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Back to Part 4
I was telling the truth in Chapter One when I
said, ‘In November 1969 I was a highly rated officer in the Metropolitan
Police and I was going places’, but now you know this really means the
opposite. Yes, I was a rising star in an organisation with one of the best
public relations images in the world, but in this world everything was
turned upside down. Yes, I had made hundreds of arrests, my evidence had
helped convict many criminals and I had won commendations, but as all this
had been achieved courtesy of the corrupt Firm running London’s CID, the
more positive my achievements, the worse their implications.
Yet I was not ‘bent’, I had never taken the £50
from Michael Perry for which The Times had condemned me. Knowing I
was innocent, I was determined to clear my name, overturn my suspension and
screw The Times with a huge libel bill.
So when Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Moody
took charge of the Times enquiry, I was deeply perturbed. You might
think I should have been pleased - surely, if a corrupt officer takes charge
of an inquiry into corruption, he will ‘protect his own’- but, on the
contrary, I knew in my bones that such a person will deliberately sacrifice
some of ‘his own’, in order to divert suspicion from himself. It’s an old
story: Poacher-turned-Gamekeeper.
I wasn’t going just on gut instinct. All of a
sudden, as soon as Moody took over, my friends on the inquiry - including my
close neighbour with whom I shared my dog walks - told me they were very,
very worried, as did other friends who had their own friends on the squad.
Their combined reports convinced me that the whole attitude towards me was
changing. I heard of a meeting at the Home Office, attended by prosecution
counsel, along with officials representing the Director of Public
Prosecutions and leading lights from Scotland Yard. The purpose was to
decide who should be charged. At first it was decided that charges would
have to be laid against Robson and Harris but not against the other six
suspended officers, including me. Better than that, we would all be returned
to duties. This decision amounted to a complete clearance. But as the
meeting progressed, John Mathew, the leading barrister for the Crown, and
Ken Dowling from the DPP’s office argued that I should go on trial, They
were the only two who felt that way. DuCann and all the others said that
there wasn't enough evidence to justify any charges against me.
I then found out that, on the basis of a hostile
report from Moody, (who was talking about a new 'secret' statement) Dowling
had convinced Mathew that there was 'now' enough 'new' evidence to justify
charges against me after all. I was shocked because I knew such evidence did
not exist. The next thing I heard, people who had originally made statements
clearing me were being re-interviewed and encouraged or pressured to make
statements casting suspicion on me. Some statements were being destroyed
altogether. Now Moody was on the inquiry, all of a sudden it was going
another way. Strange things were happening.
By now another squad had been added to the
inquiry. This was made up of detectives from forces outside London, some of
whom were sent into south London to check out every case I had ever done,
trying to prove some form of corruption. Amongst villains the word went
round, ‘If you can say something against Symonds, we can give you help’.
This provoked a rash of information from people awaiting trial. These
weren’t people who had been fitted by squads in which I had worked. These
people then benefited from having dozens of crimes overlooked entirely. One
man was facing a single charge with 26 taken into consideration, (t.i.c.)
another faced one charge with 40 ‘t.i.c.’s. That was the help they had been
given, as a reward for making statements against me.
By this time I had realised the degree of Moody’s
treachery. Up till now I had been very loyal to the Firm, and loyalty is
very important to a corrupt police force. In America they call it the ‘buddy
system’. 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 for you. This had always been so, in my experience and that of my
friends, but here something new was happening. We all were corrupt to a
degree, but here was a man who was so corrupt that he was prepared to fit up
a fellow officer. Moody was fitting me up. This was beyond the pale. So now
I knew everything that was going on but I still didn’t know quite why. Was I
just a ritual sacrifice, so that Moody and his bosses at the top of Scotland
Yard could claim they had purged the force of all unclean elements, or was
there something more personal, touching on Moody himself.
As I listened to my friends on the inquiry, and
dug around on my own initiative, I realised that the trouble stemmed from a
corrupt nexus linking my Times accuser, the thief and burglar Michael
Perry, and his burglar chums, to Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Moody
himself.
Michael Perry was the leader of a gang of young
criminals who were known locally as the Likely Lads, after the popular
television series. These criminals were heading off in vans usually up to
some Midland town, entering clothing shops, emptying them out, driving back
to London and getting rid of the clothing to local receivers. With the aid
of a crooked locksmith, who knew somebody with the company who had supplied
all the locks, they were using duplicate keys to open up maybe several shops
on each trip. They were professional, they used to wear white coats and
arrive just before opening time or just after closing time, rather than at
night when they would have looked suspicious. They would fill up their van
and be back in London an hour or two later. Over two years they had done a
hundred jobs like that and in all they had stolen one million pounds’ worth
of property. And as they never had to force entry, they never left behind
any incriminating evidence, such as finger prints, hair or clothing fibres,
on which they could be identified.
