Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| The allegations of corruption published by The Times could be traced back to Eddie Brennan, a retired safe-cracker who had graduated into fencing stolen property. Brennan was a highly successful criminal who had the advantage of a partnership with a corrupt locksmith who supplied him with duplicate keys to dozens of commercial premises. Brennan chose the targets and then allocated them to one of several London gangs, leaving the professionals to undertake the robberies in return for the privilege of buying the proceeds at remarkably low prices, thus allowing him a very substantial margin. As Brennan’s fame spread, the Yard heard that he was personally responsible for a veritable crime wave that had swept the capital, and in November 1967 a special operation, code-named COATHANGER was prepared by a team of detectives led by Chief Inspector Irvine of No. 6 Regional Crime Squad. The codename COATHANGER was chosen because much of the crime under investigation concerned stolen clothing, and Detective Inspector Bernie Robson from the Yard’s C9 Department took over operational command in October 1969 when the gangs resumed their activities. Of the eleven detectives working on COATHANGER, only two were from the Met, and the rest had been drawn from provincial forces. Robson personally had arrested twenty-two of the robbers, including the technician responsible for making the duplicate keys, but some of these had been copied and circulated, allowing several other gangs to participate in the raids. In fact, so many keys were being passed around that it was rumoured different gangs had turned up at the same premises to rob them at the same time! On one occasion a gang had arrived just as another was coming out, having left nothing worth stealing.
Robson’s first task was to recruit an informant and his chosen target was a professional named Michael Perry, a twenty-two year-old car dealer with eighteen convictions. Perry lived in Nunhead Lane, Peckham and was generally known to be at the very heart of the ‘skeleton key gang’, and when the two men met early in October 1969 Perry had been found in possession of a case of stolen whisky, and had been charged with dishonestly handling. Under pressure, he had admitted knowing the names of ten members of the gang, and five receivers. He was Robson’s best chance of bringing COATHANGER to a successful conclusion, but five days later he was talking to The Times. CID officers have many ways of cultivating informants but when time is a luxury there are methods of cutting corners and applying pressure. Sometime called recruitment by ‘the hard way’, the objective is to coerce cooperation through old-fashioned intimidation. In Perry’s case he fell for an old expedient, and he was simply tricked into touching some gelignite which was immediately sealed into an evidence exhibit bag, thus leaving him open to the charge that his fingerprints had been found on a piece of explosive recovered from a crime scene. Once the fingerprint identification had been confirmed, and usually accepted by juries as irrefutable scientific evidence from a forensics expert, the target would be facing a long prison sentence unless he agreed to become a CID ‘snout’. In Perry’s case, he was threatened with eight years inside unless he identified London’s master fence and his key-man, and he confided his predicament to Brennan who offered the story to The Tmes. However, the version peddled by Brennan omitted the true background to COATHANGER and centred on the allegation that a young man had been the victim of a scheme run by two Yard detectives who had planted evidence on him and then threatened to charge him with possession unless they were paid a large sum of cash. This rather sanitised tale of extortion was accepted without question by the newspaper which assigned two journalists to collaborate with Perry who, under their direction, began calling local CID officers with the offer of information. Perry was suspected as the leader of a gang of young criminals known, after the television series, as ‘the likely lads’ who exploited a contact in a locksmith business. They would drive up to the midlands, visit sometimes several clothing stores in one evening, and empty them, using duplicate keys and wearing white coats to allay suspicion and avoid leaving forensic evidence. Over the past two years they had raided more than a hundred shops, had left no clues, and had stolen more than a million pounds of property. They never forced an entry, and the single common denominator to their crime spree was the complete absence of any usable forensic evidence such as fingerprints, hair or fibres. However, we had heard from informants of Perry’s involvement, but had not been able to prove anything because the likely lads, shrewdly, had been working off our patch. We knew they were all driving around in big cars with pockets full of cash, but we had not spotted them in an actual robbery. We kept them under observation for weeks, and when we