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Back to Part 3
Two other policemen were charged, tried and
convicted as a result of the Times inquiry but for a petty, technical
offence of no significance, for ‘white lies’ which implied no corruption.
When Michael Perry had been picked up in September 1969 on suspicion of
stealing a van, he had been taken to Peckham police station by four officers
but questioned there by two others, PCs Paul Wilson and David Lovett. When
Perry was put on trial in May 1970 it came out that Lovett and Wilson had
made statements saying that they had picked up the suspect themselves and
taken him to the station for questioning. They had done this, they claimed,
to save the other four officers the time they would otherwise have had to
spend at court. In normal times this example of ‘cutting corners’ would have
been overlooked, especially since it occurred in a magistrates’ court where
inaccuracies and contradictions in police evidence are often discovered but
where the accused are nevertheless convicted, as indeed was to happen to
Michael Perry in this case (he received a two-year suspended sentence). But
the atmosphere generated by the Times revelations, particularly
anything concerning Perry and Peckham police station, was such that this
offence had to be seen to be dealt with in an exemplary and punitive
fashion. Lovett and Wilson went on trial at the Old Bailey in October 1970,
pleaded guilty and were given an absolute discharge. The judge recommended,
however, that they should be allowed to remain in the force. But a few days
later, at a Scotland Yard disciplinary board consisting of an assistant
commissioner and two commanders, they were asked to resign. This was despite
the fact that their own superior officers had described them as ‘excellent
policemen’ and ‘absolutely dedicated’. But the witch-hunt was on and they
had to go.
However, it was not as straightforward as that.
Lovett and Wilson were uniformed officers. They could be sacrificed without
any of the embarrassments and local difficulties which were so crippling the
Times inquiry in its investigation into the conduct of detectives. It
was CID officers who were empowered to investigate both uniformed and
plain-clothes men, and just as they appear to have been lethargic and
unwilling to seek out and destroy corruption among their own brethren, so
they seem to have been willing to go to any lengths to penalize their
uniformed colleagues, however petty the offence. At the Old Bailey judge
Neil McKinnon had said, ‘What strikes me most forcibly is the high sense of
responsibility shown by the police authorities in dealing with a matter
against two of their highly valued officers by way of prosecution in this
court instead of secretly before a disciplinary board. It shows how the
police are willing to be investigated at the highest level.’ The judge could
not have been expected to realize that what it really showed was exactly the
reverse.
It was not until January 1971 that Robson and
Harris faced committal proceedings. It was decided to try Symonds
separately, for his alleged offences were unrelated to those of the two men
from Scotland Yard. The only thing they had in common, it seemed, was
Michael Perry. Symonds was committed in March I971 and it was to be yet
another year before the three of them faced their respective trials. Symonds
in particular expressed his chagrin at having to wait so long, and it is
true that no defendant, whatever his alleged offence, should have to wait
over two years from his accusation to his trial. But in the meantime Symonds
had been up to his old tricks. He had applied to have his maintenance
payments to his wife greatly reduced, on the grounds that since his
suspension he had been receiving a greatly reduced rate of pay. The truth
was that Symonds had been suspended on full pay, less only his CID
allowances.
Five more detectives who had been suspended were
reinstated. From the evidence submitted in their cases the office of the
Director of Public Prosecutions could only conclude that there were no
grounds for further action.
The provincial inquiry team had returned to their
respective forces towards the end of 1970. A year of their careers had been
spent in the unsavoury and unenviable pursuit of corruption in another
force, and even though that force was the Met the job could hardly have
given them any satisfaction. Had it been carried through properly there
would at least have been the satisfaction of a job well done, but this would
have to have been measured mainly by the distasteful yardstick of the number
of fellow policemen sent to prison through their efforts.
