Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| Moody’s tampering of Perry’s witness statement was not the only irregularity that occurred during the enquiry, and one of the most egregious transgressions was the mysterious loss of the evidence book. This folder was then central to any criminal case and logged each exhibit and stamped and numbered every statement. The evidence books are treated with great care because of their importance, so the disappearance, soon after Moody’s take-over, was an extraordinary event. Later some of the earliest statements, which supposedly had been irretrievably lost, were sent to me by anonymous well-wishers, and those taken from staff on The Times proved critical when I sought to prove that their tapes had been mishandled in the newspaper’s offices.
By the time I had realised the degree of Moody’s treachery I had been very loyal to the firm. Loyalty is very important within a corrupt police force, and was not unlike the American 'buddy'’ system where you have to be able to rely absolutely on your colleagues. They expect you to put your head on the block for them, and you expect them to do the same. We were all corrupt to an extent, but here was a man who was so corrupt that he was prepared to fit up a fellow officer. As the truth dawned on me I wondered why I had drawn the short straw. Was this a ritual sacrifice, or was there more to it? Lambert and Yorke had been replaced on the enquiry by Moody and Virgo, and such completely inappropriate manoeuvres suggested the informed connivance of the Yard’s top commander, Dick Chitty, and maybe the DAC, John du Rose. Could they really have been compromised by Moody? There had always been a suspicion that Moody and Virgo enjoyed a measure of protection right at the top, and the lengths they had taken to prevent Williamson or his men from interviewing Frankie Holbert certainly suggested there were other very senior officers with much to lose in any widespread, external investigation into the Met’s corruption. Williamson had been bamboozled into limiting his provincial officers to pursuing non-Met leads, leaving the key players in the hands of a pair of arguably the most dishonest men ever employed by the Yard, who clearly wanted to close down what had become known as 'the Nuneaton aspect'. The options open to me were limited, and although I sent word to Moody that I had received almost weekly updates on what had been happening in the OPS< I was reluctant to threaten him. This was an officer who was so powerful and so confident that on Masonic ladies nights he would openly flaunt his friendships with the most notorious pornographers, fraudsters, crooked bookies and their wives. Only someone who knew he was immune could behave in such a manner. The only crumb of comfort for me was the decision, taken in January 1971, to try me separately from Robson and Harris. This strategy had been the subject of much discussion with my lawyers who felt that the case against them was much stronger and therefore we should either be tried together and get the tapes disallowed, or have my trial first. The worst option was for my trial to follow their conviction, and I was always certain they would be found guilty. Although The Times had lumped the three of us together, our cases were truly quite different and completely unrelated, apart from the link of Perry. Robson had certainly planted gelignite on Perry, and Harris had been very active on the side, but all I could be accused of, or so I thought, was my rather silly recruitment spiel which really could not be taken seriously. Initially the prosecution had wanted all three of us to appear at the Bailey together, and have all twenty-four tapes played, one after another, which had suited me, but that position was to change. In truth there was little to connect me with this pair from the Yard, apart from the dubious role of Michael Perry, and I was not committed for trial, to face just eight charges, until March 1971, a full fifteen months after publication of the story in The Times. Even the most jaundiced of bystanders could not fail to see how unfair this delay was on the defendants, and within a month one of the charges, of having obtained £10 from an ex-boxer, Roy Thomas, was withdrawn. This episode illustrated the way the climate had changed at the Yard, and the lengths to which the country bumpkins would go to nail me. The strategy, of preferring a whole raft of charges and then dropping most of them, was one I knew well, and was intended to be highly prejudicial. Thomas, known as ‘Tasty Tom’, was a black, one-eyed bouncer at a club in Sydenham, and when he heard that there would be favours for anyone supplying information about me he volunteered the allegation that he had given me £10 corruptly. The story was a complete fabrication as became clear when it took five officers to persuade him to come to court to give evidence at the committal proceedings. As soon as he went into the witness box he withdrew his statement, saying he was wrong in the