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Back to Part 5
Then
there was the matter of the tape-recordings, on which not only my case but
also that of Robson and Harris would ultimately stand or fall. Not only had
EMI’s chief engineer reported that in his considered opinion, these tapes
had been interfered with, thereby turning himself from being a prosecution
witness in any future trial to being a witness for the defence, but the
police could not find any proper tape expert to say they were genuine, only
some phonetics buff from a Home Office speech laboratory who came in late on
and said he thought they sounded all right. This was scarcely admissible
because this ‘expert witness’ could not seriously be accepted as impartial.
After all, the Times Inquiry was a Home Office operation, it was all being
run from there, Moody and Virgo were working to Home Office requirements,
and lo-and-behold, along comes a Home Office employee who backs up the case
they wish to embrace. Question his impartiality in court and the jury would
surely discard his evidence.
The
EMI man wasn’t our only defence tape expert, we had others, and so everyone
was convinced that the tapes were going to be thrown out early on. Even I
could spot where lumps were missing. For instance, I remembered that at one
of my meetings with Perry I had spotted a person who (as I later learned)
was the Times photographer with a camera sticking out of his coat. He was
walking past the car when he turned so that his camera was pointing towards
us. I said to Perry, ‘Is he one of ours or one of yours?’ Perry said, ‘One
of yours I think’. Ha, ha, ha, we both went. But you won't find that on the
tapes, just editing marks on either side of that snatch. I'm not saying the
Times reporters cut it out, they would never have done such a thing, I’m
sure, but someone did.
Better
still from my point of view, there was no ‘continuity of handling’, a
concept of law which we always had to take in account when preparing a case.
All physical evidence had to be safeguarded, securely stored, locked up, so
it could not be lost, stolen or tampered with. But in this case, these
dynamite tapes had been lying around in the Times office. People had taken
them home to play to their friends. The office secretaries were given them
to make transcripts and had left them on top of their desks overnight.
Outrageous. In my experience, a prosecution based on evidence with no
continuity of handling almost never got to court - maybe just one time in
ten, if the case involved some particularly nasty crime where they was bound
to be a lot of public interest, to see justice done. well, maybe this was
one of those cases but still there wasn't sufficient evidence to take me to
court.
Meantime, of course, the reporters were still claiming I had taken the
measly £50 from Perry; and that when they had searched him straight after I
had left him in the car, he no longer had the money they had given him just
before. Well, maybe, but he could have secreted it anywhere in his car
which, they admitted, they did not search. However, they said that prior to
the hand-over, they had taken down the numbers of the five and ten pound
notes. Later these numbers were handed to the Times Inquiry but when they
were checked with Freshfields it turned out that they belonged to notes
which had not even been printed by the time the article appeared on 30
November 1969. So the case against me was very weak.
So
with the pay-off notes discredited, the tapes ‘iffy’ to say the least, and
with nothing said by me on the tapes that was directly incriminating - no
talk about money, no rustling of money, no threats about money - I was
convinced I was off the hook.
No
such thing. On X Y 1970 Robson, Harris and I, were all charged, but not the
other five detectives who had been suspended along with us. Even now I
wasn’t too worried. Because my lawyers were adamant that as the case against
me was far weaker than that against the other pair, I should either go on
trial before them, or with them in the same trial. That way we could argue
my tapes away, and get them thrown out, either at the committal, or at the
trial itself in the absence of a jury - or even totally discredited in front
of one. Whichever way, I would walk out of court a free man. Whereas, if
they were tried first - and they were sure to be convicted - and I went on
trial afterwards all by myself, I was bound to be convicted in their wake.
At
first, a joint trial was also what the Prosecution wanted, with all 24 tapes
played one after another as a series. So that was fine by me, because I had
never wavered in my belief that there was no case against me. But meantime
the strain of the entire affair was seriously debilitating me. It wasn’t
just the prospect of the trial, though that was bad enough. Yes I believed
there was no case against me. On the other hand, as a member of the Firm I
had helped lock up many people for crimes they had not committed, so I had a
very real fear that the same thing would happen to me.
And
that’s just what did happen, only it was a very long drawn-out affair. Of
course, the case against Robson and Harris was watertight from day one, so
they could have gone to court the next day, pleaded guilty and it would all
have been over. Instead we all had to wait two and a half years while the
case against me was fine-tuned and finagled.
If the
Times Inquiry’s overseers had studied all its findings and concluded, ‘As
for John Symonds: there's no evidence against him, there was no continuity
in the handling of the tapes, the money numbers weren't printed until weeks
or months after the alleged money was handed over, blah, blah, blah.