Williamson’s own nominal responsibility for the
inquiry ended with the committal proceedings, but even before they had taken
place he was spending most of his time on other duties which fell upon him
in his continuing capacity as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary for
Crime. These duties too involved the investigation of allegations of
corruption. By this time his views on the depth and breadth of corruption in
the Met were cast in bronze. The apparent impossibility of eliminating it
had brought him down into a mood of hopeless despair. He was in the isolated
position of being a policeman who had dedicated his life to the force but
whose views on his colleagues - especially in the Met - were now more
hostile and alienated even than those of some left-wing political groups
whose ideology he despised but whose unwitting ally his public utterances
may have made him. By the end of 1971 he was so ‘fed up with banging his
head against a brick wall’ that he resigned from the police service
altogether, eleven years before he might otherwise have been expected to
retire. It is generally acknowledged that in doing this Williamson threw
away his inevitable elevation to the role of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector,
its far greater pension and a certain knighthood.
He officially left the service on 31 December
1971. Later he let it be reported that he had resigned because of ‘deep
personal dissatisfaction with the impact he felt he had been able to make on
important issues within the police service and the Home Office during his
last two years’ [Guardian, 16 January 1973]. It is no secret that the
biggest of these issues by far was that of corruption, above all in the
Metropolitan police. For Williamson the problem could be summed up in three
short, sharp verdicts on the only three sorts of detective he believed to
exist in the Met: those who were themselves corrupt, those who knew that
others were corrupt but did nothing about it, and those who were too stupid
to notice what was going on around them. None of them were worthy of any
force in Britain, and only in the Met could they have been tolerated in such
numbers for so long.
Williamson had convinced himself that the Home
Office was not prepared to instigate the fundamental reforms of the Met
which he himself knew were necessary. What he could not have foreseen was
that within four months of his going a series of sensational events were to
highlight the very corruption which he knew to exist but which others,
including top Home Office officials, were reluctant either to believe or to
publicly acknowledge. When Robert Mark took over as Commissioner in April
1972 he was to carry out many of the reforms which Williamson himself had
recommended to the authorities. But by then the Home Office had had its hand
forced by publicity.
The trial of Robson and Harris was one element in
this process, although the only one which Williamson knew for certain would
be taking place in the open. It had been due to start in October 1971, but
the defence had a tape expert who said that he had found ‘matters of great
importance’ on the Times recordings and needed until the New Year to
finish his investigations. As Defence Counsel James Comyn QC had indicated
in the committal proceedings that his case would rest very largely on
challenging the authenticity and admissibility of the tapes, the judge had
no alternative but to agree to two further postponements.
When the trial of Robson and Harris eventually
opened on 26 January 1972 it soon became clear how much the defence had
attached to destroying the prosecution on the tapes alone. Four tape
‘experts’ were mustered to undermine their credibility, countered by another
expert for the prosecution. They discoursed like medieval theologians over
the cause and meaning of clicks, gaps and sudden changes of background
noise. If one of the thirteen tapes could be discredited the defence would
have managed to tear off the ‘cloak of responsibility’ which The Times
had thrown around Perry and his associates. Comyn claimed that the
prosecution was built ‘first and foremost on a very polluted base’. ‘Surely
the right approach to Perry is you cannot believe the living daylights from
him unless you have absolutely independent evidence.’ The central issue of
the trial was, therefore, whether the tapes did indeed constitute such
independent evidence.
If the tapes could be shown to have been
manufactured, the defence would also convert the Times reporters into
part of the same ‘polluted base’. This would have implied that Mounter,
Lloyd and their associates, journalistic, electronic or criminal, had all
been guilty of conspiracy and perjury, and they would have to be put on
trial themselves soon after. But there was a less sensational way of
discrediting the tapes. If just enough doubt could be cast on the
recordings, showing that they were disjointed, edited rather than
manufactured, or unclear as evidence and inconclusive, the jury might absorb
enough doubt and confusion to feel able to evade that most unpleasant of
duties for any jury: to find a British policeman guilty of crime.
There was even a third line of defence: that the
tapes were, by and large, accurate but that Robson and Harris, in their
conversations with Perry, were merely conducting the normal relationship
with an informant, or potential informant. It was necessary, even essential,
to intimidate, to deceive and to lie to a criminal who, you were certain,
had knowledge of other criminals’ activities. Threatening to fit such a
person up with gelignite might be a nasty thing to do, but it would only
have happened in order to secure information and would never have been
carried through to a prosecution. Though such behaviour was technically
illegal, could it really be so morally reprehensible?