In the meantime a special Regional Crime Squad
team, Operation Coathanger, had been set up to investigate them. That’s
where the other two officers named by 'The Times' came in, for both Robson
and Harris were working on that investigation. They had been quite
successful, for there were several gangs doing these jobs, not just our
Likely Lads. Robson had done pretty well in catching a lot of the other
thieves; he was credited with 22 arrests. He had even captured the duplicate
key-maker but the duplicate keys had themselves been ‘duped’, so sometimes
several gangs of thieves would raid the same premises. Once one gang going
into a shop met another gang coming out, leaving nothing left worth
stealing.
At Camberwell we knew what the Likely Lads were
doing but the fact they were working off our patch was clever. They had done
a few jobs around London but they were doing nothing locally, except drive
about in big cars with pocketfuls of money and enjoying themselves. We were
getting information back from our criminal sources on the ground so we set
up an observation to track the Likely Lads as they came back in their vans
into south London to unload the gear at the premises of their receivers. We
also put out a report on what their were doing and where they were living,
which Scotland Yard sent out to other forces, with the result that Midlands
officers came down to us asking for assistance over the Likely Lads.
The trouble was that these Midlands officers
thought it would be a simple matter to get search warrants and arrest
people, question them and they would just admit their crimes, but these were
hardened young criminals. There was no way they were going to confess to an
officer from the sticks. Also my colleagues at Peckham police station were
genuinely carrying out a complex observation job, sitting outside the Likely
Lads’ homes waiting for them to come back from their escapades, or spotting
them in a pub and following them home. All this might take six weeks and the
DI at Peckham knew the job would be ruined if the Midlands officers demanded
the suspects should be suddenly arrested. After all, there was no still no
real evidence that they had been doing any of these thefts. So instead the
Peckham officers sent the Midlands officers over to my colleague at
Camberwell, who decided he would try to help them by obtaining a search
warrant for some of the Likely Lads’ current premises. The warrant was
obtained from a local Justice of the Peace.
Things came to a head on 22 September 1969 when a
large consignment of cigarettes was stolen from a branch of the Nuneaton and
Atherstone District Co-operative Society in Warwickshire, one hundred miles
from London. Although Michael Perry had long been a suspect in these
Coathanger jobs, he was still at large.
On this occasion there was not enough evidence to
arrest him, only that his name had been put up by a informer. Two days after
the cigarette theft Warwickshire detectives, assisted by some Met officers,
arrested Perry in Peckham and took him to Nuneaton for questioning. Again
they thought that once he was there, he would crack. But Perry already had
some eighteen convictions, so he was a well-seasoned and practised villain,
and there was no way he was going to fall for that one. Sure enough, he had
to be released for lack of evidence. Meantime one of his confederates,
called Brookes, was also a suspect but Brookes had the perfect alibi. He
told the Warwickshire officers that at the time of the offence he was with a
man called Frank Holbert who was a Justice of the Peace. Holbert duly
provided a sworn statement to this effect, which meant Brookes could not be
charged. He was off the hook.
All this would have lain undisturbed forever if
it had not been for the revelations in The Times and the subsequent
inquiry. And this is where the interests of DCS Bill Moody came in, for he
had a very personal relationship with Mr Frank Holbert JP. Of course, when
most people see ‘JP’, they think that the person whose name precedes those
letters must be a pillar of the community, for surely only a person of
integrity, reputation and impeccable character could ever be appointed a
Justice of the Peace or Magistrate. But in Holbert’s case, the reverse was
true. The only community of which he was a pillar was the criminal community
for, though he may have had no convictions, he was a criminal himself.
Frankie Holbert was a seedy weedy man. If you saw
him on the street you would never imagine him to be a JP, but he was a
typical ‘middle man’, a sub-species of humanity very useful to crooked
police and criminals. At that time there were a lot of middlemen, mostly
publicans and bookmakers who were trusted by both sides to pass money on.
Frankie himself was also trusted to hold money. For example, the police
might demand so much money not to oppose bail, but understandably the
villains didn't quite trust the police, so they would lodge a sum of money
with Frankie who would then say to the police, ‘I'm holding it’, or ‘I've
got it’, and if they kept their part of the bargain and didn't oppose bail,
he would then hand the money to the police. But if something went wrong, if
the police opposed bail or a senior officer over-ruled any such deal, or the
bail was refused by the judge, Frankie would return the money to the
disappointed party, with his commission deducted.
