "We're going to beg, do whatever we can. Anything to escape."

There are points of light; of course there are. One night in Bucharest I sit down with Damian Draghici, who is Romania's most famous Gypsy, and now the prime minister's advisor on Roma affairs. Draghici made it big as a -musician, playing jazz in the US on the pan flute, a beloved instrument in Romania. He was courted for years by successive governments, looking to put a presentable face on their Roma policies, until last June, when he decided to cast his lot in with Victor Ponta, the country's 41-year-old, energetic new leader. Draghici is a senator now, and he turned up shaven-headed in a sharp blue suit. He is also on the warpath.

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Draghici spent his first six months in office visiting 162 projects that were supposed to be helping Gypsies, and tore up Romania's national Roma strategy in the process. Some of his fiercest -criticisms have been for Roma-run NGOs, which have swallowed up tens of millions of euros in EU funds, often with few discernible results. "That was the worst for me," he says. "But the money, rather than arriving to the grass roots, was getting spent on human resources: buying a nice building, getting nice computers, getting nice cars, getting nice salaries... If you want to run a business, open a supermarket. I don't care."

Draghici's new plan relies on at least some of Romania's Gypsies having the nerve to -confront each other about knotted, painful questions within their community. "You know where I first felt discriminated?" Draghici asks me. "In my house! When I was six years old. The first time I went to school, they said, 'Be careful, because you are not like them. You are not like the gadje [non-Roma]. You are a Roma. You are more stupid. You are an idiot...' That is the biggest problem. The Roma impose on themselves the inferiority complex." I hear that phrase so many times talking about the Roma in Romania, and it describes the young men and women, and their stunted dreams, on Marble Arch. "I think the worst sickness, the cancer of the soul, is getting the inferiority complex," said Draghici. "It won't let you do anything, ever."

Before he leaves, Draghici tells me about a Roma mayor in the south of Romania, called Mihai Ioana, who is trying to stop Gypsies from deserting his district to go off to the streets of Europe to beg and steal. It is a difficult thing to do, and Draghici respects him for it. "The man who risks everything, risks everything," he said. "The man who doesn't take a chance, doesn't have a chance."

The next day we drive out of Bucharest to meet him.

There are more Gypsies in Romania's southern counties, including many of the country's most prosperous clans and families. On the way to Ioana's village of Gradinari, we pass some of their pagoda-like mansions: architectural fantasias with blue roofs, lining the road. Romania's rich Roma are an object of fascination for everyone, gadje and Gypsy. Some of them have transformed traditional Roma crafts - such as coppersmithing, or horse trading - into successful, 21st-century businesses, such as metal trading, or car dealerships. But there is a lot of organised crime as well, in networks that operate across Europe: human and drug trafficking, credit-card fraud. When we get to Ioana's rather large, brand-new mayor's office, we find him on his own. There is a catalogue for ploughs and tractors on his desk.

What will happen when the last barriers to Great Britain come down? The truth is that we don't know "It's a dream for the Roma kids to get out of here," says Ioana. "And that's not good for the people here and the countries they are going to." The mayor is a soft, approachable man in his fifties.

What he describes reminds me of Hlipiceni, and what I heard from Marius' family. It doesn't add up for the Gypsies in his district to stay. While most of the Romanians have at least some land that they owned, or some education, most of the Roma live as day labourers, earning 30 to 40 Romanian Lei (£6-£8) per day. In 2007, when Romania joined the EU, the Gypsies started to leave.

For the first time, I hear a Roma man willing to describe the system that has evolved to help them do it. Without funds or sufficient qualifications - even literacy, in many cases - to access the normal routes for Romanian migrants, Gypsies have come to rely on local camatar (money lenders) and "mules" to get them across Europe. There's nothing fancy about it. A mule might just be a guy with a car. But the deals tend to be long-term.

Roma normally travel for free out of Romania, with their travel - a few hundred euros, the interest ticking away - to be paid back over a number of years. Once they get to Spain or Italy or Germany, the most popular destinations until recently, the Roma seek the protection of a local boss, a figure that Ioana calls the seful de platz, literally "chief of the square". For a cut of everything they make, known as "taxes", the seful de platz sorts them out with a job, a place to stay, sometimes even food to eat. More often than not, though, this is just a place to beg. "They are ashamed," says Ioana. "They come back and say that they worked. No one admits that they beg."

The mayor is desperate to come up with ways to stop the Roma from leaving his district. With just a bit of investment from the government - some new agricultural machinery, for example - he believes that wages in the village might improve. (Gradinari is famous for its cabbages.) But in the meantime, the local economy is in a downward spiral. There is not enough -manpower, quality is going down. Ioana is also -spending more of his time helping his constituents deal with money lenders, and other unhappy knock-on effects of their adventures in Europe.

