Crossing the Line of Duty E-Book

Neil Root

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 357

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Metropolitan Police of the mid-twentieth century, in particular The Flying Squad and Obscene Publications Squad, has been described as 'the most routinely corrupt organisation in London'. Larger-than-life characters such as Ken Drury and Alfred 'Wicked Bill' Moody routinely fraternised with underworld figures, paid off witnesses and struck dodgy deals to get their man – regardless of whether he was innocent or guilty. And the problem went far beyond a couple of 'bent' coppers: in the end, fifty officers were prosecuted, while 478 took early retirement. Using Metropolitan Police files obtained under Freedom of Information, which have not been accessed since the 1970s, author Neil Root can finally tell the real story of how the Met became systemically corrupt, and how Sir Robert Mark, who became commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1972, finally cleaned it up.

Leseprobe

First published 2019

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Neil Root, 2019

The right of Neil Root to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9098 1

Typesetting and origination by The History PressPrinted in Great Britain

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prologue

1 New Breed of Criminal, New Breed of Squad

2 The Luton Post Office Murder

3 The Soho Connection

4 Rotten from the Outside In

5 A Beautiful Friendship Ends

6 The Sweeney Get Nicked

7 Crawling from the Abyss

Coda

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

The most routinely corrupt organisation in London.

Robert Mark, Commissioner 1972–77, on the Metropolitan Police CID when he took over

He was a past master of the arts of falsifying or manipulating alibi statements, the manipulation of identification procedures, and the repeated harassment of witnesses until we had got what we wanted from them.

A former police colleague on ex-Commander Kenneth Drury, Head of the Flying Squad, The Guardian, 1 August 2003

More could be added to ex-Commander Kenneth Drury’s list of corrupt practices too: taking huge payments and accepting lavish hospitality from a serious criminal; smoothing out a feud between two serious criminals for payment; framing three innocent men for murder, two of whom became broken men after serving eleven years of life sentences; and sharing in the reward money received for those unsafe convictions.

The Flying Squad, also known as the Sweeney, had become a byword for toughness and integrity, and internationally famous. When it began as an experimental mobile police force in 1919 it could never have been known that a man such as Drury would lead it one day. Nor that he would be convicted for corruption, along with a subordinate officer. Neither did the Metropolitan Police ever foresee that the head of the Obscene Publications Squad (aka the Dirty Squad), Det. Chief Supt ‘Wicked Bill’ Moody, would go to prison too, together with many other officers of that unit. Nor that ex-Commander Harold ‘Wally’ Virgo, who had authority over nine elite Squads, would be appearing at the Old Bailey, but not for the prosecution. Where’s Wally, a wag might have asked. He’s in the dock, another could have replied.

It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The independence, autonomy and sheer power wielded by the senior officers of these Squads, along with the trials in the Drugs Squad, and the allegations made against the Fraud Squad, would all be exposed in the 1970s. It is impossible to explore how corruption developed in the Flying Squad without examining the Dirty Squad too. It was a shared culture of ingrained sleaze.

But it had taken decades for the culture which allowed these dishonest officers to wallow in the dirt to develop. This book does not aim to be an exhaustive survey of the Flying Squad’s operations from 1919 until it was devolved in the late 1970s. It does follow the work of the Flying Squad and the kind of operations it faced over that period. But it is more concerned with trying to understand how men such as Drury, Moody and Virgo, and other corrupt police officers under them, could have been so corrupt for so long, without their superiors reprimanding or punishing them, and fellow honest officers exposing them.

For the first time, extensive access to the Metropolitan Police Files on the Flying Squad and Dirty Squad investigations from 1972–77, with minimal redaction, allows this book to tell the real story in detail. A Freedom of Information request was also made for the Director of Public Prosecutions files on ex-Commander Drury and ex-Det. Inspector Ingram of the Flying Squad, as these are strangely closed until 1 January 2047. The request was denied, as some persons still living could be affected by their disclosure. The DPP files on the Dirty Squad are already available in the National Archives, the latest released in May 2013, and they have been sourced, although there is little in them not in the Metropolitan Police Files. This is of course because the extensive Metropolitan Police investigations of the 1970s supplied the evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions to mount prosecutions. So there is probably not much more to be learned from the DPP files on Drury and Ingram of the Flying Squad too.