A middle-man like Holbert was also a ‘cut-out’, a
device to ensure that any criminal with a wad of money to hand to a copper
did not have a chance of trapping the copper into being arrested for the act
of corruption it really was. Thus if Charlie Richardson needed to give a wad
to Ken Drury, he might use Holbert as the cut-out, so Charlie could not set
Drury up in an anti-corruption sting.
There were other middle-men, with colourful names
such as Pegleg Birchmore and Red-Faced Tommy up in Southwark but in Peckham
and Camberwell Frankie Holbert was Mister Fixit, the bridge between the
underworld and the overworld, a broker of deals between cops and robbers.
Holbert was a parasite. I don’t know if he had
ever been out on robberies or burglaries himself, hitting people on the head
or breaking into houses, but he had worked himself into a position whereby
he earned a living out of other villains’ efforts. He was born and bred
amongst them, he lived amongst them, but somehow he had also made friends
with certain policemen and got involved in this ‘middling’ game. From then
on, his name was passed around the local CID offices as being ‘staunch’,
reliable, a hundred per cent ‘geezer’, maybe even one thousand per cent. His
rating must have been something like that because he took on this same
middle-man role in the West End of London, where the pickings were far
richer for both villains and bent cops, especially in Soho.
But up in Soho Holbert was performing a role
which made him probably the most important middle-man in the whole of
London. For most of the 1960s and early 1970s the entire pornography scene
in Soho was run by an alliance of pornographers and corrupt detectives. The
corrupt detectives all belonged to a unit based in Scotland Yard officially
called the Obscene Publications Squad but generally known as the Porn or
Dirty Squad. Throughout this period the two detectives who headed the OPS,
directly or indirectly, were Wally Virgo and Bill Moody, the very men who,
now holding the mighty ranks of commander and chief superintendent, had just
muscled their way into running the Times Inquiry. Later it all came
out that, between them, Virgo and Moody had been creaming off hundreds of
thousands of pounds from Soho pornographers. They had sold these people
licences to trade with impunity. As their businesses boomed, so did the size
of their bribes, as if they were calculated as a share of the profits and
paid over like a Christmas bonus. According to this yardstick, Moody and
Virgo took huge lump sum payments, as well as regular weekly pay-offs
collected by junior officers, in return for protecting these men’s
businesses from prosecution, giving them advance warning of any cosmetic
police raids on their shops or warehouses, and crushing the operations of
any competitors who were not part of this charmed circle.
In theory Moody’s job was to stamp out
pornography, or at least suppress its distribution and availability so it
did not fall into the path of people who did not want it. In reality he
controlled the trade in a way which enriched himself, his squad and his
bosses back at the Yard. As a shareholder in the businesses of notorious
pornographers such as Bernie Silver, John Mason and Jimmy Humphreys, he had
a vested interest in stamping out the non-paying opposition. All major
criminals always want rival gangs or new firms eliminated, and these porn
bosses were just the same. And quite right too, because some of the
newcomers to this market (in which the demand was insatiable) displayed a
degree of recklessness which threatened the entire racket. For instance,
they would often send out direct mail shots containing dirty photographs to
innocent members of the public who would arrive at police stations
throughout Britain holding disgusting pictures which had come unsolicited
through the door, with the come-on, ‘Would you like to buy? Send your name
and address and we can send you more pictures like this!’ Whenever that
happened, we used to send that picture and a report to the porn squad. At
that point the porn squad would know that someone had set up a little studio
somewhere and was taking dirty photos and trying to build up a clientèle. He
would then be ‘visited’ and either driven out of business or he would be
taken aboard by the squad, as a partner. Provided he paid over a percentage
of the profits, he would be allowed to continue, while benefiting also from
the OPS’s professional guidance as to how to avoid getting nicked - by the
OPS itself.
I knew all about this from a chum of mine, a
detective who had worked with Moody when he was based at Croydon. When Moody
was appointed to head the OPS, he took him along because he knew he could
trust him. Indeed Moody set up the whole porn squad scam, with his aid. With
a few other trusted cronies, they became full participating members in the
dissemination of pornography: getting it into the country, opening shops,
getting it sold, and getting lists of people who would pay large sums of
money for this filth.