As for the talk of money on the recordings, it
was of money going from the detectives to their informant Perry or his
associates, and not the other way round. Where the rustle of paper could be
heard it was either Perry receiving his informant’s fee or Perry handing
over information on paper, for instance a plan of some garages where stolen
goods were being stored. Provided there was no proof to the contrary, a
solid British jury might be convinced that this was just a necessarily
unpleasant saga of two seasoned detectives who had merely been doing their
job. As the seven-week trial was drawing to a close James Comyn luridly
proclaimed that they had been ‘battling through the polluted waters of
Peckham’s underworld, trudging through the slime and sludge of the dirty
underworld, dredging for the truth’. And in these sordid depths, he implied,
who realistically would expect a detective to fight according to the
Marquess of Queensberry’s rules, least of all the criminal fraternity
itself?
The prosecution case was put by John Mathew, one
of the foremost Treasury counsel and something of a specialist in police
corruption trials. He told the full story of Perry’s criminal background and
made no excuses for him: ‘He is an accomplice in this case and could as such
have been in the dock as one charged with corruption.’ However, the jury
were to hear tape recordings which ‘painted a picture of complete and utter
corruption and completely confirmed the story of Mr Perry’. Not that Mathew
was claiming they were of very high quality. ‘Some are almost devoid of
anything intelligible and some have snatches of conversation.’ Yet they
amounted to conclusive proof, when backed by the impeccable respectability
of Mounter, Lloyd and The Times itself. As Mathew was to emphasize at
the end of the trial, without either Times or tapes there would have
been no corroboration of Perry’s story. Who then would have believed Perry’s
word against Robson’s? ‘You would not have been in the box for seven weeks.
You would have been in it only seven minutes.’
Just in case the tapes were to be discredited or
judged inadmissible, Mathew had an occasional police witness to puncture the
defence’s credibility. One of these was quoted early on. A few days after
the Times report an Essex detective inspector came into Robson’s
office at Scotland Yard and said to Robson, ‘You look deep in it.’ Robson
replied, ‘I am right in it.’ He denied everything, except the gelignite: ‘It
is true about the gelly. I put it in his hand.’ Robson then gave a
demonstration of how he fitted Perry up, by putting his arm through Perry’s
car window. Mathew told this account to the court, pointing out that it was
not until many months later that the detective inspector felt it was his
duty to report the matter to the authorities.
Mathew did not name the Essex man, who was
Detective Inspector Ronald Larby. He had not revealed his information to the
inquiry until well after the committal proceedings, indeed only a few months
before the trial itself. But at his committal Robson denied the gelignite
allegation. Meanwhile Harris as a witness and many of the officers who were
with them that day were saying that they had seen no such incident. When
Larby’s testimony was made available to the defence Robson suddenly admitted
that it had happened.(4)
He was to say in the trial that it was a shocking and scandalous thing to
do, ‘but I felt that, wrong as it was, I considered the thousands of pounds
worth of property that was being taken was even more wrong. Perhaps I had my
values wrong.’
When Michael Perry was examined during the trial
he was not coy about his relationships with detectives. He admitted to
having bribed a total of five officers, the two in the dock and another
three. Of these, Perry said he gave two of them money ‘because I wanted to
and also because they asked for it. The other I paid because he was on
full-time take.’ The payments were for alleged favours. To one of the
officers he had handed the money over directly and to the others he had paid
a lump sum of £200 through a go-between, Pegleg Birchmore, an elderly
scrap-metal dealer, who was ‘a sort of stakeholder’ in such transactions.
Perry said that police officers had given false evidence against him about
half a dozen times. His grievance was not against the police as a whole,
‘only the crooked ones’.
When Garry Lloyd and Julian Mounter appeared they
vigorously defended their actions and those of The Times, both in
conducting the investigations and in not handing over their findings to the
police before publication. That way, said Lloyd, ‘the whole matter could be
hushed up and might not have come to light at all’. ‘We considered that it
would be most unsatisfactory to ask detectives or policemen to inquire into
the alleged misdeeds of their colleagues.’ Comyn asked Lloyd, ‘It was a
piece of amateur detection on your part?’ ‘No, professional reporting.’