Decision: no case to answer’, certain influential members of the public
wouldn't have been satisfied. There was still a call for what amounted to a
ritual expurgation of Scotland Yard, with me as the symbolic offering, but
on any other grounds it was a nonsense to keep going for two and a half
years on an investigation into an alleged £50 bribe in the back[?] of a car.
That doesn't take two and a half years to investigate. Instead, both Moody
and Virgo for their reasons and the Home Office for its reasons, kept the
investigation going by pretending to prove ever more heinous crimes by me,
just to make it more difficult for my side to keep shouting that they had
not proved anything so the trial should be dropped. That's why they delayed
it for two and a half years, and that's why they felt they couldn't let me
off. It was a political thing or so I was told by my dog-walking chum on the
Inquiry team, and other well-wishers.
When I
was completely sure that I was being fitted up by Moody, with statements
being physically altered, original statements destroyed, witnesses
re-interviewed and pressured to go other ways, I sent a message to Moody,
warning him that I knew what he was doing and I wouldn't stand for it. I let
him know that I knew enough about him to take him down with me, so he had to
stop fitting me up.
So
Moody counter-threatened me. His reaction - which I should have foreseen -
was not to stop fitting me up but to make sure I went down. And when I
uttered other threats to other people, I received escalating threats up to.
‘You’re going to go off a roof’. But between these threats there was velvet
glove coercion. Emissaries would tell me, ‘There’s no need for it to be like
this, so why go this way? You've only been summonsed for this £50 caper’ - I
had never been arrested, I received a summons through the letterbox saying I
had to attend court - ‘the maximum sentence for that is two years, you’ll
only have to do part of that, you'll go to an open prison, it'll be a cushy
life, you just chuck yourself on your bed and read books, and you wander
around and have a nice time, and when you come out you'll be looked after’.
So
what they wanted was for me to swallow the false charge, be wrongfully
convicted, all to save them and their corrupt empires. And the promise was,
when I came out I would be ‘looked after’. I would be recompensed and I
could have a good life. And, as if to prove me really meant this, in 1970
Bill Moody sent one of his biggest paymasters, the pornographer John Mason,
along to my house in a small village in Kent, to make me a staggering offer.
He confirmed that, when I came out, he would look after me: I could manage
one of his dirty book shops. Indeed, if I liked, I could start one up there
and then, while I was suspended and long before my trial. So we went for a
ride down the main road to Sevenoaks where, he said, he was going to start
me off as a pornographer. Well, there was no way I was ever going to accept
this offer, but I knew it was nonsense right from the start because
Sevenoaks is not even in the Metropolitan Police area. It was way beyond the
reach of any corrupt clout that Moody could exercise. I don’t suppose Mason
had the wit to realise he had given the game away, but I knew this meant
Moody was playing a silly game. He had no power to persuade either the Kent
Police or the stuffy burghers of this austere town to allow a tits-and-bums
emporium to open up in the high street. But that was just to con me into
believing I would be ‘looked after’. Mind you, if Moody had really wanted to
look after me, he could have got Mason to put me into running one of his
best book shops in the West End where I could have earned a thousand pounds
a week, which in those days was unimaginable money. But no doubt that was
something that Bill Moody would have deemed ‘too close to home’.
What
an ingenious man he was, like a brilliant but mad scientist who had created
a seemingly faultless machine - in his case one that sprouted money by the
bucket full - but which in the end would malfunction and choke him with a
surfeit of riches because he could not switch it off. In the end he would
drown in his own greed but at the time I underestimated him. I suppose he
underestimated me too, because we got into this mutually lethal conflict
with me thinking he would back down because he knew that I knew a lot about
him, and he thinking he could frighten me off and shut me up.
And so
I resolved to front him up, face to face. I asked to see him several times.
I even arranged meets with him but he never turned up. Afterwards he would
say it was too dodgy, he couldn’t come out to me because he was the
investigating officer. So I had to wait for my chance. Once I happened to
see him in his car and I waved. He saw me, put his foot down and shot off.
He was quite nervous, understandably so. But the time came when we were sure
to meet, because as head of the Inquiry, he had to get me to answer a
questionnaire in person. So in June 1970 I went to Tintagel House, a block
on the Thames where the Inquiry was based, accompanied by my solicitor,
Victor Lissack. Quite rightly Victor advised me to refuse to answer any
questions so the meeting was quite disjointed and we took several breaks.