Other authors, such as James Morton and Duncan Campbell, have done sterling work on this topic before, and their work has been sourced here, alongside others. This author hopes that he has added to their efforts. It is also the first time that a detailed account of Drury’s corruption in the Luton Post Office Murder case of 1969, where he framed those three innocent men, has been included in a book along with his Soho criminality. The Metropolitan Police files have also brought new revelations about the Luton case. In the following chapters, Drury’s career is traced from 1946 until his death. The incubus and growth of his arrogance, audacity, lack of morality, and the increasing power that fed it, is documented. The corruption within Drury, as with other corrupt senior officers, had become so entrenched over many years that he felt untouchable. When caught, he had no choice but to brazen it out, using the age-old police excuse, ‘I was just cultivating an informant’, as a fig leaf.

Much has been made of so-called ‘Noble Cause Corruption’. This is when a police officer makes a mistake, or cuts procedural corners, to secure the conviction of a suspect he or she thinks is guilty. Such cases obviously do exist, but there is not an iota of nobility in the corrupt practices covered in this book. Greed, ambition and power, and the fact that they could get away with it for a long time and were operating in a climate that made them believe that, are the keys to unlocking the causes here. If someone had asked one of these corrupt officers why they were corrupt, they might have answered, had they chosen to do so honestly, ‘because I can be’.

Dick Kirby, an ex-member of the Flying Squad, has published his own history of the Sweeney, but whilst it is good on operational details over the decades, it is very light on the subject of corruption. It is especially kind to ex-Commander Drury. In fact, it was a newspaper article that Kirby published in the Sunday Express on 17 July 2011 which motivated this author to write this book. Kirby wrote:

When Ken Drury, the former commander of the Flying Squad was jailed for eight years for corruptly receiving some gold cufflinks and a free holiday in Cyprus in the mid-seventies, the moralists had a field day. The cufflinks and holiday all look like very small beer indeed now.

Moralists? Small beer? This book will show exactly what Drury was convicted of, and much else for which he was not, the gravity of some of which is truly appalling. The details of Drury’s relationship with the violent and manipulative Soho pornographer James ‘Jimmy’ Humphreys are also breathtaking at times. This author, like the police officers who investigated Drury in the 1970s, found himself believing Jimmy Humphreys, a seriously nasty man by all accounts, rather than the word of the former Head of the Flying Squad. As a serving Metropolitan Police officer told this author, there was ‘barely a cigarette paper between them’.

The late Sir Ludovic Kennedy’s seminal 1980 book Wicked Beyond Belief about the Luton Post Office Murder case got the two remaining imprisoned men whom Drury had framed, David Cooper and Michael McMahon, released. But their convictions would not be quashed until 2003, after both of them had sadly died. Sir Ludovic Kennedy deserves the highest praise and respect for his efforts on behalf of Cooper and McMahon, as well as for Timothy Evans and Patrick Meehan, amongst other miscarriage of justice cases he championed. This author hopes that this book will remind some and inform others what Drury did to three men in 1969–70, shortly before he became head of the Flying Squad. Especially as Drury was inexplicably never punished for what he did in the Luton Post Office Murder case.

Some of the corrupt links and meetings between Drury, Moody, Virgo and other members of the Flying and Dirty Squads with criminals such as the pornographer Jimmy Humphreys and Bernie Silver of the Syndicate are farcical. That world was sometimes Ortonesque in flavour, but there was menace too, and violence in the Soho air. Pornographers, ponces, pimps, gangsters, armed robbers, cat burglars, safe crackers, smash and grabbers, getaway drivers, killers and policemen, honest and dishonest, live in these pages, roaming London from 1946 to 1978.

Corruption can only breed if it is allowed to, and that is why the times in which corruption was taking root and then thriving are explained, to provide context. How high did the corruption go? The reader must make their own judgement after reading this book, but at the very least there was a conscious turning of blind eyes at a level higher than Drury, Moody and Virgo.

But there is also Sir Robert Mark, the hero and scourge of Met Police corruption. Sadly, as this book will show with the fiasco of Operation Countryman post-Mark, he managed to cut out the culprits, but not the culture of closing ranks.

The legendary TV series The Sweeney, plus two film spinoffs, made and first broadcast when these scandals were being exposed, is the public perception of the Flying Squad shared by many. An ex-detective inspector of the Met, who started his career when all this was happening in the mid 1970s, told this author in an interview that the depiction of the Sweeney by John Thaw, Dennis Waterman and Garfield Morgan in the TV show was ‘not far off the mark’. Having read transcripts of the words of Flying Squad officers, especially the way that Drury spoke, it does seem authentic.

