Eurojust and the case of Robert Dawes

 
Robert Dawes currently at large on the Mijas Costa in Spain
Eurojust’s Andrew Crookes (Right) with Aled Williams current President

 
Last week I wrote in The Guardian about the cock-up over a request from the Spanish authorities which led to organised crime boss  Robert Dawes being freed from custody.
 
Dawes track record has been catalogued here and in the publication Hoods. He has been on the radar of British law enforcement officials for 13 years. Indeed he has been described recently by officers from Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) as “a highly significant international criminal” who is “wanted for murder in Holland and drug trafficking in the UK”. Their own words not mine.
 
How did it come to pass that a man in such demand by law enforcement agencies was allowed to go free because an urgent request for assistance from a Spanish judge to SOCA somehow got lost in the post for FIVE months.
 
SOCA officials have been pointing the finger at Eurojust saying the document must have been “lost in the Eurozone”. The letter rogatory, the formal request made by one country to another, was sent by the Spanish judge on April 19 2011 but did not arrive with SOCA, say its officials, until the end of August 2011. Dawes was released on September 12 because the judge had not received any response from the British.
 
It appears the letter was sent via Eurojust. A powerful body set up in 2002, based in the Hague. Its remit is to speed up co-operation between EU countries on international organised crime cases. Eurojust has around 500 administrative staff but its power lies in the delegations from each European country of which there is a head and deputy head.
 
It appears that the document was sent by the judge Jose Santiago Torres Prieto to the deputy head of the Spanish delegation Maria Teresa Galvez Diez and from there it would have been forwarded on to the British authorities via the British delegation. It would have been no more than a a day’s work at Eurojust’s headquarters to send the request to the UK.
 
Often mistakes happen because officials do not realise the importance of a document or request but when one looks at the CVs of the British delegation at Eurojust one must wonder how things could have gone so catastrophically wrong, if indeed the fault lies with Eurojust.
 
The UK’s delegation head is also the current president of Eurojust. His name is Aled Williams and to quote his own biography from Eurojust his “legal career started in 1984 when he was admitted as a solicitor and then worked as a prosecutor with responsibility for serious cases of homicide, fraud and drug trafficking. In 2002 he was appointed the United Kingdom liaison magistrate to Spain. He worked in the Ministry of Justice in Madrid for four years, dealing with mutual legal assistance, extradition and the introduction of European Arrest Warrant procedures.
 
The background of his deputy Andrew Crookes is even more interesting. To quote Eurojust he was “admitted as a Solicitor in 1989, he is a Higher Court Advocate and has 20 years’ prosecution experience. He worked as Trial Unit Head in Nottinghamshire prior to joining the Crown Prosecution Service Headquarters Central Casework Divisions in 2004. He was Head of Special Crime Division, York, and in 2006 was appointed Head of the Organised Crime Division in Birmingham. There he was responsible for a team of lawyers dealing with prosecutions arising from investigations by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, including money laundering, drug trafficking and human trafficking. Prior to joining Eurojust, he was appointed as a Senior Specialist Lawyer to deal nationally with the most complex, serious and sensitive cases arising from the activities of international organised crime groups.
 
When one considers Robert Dawes background from Nottinghamshire, his background in organised crime, money laundering and drug trafficking in Spain and other countries his links to at least two brutal murders; it is difficult to believe you could find two lawyers who would fit the bill better than these two members of British delegation or indeed more eminent in their field.
 
So what went wrong? Eurojust are currently looking into the matter and so we will have to see what explanation they deliver. Lets just hope it won’t take another five months to find out. In the meantime surely it is important to ensure that Robert Dawes is finally put before the courts and face the evidence that exists against him whether that be in Spain, Holland or the UK.

The Teflon Don slips away again

Robert Dawes is free again. Another botched operation or is something more sinister going on?

EARLIER this year I wrote about the case of Robert Dawes , head of an organised crime group which has left a trail of devastation in its wake through its activities over the last 10 years.


Dawes was finally arrested in Dubai on an International Arrest Warrant issued by the Spanish authorities and flown to Madrid in May this year. It seemed as though the law enforcement agencies had finally managed to get their man after countless investigations against him dating back more than a decade spanning Holland, Belgium, Dubai, Spain and the UK.


The Spanish were “cock-a-hoop” over the arrest to the extent that they issued a statement saying, in targeting Dawes, they had seized millions of pounds worth of drugs including 5.7 tons of cannabis resin, 100 kilos of heroin, 210 kilos of cocaine as well as four firearms, 5.4 million pounds’ worth of property and 90,000 pounds in cash. They described Dawes as “the boss of one of England’s most important drug trafficking organisations”.


Dawes was placed in custody in Madrid and prosecutors began to finalise their case which centered on the details of Operation Halbert, the SOCA led operation which focused on Dawes which was set up in 2006 and which had already led to three British men and a Columbian being jailed for between seven and half years and eight years in the Spanish courts after 187 kilos of high purity cocaine was seized near Madrid.