During
one of these breaks Moody followed me into the toilet and told me that I was
‘doing well’ and to ‘keep it going like that’. With these remarks he was
encouraging me to continue to refuse to answer his own questions - yet
another example of the world turned upside down - so I turned on him. I
said, ‘You bastard. You know, you’ve done the dirty on me Bill. You’re
fitting me up and I shall fix you, Mate. If I go, you’re going too’. With
that, Moody looked very worried and nervous. Tough guy that he was, he was
trembling and went to pieces a bit in front of me. Think about it. Here was
I, a mere sergeant on the brink of ruin, and there was he, a chief
superintendent apparently untouchable, and yet he couldn’t look me in the
eye. So I left him in the toilet without exchanging another word.
It’s a
wonder that he didn’t assault me, because, with his form and in any other
situation, that’s exactly what he would have done. He always prided himself
on being a tough guy, but he knew enough about me to know that I was
probably harder than him. Not only was I younger than him but I had a much
better record as a boxer. It’s pathetic to compare these things but at some
point he had won a Metropolitan Police novices title, whereas I had been the
heavyweight champion of my Regiment - Indeed, I had fought a good number of
bouts while I was in the army, where boxing was regarded as ‘good for the
morale in the men, you know’.
I
always tried to play down this side of my life, but Moody seemed to revel in
being ‘a man's man’, always ready to use his fists. For example, when he was
at Croydon police station, he would be talking to another officer and the
next thing, they would be swapping blows across the desk and they would jump
up and have a massive punch-up all over the office. Then it would all
subside and they would go and have a drink.
Even
on the Times Inquiry, he fell into fisticuffs, and all because he could not
get the Warwickshire officers from Nuneaton to say anything much against me
over my handling of inquiries into that cigarette theft which the Likely
Lads had done in their town. Back when they had come down to arrest Michael
Perry and his chums, I had been probably the only Metropolitan officer who
showed them any courtesy or helpfulness. I had taken them for a meal, bought
them drinks, arranged cups of tea and made all their arrangements so we had
a good relationship and kept in contact. If they wanted any information from
the Met, they were phoning me at Camberwell, not Scotland Yard. They
certainly weren't in touch with the police at Peckham, who regarded them as
‘spoilers’ and treated them with surliness and contempt. So when the Times
disaster hit me, and the Inquiry team were bound to interview those Nuneaton
officers about my performance, I didn't want anything more from them than to
tell the truth about our relationship, because it was completely straight
and to my credit.
So of
course, it was Bill Moody who seized this end of the Inquiry and he went up
to interview these officers at Nuneaton. He wasn’t looking for statements
from them to my credit, he was looking for statements to my dis-credit. And
of course he was trying to lead them away from making any mention of Frankie
Holbert, and so shield Holbert from direct questioning. But because the
Nuneaton officers did not go Moody's way, he set about them. He got one chap
up against the wall and laid into him. That was Bill Moody all over. He was
what we called a ‘punchie’. The Nuneaton men made an official complaint to
the Met Commissioner about Moody’s assault but nothing happened to him. None
of this did me any good. In fact it turned them so much against the Met that
they made some statements which did me harm. So in his crude puggish way,
Moody did me over yet again.
And
now - at his behest or not - in came another offer to me, a more traditional
one, which was to become very popular during the 1970s whenever corrupt
officers wished to avoid jail, and that was the ill-health pension. I had
paid all my dues for twenty years, from the age of 17 to 37, so I was
pressured to declare myself mad, to ‘do a Challoner’, a dodge immortalised
by a notorious bent detective who back in 196X [check] had framed some
political demonstrators by planting bricks in their pockets. Very easy, I
was told. All I had to do was go and see the police psychiatrist, who would
be in on the deception, and to see my own doctor and complain of feeling
dizzy and being ill and losing my memory and so and so. And I had a very
good reason for being in such a dreadful mental state: I had been suspended
for two and a half years, which was a long, long time to be left in a limbo
- long enough to go nuts - and I was assured that I could quite easily
retire at the age of 37 with a full pension.
But I
would not do it, because I was not guilty and all that fakery would have
easily seen through as the last refuge of a guilty man. It would have been
better if I had been guilty. If I really had taken that £50, I would have
done my time in jail, this act of petty graft would have been expunged after
about three years [check] under the Rehabilitation Of Offenders Act, and I
would have had thirty years to rebuild my life. The fact that I did not take
the £50 is why I've spent thirty years fighting this.