had identified most of the gang members we sent a report to the Yard which circulated their details to some of the forces in the midlands that had been plagued by the well-planned and executed raids. For our part, we continued the surveillance in the hope of catching them at home after one of their escapades. The catalyst was a robbery on 22 September 1969 at the Nuneaton & Atherstone Co-op Society in which a large consignment of cigarettes were stolen, and two days later the Warwickshire detectives descended on Peckham to arrest Perry, and we received a request for assistance which implied that they thought these hardened young south London career criminals would crack at the first sight of a search warrant and an interrogation. The midlands officers wanted our cooperation in arresting all the suspects simultaneously, but the DI at Peckham knew that such tactics would waste six weeks of our time. His solution was to send the visitors to Camberwell with the suggestion that they apply for a search warrant from a local Justice of the Peace who was always willing to sign anything we put in front of him, irrespective of the supporting evidence. As I was later to discover, this particular exercise had proved very profitable for the detectives involved, as the raid resulted in the recovery of a large quantity of cigarettes, only a proportion of which ended up in the property store as evidence. Such diversions were quite routine, but this rather minor episode was to come back to haunt all concerned. In spite of the successful raid, the visitors really had no evidence against the likely lads, only a strong suspicion, but we were to humour them. Even the Yard, which had put the likely lads under surveillance in the hope of catching them unloading their gear at their receivers, had failed in their task, but all this promised to change when we received a call from Perry offering information. My first encounter with Perry occurred following his call to our office. Although we had not met previously, I had known his mother, a convicted shoplifter from Woolwich and it was through this link that he picked me as a suitable target. Always willing to recruit a new source, and being under no pressure to achieve any particular results because I was unconnected with the Yard’s COATHANGER operation, I met Perry and made the standard ‘soft’ pitch, that his cooperation with me would result in a measure of protection for him should he come to the attention of the police. This was an old technique, much favoured by my mentor, Ken Drury who was later to command the Flying Squad, and had built a solid reputation while a DI on the Regional Crime Squad I had served on at St Mary Cray, Orpington. Perry seemed agreeable to the suggestion, but when I called for his file I learned that he had plenty of form, and was even suspected of having broken into the tobacconists directly underneath his own flat, which he shared with a man named Robert Laming. Both men were also under investigation concerning a missing schoolgirl who was found to be living with them. In short, they were really nasty villains, and at a later meeting I was concerned that his reason for calling me to a rendezvous was his claim to me that two detectives had planted evidence on him, and he had named Robson and Harris. I had passed this awkward news on to DI Jim Sylvester at Peckham, whom I knew had served with Robson at Chelsea, and would be able to warn them. Six weeks after my meeting with Perry The Times ran their scoop that DI Robson, his assistant ‘Bomber’ Harris and myself, had been meeting Perry regularly to extort small sums of money from him. The evidence supporting the allegations, which was delivered to New Scotland Yard at 10pm on the night prior to publication, consisted of a long witness statement from Perry and a tape recording, and this was enough for the C1 Night Duty Officer, Ken Brett, to telephone the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Peter Brodie at home. He ordered Commander Yorke to start an immediate, overnight investigation to be conducted by Fred Lambert, and his assistant, Sergeant Basil ‘Baz’ Haddrell whom I had known as a fellow officer at St Mary Cray, ready for a top-level meeting early on Saturday morning. Lambert had been on call that evening, but was in a potentially awkward position because he had served with Harris at Brixton and later had worked together on the Flying Squad, and had got to know his family. I later learned that Lambert informed Yorke that he had also served with Robson, but Yorke had merely replied that he had also known both Robson and Harris. Lambert was ‘to get on with it and do a good job’, but he was unhappy with his assignment, which was to last six months. Within an hour of these events I was telephoned at home to let me know what had happened, and as I had worked on several disciplinary enquiries I knew the precautions that had to be taken. I had played a very peripheral role in the Richardson ‘Torture Gang’ case, which had put away London’s most dangerous gangsters