Lloyd and Mounter sternly rejected the suggestion that they were motivated
by sensationalism or any thought of personal gain.
It was on the matter of the tapes that they were
most adamant. Lloyd was positive that none of them were copies. When Comyn
said that four of the tapes had pencil marks on them, Lloyd .retorted, ‘I
know the marks did not appear on the tapes while in our custody.’ How then
had they got there?
‘The fact we carried out this investigation means
that we are not the most popular people with the police.’ The tapes had been
handed over to the Yard, and they had stayed there for a long time. ‘... it
would have been the easiest thing in the world for someone of evil intent to
put the marks on.’ At The Times, they had been played back soon after
recording and then kept in a locked filing cabinet. Suggestions that they
were faked were ‘absolute rubbish’. On the matter of some patchy transcripts
of the Army and Navy Stores conversation, Comyn said they were incomplete.
Lloyd pointed out that The Times’ secretaries had been overwhelmed by
paperwork. ‘We did not have time to check all the transcripts which went to
the police and had to rely on our secretaries.’ Where there was a lot of
swearing, Lloyd attributed the gaps in the transcripts to the fact that
The Times’ secretaries were most familiar with the language of a Chelsea
boutique and may have left out some of the four-letter words. It was the
judge who suggested that a girl who was religiously inclined might have been
offended by a remark such as ‘all those bloody crucifixes’. Comyn asked, was
it not surprising that where there was a loud rustling - when money was
alleged to have been changing hands – the words had been omitted from the
Times transcript? ‘Not surprising, no.’ That passage was difficult to
hear on their equipment. ‘We never thought of the Times transcripts
as the definitive version.’
The defence’s strategy was clearly to imply that
where The Times’ version was patchy the tapes had been tampered with,
and this was particularly important at moments of alleged cash transfer.
Judge Shaw pointed out that most of the discrepancies occurred when Perry
was speaking, and implied that they were due more to Perry’s accent than to
any sinister manipulation. Mounter stated that ‘we realized from the outset
the importance of the tapes, so we took every precaution we could’.
Comyn: ‘Did it cross your mind to edit them?’
Mounter: ‘That is a scurrilous suggestion. It
never crossed my mind at any time.’
At one point on the tapes Mounter and Lloyd had
themselves exchanged expletives, but even here Mounter had refused to
contemplate the sound engineer’s suggestion that they should be erased.
After the reporters a motley succession of
prosecution witnesses appeared, some of them with obvious distaste.
Detective Chief Inspector James Irvine, in charge of Coathanger, spoke up
for Robson, but when asked about the gelignite incident he said, ‘I would
never have expected him to do a thing like that.’ The judge asked Irvine
what he thought of such conduct: ‘I would not entertain it in any officer
under my command.’
Dermot O’Keefe, an associate of Perry, confirmed
his version of the gelignite incident. Hawkey, the sound engineer, made it
clear he had not edited any of the tapes but also that he found the whole
affair distasteful: ‘I did not want to be involved in anything to do with
the police.’ (It seems that while the recordings were being made Hawkey was
not at all sure whose side he should have been on.)
When Warren Harrison, the Times
photographer, testified, he surprised both the defence and the prosecution
by saying that he had seen money in the back of Robson’s car during the
encounter on the 5 November. When Harrison had been interviewed by
Metropolitan officers on the inquiry he had said nothing about the money,
but in court he explained that he had done this because his job was to take
photographs and not to be an observer or an oral witness. (On this occasion
he had not taken a photograph because the light was bad and he did not want
to be seen by the detectives.) None of the investigators, certainly not DCS
Moody, had expected Harrison to say anything about the money. Yet his
casual, almost accidental, revelation may have ensured that Robson and
Harris were convicted.
The Laming brothers, James and Robert, said they
had each been intimidated by the accused. James said he had been given a
week to ‘come up with a name’ or the choice of ‘a ride up the Ml’ or having
his ‘dabs’ found in a shop. He also said that Perry had been hit over the
head with one of the bottles of Scotch concerning which he was charged,
during the police raid when they first met Robson and Harris.