You nail a villain and some ponced-up pinstripe Hampstead barrister screws it up like an old fag packet on a point of procedure, then pops off for a game of squash and a glass of Madeira. He’s taking home thirty grand a year and we can just about afford ten days in Eastbourne and a second-hand car. It’s wrong, my son.’

Det. Inspector Jack Regan, played by John Thaw, in The Sweeney

If I told my blokes to go to the moon, they’d do it. And if, when they got up there, they couldn’t find the moon, they’d fucking well plant one there.

Ex-Commander Kenneth Drury, Head of the Flying Squad, 1971-2, at a 1971 dinner given in London in honour of the American astronauts who had landed on the moon in 1969, who were present at the event

The world of Drury, Moody, Virgo and the other corrupt officers was a very different one, before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) of 1984. PACE was made law to make a set of ambiguous laws clearer, laws which dealt with police powers. PACE brought in a single law that firmly stipulated and controlled police powers to stop, search, arrest and detain and interview suspected criminals. Perhaps most importantly, it introduced tape recording of interviews. And as we will see, this would have curtailed Drury and other bent officers like him in some of their dirty habits.

Not that PACE has meant that Metropolitan Police officers have always behaved well since1984. We all know that this is certainly not the case. But it implemented a standard, and it has made it easier to discipline and prosecute wayward officers, as did the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. The most shocking aspect of the corruption in the Flying Squad and Dirty Squad in the 1970s and before, as this book traces, is the systemic nature of that corruption. The 2012 exposure of the huge cover-up by West Yorkshire Police of the true causes of the Hillsborough tragedy, fatal police incompetence in preparation and response, and the blaming of the victims and other football fans, is very troubling. This clearly shows that ingrained and widespread corruption has existed on a large scale since the great trials of 1976–77. As recently as July 2013, it was reported in the Sunday Times, in a piece by Michael Gillard and David Leppard, that ‘Scotland Yard faces a new corruption scandal over claims that its most sensitive units dealing with informants, intelligence and protected witnesses have been “infiltrated” by corrupt officers in the pay of one of Britain’s leading organised crime figures’.

Human nature never ceases to shock in its capacity for immorality. Added to that, the novice, innocent or inexperienced can be intentionally implicated by the corrupt, so that they become enmeshed and tainted. The Metropolitan Police, the Flying Squad and even the Dirty Squad had many honest, brave officers in the period covered here, doing their best in sometimes highly dangerous circumstances. This shouldn’t be forgotten. But neither should the wrongdoing of certain officers. This is the story of the fall of the Flying Squad and Dirty Squad, and the corruption, greed and villainy that grew within them.

PROLOGUE

Bow Street Magistrates Court, London30 March 1976

There he was. In the eyes of some a pig in a poke, to others he was an open sore on the vast backside of the most powerful police force in the country, which was now roasting in the disgusting swill of venal corruption. Ex-Commander Kenneth Drury, aged 55, former head honcho of the Flying Squad, the Sweeney, the Heavy Boys, pinnacle of the CID, la crème de la crème of the Metropolitan Police. Grossly overweight, his expensively overfed stomach protruding over the waistband of his straining trousers, suit hardly containing him. Grey hair swept back, sideburns bristly in the style of Lorne Greene in the hit American TV show Bonanza.

Another TV show, The Sweeney, had already cemented the image of the Flying Squad in the minds of the public. Its third series was due to begin in September that year. Hard-hitting and uncompromising, it had revolutionised the portrayal of the police on British TV when first aired in 1974. This had followed on from the quaintness of Dixon of Dock Green and the slightly more hard-edged Z Cars. Hints of corruption were written into the scripts of The Sweeney, created by Troy Kennedy Martin. But there was always nobility and a sense of ‘doing it for the right reasons’ running through the central characters.

Drury was in the dock, facing charges of bribery. Drury’s television equivalent wasn’t Det. Sgt George Carter played by Dennis Waterman, nor Det. Inspector Jack Regan played by John Thaw. It was Det. Chief Inspector Haskins, the boss of the above-mentioned, played by Garfield Morgan. Haskins was an honest copper, although in one memorable episode he was framed by a gangster, the audience forced to question their own judgement about him until the end of the episode exonerated him. Not that Regan or Carter ever doubted their boss. If only the same could have been said of ex-Commander Drury, head of the real Sweeney. But would anybody at that time in the real Sweeney have raised any concerns anyway?