since the Kray brothers, and that enquiry had led to ninety allegations of corruption against the officers who had built the prosecution’s case. I had not been one of the team that had investigated Richardson’s lucrative rackets, which including running the car parks at London Airport, but coincidentally I had known Eddie Richardson years earlier when we had both spent Saturday nights at dances held at the Streatham ice rink. Like hundreds of other CID officers, I had taken a few witness statements and followed up some local enquiries concerning the Richardson enquiry, but truly my contribution had been negligible. Almost immediately after my initial warning I received a call from a Daily Express journalist who read me an extract from the first edition of the next morning’s Times, and I had to suppress a gasp and pretend this was all in a day’s work, while declining to comment. The headline alone made my heart race: ‘LONDON POLICEMEN IN BRIBE ALLEGATIONS. TAPES REVEAL PLANTED EVIDENCE’. Disturbing evidence of bribery and corruption among certain London detectives was handed by The Times to Scotland Yard last night. We have, we believe, proved that at least three detectives are taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence offered in court. And for allowing a criminal to work unhindered. Our investigations into these men convince us that their cases are not isolated. The total haul of this detective Sergeant John Symonds of Camberwell, and two others, Detective Inspector Bernard Robson of Scotland Yard’s C( Division and Detective Sergeant Gordon Harris, a Regional Crime Squad officer on detachment from Brighton to Scotland Yard, was more than £400 in the past month from one man alone. I told the Express journalist I had no comment to make, and quickly jumped in my car to pick a copy of the first edition from an all-night newspaper stand in Fleet Street. I skimmed through several paragraphs about Robson and Harris until I reached what were claimed to be extracts of conversations between me and a small-time professional criminal whom I had supposedly met in south London pub car parks. These meetings had been photographed and tape-recorded, and apparently I had advised him: “Don’t forget always to let me know straight away if you need anything because I know people everywhere, because I am in a little firm in a firm, alright?” In the cold light of day, and taken out of context, the conversation, mixed with every kind of expletive, sounded ghastly, but that is the way you talked to such people. Furthermore, if you were an energetic thief-taker, you would have to endure allegations of that kind as an occupational hazard. That, of course, did not mean that such claims were not investigated to the fullest possible extent, so first I contacted my family solicitor to alert him, and then I searched my own house from top to bottom for any incriminating evidence, such as chemically impregnated banknotes that might have been planted on me, before driving to my office at Camberwell to check my desk. Accompanied by the station sergeant I also went through the prisoners’ property store and examined all the valuables in the safe to make certain that everything logged under my name was properly accounted for. I had heard of so many examples of officers being ‘fitted up’ with compromising evidence that I wanted to be absolutely certain that I was not about to fall into the same trap. My final precaution was to take the key from behind my desk and visit a small locked broom cupboard in an outbuilding that was marked ‘cleaners’ but contained the CID’s secret cache of fit-up exhibits. This was a collection of knives, guns, drugs and masks that were occasionally deployed when a reluctant informant needed some persuasion. In my experience they were the essential tools of the CID officer’s trade, but their discovery during an official investigation would cause nothing but trouble so I carried the lot to my car and drove them to Peckham police station where a colleague willingly accepted them. Finally I took my car to a late night garage and put it on the ramp to examine the underside of the vehicle. Once again, this was a necessary precaution because I had heard of small, magnetised containers packed with banknotes being concealed beneath the engine block. Only when I had completed the most detailed search inside and outside the car did I feel entirely confident about facing Lambert’s investigation which doubtless would begin early the following morning. It may sound odd that I should have gone to such lengths if I was truly innocent of taking money from Michael Perry, but I had good reason to be anxious. I reckoned that no newspaper would publish such allegations unless there was a verifiable paper-trail, and in this case an absolutely essential component would have been a stash of dirty money. I knew that none existed, but it would not take much effort to find a way of planting some on me, my car, in my desk, or even in my garden shed. By checking all the obvious hiding places, any