When DCS Bill Moody appeared in the witness box,
in his capacity as officer in charge of the Times inquiry, he made it
clear that in no way did he condone the behaviour of the accused, but
nevertheless he supported a tough and at some times brutal intimacy with
criminals. Informants were a necessary evil, ‘a very dangerous breed’. Some
had to be kept ‘sweet or frightened’, ‘some of them have to be jogged to a
degree’. He did not have physical violence in mind, just a little
‘legitimate pressure’. Moody praised the work of Robson and Harris,
especially the latter, who, he said, had received seventeen commendations,
including at least ten for catching thieves. ‘During his service he must
have been an extremely hard-working officer.’ (5)
When Robson spoke in his own defence, he denied
that he had ever taken money from Perry or ever indicated that he was open
to offers. Perry was on the contrary, potentially, a very good source of
information, and Robson said that he did actually give information. As for
the gelignite, ‘shocking and scandalous’ though his action was, Robson
considered that the other bits and pieces found at Perry’s flat during the
whisky raid must have been parts of a safe-blowing kit. Thus the use of
gelignite as a frightener was ideal for attempting to disgorge information
about receivers from Perry. But the gelignite was only a frightener - no
more than a piece of cardboard tubing used for teleprinter paper rolls,
wrapped in brown paper. Robson said he had never intended to use this device
to extort money.
Robson said that the tapes were not accurate.
Things appeared on them which he did not say, and things he did say were not
on them. He had never told Perry he would be satisfied with the name of
someone who was not genuinely a receiver. It had been Perry who had raised
the name of Skipton, the tobacconist: ‘I thought Perry was telling a pack of
lies about Mr Skipton and I had no intention of doing anything about it.’ On
intimations of favour concerning Perry’s forthcoming van theft trial, ‘I
made some empty promises that I would assist him with this, but of course
this would have been impossible. I was working with him as an informant, so
that he would trust me. I had to build up a bond.’
But what information had Perry provided? A sketch
map of some garages where stolen property could be found. Unfortunately,
said Robson, this paper had been lost during the inquiry. Robson also stated
that Perry had given him this sketch on 5 November, which accounted for the
rustling on the tapes of that date. It was not, as Perry alleged, the rustle
of pound notes being handed over to Robson. On the same tape there was a
reference to money, but again that was money to go from Robson to Perry.
Similarly, on the tape of 21 November the reference was not to £50 each from
Perry and the Lamings for forewarning about police raids, but of payment to
them if they would divulge the name of a fourth man involved in the Hemel
Hempstead robbery. Yes, Robson had tipped Perry off about the raid on the
flat he shared with the Lamings, but this was legitimate provided the
informer did not have a lot of stolen property in his home. ‘If one feels
one will further the inquiries by giving a tip-off to a potential informer,
after careful consideration ...’ one would do so. Robson also admitted that
he had told no other officer of his intention to inform Perry.
The defence ploy of lowering Perry - or elevating
him - to the level of an informer might, if it had succeeded, have excused
at least some of the accused’s behaviour. ‘Doing business’ on the tapes did
not mean bribery but paying for an informant’s knowledge. Comyn said that
Robson believed Perry and the Lamings were ‘the weak links near the heart of
this criminal chain’. Even the judge, in referring to associations between
policemen and criminals, and the large amount of information which is
derived from them, said that ‘you cannot preserve associations of that kind
on the basis of suburban social good manners’.
But the defendants’ repeated assertion that Perry
was potentially a good source of information had to be matched with Robson’s
pathetic admission that Perry never gave him the name of a single receiver.
During the trial Robson said that the whereabouts of one man, whose identity
was already known, would by itself have been of terrific value. This was one
Kelly, a local villain. However, ex-Woman Police Constable Everest, who was
in the Coathanger squad at the time of the incidents, said that a local
police constable, ‘Squirrel’ Squires, had told the squad that Kelly could be
found in a local arcade café. The information did not have to be wrung from
Perry. As for the sketch plan of the garages, Robson was unable to explain
satisfactorily why he had done nothing about checking them for three days
and why even then he had only looked around the premises. Again, it became
clear that this information had not come from Perry but from the two
Leicestershire officers on the Coathanger squad. After a trip north they
returned with detailed information on several London premises used for
receiving, including these same garages. WPC Everest even recalled going to
the garages herself. During the trial the Leicestershire officers were
waiting to appear for the defence, but after Everest’s revelations they were
packed off to Leicestershire and never appeared for either side.