Around 1968 I had been offered a job on the porn
squad. Moody had chosen me because, as far as he was concerned, I was
trusted, tried and true. It was a kind of inverted honour to be asked. It
showed I could be relied on to join in. No one joined merely because the
postings clerk said, ‘Oh well, who's this? DC Bloggs? Put him on the porn
squad’. You had to be hand-picked, known to be ‘sound’, because you were
going into a totally corrupt environment in which massive sums were coming
in and being counted out, sometimes openly on desks. The very fact that
Moody had invited me on the squad showed our relationship but, to his
surprise, I refused because I also had the chance to go to the Flying Squad.
My friend Ken Drury was taking over as Commander of the Flying Squad which
was more my style, more my idea of policing. Friends could not understand my
decision because on the porn squad I could have made thousands and
thousands. People who went on the porn squad used to immediately buy a new
car. And shortly after that they would buy a new house. Then the house would
be furnished regardless of cost. And people would arrive at work wearing the
most expensive Italian shoes and the sharpest suits, stinking of aftershave,
cheeks flushed with good living and smoking a big expensive cigar. That was
the porn squad. And people couldn't understand why I didn't want to go
there.
I didn't want to go there because people were
corrupted there. I had seen the films they had to view because policemen who
were friendly with porn squad officers had the chance to see the latest
batch of seizures, which used to be shown in one of the cellars at Scotland
Yard. This amounted to a private cinema, a perverts’ peep-show, frequented
by regulars, some of whom had travelled from the outer reaches of London and
beyond, as well as people like myself going out of curiosity. And these
films were horrifying, the worst of the worst, including ‘snuff movies’,
where children and young girls were either being done to death or were very
good actors. These were the sort of films that collectors, notably the great
and the good of our land, paid large sums of money for.
I had no interest in seeing any more of these
films, or reading dirty books or having anything to do with that sort of
filth, even though I knew there would be a lot of money in it for me if I
joined Moody’s squad. A very close friend of mine, who was also a very close
friend of Moody's, was completely destroyed by his time on the squad. He
really was corrupted and became a sexual pervert. Maybe a strong-minded man
with a secure background could watch disgusting filth all day long, and be
unaffected and return home to his wife and children, and close that
compartment of his mind. But a lot of policemen are not of that stamp, they
are not strong enough to resist the evil influence because porn is like
drugs or tobacco, it can hook you. It can provide you with thrills and
excitement of which you want more and more, and you become jaded, so to get
more thrills and excitement you must go for harder and harder porn.
This friend of mine took the work home with him.
He wasn't strong enough to put that side of his life into that compartment.
He was no longer satisfied with normal matrimonial relations with his
long-time live-in girlfriend, and tried to get her to get up to all sorts of
nonsenses and perversions, with himself and with tarts and other blokes. It
ruined his relationship with that particular girl. I was lucky in that I had
prior personal knowledge of what had happened to him and to other people.
There was no way I wanted to end up in that condition.
As in any other area of corruption, there had to
be middle-men in Soho, and this is where Frankie Holbert came in, for he was
Moody's bag carrier on the West End porn scene. He collected money from the
pornographers and gave it on to Moody. He wore the respect due to him as
Moody’s man, so if he turned up at any porn-dealer’s premises and said
‘Bill’s sent me for the money’, or whatever, then the porn-dealer would hand
it over, with Holbert acting as the ‘cut-out’ insulating Moody from any
repercussions. He was therefore so useful to Moody, and knew so much about
his corrupt activities, that he was in a position to have brought the whole
house down, burying Moody in the rubble, if he was ‘leant on’ by an outside
investigator with the power to lock him up if he did not ‘sing’.
It’s my suspicion that Moody had known Holbert
from way back and had planted him in Soho for this very purpose. It’s
possible that Holbert had some villainous interests of his own in the West
End through his receiving, but otherwise I can’t think why he should go
there. After all, there was plenty of villainy for him in the grimy streets
of Peckham, where he was king of the roost, whereas in the West End he was
just another scruff-bag man, in amongst hundreds of others in the dirty
raincoat brigade. He had no style, so I think he must have been nominated by
Moody because Moody felt Holbert ‘belonged’ to him.
But Holbert was also a weak man, in terms of his
character. He had no resilience. Under the pressure of determined
questioning, he was bound to buckle, crumble, confess and tell all. At least
that was what Moody must have thought, and probably Moody knew him better
than anyone except his own family.