subsequent discovery would have had to have been based on a plant made after the newspaper had hit the streets, and I would be in the clear. For a newspaper to behave in this way was, in those days, really quite extraordinary, and for the upmarket Times to indulge in such tactics was unprecedented. Why had the newspaper not taken Perry’s allegations straight to the Commissioner, Sir John Waldron, who was universally respected? Whatever his loyalty to the force, Waldron would had been ruthless in his pursuit of corruption. Even more inexplicable was the newspaper’s willingness to collude with a professional criminal and print a story which, by its nature, presumed guilt. In these uncharted waters I knew that I was in deep trouble. The Met employed 3,250 detectives, but it was my name in the headlines. On the next morning I went in to my office as usual and awaited my fate, but as I read the front page of The Times again, and read allegations against a total of fifteen colleagues in south London my alarm grew. I had been lumped together with Robson and Harris, and I found it extraordinarily reckless that they had apparently continued to meet Perry after I had warned them. However, one call to DI Sylvester at Peckham established that he had not said anything to Robson, but had conveyed a message to Harris, who later denied he had ever received it. Suddenly Ken Drury’s famous ‘soft’ recruitment pitch looked rather less impressive as it appeared in transcript form in the newspaper’s impassive print, and I realised I would be bound to be tied in with Robson and Harris. As I waited for the inevitable I carefully went through my paperwork, comparing the entries in the CID duty book with my own diary and pocketbook and, after attending a prearranged meeting with another informant unconnected with COATHANGER, finally went home and called in sick to give me some extra time to consider my increasingly precarious position. By the following morning the situation had changed markedly, and Victor Lissack arrived early, having been despatched from the Yard, with a request that I issue libel proceedings in the High Court instantly so as to prevent any further revelations in The Times. A writ had been drawn up by a prominent lawyer, the ex-MP Edward Gardiner QC, and this was served later the same day, just as I learned that there were some major problems with the Times’ story. To my relief I heard that there was no reference to any money in the transcript of my conversation with Perry, and there was considerable doubt about the ‘continuity of handling’ in respect of the tapes which had been left around on desks at the The Times, played at office parties and even taken home by journalists, thereby mixing up the originals with the copies. Worse, it emerged that the journalists had given money to Perry to hand to the police, which smelt of entrapment, but had failed to take the obvious precaution of searching Perry properly after his meeting to see if he had kept the cash. Combined with the illegal use of a wireless transmitter to record the detectives’ conversation remotely and the illegal recordings of telephone conversations from Perry’s mother’s flat, the case seemed to boil down to the allegations made in Perry’s uncorroborated witness statement. Certainly he had been equipped with a small Grundig tape-recorder as a back-up, but he also had the ability to switch it on and off, which he had done. Furthermore, apart from Peter Jay, the Economics Correspondent, Brennan had been the only other person involved in the episode, apparently employed as a consultant, because the newspaper was unwilling to take any advice from the ex-police officer who worked as The Times’s chief of security for fear of a leak back to the Yard. In short, Perry’s evidence looked very dubious and when a check was made with the Bank of England on the serial numbers of the banknotes allegedly handed to me in October, it turned out that they had not printed nor placed in circulation until six weeks later. This was an important point because The Times journalists insisted they had looked in Perry’s pockets to establish that he had not kept the £50 himself but, crucially, they had failed to search his car. I knew I had not taken the notes, so the obvious answer was that Perry had hidden them somewhere in his car, but they had not thought to search that too. It was on Lissack’s advice that I made a fateful decision, to immediately start work on a lengthy statement, what I would later call my dossier, in which I detailed the kind of practices required for an efficient CID office to obtain convictions, and named some, but by no means all, of the detectives who cut corners. This was an exercise in self-preservation, and my instructions to Lissack was to keep it in his safe and not show it to anyone unless something happened to me. This was to be my insurance policy, or so I had thought, but I had put my trust in the wrong man. Lambert’s preliminary report on The Times’ allegations was delivered to the Commissioner on Monday,1 