In July of the following year, 1977, Drury would be sentenced to eight years for corruption, but that was in the future. Today he was in court with eleven other suspended or retired Metropolitan Police officers, including ex-Det. Inspector Alistair Ingram, a suspended detective inspector who would be acquitted so should not be named, and ex-Det. Supt Alfred ‘Wicked Bill’ Moody, former head of the Obscene Publications Squad (aka the Dirty Squad). The almost equally vile but greedier Moody would get twelve years in 1977, as would ex-Commander Wally Virgo, overall head of all the big squads, Flying, Obscene Publications, Drug, as well as six others. However, Virgo’s conviction would later be quashed on appeal, reinstating Drury with the very dubious honour of being the sole highest-ranking police officer ever convicted of corruption in Britain.

Ken Drury had resigned as Commander in charge of the Flying Squad almost four years earlier. This was after his almost unbelievably corrupt links to the top Soho pornographer and club-owner Jimmy Humphreys were exposed by the People Sunday newspaper on 27 February 1972. Less than three weeks later, on 17 April 1972, Sir Robert Mark became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Mark’s avowed mandate was to clean up that institutionally corrupt organisation, the largest and most powerful police force in Britain. This rooting out of insipidity would lead to Drury being arrested on 28 February 1976, taken from his home with a blanket over his head, the tabloids snapping him, an example of illicit police tip-offs of the media working against their own.

That day at Bow Street Magistrates Court was the latest in Drury’s court appearances, waiting for committal to trial, and living on bail. The path to this day had taken many twists and turns, some almost too incredible to believe.

Now, sweating and breathless, dying for a smoke, Drury was facing the music at last. The No.1 single in the British music charts that week was Save Your Kisses for Me by Brotherhood of Man. But Drury knew that only his wife wanted to kiss him any more and that otherwise he was very much alone. But something happened in court that day which was a clue to the true depths of Drury’s evil, something for which Drury would never face punishment. Drury’s corruption in this case had ruined the lives of two innocent men, tried to do the same to a third, and had massive repercussions on their families too – something which the writer and campaigner for justice, the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy, would call ‘wicked beyond belief’.

A young man, dressed very casually, suddenly stood up and started shouting at Drury in front of the court.

‘You know me! You picked up my brother Cooper for the Luton murder!’

There was no reaction from the already red-faced and greasily sweating Drury. The man was referring to David Cooper, one of the men whom Drury had framed for the Luton Post Office murder in 1969, when a sub-postmaster named Reginald Stevens was shot dead by a gang of armed robbers. The dark arts of Drury were used to their full in that case, and that’s just one that came to light. Drury’s amoral corruption almost definitely went back at least to the early 1950s.

All of the officers in court that day were remanded on bail of £5,000 each, a very considerable sum in 1976. But then none of them had had to survive purely on their police wages in earlier years.

No remorse or show of contrition from Drury, showing the arrogance of only the truly rotten and corrupted. What a fucking turn-up, Drury might’ve said - the ex-Head of the Flying Squad facing lengthy porridge. Beneath Drury’s veneer of nonchalance, the beads-turning to-drips of sweat on his brow perhaps betrayed some fear. The prospect of prison with hardened villains, some of whom he’d put there, some legitimately. They’d have him if they could.

But no shame, no shame at all.

Drury and his fellow bent coppers had forever tarnished the reputation of the Sweeney, something even a TV show couldn’t entirely wipe away from public consciousness. But then nobody has ever really known the true depths of corruption fathomed by members of the Flying Squad and other elite Metropolitan Police squads.

1

NEW BREED OF CRIMINAL, NEW BREED OF SQUAD

THE FIRST THIRTY years of the Flying Squad since it was formed in 1919 saw it tackle serious criminals committing a multitude of crimes. But there was a huge surge in violent crime in the decade after the Second World War, largely a result of the desensitisation brought about by the war and the higher prevalence of guns in society. This meant that more criminals were armed or ‘tooled up’ with firearms. Villains had also enjoyed more latitude during the war, when the focus of the authorities was on defeating Hitler and dealing with brutally incessant bombing raids. This fertile criminal environment died hard. Successive governments in the 1950s would take a hard line in fighting this crime epidemic. Pressure would be kicked down from the Home Secretary to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to the senior CID ranks, and then the Flying Squad. Consequently, the Flying Squad was busier than ever.