head, and the charge was dropped. This was, for me, quite a significant development because although I had always been confident that there was no real evidence for a conviction, I was concerned that I might fall victim to the kind of behaviour I was all too familiar with, namely people going to prison for offences they had not committed. Could that really happen to me? I was becoming increasingly anxious about my chances of an acquittal, and after two and a half years the strain was beginning to show. I had endured all the rumours of a fit-up, and had received a couple of death threats, and had nearly been beguiled by the advice from one group of well-wishers who urged me to plead guilty to a charge that had a maximum sentence of two years. They pointed out helpfully that I had not been arrested, but instead had received a summons to answer the £50 charge. I could expect credit for a guilty plea, and a short sentence which would be served in a cushy open prison where I could do plenty of reading, and there was the promise that I would be looked after upon my release. Furthermore. My conviction on such a petty charge would be expunged with a few years under the terms of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. To make sure I truly understood what was on offer, Moody sent one of his pornographers, John Mason, down to my cottage in Orpington to guarantee me a job managing one of his shops once I had served my sentence. He even offered to set me up with premises in Sevenoaks before my trial so I could be occupied while I was suspended. There were several problems with Mason’s offer, not the least of which is the geographical fact that Sevenoaks is a little off the Met’s ground, and therefore Moody’s proposal was probably completely bogus. Although he had not realised it, Mason’s embroidery of Moody’s suggestion had back-fired, and served only to alert me to the danger I was in. Later, an alternative suggestion was put to me, that I should apply for an ill-health pension on the grounds that I was mad, a procedure known as ‘doing a Challoner’. I had paid into a pension scheme for twenty years and was assured that, at the age of thirty-seven, I could easily claim to have succumbed to the strain of my long suspension. I rejected this proposal on the grounds that I was not willing to involve myself in any fakery, and anyway to declare myself insane was the last resort of the guilty man, and I knew I had not committed the crime I was charged with. If I was to pretend to be a lunatic, I would be discredited forever. Although I had asked several times for meetings with Moody, I only saw him on one occasion, during my formal interview at Tintagel House. On the advice of my solicitor, Victor Lissack, who sat beside me, I declined to answer any of the questions, and during a break in these rather one-sided, fruitless proceedings, I visited the gents where I was joined by Moody who told me I was ‘doing well’ and that I should ‘keep it going like that’. Thus he was encouraging me to refuse to answer his questions! At that point I really lost it, called him a bastard, and accused him of doing the dirty on me. “If I go down, I’ll take you with me” I said with venom, which certainly took him aback. For a moment there was the bizarre scene of a detective sergeant on the brink of ruin threatening an apparently untouchable chief superintendent, yet he looked really worried. I then stormed out, saying not another word. In retrospect, I think I was probably quite lucky, as Moody was always quick with his fists, although he may have thought the better of mixing it with a younger man who also knew his way around the boxing ring. During this period my relationship with Lissack deteriorated through a lack of trust. Initially, when he had been quick to act on my behalf, and had come highly recommended by the Yard, his links to senior officers had been an advantage, but as the situation had changed, and I increasingly saw many of my former colleagues as the adversary, I began to see Lissack in a rather different light. He had been one of the regular attendees at the police boxing evenings, and he unquestionably had the very best connections. He and a few other trusted solicitors had built a very lucrative practices based almost entirely on police ‘private’ business, which encompassed divorce and house conveyancing for individual officers, as well as litigation and criminal work. But was all this influence-peddling, from a small office in Covent Garden conveniently opposite Bow street nick, being translated into influence on my behalf? It certainly did not look like it to me, and shortly before the committal proceedings, at a pre-trial hearing at Wells Street Magistrates Court, I decided to sack him when he insisted on representing me without counsel, and find another solicitor. The crunch had come when the other defendants were represented by QCs and juniors, but I was not and Lissack insisted I could not have Sir Edward Gardiner. A very public row ensued, and Lissack dramatically