Well
maybe I should have taken the ill-health pension - a euphemism for insanity
- but I didn't want to do it because I had three young children, there's
never been any history of lunacy in my family, and I couldn't imagine myself
becoming a registered lunatic. And also, if ever I had sought to raise all
the issues about the police that I am raising now in this book, I would have
been dismissed as a total madman. You can imagine all those top detectives
who had been stuffing their pockets with dirty money for decades telling
their politician friends, ‘Yes, well there was that man who talked about a
firm within a firm on those Times tapes but of course, he was quite mad, you
know, still is. In fact he's in Cane Hill now, bed number so-and-so, retired
on an ill-health pension stone bonkers’. I was under great pressure to do
that and now I wish I had, because, when I reached 55, it would have become
a full pension. And it would not have made much difference if I had,
because, without even taking it, I have been dismissed as a lunatic and a
fantasist ever since. ‘The man's mad!’
And
so, having spurned both the nutter’s pay-off and the porn shop sinecure, I
took Bill Moody on yet again. I fought back, I sent him another message,
which was probably a mistake, because it only heightened his resolve to nail
me, and get me convicted, so anything I might say later could be rubbished
as the sour grapes of a discredited man. That is why they went to such great
lengths to hang a conviction round my neck. But through his chosen
intermediary - a brother Freemason who later retired with the rank of
superintendent - I knew what he was doing, I wouldn’t stand for it, and if
he continued doing this I was going to expose everything: all the
corruption, the corruption within the porn squad, within Freemasonry, all
Moody's connections, the drug squad, the Flying Squad, the whole lot. People
advised me not to do it but I went ahead and did it anyway.
What
is more, I told him that unless he desisted in this course of action, I was
prepared to take the line that everything I said on the tape recordings was
true, and, on that basis I would be playing them mostly in my defence, and
then backing them up by saying, ‘This tape recording is true, because there
is a Firm which does work like this, because we're all corrupt and this is
how we do it’, and that's what I told Moody I'd do, if that's the way he
wanted to play. In other words, I was not going to offer a conventional
defence, I was going to parry the charge with an explanation thus: ‘I'm not
going to plead guilty to taking the money but I do admit that these
conversations took place, and they are quite true. There is a “Firm within a
Firm” and these are the people on the Firm - Moody, Virgo, Drury, Chitty, Du
Rose and Uncle Tom Cobley and all - and this is what they've done and this
is how it works’, and so on. And to back that up, and to run that defence if
necessary, I created a dossier on corruption in the Metropolitan Police. And
in this dossier I even started off with the half-crown-on-barrow-handles
story. How I myself was inducted into it, and how, in order to get into the
CID, I had to prove that I was either prepared to be corrupt or to condone
corruption, and I also made the point that it was necessary to commit
perjury to get into the CID and you were expected to commit perjury thereon
afterwards.
In
that dossier I did not release all I knew because I had loyalty to all the
people who were still standing by me, coming to see me, helping me and
having collections for me and giving me information, I left a lot of people
out but I put a lot of people in.
Having
laid all this out in my dossier, I gave it to my lawyer, Victor Lissack,
with instructions that if anything happened to me, it would be released to
the public. I said that because my biggest fear now was not about going to
jail but about the specific fate that the Firm’s ‘board members’ were
preparing for me. I had been told that I was going to be ‘done in’. Killed.
And I believed these threats because I believed I was dealing with people
who had arranged for people to be killed in the past. There was many a story
of people who had been ‘disappeared’ or, like Frankie Holbert, suddenly
taken it into their heads to jump off high-rise roofs or out of fourth floor
windows. And as these people, so powerful and corrupt themselves, had
already been so wicked as to fit up even ‘one of their own’ like myself,
then I believed my life was in real danger. I could be killed. That’s why I
told them that I had made this dossier because that was all part of the
threat: If anything happens to me, if they were to kill me, everything's
down in writing.
The
next thing I found out: they had a copy of the dossier and now everyone was
really gunning for me in a big way. It seems I had been betrayed by my
lawyer. I had been with him for two years, entrusting all my work to him and
making statements, but I should have known this all along, for he used to
attend all the functions at Scotland Yard and all those boxing club nights
hob-nobbing with my chiefs. And so, on the night before my committal, I
chucked him and changed lawyers. But more than that. I took a look at our
‘black book’: a top-secret but far from official ‘for CID eyes only’ list of
dodgy police-hating lawyers. Yes, we had a book that such-and-such lawyers
are untrustworthy: if they phone up give them no information, don't talk to
them, have nothing to do with them, because, they're very dodgy. So did this
mean they were crooked? Not at all, for if they were crooked, bent, that was
fine because that meant they were malleable, you could do deals with them.
No, what we meant by dodgy was lawyers who were left wing or radical, the
kind of solicitors who believed that corruption was a bad thing and would
make a fuss if they thought you had told lies in court, and didn’t like you
if you beat up blacks.