The police work closely together with the judiciary, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions and prosecuting counsel in gaining convictions. If the Establishment, led by the Home Secretary and the Home Office, plays hard-ball, the police have to follow, although sometimes the latter can influence the former, of course. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, getting arrests and keeping the clean-up rate high was a real pressure in the 1950s as violent crime abounded, both for the Flying Squad and the Metropolitan Police as a whole.

This culture would breed a need to get the cuffs on somebody, and sometimes the wrong person was punished severely, as we shall shortly see in the case of Michael John Davies. Sometimes, the legal establishment hanged people when they should have received a prison sentence. To understand how the Flying Squad developed in the 1950s, and how it became almost autonomous by the 1960s, it is important to understand the legal culture in which it operated. Particularly as that near-autonomy would prove fertile ground in which corruption could grow.

* * *

Clapham Common, South London, 2 July 1953, evening

The green expanse of the Common was full of young people enjoying the summer breeze. It wasn’t uncommon for gangs of teenagers and men in their early 20s known as ‘Teddy Boys’, as they dressed in Edwardian-style drape coats, to hang around there, and these included the Elephant Mob, the Brixton Boys and the Plough Boys. That night there were about 200 young people there, both male and female. The bandstand in the centre was in full swing, surrounded by a circular area of tarmac with trees evenly spaced out. On the north side, there was a café and dressing rooms, a drinking fountain, as well as benches.

Four young men sat on two parallel facing benches, two on each bench, their legs stretched out to the opposite bench. They were 17-year-old John Beckley, Fred Chandler, aged 18, and two other friends. They weren’t from Clapham. The Plough Boys were, and they were named after a pub in Clapham High Street. It was one of the Plough Boys, Ronald Coleman, aged 15, who pushed through the legs of the young men on the benches. One of those on the benches said to Coleman, ‘Why don’t you walk round the other way, you flash cunt?’ Coleman didn’t react, but went back to the other members of the Plough Boys standing nearby, and both sets of youths tried to stare each other out. After a while, Beckley and his friends decided to leave the Common as it was getting heavy, and they got off the benches and made towards the road.

But John Beckley and his three friends were just at the drinking fountain when the Plough Boys rushed them, and a fight started. As kicks and punches rained down, a witness heard a member of the Plough Boys say ‘Get the knives out!’ One of the young men from the benches was stabbed, but all four managed to break away and make it on to a Routemaster bus, travelling on the North Side of Clapham Common. But the Plough Boys were in pursuit, and as the bus was stuck in traffic, they jumped aboard and dragged off John Beckley and Fred Chandler at a bus stop. Chandler was stabbed in the stomach and groin, but miraculously managed to get back on the bus and it pulled away. He would survive. However, John Beckley took the brunt of the fury of the Plough Boys, and although he ran away, they chased him until eventually he was cornered against a wall, and in an act of desperate bravado said to his attackers, ‘Go on then, stab me, stab me.’ One of them did just that, and Beckley slumped to the pavement. The bus had now stopped again when they saw the commotion, and once the Plough Boys had run off, one passenger made a call to the police, and another gave aid and comforted Beckley.

John Beckley had received six stab wounds to the body and one to the face. He was pronounced dead at the hospital at around 10.45 p.m. The post-mortem was carried out by the famous pathologist Dr Donald Teare. The police worked quickly, as they had witnesses, although identification of the killer would prove controversial.

The official file on the case in the National Archives holds a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police dated 3 December 1953, which shows how quickly the police of ‘L’ Division had worked: ‘I should like to express my appreciation of the excellent work done by Det. Supt J.M. Davies. It is clear that he and the other officers working under his direction had little respite in the days after the incident on Clapham Common, and I know that many of the people interviewed were reluctant to help police. The success of the investigation is shown by the fact that, within seventy-two hours, five of the six youths concerned in the fight at the bus-stop had been identified and charged.’

The six members of the Plough Boys who would stand trial were Ronald Coleman, aged 15, who had originally provoked Beckley and his friends on the benches; Terence Power, aged 17, Allan Albert Lawson aged 18, Michael John Davies aged 20, Terence David Woodman aged 16, and John Frederick Allan aged 21. Two of them initially denied being on the Common at all that evening, while two admitted being there, but denied being involved in the fight. Michael John Davies surrendered himself at Clapham Police Station on 5 July 1953, three days after Beckley’s murder. He said, ‘I was there, but I didn’t use any knife.’ He admitted using his fists.