threw down his file and stormed out of the court, telling the magistrate that he had just been fired by his client. Under normal circumstances to switch horses mid-stream would have been sheer folly, but my strategy was ‘to look on the other side of the fence’, in the police ‘black book’ for someone considered to be hostile to the Met. This unofficial folder, held in the safe of every police station, was a list of lawyers who were considered by the police to be unreliable and with a long record of complaints. This did not mean they were actually bent, in which case they might be useful to the CID, but rather that they could not be relied upon to cooperate, took on unpopular causes and were suspected of recording their telephone conversations. They were, in the main, left-wing, anti-establishment and generally the kind of people I would never want to be associated with, but needs must, and top of the list was Ben Birnberg, who had an office on the poor side of London Bridge. My decision to hire him to represent him was one of the best I ever made, and I never regretted it. I told him that he came highly recommended because he topped the list in the black book, and he worked extraordinarily hard to prepare himself for the imminent committal proceedings. When this preliminary hearing took place he had completely mastered his brief because he had worked day and night to prepare my defence, and when eventually I was committed, it was to answer a single charge of accepting a puny £150. Birnberg was not surprised by my disclosure about the black book, and later he raised Cain about the scandal, leading to the Tard scrapping the system. The strain of preparing my defence, resisting the pressure and being on suspension took its toll, and over those two years I lost six stone in weight. My health was collapsing and I had a brief, not very restorative stay at the Met’s nursing home in Denmark Hill with hepatitis. This was to be followed by a period at the convalescent home in Hove, but the senior management stepped in to exclude me, as though my corruption might contaminate the other patients. Finally, I accepted my doctor’s advice to take long holiday and decided to accompany my girlfriend Barbara to visit her father’s war grave in Tunisia, instead of going to the Met’s convalescent home by the seaside. A soldier in the Scots Guards, he had been killed at Tobruk just before she was born, and she had promised herself a pilgrimage to North Africa. I drove us down to Algeciras in a motor caravan, receiving a friendly wave goodbye at Dover from (Sir) Peter Imbert, the future Commissioner who was then the Special Branch duty DI at the departure ramp, and I soon found myself I found myself at the Sundance Village, a holiday resort near Rabat in Morocco, enjoying the sunshine and eating large quantities of oranges, as prescribed by my doctor. I had never intended to flee the country, and I had several good reasons for remaining in England. I was recently divorced, had three young children, and my mother, now a widow, was of an age when it would not have been fait for me to ask her to look after them. Yet that is exactly what I found I had to do, albeit with the greatest reluctance. My relationship with the Yard had deteriorated to the point that I knew my life was in danger. Lissack had obviously spread the word that I had prepared a dossier on the activities of named detectives, and of course I had threatened Moody, which probably had been unwise. Whilst I would never have been intimidated by some thug approaching me in the street with an axe, promising to do me in, as happened, the veiled hints from men in suits, couched in Masonic language, was far more sinister. ‘The craft’ had turned against me, and this development was of far greater concern to me than being confronted by a group of hired muscle outside a pub in Kent where I had an appointment to meet a contact. On that occasion they made the mistake of failing to knock me out with their first blow, on the back of my head, and I rounded on them to deliver a good pasting, on a scale that the pub’s regulars still talk about it. This was no coincidental encounter for one of my assailants spoke in a Glaswegian accent and called me ‘Jimmy’, a voice and name I recognised from one of several anonymous calls I had received. The extraordinary influence of Freemasonry on the Met cannot be underestimated, and within the police the ‘Jockafia’ was especially potent. Whereas the masons in England have a minimum age of twenty-one for membership, the sons of masons in Scotland can join their father’s lodge at nineteen, thus making some Scots policemen ‘Jocksonic’, enjoying a two year advantage over their English contemporaries, receiving the benefit of accelerated promotion based entirely on their links with the lodge. Certainly nobody in the Met ever wondered why there were a quite disproportionate number of Scots in senior positions. In those days of back-room deals and unspoken influence, ijt was not unknown for witnesses to