Moody’s problem, which he shared with his porn
squad overlord, Commander Wally Virgo (and by implication dozens of other
detectives on that corrupt outfit), was that the Times Inquiry was
now split into two units, which in effect were competing with each other. On
one side was the Scotland Yard inquiry team, led initially by Freddie
Lambert, and on the other side was the team of provincial officers which had
been tacked on to the inquiry to give it an air of objectivity and
independence from the Met. This was led by Frank Williamson, a former Chief
Constable of Cumbria with a whiter-than-white reputation who was now a Home
Office Inspector of Constabulary. His appointment was the result of
political pressure and had been bitterly opposed by everyone in Scotland
Yard, including the Commissioner, who had objected in the strongest terms.
Quite right too because it wasn’t many days before Moody, Virgo and those
above them in the Yard realised that Lambert was getting on far too well
with Williamson. In turn Williamson rightly regarded Lambert as honest and
well-meaning but impossibly compromised by conflicting loyalties: to the
truth and to the Yard.
Early on in the Inquiry, it was decided there
should be a clear division of tasks. Lambert’s team should investigate those
matters which related solely to the Metropolitan Police, while Williamson’s
team should probe every non-Met matter. This seemed clear-cut until Scotland
Yard realised that the ‘Nuneaton end’ was assuming bigger and bigger
dimensions. Not only had Perry been taken to Nuneaton on suspicion of
involvement in the cigarette job but his confederate Brookes, had been given
a false alibi by his 'JP' chum, Frankie Holbert and everyone was convinced
that if a really tough investigator got hold of him, Holbert would end up
giving out everything he knew. Not only about Camberwell but about his West
End connections, his pornographic friends, his police friends, and the deals
he was still broking for all of them. Everyone was worried because they felt
that if Frank Williamson himself got hold of Holbert, he would crack.
So, panic stations. Suddenly - and much to
Williamson’s anger - Virgo removed Lambert from the inquiry and Moody took
his place. I’m sure this could have happened only with the informed
connivance of their bosses who had benefited from the fortunes which Moody
and Virgo had been collecting from pornographers for almost a decade.
That's why Bill Moody forced himself onto the
Times Inquiry, simply and solely to cut out the danger of weak, crooked
Frankie Holbert JP being investigated or cross-examined or spoken to by
anyone other than Moody himself. It's as simple as this: Holbert was the
link between the Camberwell corruption allegations as printed in The
Times and the pornography racket in Soho.
Ah but... you may say... surely interviewing
Holbert would still have been a task for the provincial officers on the
Inquiry, because of the false alibi he had provided over the Nuneaton job.
That is correct but Moody did not see it that way, and his Yard masters
'pressured' Williamson into surrendering that ‘Nuneaton Aspect’ to Moody.
In some strange way this ruffian of a detective,
whose job wasn’t really important to society at large - porn squad, dirty
books, naughty photos - had become vastly rich and very powerful. This mere
chief superintendent seemed to have everybody’s ear. But it wasn’t so
strange: Moody had everyone’s ear because he was enriching them as well, all
the way up the tree. He was paying off everybody, except the Assistant
Commissioner, Crime, Peter Brodie, an honest man.
So now everyone in the Yard chain of command bar
Brodie had a vested interested in helping Moody to protect his own back
regarding the pornography racket. They would all sink or swim together, so
to stop Moody sinking they allowed him to commandeer the ‘Nuneaton Aspect’
and close it down. Which is what happened eventually. There was a long
struggle between Moody and Williamson over who would interview which
witnesses, but the only witness who really mattered was Holbert - all the
rest were thieves with strings of convictions whom no average jury would
ever believe.
So how 'did' Moody shut it down? Well, as luck
would have it, a few months later Frankie Holbert fell off the roof of the
block of flats in which he lived in Deptford. So did he jump or was he
pushed? Although he was a weak man, and he would have had no stomach for
being interrogated by anyone from Williamson’s team, the only interrogator
he now faced was his friend and partner-in-crime, Bill Moody. There would
have been nothing to fear, surely, unless Bill Moody could not afford to
have Holbert around to be questioned by anyone else years down the road. For
myself, when I heard the news I knew it could not possibly have been suicide
- Holbert just did not have the ‘bottle’ or strength of character to kill
himself - so it had to be murder. I had been expecting something like this
to happen to him because he knew far too much to be allowed to live. One way
or another, he had been coaxed or coerced onto that roof and pushed off.
After that, not only was Holbert dead. So was the Nuneaton Aspect. And so,
for the time being, was the chance that Williamson’s team might make the
crucial leap from investigating the miniscule degree of corruption alleged
in The Times to the far bigger issue of rampant corruption at the top
of Scotland Yard. Moody had succeeded in blocking off the Holbert route to
revealing the monstrous scale of the graft racket which Moody, Virgo and co
had been operating in Soho and the rest of the West End for so many years.