The trial of all six for the murder of John Beckley opened on 14 September, and the prosecution was led by Christmas Humphreys, fresh from his success in securing the death penalty on Derek Bentley in 1951, and two years away from getting Ruth Ellis sentenced to death. Humphreys told the court that he could find no evidence on the indictment to convict Allan, Woodman, Lawson or Power for murder, and they were kept in custody and later sentenced. Power, Woodman and Allan were given nine months on three counts of common assault to run concurrently, and Lawson got 6 months on the three counts of common assault to run concurrently. Ronald Coleman and Michael John Davies pleaded not guilty to Beckley’s murder. Their trial lasted a week, but the jury was unable to agree a verdict after being out for almost four hours.

Then Humphreys decided that he did not want to put 15 year-old Ronald Coleman on trial for murder again – although he had been the one who started the antagonism on the Common- and a new jury was sworn in by the judge, which formally found Coleman not guilty of murder. Coleman received nine months for common assault, and despite his age, he wasn’t sent to borstal, but to an adult prison. That left only 20 year-old Michael John Davies to face the murder charge.

Michael John Davies was a labourer from Clapham. His case file shows that he was in the RAF from April 1951 until 28 April 1953, so he had only been out of the force for just over two months when Beckley was killed on 2 July. In the RAF, Davies had been an Administrative Orderly, and no offences were recorded against him.

The trial of Michael John Davies for John Beckley’s murder opened on 19 October 1953. Humphreys again prosecuted, with Maxwell Turner as his junior counsel. The most damning evidence against Davies was a witness statement. Mary Frayling, a secretary, had been on the top deck of the Routemaster bus, and said that she had seen the youth with the knife, and she identified him as Michael John Davies. But he still vehemently denied either having or using a knife. In his opening address for the prosecution, Humphreys said, ‘After hearing the evidence you may have no doubt that Davies was using a knife that night. And if in that concerted attack he was using a knife, and a boy died through being stabbed, then that is all you need to find in order to find him guilty. But I ask you to find that it was his hand that stabbed Beckley so that he died.’

Michael John Davies was sentenced to death on 22 October 1953. There was an appeal heard on 30 November and 1 December, and Humphreys focused again on the witness evidence of Mary Frayling. But a crucial factor was that it was getting dark, and she didn’t have a clear view. She said the attacker had a colourful tie, and Davies owned one just like it. Even more crucially, Davies was never put on a formal identity parade, as he had admitted from the beginning being involved in the fight. Frayling had picked Davies out in a pre-trial court hearing. No other evidence linked Davies to the knife. The appeal was dismissed, and Davies remained in the shadow of the gallows. On 15 January 1954, a final appeal was heard in the House of Lords, but was dismissed there too. Petitions were drawn up, and eventually the Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe reprieved Davies, and he was given life imprisonment.

Davies continued to plead his innocence, and Lord Pakenham got involved in his case in 1958. Some of the original Plough Boys involved in the fight with Davies denied that he had used a knife on Beckley, but of course they were then safe. Davies was released from prison on 23 October 1960, after serving seven years. He continued to fight for a pardon, and in 1962–63, the famous justice campaigner Lord Longford, whom we will meet again later, was involved in his case. But in 1966, the Home Secretary of the day, Roy Jenkins, said that he could not intervene in the case, as there was no new evidence.

There was massive newspaper coverage of the murder of John Beckley in 1953, and this undoubtedly put pressure on the police to nail a culprit for the stabbing. As we have seen, the judicial climate in 1953-54 for the trial and appeals of Davies was a harsh one, and with the Establishment Buddhist lackey Christmas Humphreys as prosecutor, and the close-to-sadistic Lord Chief Justice being Rayner Goddard, it is little wonder that somebody had to be convicted. A 17-year-old boy had been killed, but then Davies was almost hanged, even though there were severe doubts that he had wielded the fatal knife.

At Davies’s trial, one of the policemen giving evidence against him was Det. Constable Kenneth Drury, whom we met in the Prologue. Under presumably rehearsed questioning from junior prosecution counsel Maxwell Turner, Drury said he had purchased a knife thought to resemble the one used to kill Beckley and checked where they could be bought all over London. Drury described it as ‘quite a cheap knife’ and that such knives were available to buy in many places not far from Clapham Common. In fact, the actual murder weapon was never found.