We leave his office and go down the road to Gradinari's only café. A red pool table sits under a thin canopy of leaves. It's the end of the working day, and around a dozen Roma have gathered there, their hands dirty from the fields. They have all been abroad in Europe at one time or another in recent years, and Ioana asks them, point blank, in turn, "Did you beg? Did you beg?" "Yes," each replies. "Did you beg?" "Yes." He goes round the whole group, and the men volunteer a few details of their lives abroad. A tall Roma man in a black jumper ended up paying a mule €2,000 (£1,690) for a ride to Germany. A man who worked on a farm outside Milan paid a cut of his salary to the local seful de platz for five years. A man who begged for two years in Sardinia, called Petruscu, -suddenly drops to his knees, inclines his head and puts his hand out, his body shaped by muscle memory. "This is hard work," he says. "I did this for ten or 12 hours a day."

I ask if it is really necessary to migrate in such an expensive and punishing way. "You have to pay. You know from the outset. You know from before you go away," says a man called Stoian, who has begged in Madrid, and Foggia in Italy. "If I had the money to go on the bus on my own I would," says Petrescu. "But even if I had, I would still have to affiliate myself with a platz.

Everywhere is controlled." When I tell the men about the Gypsies around Marble Arch, their immediate reaction is of slight dismay.

London is, without question, the next destination for the Gypsies in Gradinari, and this sounds like a good platz. But they figure it must be controlled by Roma they have no connection with. "Right now, in England, this thing is still very much at the beginning, so there is competition for the better places," explains Stoian. "We would only go if we already knew somebody there, otherwise it is just impossible."

It's a dream for Roma kids to get out of here. And that's not good for the countries they are going to (Roma Mayor Mihai Ioana)

In the end, we are just talking about economics. The push and pull of money. The men reckon a day of begging in a wealthy European city could be bring in about €40 (£34) - four times what they get for a day's work in the cabbage fields - maybe more in London. Sure, they have been told some crazy things about Britain.

There is a rumour that if they turn up with their families, they will get €2,500 (£2,112) in benefits straight away to get them started. (Not true.) But even if that isn't the case - and even if they have to pay way over the odds to get here; and even if they have loan sharks on their backs wherever they end up; and even if a little cut of what they make goes to a seful and he hangs over them for years - the amazing thing is that it still, just about, just enough, beats staying where they were. It's worth a shot. "It might be weird," says a handsome Rom called Vijay, "but that's why we're going."

The financial logic is what makes Mayor Ioana's task - the campaign to fight the third great Gypsy migration - so difficult.

It's like holding back the wind. On my last day in Romania, I go to a shelter, in the far western city of Timisoara, that intervenes in cases of human trafficking. For the last three years, the shelter, which is run by a charity called Generatie Tanara Romania, has had a contract with the French government, trying to assist Gypsies - often -children - who have been caught up in begging and prostitution rings against their will. But it is rarely, if ever, a simple matter, finding the line between the freedom to move and the -compulsion to do so. What sounds and looks like organised crime to us is still a way to change your life. Do Marius and his brother want to leave their mother, and her house falling into the road?

Would the Gypsies of Gradinari prefer to grow cabbages? Is it even up to them? "Migration, trafficking, for them maybe it is the same thing," says Francisc Csizmarik, one of the case workers at the shelter.

It is raining gently, but Csizmarik wants to take us out for a short drive. Within a minute or two, we are passing the astonishing mansions of Timisoara's rich Roma. Csizmarik used to be an investigative journalist, and as we go past each house - the alarmed fences, the columned facades, the yellow, Gypsy châteaux - he calls out, "This from begging. This from smuggling. This from doing stuff with cars." These are the rewards of the

camatars, the biggest seful de platz. Csizmarik explains that even when the shelter does manage to persuade Gypsies that they might have been trafficked, or exploited, it is impossible to get them to testify against their persecutors. We drive past, our eyes drawn to the foreign licence plates. Germany.

Italy. A British blue Mercedes C-Class. "These guys have nothing to do with the poor Gypsies. They just exploit them," says Csizmarik.

We pause outside yet another Scarface pile. "Do you think they are discriminated?" He asks from the front seat. "Who is discriminated here?"

It is a perfect summer evening, the last time I stop by to talk to the Gypsies in Mayfair. They are gathered on Park Lane, in the central reservation, a cluster of about 50 by now, under the plane trees. Among the Gypsies, a Roma man is lying on his back, looking up the sky, playing a simple song on the accordion. Marius is there. The police are still giving the group a hard time, he says.

He is still thinking of leaving. But I notice that Marius has a summer outfit now. The Dolce & Gabbana-style sweater is gone.

Now he is wearing chinos, espadrilles and a blue velvet jacket. He has a bottle of shower gel in his pocket. He's also been joined by a friend from Hlipiceni, who smiles and gives his name as Vasil.

It is clear that something has changed. I have come too many times, asked too many -questions. Ioanna, in particular, is hostile now and accuses me of spying. Perhaps a dozen Roma come and stand around. No one is aggressive, but no one wants to talk either. I remember a phrase that one of the police officers used. "The shutters come down." Over the heads of the group, I notice two better-dressed Roma men, who I have not seen before, approach one of the elders from Botosani. They talk for a minute, and then disappear into the London rush hour. I ask Marius if there was a

seful de platz in Marble Arch, and whether I can meet him.

His eyes never waver. "We don't have anything like that here."

Originally published in the January 2013 edition of British GQ.