So now
I had a brilliant wheeze. I went off to see the lawyer who was right at the
top of that very list: Mr Benedict Birnberg at Tower Bridge. I needed
someone who was anti-establishment, and I needed him to work like the magic
shoemaker in the fairy tale: all night and with meticulous care. And that is
exactly what he did on the eve of my committal. And it was a massive
committal, with hundreds of statements and dozens of witnesses, so Ben had
to work incessantly, day to day and night by night. My counsel, Brian
Capstick had no idea what any witness was going to say, until the witness
started speaking, but I never regretted making the switch.
Of
course, it had the desired and predictable impact on my persecutors, Moody,
Virgo and the crooked Yard hierarchy. When they added my switch to Ben
Birnberg, and the threats I had made about my dossier, to the contents of
the dossier which they were now able to scrutinise in pirated form, they
regarded me, quite rightly, as a very serious threat.
And so
they counter-threatened. No longer was I advised to shuffle off with a
lunatic's pension but I was advised to get out of the country. And if I
didn't go, I could expect the worst.
By
now, as you might expect, with all the strain of all the legals, the endless
rumours, and most of all this nerve-wracking war with Moody, I was really
worthy of an ill-health pension. My body was falling apart. I was very ill,
slumped in my bed, too weak to walk, yellow all over, yellow finger nails,
yellow eye balls, my weight down from 16 stone when fighting fit to a mere
10 stone. In short a physical wreck. And that’s when I heard that at last
the Director of Public Prosecutions, with the guidance of counsel and
police, had decided to put Robson and Harris on trial first, with me
following on immediately in a separate trial, both at the Old Bailey. This
was my worst nightmare for with Robson and Harris sure to be convicted, I
would almost certainly be dragged down in their wake.
At
this stage, when I was completely shot through, a broken man, in came yet
another revised offer: ‘You've got to leave the country, you'll be helped
out, we'll tell you what to do, where to go and how to do it’. I said I
wouldn't leave the country because I had no money and I had three small
children who were being brought up by my mother. I was recently divorced,
their mother had abandoned them and I wasn't going to abandon them too. I
certainly wasn't going to run off and leave them with my mother at that
stage of her life and, as I couldn't take the children with me, I didn't
want to go.
So now
I received enormous pressure to go. The pressure was, ‘You either go abroad
or you..., you..., you’re gonna go. Go in a box, go. You're going to go
anyway, one way or the other way’. So what I did, I said, ‘Look, I will go,
but I'll only go to force a break between the Robson-Harris trial and mine.
That way, with a few months in between, the hue-and-cry, lynch-mob
atmosphere might give me the chance of a fair trial, fought with a
conventional defence.
But
still the threats came through from Moody, only now they were Masonic
threats, borne by Masonic sources in Masonic wording. Masonic-based threats
carry a lot of weight. If a roughie-toughie comes up to you in the street
and says, ‘I going to punch you in the eye, Mate’, that's one threat and it
may put you in fear. But when you receive a visit from a very senior and
respectable man, very well-dressed, with a curt but outwardly courteous
manner, and he is accompanied by two or three similar men, and he delivers a
message to the effect that unless you do something you'll be seriously hurt,
it is very chilling indeed.
Well
now my physical state, and my state of mind, are getting even worse. I was
so worried by these threats that the worry brought on hepatitis. My doctor
told me, it was all down to my anxiety over the threats, and the grand
betrayals by many of my colleagues, and expecting to be killed or worse
still, horribly injured or crippled, a wheelchair case forever. I put on a
brave front but I couldn't sleep and I contracted hepatitis.
With
my weight still dropping, I was taken into the police nursing home on the
orders of a police surgeon who knew I was very seriously ill. But when word
leaked upwards that I was in a police nursing home, one of the Metropolitan
Police’s Assistant Commissioner - just two heartbeats away from the highest
rank in the entire force - turned up at the home, looked round the door,
glared at me and then had me ejected. Unable to walk, I had to be helped
into a van and driven off. I was then booked in to go to the police
convalescent home in Hove, for which I had been a major fund-raiser, as well
as having made voluntary contributions to its upkeep from my pay for many
years, but then I was told they didn't want me there. So I was in a very low
state. I was more or less broken.
At
this point in came Moody’s final offer. There was now only one way to avoid
being killed: leave the country. However, to sugar the pill of exile, Moody
and his bent porn squad-cum-Masonic circle would help me out of the country
and pay me £2000.
I was
still objecting to going but at least now my immediate financial needs would
be met. I was told I would be supplied with this £2,000 when I was about to
leave, to keep me going for a while and there would be more to come later.
And that was the final, final offer.