The police investigation into John Beckley’s murder under Det. Supt Davies was run by dividing the officers into two groups: one group took statements and dealt with messages, and the other group was out interviewing people on the streets. The official file shows that Drury was probably in the group taking statements, as his neatly typed and signed statements are still there. Seven police officers, including thirty-two-year-old Det. Constable Drury, were recommended for a commendation on 27 October 1953, five days after Davies was sentenced to death. Drury had last been commended on 4 November 1952, so less than a year earlier. He was a dedicated and fastidious policeman, it would seem.

Kenneth Ronald Drury was born on 18 October 1921. He had been a Post Office messenger boy before joining the Territorial Army in May 1938, aged 16. He was mobilised in October 1939, and served in the Corps of Military Police during the Second World War, reaching the rank of staff sergeant, before being demobilised on 7 June 1946. Just ten days later he joined the Metropolitan Police, Warrant No. 128818.

In his memoirs, the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds recalled meeting Drury in 1948 or 1949, when Reynolds was still a teenager and Drury had been in the Metropolitan Police for just two or three years. Drury’s service record in the Metropolitan Police files shows that he had been in uniform in ‘A’ Division until 12 July 1948, when he joined the CID in ‘L’ division, which was based in south London, where Reynolds was brought up, and where Drury was still stationed in 1953 when he was involved in the John Beckley murder investigation. So Drury was out of uniform in 1948–49, a plain-clothes Detective Constable, the most junior CID rank.

Already becoming involved in petty crime, Reynolds remembered that he had bought a sunlamp off a friend for £5 apparently not realising it was stolen. Next day, Reynolds had a visit at his parents’ house from the then 27- or 28-year-old Det. Constable Drury.

‘Bought any sunlamps recently?’ said Det. Constable Drury.

‘Yeah,’ said Reynolds.

‘Who from?’ said Drury.

‘A bloke in a pub,’ said Reynolds.

Drury fixed Reynolds with a stare for a few moments.

‘Are you sure you can’t do anything to help me with my enquiries?’ said Drury.

Reynolds was nicked, charged with receiving stolen goods and fined £20. The day following Reynolds’s appearance in court, Drury turned up again at Reynolds’s house. ‘Well, you’ve just paid a twenty quid fine, but I gave you a chance to do something about it. Silly fucker, I could’ve straightened the whole thing out for a tenner,’ said Drury. Not exactly ‘Evening all,’ the catchphrase of the cheerful policeman played by Jack Warner in the popular police television show Dixon of Dock Green, which would begin to be broadcast six or seven years later in 1955, and run until 1976, when The Sweeney would be all the rage in living rooms.

Corruption was already rife in London policing. Eric Mason, who would be active in London gangland from the 1950s until the 1970s, said that he had paid the police lots of money since he started out as a criminal, to get bail or to have his previous record shortened for the court before sentencing, as reported by Duncan Campbell in The Underworld. When he was detained in Cardiff over a bank robbery, the Welsh policemen made comments about London policemen, ‘and how they could afford 500-guinea suits and double-Scotches’. Mason would later be a member of the Kray firm, and in the mid 1960s received 370 stitches and multiple skull fractures when hit on the head with a chopper by the notorious ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, then working for the rival Richardson gang.

Incidentally, while doing an eighteen-month stretch in Lewes Prison in Sussex as a young man, Bruce Reynolds met another south London criminal just starting out like him. His name was James ‘Jimmy’ Humphreys, and by the late 1960s, he would be a major force in Soho vice, and will feature heavily in this story later on. More interestingly, the Metropolitan Police files show that while DC Drury was based at ‘L’ Division in south London, on 19 September 1951, he pulled Humphreys’ criminal record file out of the Met’s file system, ‘to assist him in a case of robbery’. The robbery had taken place in Clapham on 6 September that year, and Humphreys was not arrested after Drury read his file. Twenty years later, Drury and Humphreys would enjoy a lucrative and mutually corrupt friendship, before it turned sour and Humphreys would become Drury’s nemesis.

Almost two and a half years after the John Beckley murder investigation, on 28 December 1955, Drury joined C.O.C8, the Flying Squad, where he would stay for a year, until 3 December 1956. On that same day, Drury became a Sergeant (2nd Class). He was rising steadily up the ranks, growing in confidence. The fact that he was seemingly bent just two or three years into his service, when still the lowest rank of detective, tells a troubling story, and also gives a snapshot of how corrupt some members of the Metropolitan Police were in the immediate post-war years, and the climate that allowed it to fester. The police hierarchy was alerted to this corruption. As we shall see, in 1955 Det. Supt Hannam made a report about corruption, focusing on the seminal West End Central police station. But the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Nott-Bower, personally went down to West End Central and gave the officers stationed there a pep talk, assuring them that he believed the allegations to be untrue.