Harris also endeavoured to add Perry to his
declared total of twenty active informants, some of whom ‘would inform on
their own parents’. On 30 October, in Perry’s car outside The Edinburgh,
said Harris, he had not been taking money from Perry, but had been giving
Perry £3 out of his own pocket. When Harris was heard talking of money on
the tape, he claimed that the tapes had been tampered with. When there was a
reference to hundreds of pounds, it was not the size of the pay-off
necessary, but ‘hundreds of pounds’ worth of stolen property I wanted to
recover and that was the way I was talking to Perry’. As regards the earlier
untaped incident at The Edinburgh, when Perry claimed he had paid Harris
£25, Harris claimed he had been lunching with a dozen senior officers.
Unfortunately, none of these officers appeared in court to confirm his
version. Worse still, one officer appeared to give evidence that he had
driven Harris to meet an informant, and that Harris had not said anything to
him about lunching with any colleagues.
It must have been distressing to Robson and
Harris that almost nothing they said to disprove the prosecution’s case
could be corroborated by anyone at all. All the more reason, therefore, for
the emphasis of the defence on the weaknesses or inadmissibility of the
tapes. Mr Killick, for whose evidence the trial had been delayed by almost
three months, said that he had spent 800 hours examining the tapes. He had
come to the view that all but one of them were copies and that in some cases
they had been edited. Killick stated that whole blocks of speech might have
been interchanged and there were obvious interruptions of continuity. He was
adamant that the recordings had been interfered with.
Another expert, Hugh Ford, said that ultraviolet
ray examination showed that clicks on the tapes coincided with a very
distinct change in background noise, of the sort commonly associated with
editing. Where one tape was damaged, the only possible reason for causing it
would have been to hide a possible edit. George Taylor, a senior audio
applications engineer with EMI (to whom the Yard inquiry team had sent the
tapes without the knowledge or approval of Frank Williamson), said that
scientific evidence showed that three tapes were copies, and another four
had defects making their authenticity doubtful. Of one recording Taylor
said, ‘It is perfectly obvious that there has been an edit on this tape. It
sticks out like a sore thumb.’
But the defence evidence was not as formidable as
it might at first have seemed. One of the experts based his views on the
scientific results of the most up-to-date spectrographic tests. However, he
had to return to the witness box to say that his machine had made a mistake
owing to a technical fault.
The prosecution countered with unqualified
support for the veracity of the tapes. This came from Stanley Hyde, a civil
servant working at the Joint Speech Research Unit of the National Physical
Laboratory, to which Williamson had promptly sent the tapes when he had
retrieved them from EMI. Hyde said ‘I have found no evidence that editing
has taken place ... I have studied them very extensively and have
particularly taken up points of criticism which I have discovered since I
first began my analysis, and I can find no evidence that convinces me they
are edited, and in my opinion they are genuine and not copies.
For the prosecution John Mathew emphasized that
scientific evidence had to be looked at together with the realities of the
situation. The evidence of the experts in no way weighed against the factual
evidence of Perry, Mounter and the sound engineer. Indeed, where the defence
expertise was most hostile to the tapes, it appeared also to conflict with
the evidence of the defendants. Mathew said that experts could get lost in
the narrow scope of their own field.
It seems that the jury preferred Mathew’s
interpretations of the tapes to that of the defence experts, for Robson and
Harris were found guilty on all counts. They were both sentenced to three
years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to demand money from Perry with menaces
by falsely accusing him of unlawfully possessing gelignite, Robson having
admitted to fitting Perry up. They received a concurrent sentence of five
years for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by accusing Perry of
delivering or causing stolen property to be delivered.
Robson received a further two years for warning
Perry regarding impending police action - again a charge which Robson had
admitted - and one year for accepting £50 in payment for this information.
Harris received one year for accepting £25 from Perry for showing favour
over the whisky-receiving prosecution. (On this charge there had been no
evidence except the conflicting versions of Perry and Harris.) Robson’s
total sentence was for seven years while Harris was sent down for six.