disappear, and I had crossed entirely the wrong people. Furthermore, I could expect no help even from the straight officers I knew at the Yard because I had become the victim of a whispering campaign. I shall never forget the incredible news from Robson that Harris had been to see Dick Chitty and had alleged that I, as a former army officer with competition experience, was a crack shot and owned a weapon with a night scope. Supposedly I was preparing to shoot Michael Perry with a sniper’s rifle from a position in a block of flats opposite his mother’s home, and Robson was to be my getaway driver. Apparently Harris had been approached by us to act as look-out and let us know when our target was in the vicinity. I scoffed at the suggestion, later put to me by Lambert’s intermediary, Mike Smith, although I may have been unwise when I added that “the thought had never occurred to me, but if anyone was going to get shot, it would be that bastard Harris! This off-the-cuff remark unfortunately betrayed the fact, which would have been relayed to Lambert, that I had been warned that an attempt had been made by Harris to negotiate a deal and turn Queen’s Evidence. None of his tale about a murder plot was true, but in those difficult times my comment about wanting to bump off Harris may have been taken seriously, and certainly proved that I was receiving information from inside Lambert’s inquiry. In reality, I was confident that Harris had nothing incriminating to say about me, which was why he had been obliged to invent a cock-and-bull assassination story. If I had planned to kill Perry I certainly would not have confided in Harris, whom I hardly knew. Anyway, in peaceful Morocco these were but unpleasant memories, and I was content to recover my health and prepare myself for my trial, now set for July because the prosecution had been granted even more time to examine the fourteen remaining dodgy tapes relevant to my case. Rather less enjoyable were the English newspaper reports of the Old Bailey trial of Harris and Robson, and their gaol sentence on 3 March 1972 of six and seven years respectively. The trial lasted seven weeks and their defence counsel, (Sir) James Comyn QC, used four experts to undermine the authenticity of the tapes on which Perry’s supposedly incriminating conversations had been recorded. The strategy was to discredit the recordings and explain the behaviour of the two officers as the necessary conduct of two excellent thief-takers. Intimidation, blackmail and threats were, they claimed, part of the rough-and-tumble of dealing with the underworld, and Perry had only been threatened with being charged with possession of gelignite, so no harm had been done and a potentially valuable informant with direct knowledge of many crimes had been recruited. As for the talk of money, the references had been to payments that would be made by the detectives to Perry for information, not to cash extorted from him. Unfortunately the jury seemed shocked by Robson’s admission that he had used the gelignite to entrap Perry, and did not recognise this tactic as what might nowadays be called ‘noble cause’ corruption. Perry was a hardened, professional criminal, and while unorthodox (and illegal), the method of acquiring his fingerprints on the explosive had proved a powerful encouragement to wavering informants. As for the tapes, four independent experts testified that all but one of the tapes were copies, and they showed distinct signs of having been edited. Even the prosecution’s principal engineer acknowledged that the tapes had been interfered with, so the only expert willing to confirm their authenticity was a phonetics specialist from a Home Office laboratory who testified that he thought they were genuine. However, as his salary was paid by the Home Office, he could hardly be described as independent or impartial. I knew the tapes had been tampered with because at one point in my conversation with Perry we had both joked about a man who had been hanging around nearby with a camera lens sticking out of his coat. Pointing to him, I had asked Perry “Is he one of ours or one of yours?” We had both thought this quite funny, but the entire exchange had been deleted from the tape. This, combined with concerns about the ‘continuity of handling’, should have been enough to sink the prosecution. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this evidence was that someone had tampered with the tapes, and when I sat in the public gallery, taking notes, as James Comyn opened for the defence, I was surprised to see that this very senior silk appeared to be pulling his punches, and made no criticism of the conduct of the newspaper. There was no mention of the illegal use of a telephone tap, no criticism of the illegal recordings, and no full frontal assault on the integrity of the journalists. Naturally, as this performance was likely to be a rehearsal of my own forthcoming prosecution I was aghast at the strategy and reported every detail to my solicitor and barrister. Their explanation was hardly comforting. Apparently Comyn had volunteered to join the defence team pro bono, and his offer had been accepted with enthusiasm by Robson and Harris, although they had been worried by his advice that any direct attack on The Times would be counter-productive. I was mystified by this, and even more alarmed when I heard a possible explanation. Comyn lived in County Meath in Ireland, and was a near neighbour of Lord Thomson. Without being unduly conspiratorial, it occurred to me that it would have been in the interests of the proprietor of The Times, supposedly ‘the Top people’s paper’ to ensure that the newspaper escaped any criticism, and what better way than to exercise some influence over the defence? The trial cost an estimated half million pounds, and resulted in two ‘efficient and conscientious’ officers receiving long prison sentences for a measly £275 in bribes and blackmail. Robson had made twenty-two arrests in operation COATHANGER alone, Harris had received ten commendations. Perry, on the other hand, was soon back at the Bailey, to be convicted of forging bankers’ drafts to steal 100,000 cigarettes, which earned him a sentence of eighteen months, on to which was added a suspended sentence of two years which he had received for the Peckham van theft. His co-defendant was James Laming, brother of Robert and the only other person to have supported Perry’s allegations. In June 1973 Robson and Harris took their case to the Court of Appeal, claiming that the judge, Mr Justice Sebag Shaw, had erred when he had allowed the jury to retain copies of the disputed tape transcripts throughout the trial. This decision had been plainly prejudicial to the defendants, but the Appeal Court judges were not in the mood to find against one of their colleagues, and rejected the appeal. With the conviction of Robson and Harris the mood in London changed dramatically. The CID was despondent that a man with Perry’s form could put away two good detectives, and what chance would they have in prison? They had received the most savage of sentences, and I Knew I could expect much of the same. The climate of public opinion had swung against the Yard, and even before the end of the trial a report of Commander Ken Drury were published in the People, relaxing on a two week holiday in Famagusta, Cyprus, with the porn merchant and strip-club owner Jimmy Humphreys. Nor was this the only scandal to hid the Yard, for the elite Drug Squad was itself to be busted by Customs & Excise, with its chief, Vic Kellaher, and five of his subordinates being charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice. Finally, in November 1973, Kellaher would be acquitted, but three of his detectives were convicted of perjury and imprisoned. As for the Dirty Squad, Mark ordered an entirely new clean-up to be conducted by a specially-formed team, the Anti-Corruption Squad which operated in parallel with the feared ‘rubber heels’ of A10. Headed by DAC Gilbert Kelland, it prosecuted fifteen officers and obtained convictions against thirteen of them who went to prison for a total of 96 years. Altogether about forty detectives were investigated, and more than half wisely opted to leave the force straightaway rather than face disciplinary charges. Kelland’s principal witness was Jimmy Humphreys, who was imprisoned for eight years on an assault charge, and his very detailed diary which listed most of his contacts with corrupt CID officers. His wife, Rusty, was imprisoned for running a brothel in Greek Street, and overnight his empire and influence vanished. Once Kelland had acquired Humphreys’ diary, some pages of his proposed autobiography and his testimony taken in a prison cell, Soho was raided by a new Serious Crimes Squad, headed by DCS Albert Wickstead, who worked not from the Yard, where there was a fear of contamination from the Flying Squad, but from Limehouse police station. Wickstead had spent his career in the East End and had gone about his business with an almost religious zeal. Forty tons of porn was recovered on their first raids in Soho where the managers protested that they had already paid their dues to the Dirty Squad. Bernie Silver, convicted of living off immoral earnings for the past eighteen years, went down for six years, and his enforcer, Mifsud, was convicted of jury tampering. As for their police associates, the blood-letting was truly terrible. Drury and Virgo, who had retired from the force, were arrested at their homes, and Moody, who had taken a medical pension, was also taken into custody. This was astonishing, for Virgo had been the Met’s longest-serving officer and arguably one of the most powerful men on the force. At the subsequent Old Bailey trials, no less than seventeen pornographers gave evidence against the detectives, as did four former members of the OPS. After the Drugs Squad and the Dirty Squad had been hit, it was the turn of the elite Flying Squad, and its former commander, Ken Drury, went down for eight years and DI Adam Ingram for four. |