Drury’s altercation with Reynolds was minor corruption, but from a compromised acorn would grow a rotten tree. By the time that Drury returned to the Flying Squad in 1970, he would be a Det. Chief Supt, brazenly arrogant and deviously cunning.

* * *

London gangland in the late 1940s up until the mid 1950s was dominated by a power struggle between Billy Hill and Jack ‘Spot’ Comer. The Flying Squad had had dealings with both men, Hill since the late 1930s and Comer with the botched Heathrow Bullion Robbery of 1948. Hill especially would continue to be in the sights of the Flying Squad for the first half of the 1950s, until his semi-retirement in late 1955, early 1956. Comer’s influence was waning by the mid 1950s, and Hill was the dominant force when he stepped back and lived in Marbella for a time, his empire being run by trusted associates in London.

But both men would have a major influence on the new force emerging after 1954 – the Kray Twins (Ronnie and Reggie), and their ‘Firm’. The Krays’ empire began in Bethnal Green, Mile End, Bow and Whitechapel in the East End of London and then moved into the West End, including Soho, in the 1960s. The Richardson gang too, based around the brothers Charlie and Eddie, whose base was Camberwell in southeast London, was on the rise. The Krays and the Richardsons would be the major forces in London organised crime from the late 1950s until the arrest of the Richardsons and their gang in 1966, and the taking in of the Krays and the Firm in 1968.

The convoluted intricacies of the activities of the Krays and the Richardsons need not concern us here. The history of both gangs has been minutely documented and the stories told many times, and the fact is that neither gang had much involvement with the Flying Squad. The Krays were involved in armed robbery to an extent, which was still the main target of the Flying Squad, but there are no recorded altercations between them. The Krays specialised in extortion and protection exerted by intimidation, and clubs, while the Richardsons focused on long firm frauds, scams, fruit machines, extortion by intimidation, and even had mining and property interests in South Africa for a time. Both gangs became increasingly violent as they became more powerful, and the Metropolitan Police, realising the true menace of their spreading tentacles, set up special investigation teams to bring down both.

However, there is no doubt that both the Krays and the Richardsons would have had corrupt coppers in their pockets. No criminal operation of the size that both gangs built up could have operated without some help from those inclined to use their uniform or rank to make some extra. In fact, Charlie Richardson, no stranger to the protection rackets himself, once said that ‘the most lucrative, powerful and extensive protection racket ever to exist was administered by the Metropolitan Police.’ He was speaking from personal experience, and whilst both gangs are not major threads in this story, it is important to remember that the Krays and the Richardsons were operating throughout the period covered in this chapter, and that wider Metropolitan Police corruption was taking place while the Flying Squad was occupied with individual armed robberies and the Great Train Robbers. Meanwhile, the Syndicate was simultaneously growing in Soho, preparing the seedy soil in which the corruption that would bring down the Flying Squad and the Obscene Publications Squad in the 1970s could be fertilised.

* * *

As the 1960s progressed, corruption was both witnessed and indulged in by honest coppers and dishonest police officers and criminals respectively. Michael Hames was an honest policeman, who joined the Met as a probationer and became a police constable in 1964. He would rise to the rank of detective superintendent and become head of the Obscene Publications Branch aka ‘the Dirty Squad’ in the 1980s and early 1990s, long after the corruption scandal that hit the Dirty Squad in the 1970s.

In his memoirs, Hames recalled how he had brushed up against a corrupt superior whilst a probationer at Albany Street police station, working in shifts of 6 a.m.–2 p.m., 2 p.m.–10 p.m. and 10 p.m.–6 a.m., six weeks on days and three weeks on nights on rotation. On one shift Hames had stopped a club owner of Greek origin, Vasos Avramides, known as ‘Petaros’, in his car, as he was disqualified from driving. Petaros owned a club in Drummond Street, which is close to Euston Station. The club was frequented by small-time crooks and prostitutes, and so both it and Petaros were very much on police radar. After Petaros had been entered in the charge book, the next day Hames had a visit from a Crime Squad officer at the police station.