A seven-week trial, costing around half a million
pounds, was over. Considering that the result had been to find two policemen
guilty of taking a total of just £275 in bribes and blackmail, it was an
elaborate affair, especially since the prosecution case was little more than
had been established in a newspaper report twenty-six months before. The
strangest thing about the defence case was that it might well have been
conducted by the old guard of Scotland Yard itself. It was based on the
tolerance, almost the encouragement, of close intimacy between detectives
and criminal informants. It assumed that the likes of Perry could never be
believed in court against the evidence of a police officer. Above all it
assumed that anyone who accused the Metropolitan Police of misconduct must
themselves be worthy of the deepest distrust and the most determined
investigation.
Michael Perry was to follow the two Yard men to
prison very quickly. Less than two weeks after the end of the Times
trial he was back at the Old Bailey, accused of forging bankers’ drafts in
order to steal 100,000 cigarettes. He was found guilty and sentenced to
eighteen months in prison, but he also forfeited the suspension of the
van-theft conviction and had to serve a further two years. One of his
co-defendants who was also found guilty was James Laming, who had been
Perry’s fellow-accuser of Robson and Harris.
In June 1973 the Appeal Court heard from the two
detectives, on whose behalf James Comyn once more appeared, to challenge the
way in which the judge had summed up the case, particularly in regard to the
defence tape experts and the evidence of the photographer. He also
criticized the decision to let the jury have transcripts of the tapes
throughout the trial. In addition he wished to call further evidence, from
the woman who had assisted the sound engineer with the recordings. But on
all these points the Court of Appeal found that the Old Bailey judge could
not be faulted and turned the appeal down.
Lord Justice Edmond Davies took the opportunity
to pay tribute to Mounter and Lloyd: ‘It would be churlish were we to fail
to make mention of the great public service rendered by these two reporters.
It was, it would appear, mainly their intrepidity and skill which laid bare
a hideous cancer which, if unchecked, could have done even greater and
incalculable damage to law enforcement.’ But the cancer was far more
extensive than either the Appeal Judge or the reporters could have realized
when the story had been published back in November 1969.
In March 1972 senior detectives at Scotland Yard
had accepted the guilty verdicts on Robson and Harris with resignation -
though not with resignations, which might have been more appropriate. They
seem to have felt even if Robson and Harris were indeed guilty it would
still have been better for the force as a whole had they not been convicted.
The reputation and morale of the Metropolitan Police, and particularly of
its plain-clothes branch, were bound to be undermined. Other onslaughts,
from the press, the authorities and even from within, might well be
encouraged by the convictions.
Indeed, trouble was already springing up all over
the place. The Drug Squad was known to be highly suspect and some of its
members were under investigation. There were a number of other prosecutions
pending against individual Metropolitan officers. Only a few days before the
end of the Times trial the Sunday People dropped its bombshell
about Commander Kenneth Drury’s holiday on Cyprus with Jimmy Humphreys,
which was to open up the whole pornography corruption scene. In comparison
with the names and sums which were now being talked about, Robson and Harris
were small-time figures on the take. Yet it was the conviction of these two
Regional Crime Squad men which was to legitimize a much greater
consciousness of police corruption. It was forcing a previously impervious
public to absorb the fact that many London plain-clothes men were very
probably ‘bent’. In this sense the Times trial was a major
psychological breakthrough.
But for any policemen who might have been part of
the ‘firm in a firm’ there was to be one piece of good news. John Alexander
Symonds failed to appear at his own trial, which would otherwise have opened
at the Old Bailey on 12 April 1972. His mother stated that he and his woman
friend had left the country some six weeks earlier without saying where they
were going or how long they would be gone.
Appearing for the prosecution yet again, John
Mathew said that Symonds had last been seen on 24 February. He had bought a
motor caravan on hire purchase from United Dominions Trust, sold some
property for cash and gone abroad. He had not returned on 25 March, the date
for which he had booked the return passage of his vehicle. Symonds’ defence
counsel read out a letter which had been posted, presumably by someone else,
in London on 27 March. This made clear that the Robson-Harris trial, which
was in its last week when he disappeared, had convinced him that he had
little chance of staying out of prison: ‘I am not at all happy about the
justice of following them with the publicity about wicked detectives.’ He
wanted his trial to be delayed for as long as possible, presumably to allow
the publicity to die down (earlier he had complained about how long he was
having to wait for his trial). But, despite a defence request that Symonds
should be allowed to surrender voluntarily to the court, a warrant was
issued for his arrest.