Having safeguarded his own position, Moody had
all the greater need to show zeal by despatching a few lowly detectives to
the gallows. It was clear that Robson and Harris ‘had to go’, but what about
me? As soon as I heard about Holbert’s fate, I knew we were no longer
playing ‘footsie’ under the table. Would I be the next one to go off a roof,
fall into a lift shaft, or be found bobbing up and down in the Thames?
This was no paranoid fantasy, for at this time
there was such a panic going on amongst the very corrupt cops at the top,
with such huge sums involved that twelve-year jail sentences would surely
come their way if the truth ever came out. It all seemed horribly logical to
me: I was being offered up as a sacrificial lamb for allegedly receiving £50
from a little criminal in a car - a nonsense - when I was being investigated
by men who were receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds, sackfuls of
money.
And that’s when things started to go even
‘wronger’, people became desperate and threats were issued. I now knew for
sure that Moody was a dangerous man, he had powerful friends and I was not
frightened of him personally, I realised that he was a very dangerous man,
especially when he was threatening to have me killed or 'seen to' as he had
Holbert.
If I didn’t like that prospect, then I was going
to have to stomach being put on trial along with Robson and Harris. By
closing down the Nuneaton Aspect, he would not only save his own skin, the
other five suspended detectives would most likely be saved too. That left
only me as a fall guy, which neatly coincided with the minimum visible
response required to the Times story. Any thinking member of the public must
have thought how remarkable it was that the only crooked cops in the whole
of London just happened to be three detectives picked on almost by chance
during a bumbling newspaper investigation. What little reassurance that
could have given readers! If sleuths of this amateur quality could pluck the
only bad apples in Scotland Yard’s barrel, when the entire armoury of the
greatest police force in the world could find none at all.
My friends and colleagues were keeping me
informed on a daily basis of the mechanisms whereby this fit-up and cover-up
combined was being achieved As they witnessed Moody’s serpentine twists and
turns, they were horrified to see, for the first time in their experience, a
corrupt policeman being so corrupt, according to the dog-eat-dog principle,
as to fit up a colleague. Had he been in the same mess as I was, I would
have been prepared to help him out, as a brother detective. If he had come
to ask me to give false evidence or fit someone up to get him out of
trouble, I would have done it, because that was the way things were done
then. But now in 1970 he broke the code. He was fitting me up, and I was
told exactly how. In order to reverse the drift of opinion at the DPP’s
office, where it had been decided that the case against me was null and void
because there was no proof of intention or threat or the all important
'favour', Moody had written the word ‘If’ on a statement made by Perry,
which wasn't there before. That ‘If’ made a tremendous difference, for now
it was possible to interpret that I had shown an intent to do him a 'favour'
i.e. Perry’s Statement had already been typed out for the committal
proceedings, so we now had typed copies of Perry's statement with no ‘If’,
and we had the original statement with a big, crude ‘If’ subsequently
super-imposed on it. Most extraordinary of all, Moody had had the balls to
tamper with Perry’s statement in this way in front of witnesses in the
office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Justice was being perverted
by a bent detective before the very eyes of some of this country’s most
senior legal officers.
When I heard all about this, that's when I
changed, because I couldn't believe it. That's when I decided I must fight
back. That’s when I warned Moody not to do it. What I had not foreseen was
that Moody’s hold on those above him went far beyond the hierarchy in the
Yard. In his capacity of Head of the Obscene Publications Squad, he had
access to all seized mailing lists of the people subscribing to the
filthiest porn imaginable - children, animals, coprophagy, even snuff movies
- which put him in a position to blackmail the highest and mightiest in the
land: ministers, MPs, lords, judges, bishops and prominent businessmen. None
of these Great and Good had the wit to see that, although the brochures said
these films, pictures and books were being sent direct from Sweden, Holland
or Denmark, in fact it was all being copied here in Britain and mailed out
from a pokey warehouse which might eventually fall prey to some British
bobby, bent or straight. True, they couldn’t have foreseen that they might
fall into the clutches of someone quite so evil as Bill Moody.