I
decided to accept because I was ill, weak, vulnerable, I was worried by the
threats, I realised the fit-up was complete and I was sure we were all going
to be convicted because Moody was now directing the whole circus. I was
told, right or wrong, that he had even taken the two Times reporters to
courts to show them how to give evidence. I knew that the investigating
officers were busy covering over all the faults in the case. And so I was
convinced that I really would go to jail, even if the Grim Reaper Moody had
not claimed me before.
So I
agreed to go and let Moody know. A few days later the £2,000 was brought to
me, in cash, by another officer who had been suspended with me but was now
in the clear, thanks to Moody’s ‘moody’ investigation. As soon as he had
benefited from this act of grace, he had become Moody’s middleman in his
dealings with me. How ‘moody’ is that? A detective who owed Moody his very
liberty was now dropping off dirty money to me, like a Mafia bag-man at his
godfather’s behest. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
What
made these people’s threats all the more real was that I could see why they
had to kill me. I was a threat to the whole organization, ‘the Firm within a
Firm’. I had openly told them I was going to blow the lid off the entire
racket. In fact I even began to reason that they were being quite good to
me. After all, other people whom they wanted out of the way either didn't
receive any warning or weren't in a position to flee abroad. A number of
people died inexplicably unless you accepted suicide as the explanation. So
being offered the option of going off a roof, rather than being driven to it
like Frankie, seemed a rather benign way of doing business. Certain
criminals became very scarce at that time because they were under threat
from the same police gang. Indeed a few years later, when the pornographer
John Mason was in a similar position, he too was made an offer he couldn’t
refuse.
And so
I resolved to take a long trip through Europe. My girlfriend Barbara agreed
to come with me, so I bought a motor caravan for the journey and we made a
farewell trip to see certain staunch detective friends of mine so they could
wave us off. We gave them various contact points, addresses to write to so
we could all stay in touch. I had been told that it would be all right to go
from Dover, so we drove down there to board a ferry. Despite the assurances
and the fact that there was no theoretical obstacle to me leaving the
country, I was nervous about being stopped and questioned by Customs or
Immigration. On paper I was not doing anything wrong: I was free on bail at
the time (I had never been arrested over that piffling £50 charge), I did
not have to report anywhere before showing up at my trial, and I still had
my passport which no-one had ever taken away, but just like in so many
movies (Casablanca, The Thirty Nine Steps, North By North West, The Great
Escape) I had a real fear of being taken away at the very point of flight.
Anyhow, who should pop up but the Special Branch detective inspector
stationed at Dover, Peter Imbert. He came over and spoke to us as if he knew
we were coming I knew Peter Imbert in the Met and he was friendly. He wished
us good luck and saw us through Customs. We went straight through onto the
ferry. No-one asked us any questions but maybe Customs had seen him talking
to us. Later Peter Imbert became Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police,
and then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
When
news of my departure eventually reached the Firm almost certainly through
Enid Blyton no doubt every member breathed a sigh of relief. Robson and
Harris were clearly just going to bow their heads, take the punishment,
emerge from jail a year or two later and disappear into discreet obscurity.
And now I was out of the way, ‘off the picture’. To anyone on the Firm, that
was a ‘result’. The nightmare was over. Moody, Virgo and Drury could get on
with collecting their huge pay-offs and passing fat wads upstairs. And the
citizens of London could sleep soundly in their beds, secure in the
knowledge that the Metropolis was still being protected by the greatest
police force in the world.
Although I had told Moody & Co that I was leaving the country, I had not
told them of my intention to return after several months, when the dust had
settled and any publicity over Robson and Harris’s corruption had died down.
As it happened, I was given a ‘window of opportunity’ when I heard that my
own trial was being postponed until July 1970. The sound engineers had told
the judge that (even after two and a half years) they were not ready to give
evidence on the fourteen or so tapes relating to my case, because they had
been concentrating their expertise on the other tapes that were being
challenged in the Robson and Harris trial which was up first. They still
needed to spend weeks examining and analysing what we were saying were the
faults and editing signs on ‘my’ tapes. So now that I knew that I would not
have to show up at the Old Bailey till July, I had a full six months to sort
my head out and regroup.
In the
meantime my plan was to head off to a warm climate and recover my health. My
doctor had told me the best thing I could do was, have a quiet life and eat
lots of citrus fruits. So, what better place to go in the motor caravan than
Morocco? There I would get all the things I needed to make me well: lots of
sunshine and sackfuls of fresh oranges. I could eat oranges all day long.
Also,
as Barbara was going with me, we were going to take a side trip to Tripoli,
in Libya, where her father had been killed in the Second World War, before
she was even born. He was buried in the War Graves Commission cemetery
there, but she had never been to his grave.