Predictably, Symonds could not be traced, despite
the vigilance of the Tunisian police who, in marked contrast to Scotland
Yard, were reported in mid-May to be keeping a round-the-clock vigil on the
war grave of the Scots Guards father of Symonds’ woman companion. To this
day Symonds still has not been found.
There must remain considerable doubt about
whether there was ever any serious attempt to find him. But it is more
worrying that he had been allowed to leave the country during the crucial
period of the Robson-Harris trial. He was on bail for a mere £500. No one
had taken the precaution of taking away his passport. It had been
confidently predicted long beforehand that Symonds would disappear from
Britain, by none other than the officer in charge of the inquiry, Bill
Moody, when he had been questioning Julian Mounter many months earlier. Yet
neither Moody nor any other police authority had requested any substantial
restraint being put on Symonds’s movements. Symonds himself had taken no
efforts whatsoever to conceal his purchase of the motor caravan or the sale
of his property. Even his girlfriend had sold her retail business for cash.
They could not have given more public notice of their intention to depart.
And yet Moody had not done anything to restrain them.
The strong suspicion remains, therefore, that
Moody gave Symonds a licence to abscond. Either it was negligence which
allowed him the opportunity to start a new life - apparently in Rhodesia or
South Africa - or he was told to get out of the country because his trial
would have been too much of an embarrassment for other officers in the
Metropolitan Police whom he could have implicated. This would have been the
only satisfactory solution to the problem that Symonds was constituting, for
he had been openly threatening to name the names in his ‘firm in a firm,’
The other serious aspect to Symonds’s
disappearance is that it destroyed the only tangible achievement of the
Times inquiry team - particularly of its provincial officers. If little
that came out in the Robson-Harris trial owed its discovery or confirmation
to any-part of the inquiry’s work, at least the provincial team had dug up a
number of substantiated cases of Symonds’s corrupt activities in Peckham and
Camberwell. It was not only the Times evidence which would have been
offered against Symonds. When the accused took off for the Continent he took
with him the only positive memorial Williamson’s provincial inquiry team
would ever have had.
At Bill Moody’s trial in 1977 an unconsciously
ironic postscript was added to the story of the Times inquiry by
Peter Brodie, who had been Assistant Commissioner (Crime) throughout its
duration. Appearing on Moody’s behalf Brodie, a man of unquestionable
integrity, was asked his opinion of Moody’s performance. He replied that
there had been no criticism at all of Moody’s role. He had applied himself
‘totally, with the whole of his effort’ on an extremely complicated
investigation. ‘At the conclusion of the whole of the inquiry, so far as I
can remember, everyone was quite satisfied. There was no question of the
whole thing being opened up again, as sometimes happens.’
(4) Because Robson had
now been forced to admit the incident, Larby did not even have to appear at
the trial. Yet he was to suffer severely soon after it was over. It appears
that an unsuccessful attempt was made to stop him from keeping to his story
- he was visited by a senior Yard officer before the trial opened. But when
it was over a juicy story was published in the Sunday People, on 23
April 1972. It revealed that Larby, who was stationed at Brentwood, had been
having a passionate six-month affair with the attractive wife of Donald
Bruce, a convict then serving a seven-year-sentence for receiving. When the
affair was breaking up Larby told his superiors all about it, in order to
forestall Mrs Larby, who had threatened to do the same. Perhaps if he had
decided not to testify against Robson, this story might never have come to
the newspaper’s attention. After disciplinary proceedings Larby was
dismissed from the Essex force.
(5) During the trial
Moody still seems to have been assuming that Robson and Harris were going to
be acquitted. With a lack of concern that even at the time struck Mounter
and Lloyd as odd in an officer in charge of such a case, Moody used to tell
the reporters that the jury did not look as if they were likely to convict.
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