So not only was he handing out sackfuls of porn
bribe money upstairs (some of it to far senior people with the power to
decide whether I went on trial or not) he also had the ear of important
friends outside the Yard, whom he had acquired after seeing their names on
these mailing lists. No doubt, on meeting them, he could rapidly divine
whether their love of paedophile porn or sado-masochistic material was
matched by a predilection for buggering small boys or getting whipped
themselves. It seemed that a lot of these people had been corrupted at
public school, hence their delight in caning and the infliction of
punishment. And we, who knew about this, were always expecting a monster
scandal. We were all waiting for an announcement, ‘Lord So-and-So arrested’,
or ‘The Rt Hon Blah Blah MP, Minister of Balloons, charged’, but nothing
ever happened. Instead that list became a source of power to Moody, and to
other people who succeeded him in that post, because no doubt he went to see
Lord So-and-So or the Rt Hon Blah Blah MP, and then he had these people's
careers in his hands. I don't know whether anybody paid any money over, but
even just by not prosecuting these people, he acquired all sorts of
influential friends and put himself in a very strong position.
They say, power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Well, Moody had become so powerful, he thought he could
get away with being the first police officer in anyone's knowledge, to fit
up a ‘brother’ detective and get away with it. Now he might claim, even
today, that he was the victim of political circumstances. He might say that
his Yard bosses had told him that they wanted to turn round and proclaim to
the Home Secretary and the world, ‘It's all been fixed! Two and a half years
ago, three silly men took some money, now they're all in prison, ruined. End
of story!’ Moody might say that the Yard just couldn't bury the case against
me because of pressure from the press, not just articles but also letter to
The Times from all sorts of influential people demanding, ‘There must
be an inquiry’, ‘This must be scrutinized, openly and publicly. We cannot
allow the police to investigate themselves again’. But of course none of
that justified Moody and co. faking evidence, fundamentally changing the
meaning of people’s statements, or of course merely ‘diverting the
discourse’, as Freemasons say, away from the far grosser corruption
practised by Moody himself.
But there was a personal edge too, for Moody and
I went back some way. He was not exactly a friend but an acquaintance, as we
had served around the same areas, including Croydon. We also had a common
interest in boxing - we were both pugs ourselves - which meant we used to
meet on social terms which blurred the disparity in our ranks. This meant
that I knew enough about his corrupt activities before even he had wormed
his way onto the Times Inquiry to be able to sink him in the water if
ever I needed to.
Right from the moment when my friend Ernie Culver
had gone up to Soho with Moody when he first took over the porn squad, and
over many succeeding months and years, Ernie had been giving me a more or
less weekly update on Moody’s rapacious activities. I knew exactly what he
was doing, how he was doing it, and eventually Moody realised that I knew.
He knew that I knew, and that's why he took my threats seriously. He knew
that I was a great danger to him.
I knew how he had set up from scratch a
completely corrupt relationship with certain chosen pornographers, even
making himself a full partner in companies importing and distributing this
material. I knew all about his relationships with Bernie Silver and Jimmy
Humphreys because, they were all so confident, the relationship was more or
less open. They used to turn up as guests at all sorts of functions, from
Flying Squad dinners to boxing socials. And everyone would be sitting at the
same table. I went to some of these do’s and I was astonished by his
brazen-faced nerve. I attended many Masonic ladies' nights where Moody was
in company with other pornographers as his guests or, even worse, as his
fellow Freemasons and lodge members, and their wives would all be prattling
away together too, like blood sisters! And not just pornographers’ wives,
but the wives of the top echelon thieves, fraudsters, crooked bookmakers and
publicans who were also enjoying the festive board. Whereas other detectives
might have hidden these connections away, and certainly not demeaned their
wives by such intimate association, with Moody the relationship was open.
That's the odd thing, it was completely open. He was very confident and his
confidence was based on assured power.
Armed with all this first-hand knowledge, I had
already got my retaliation in first. Right from the moment Victor Lissack
had come to my house on the morning after The Times put me on the
front page, I had vowed to prepare a vast dossier on all the corrupt
officers I had ever served with or known about, excepting only the few whom
I felt were going to be staunch and stand by me. As soon as I discerned the
slightest wavering in Scotland Yard’s support for me - a matter of hours
rather than days - I carried out that vow. As it happens, Bill Moody was
already high on my list. Even before he took over the Inquiry, I had named
him in my dossier, along with over one hundred other officers, mostly ranked
inspector and above [check]. More damaging still (or so I thought at
the time), I had given this x-page account to Victor Lissack for his safe
keeping.
What I had not realised at the time, but what I
believe to have happened soon after, was that Lissack, for whatever motive,
had quickly sent a copy of my dossier to Scotland Yard itself. This betrayal
of my confidence, as I saw it, meant that, for sure, someone in the Yard
hierarchy had funnelled the relevant pages to Moody himself, so that even
before he had ousted Freddie Lambert, he knew I had put my money where my
mouth was. I had written it all down, ready for distribution to the
government, the press, whomever. Of course, I would have been very happy if
Moody had dismissed the Times story and ensured that I did not get
charged, but it didn't happen like that.