So
that’s what we did. We went via Europe to North Africa, so that Barbara
could fulfil her long-held wish to visit her father's grave and I could have
sunshine and oranges. And in July we were going to come back to London
where, despite all the threats, I was going to offer myself for trial,
having used Moody’s £2000 as holiday-cum-convalescent money.
Well,
of course, Moody & Co had never wanted that, but they wanted it even less
after a time-bomb which I had left lying around in London went off. I had
constructed it rather like my vast corruption dossier, only this device was
primed for detonation even if I was not killed. Before I fled the country, I
did this one last piece of mischief. My new lawyer, Ben Birnberg, was being
featured in a television documentary film, with some such title as ‘Radical
Lawyer’. It was to show a cross-section of his clients, most of whom were
complaining about police, and he asked if I would be prepared to take part.
I said yes and I allowed myself to be filmed saying a lot about corruption
and how the whole thing worked. I also said things which tied in with the
problems of Birnberg’s other clients, including black people who claimed
they had been beaten up, tortured and framed. I admitted on camera that the
police were more or less fascists, bullies, full of hatred towards black
people, which was true.
The
filming was done about a week before I was due to leave the country, so now
with some glee and a twinkle in my eye, I told certain officers that I had
done this. I said, ‘Look, I'm going and because I'm going, I've made this
film as my “goodbye and thank-you” to the Met. “Have this on me!” Ta Ta!’
Well,
I thought it would be left lying in the can for months, but instead it was
shown only a few weeks after we left. I heard this news when we were
tootling around in the motor caravan, so I phoned up one of my friends, my
old partner-in-crime Enid Blyton and I asked him, how did the film go down.
He said, ‘It went down like a bomb’. Panic stations at Scotland Yard, a huge
scandal, lights burning all night and chiefs running around like headless
chickens. So Enid added, ‘You can't come back now. Scotland Yard have seized
the film! In fact don’t come back at all. You've burnt your bridges behind
you’. That was the great storyteller’s expression.
And he
was right, of course, but although the premature explosion did seriously
affect my scheme to return in July, this news did give me a few long-overdue
chuckles, and there hadn’t been many laughs in the previous thirty months.
Enid
went on tell me that I had done a lot of damage the police, particularly
with my claims of racism, which had included remarks about beating up black
prisoners and fitting them up, which tied in exactly with what Birnberg’s
black clients were saying. So this is not the first time I’ve said this sort
of thing. It's important to know that in 1972 when I was a detective
sergeant and still a member of the Metropolitan Police, I said the same
things on television about the force as I am saying now. This was before I
had even gone on trial, so these are not just the sour grapes of a convicted
man, uttered many years later.
Three
months into our trip, as I guzzled oranges in the Moroccan sun, we read that
back in miserable London Robson and Harris had been convicted. The verdicts
were front-page news: ‘Corrupt detectives jailed for six and seven years’,
‘Wicked evil men’ and so on. They had played a brave defence. Their tape
experts had even made up tapes to show how easy it was to fake devastating
evidence against public figures. On one of these even the prime minister of
the day could be heard taking a bribe and saying, ‘Thanks very much’, along
with the rustle of a few crisp fivers.
But
Robson and Harris had to go down. It was a matter of state for them to be
convicted, to appease the baying press and all those members of the Commons,
Lords and intelligentsia who had been demanding the same thing: a public
enquiry into police corruption in general and Metropolitan Police corruption
in particular, so that the public would know whether the Firm which I had
inadvertently revealed really did exist. Thirty years later that inquiry has
never taken place, and the consequences - in terms of continuing corruption,
racism and incompetence - are now staring every citizen of London in the
face. Back in 1972 jailing two or three bent detectives was a kind of
buy-off, a diversion, until the great and good forgot about police
corruption and shifted their attention to another lost cause.
The
£2000 was lasting quite well, when suddenly I had another piece of news. My
trial had been rushed forward so much that it was going to run almost
back-to-back with the Robson-Harris trial and start almost immediately. It
seems that once the prosecution team found out I was no longer living at
home, its leading counsel John Matthew had stood up in open court and told
the judge that I had disappeared and inquiries were being made at all the
lunatic asylums and psychiatric hospitals in Britain in case I had checked
myself in. I was sent a newspaper cutting to that effect.
At
first I thought, how odd. Surely, in that tight huddle of lawyers, civil
servants and Scotland Yard investigators orchestrating this whole affair,
the person of Detective Chief Superintendent Moody must have told Mathew
that I was off abroad, and not in a loony bin at all.