December 1969, and on the following Thursday the Yard announced that Robson, Harris and myself were suspended from duty. It seemed that the tapes were far from conclusive evidence of anything, except perhaps some unwise and colourful remarks made by me. I was told later that when colleagues had listened to the tapes they had laughed because over the years they had all heard the same thing. As I had learned at Ken Drury’s knee, there is a method to gaining the confidence of a professional criminal, and part of the technique is to assure him that you are ‘alright’, and that he will be too if he works with you, to mutual benefit. The crook has to believe that he can have a little license to do his bits and pieces where he can be protected, in return for information and bodies. Whether a detective ever really gives the promised measure of protection is an entirely different matter, but it is accepted that he is going to try and acquire the protection without compromising anyone else, while you are intent on gaining the information without delivering on the rest of the bargain. It is a game that has gone on for years, and all the tapes showed was the extent to which I had learned my trade, and the number of times one could insert swearwords into a conversation. They were not to be listened to by the faint-hearted, nor the middle classes over their breakfasts, nor gentlemen in the clubs in St James’s, but they did reflect life in south London’s criminal fraternity. Another potential source of embarrassment was a disparaging comment about provincial police officers, and I knew such comments would not endear me to any ‘old swede’ brought in to conduct an investigation of my case. The Met culturally had always been fairly contemptuous of country coppers and in one of the taped conversations with Perry I had gone through the usual routine of building up my own status as a man of influence within the CID, describing myself as ‘a firm within a firm’, using the jargon Perry would understand, so he would know that I was not a person to be manipulated or messed about. I wanted results from him and plain language was called for, although I erred when I slipped into an explanation of how I would not be able to exercise any influence outside the Met. Naturally, such observations, though reflecting the opinions of colleagues, would be bound to irritate provincial officers. I suppose it could also be said that the tapes were an embarrassment to the Yard because, if played at a trial and combined with my explanation, it would show that the Met routinely conned the criminal classes into becoming informants. Somehow this was not a message the Yard wanted to broadcast, or the public wanted to be told. However, even if our conversation might have been a little strong for some tastes, the tapes showed nothing that was directly incriminating, and far from betraying the sound of notes rustling, there was not even a single word recorded about any money, and definitely no threats. With the pay-off notes discredited, and doubt cast on the ‘iffy’ tapes, and nothing awkward in the recording, I really thought I was off the hook, and rightly so. The impending litigation quickly eliminated further stories in The Times, and the cases against the other twelve suspended officers soon collapsed, leaving a few relatively minor disciplinary matters, and Robson, Harris and me to face the music. However, as the Lambert enquiry progressed, his focus turned on The Times and there was talk of charges being brought in respect of Perry’s deployment as an agent provocateur. This was excellent news, but it did not last long as the Home Secretary, James Callaghan MP, announced that he was to order an outside force to conduct a further investigation. This brought angry protests from the Commissioner, Sir John Waldron, who insisted that Callaghan had no power to interfere with his force which enjoyed autonomy under the Metropolitan Police Act, and when the ineffectual Frank Williamson, then HM Inspector of Constabulary (Crime) and formerly the Chief Constable of Cumbria, was appointed to advise on the matter, helped by a team drawn from the Midlands, the new enquiry ran into the sand, unable to interview any officers from the Met. The conclusion was that Lambert submitted his report, clearing me, and recommending that I be allowed to return to duty. As for Williamson, he retired prematurely at the end of December 1971 and never received the knighthood that is usually granted to HM Inspectors. Within the Met the view was that Williamson, with his austere Plymouth Brethren background and crusading zeal, had been entirely the wrong man for the job. He could see no reason for any police officer to socialise with criminals, whereas it had long been accepted in the CID that the only way to catch thieves was to go for an occasional drink with them. It was a fundamental difference in attitude, and one that broke Williamson, or at least earned him the contempt of the Met which understood what needed to be done to fight crime effectively. |