So instead I spent much of the next ten years
firing off versions of my dossier to influential figures in public life,
from Lord Longford to X, Y and Z, to the point where I really do believe
that I was the one who brought down Scotland Yard. It’s something I don’t
boast or shout about, but it is the truth for in my 1969 [1970]
dossier I had named all the officers who would appear at the Old Bailey in
1976 and 1977 in the drug, porn and flying squad corruption trials,
including the most notable scalps, Moody, Virgo and old Ken Drury.
What was riling me wasn’t just Moody’s forging
statements from Perry and co. directly relating to the Times
allegations but the plain daft material which both Moody’s and Williamson’s
teams were collecting in order to pin totally new offences on me. I was
getting reports back about petty crooks being offered any deal they wanted
if only they could say something against me. So one of these guys came up
with a story about finding me staggering along Camberwell High Road
staggering around drunk and he came up to me and said, ‘Alright John?
Y’alright Mate?’, and I said, ‘Uh, no, I’m not alright, I ain’t got money
for a drink’, so this little bloke says, ‘Don’t worry Mate have a fiver’! So
by now, he says, I was nearly crying with gratitude, ‘Uh, now I can go and
get a couple of pints of beer, can’t I?’, and I staggered off, dishevelled
and weeping, with a filthy fiver in my pocket.
All bollocks, but, blow me down, this became the
subject of a charge: ‘You are hereby charged that on such and such a day in
November 1969, blah, blah, you did corruptly solicit a gift of £5’.
Convicted on that alone and I would have been given two years of
imprisonment. So what happened to the little man that told this tale? He was
in prison facing thirty-six charges of shop-breaking, for which he had no
hope of bail but, after he had come up with this rubbish, he was allowed
bail and charged with just one offence, with the other thirty-five ‘taken
into consideration’. Better still, at his trial some Midlands police officer
stood up and put in a good word for him, so he got probation. So by twisting
the investigators round his little finger, he had got off ‘scot-free’, but
when it came to my committal, he would not give evidence. It was a manifest
fabrication and he was not going to testify in court and risk perjury
charges when he had already got all he wanted.
At about this time I was told that a lot of other
funny things were happening. My closest friend on the Times Inquiry
told me that all the original statements - including all the ones that would
have helped me - had suddenly gone missing from the office. They had ‘got
lost’. Most scandalous of all, the exhibits book had disappeared too. On any
inquiry an exhibits officer is appointed and everything must be entered in
his book: every statement, every exhibit, all marked, labelled and stamped..
In an important inquiry the exhibits book is treated like the crown jewels.
Lose that and you have lost everything.
But as soon as Moody came on the inquiry, the
exhibits book disappeared so the whole investigation had to be done again.
Later certain senior editorial figures on The Times claimed they had
never made any statements. Fortunately, my closest friend found copies of
their statements which had been among those irretrievably ‘lost’. He sent
them to me as if from an anonymous well-wisher, so in one stroke I was able
to show the Times folk up as liars. If my chum had not found them,
these statements would never have been disclosed but they were vital to my
claim that the tapes had not been treated properly when they were in the
newspaper’s possession ....
There were two stages in any assessment of the
legal value of the Times tapes. First, were they authentic, had they
been edited or tampered with, and most important of all, had there been
‘continuity of handling’? Second, was what I was alleged to have said on
them incriminating?
But was anything I said on the tapes
incriminating? When my police colleagues heard them, they just laughed. They
weren't saying, ‘Oh, how dreadful!’, because they had all heard other people
saying the same thing. I was only repeating what I had learned during my
training at Ken Drury's knee. He used to talk along those lines. It's all
part of how to make friends with a crook and reassure him that you're all
right, and if he works in with you he'll be all right, to our mutual
benefit, because he can have a little licence to do bits and pieces round
here and I can protect him, but in return, I will expect him to give me
bodies and information. Whether you ever give him a licence or whether you
do protect him is another matter. It's all a con and a battle of wits. He's
going to try and get protection from you but not really help you, and you're
going to try and get information from him and not give him any protection.
It's a dirty game but everyone realises that. It was just talk along those
lines, but when I told Scotland Yard, ‘I want the tapes to be played because
I'm going to back them up’, that was the turning point. It was panic
stations because the Yard could not contemplate the revelation that conning
criminals was all part of its standard code of behaviour.
Go to Part 6 |