Then
suddenly it dawned on me. Moody and the Firm were already laying the
foundations for a scheme to wholly discredit me, whether I ever came back to
face trial or not. They had to ensure that, even if they never managed to
kill me, and even if I was acquitted, nothing that I ever said about their
own ravenous corruption and the whole rotten structure of Scotland Yard
would ever be believed.
This
is why I say I should have taken that ill-health pension I was offered, for
I would now be a fairly well-off old gent, a happy classified lunatic,
pocketing a very nice £1,000 government cheque every month, just as I would
have been doing pro rata for the last 30 years. My refusal to declare myself
mad, in order to get the pension, has not saved me, because as far back as
1972 that fine lawyer John Matthew was standing up in the Old Bailey saying
they were searching the asylums and implying I was a lunatic. This appeared
in the national papers before my trial could even begin, which, as any press
lawyer should have spotted, constituted contempt of court.
The
next thing I heard, they had rushed forward not only the trial but police
disciplinary hearings too. This was completely illegal. For disciplinary
hearings you are supposed to be forewarned, you have to be given the chance
for you or your representatives to attend. So there I am, very ill, thrown
out of the police nursing home, banned from entering the other place in
Hove, but departing the country legally to recover my strength for the
trial, and Scotland Yard is closing the doors on me. And at this kangaroo
court of a disciplinary hearing, I was sacked for wilfully absenting myself
from the place where I should have been on duty - at the Old Bailey, Number
One Court, to stand trial! That's the reason I was sacked.
Inevitably, I saw the dead hand of Bill Moody behind this crooked scenario.
The next thing I heard, Moody went along to my mother, gave her £200, and
said, ‘That’s John's pension money’. Well, of course, she accepted it,
because she didn't know the score. She was financially strapped at that
time, I had cleared off, she had my three small children to look after, so
when a polite man turns up at the door and says, ‘John's pension money, sign
here’, she was obviously going to sign and take it.
Even
this was a dirty, dirty trick. For even if this was meant to be a refund of
all my pension contributions during thirteen years in the police, it was
well in excess in two thousand pounds. So what Moody had done was
appropriate my contributions and deduct the £2,000 which he had previously
sent me so I would flee the country, spare him the burden of having me
killed, and never disclose the truth about the Firm.
But
the bastard had given me that money on the understanding that it was an
outright gift, a donation, silence money, whatever. It wasn’t even his
money, nor did it come from the pockets of any other members of the Firm. It
was just a slice of his weekly and lump sum bribes from pornographers, which
were then adding up to £100,000 a year - equal to over one million pounds at
today’s values. So now he was stealing my pension money to make up for
diverting £2,000 worth of graft. So that's where the £2000 came from. My own
pension money.
It was
Moody who had manoeuvred the trial forward, it was Moody who had fixed the
disciplinary hearings and it was Moody who stole that money. Years later I
found out that under normal circumstances, if my pension contributions had
not been drawn out, they would have lain there as a part-pension, which I
could have started to draw when I was 55. But when I enquired , I was told
there was no pension for me, because Moody had drawn everything out around
March 1972.
At
that same time Moody or his chums in the Firm had finally tipped off the
newspapers what they had known but concealed for three months: I had fled
abroad. And in some souk cafe in Morocco, Barbara and I had a few uneasy
giggles reading tabloid tales headed, ‘Policeman flees with barmaid’.
The
game was up. Moody had won. For as long as I could foresee, I would not be
returning to England. I was now in permanent enforced exile, a medieval
punishment which in some respects is far worse than jail or death. From now
on I would be living on my wits, a mendicant wandering the world offering
his talents to anyone who would pay for them.
But in
the meantime I was not going to give up on Moody. Years later when he was
arrested, I knew I had started it all. I'm talking about my dossier.
Remember, I had put Moody's antics on paper, as far back as 1970 and somehow
it had got it into the right hands. And as it had taken him and his crew two
and a half years to investigate me for fifty quid, I wasn't surprised that
when the Yard decided to throw him to the wolves, they took five years to
investigate him for five hundred thousand quid, which is what he had.
I
should imagine it was a tremendous problem to pin Moody down because he was
cunning, evil and totally ruthless, with no conscience whatsoever. He was
the first man in the modern history of Scotland Yard to fit up a fellow
officer. Everyone was horrified when he did that. It was beyond the pale and
unimaginable. That's why I got so much help and support. By fitting me up,
Moody created a precedent which eventually did for him. A system which had
previously been so strong, he had smashed. He had broken the mould, and
thereafter people were prepared to go to some lengths to do him down. So
good luck to him. He brought it on himself. He did for himself. He did it to
himself. That was my attitude. He was the first one to fit me up and now
he's got his. That's all.
Go to Part 7
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