Then on September 12 in Madrid a strange thing happened. Dawes was suddenly released from custody by a Spanish judge presiding in Court 32. The officers at the head of the Guardia Civil elite Central Operative Unit which had targeted Dawes were not informed of his release and even a week later the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) were denying that the charges against Dawes had been dropped and that he was at liberty. SOCA argued he had merely been released on bail back to his home on the Mijas Costa. Yet there was no surveillance in place for a man known to have several false passports and who has a penchant for fleeing to countries with no extradition agreements such as Dubai. It has since emerged that one of the reasons prosecutors in Spain offered no evidence against Dawes is that one of his associates – British man Karl Hayes who had been interviewed at length by officers from SOCA while in a Spanish prison – was now refusing to make a statement against Dawes. 


Returning to SOCA’s role in this matter; it has a number of serious questions to answer about the way this botched operation has unfolded. An official spokesman for SOCA denied their primary role in investigating Dawes. It was, said a spokesman, a “Spanish operation” which SOCA simply assisted “where required” . That is a strange assertion in itself since, according to documents filed in the Spanish courts, SOCA was the lead agency on Operation Halbert and the main involvement of the Spanish authorities was in making the initial arrests on their soil, seizing the cocaine and subsequently applying for Dawes extradition from Dubai. All the intelligence for the operation came from SOCA including the tracking of vehicles, and if SOCA had no primary role in this investigation why did its officers fly out to Spain to interview one of Dawes’ associates Karl Hayes a number of times? 


And what are we to make of the Spanish courts statement on Robert Dawes release. This is what they had to say. 
“The Provincial Court in Madrid has revoked the indictment of Robert Dawes issued by the Court of Instruction number 32 and so he is at liberty. The magistrates at the Provincial Court understand that, over and above the important report by the Central Operative Unit (of the Guardia Civil) which is found in the proceedings, it is necessary to wait for a response from the Commission of Dubai, with reference to the searches in the case, and, above all, the Commission of the United KingdomWhen the judicial authorities of those countries respond with evidence the case will be taken up again, but neither of the two commissions has yet commented and there is no indication of when they might do so.”


So in effect Spain is blaming the UK for failing to provide it with the evidence it had requested to keep Dawes in custody.




Robert Dawes has been identified in no less than nine large national criminal investigations in the UK involving large scale drug shipments since 2000. In addition he has been identified by Nottinghamshire Police as the man suspected of commissioning the murder of David Draycott, in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire in October 2002, a case in which no-one has been charged. Additionally, Dutch investigators have evidence that Dawes sponsored a similar hit against an innocent school teacher, Gerard Meesters in Groningen, Holland in November 2002. As recent as late last year a SOCA document described Robert Dawes as “a highly significant international criminal” and in the prosecution  of Dawes brother John, who received a 24 year sentence for drug supply and money laundering, Robert Dawes was named as the head of the organisation.


When Dutch investigators visited the UK in 2004 to speak to potential witnesses with intimate knowledge of Dawes’ drug smuggling and money laundering operations, those witnesses all pointed the finger at Dawes saying they believed he had ordered Gerard Meesters murder. None would make a formal statement to Dutch prosecutors fearing reprisals. Some went further. Dawes, they believed, was an “asset” who was being protected in some way from prosecution because of the information he held.  A statement they said, implicating Dawes, would not be conducive to their long term health if a prosecution failed. Even police officers who have investigated Dawes in the past are coming to the conclusion that Dawes is a “Teflon Don” to whom no prosecution will stick. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen but the latest twist in the life of this latter day Godfather does nothing to debunk the theory that some hold that Dawes is in some way being protected. At present Robert Dawes’ criminal CV appears to be an example of 11 years worth of clumsy law enforcement work or someone somewhere has been placing spanners in the works deliberately.I am told the Spanish authorities now have no idea where Dawes is. Either way at present Robert Dawes appears to be bullet-proof as far as our law enforcement agencies are concerned and I hear that  he is even lining up a 200,000 Euro claim against the Spanish authorities for wrongful arrest. Priceless.









The return of a true legend….



Roger Cook prepares a piece to camera for Abuse of Trust documentary

Earlier this year I had the pleasure to work with the legendary investigative journalist Roger Cook for a documentary we helped produce for the BBC titled An Abuse of Trust. The film will be screened on Tuesday at 10.35pm on BBC1 and tells the story of how an Oxford University educated paedophile school teacher was freed from prison only to change his identity by stealing the details of a young boy buried in a Derbyshire graveyard. Derek Slade then went on to dupe various charities and set up his own schools abroad abusing young schoolchildren until the authorities finally caught up with him in 2010.
I will let the documentary speak for itself, but I have to pay tribute to Roger for his persistence and professionalism in helping to get the story onto the screen. In the current climate of journalist-bashing which seeps from the open wound of “hackgate”, it is wonderful to still have people of Roger’s calibre working to uncover dark secrets and the impact of those upon ordinary people.  Through the seventies, via BBC radio’s Checkpoint programme, then through the eighties and nineties with The Cook Report, Roger paved the way for a particular kind of confrontational broadcast journalism.

He became known as the “Taped Crusader”, gaining a reputation as one of the bravest and most beaten up reporter working on the airwaves. It is worth remembering that without him there would have been no Paul Kenyon, Donal McIntyre or a host of other young bucks who have followed in his path but rarely equalled him in audience figures or respect. I can confirm that the camera still loves Roger and though he recently racked up 68 years on his body clock he can still deliver those wonderful understated pieces to camera which makes the viewer rightly outraged at the wrongs that permeate our society.  Roger, I salute you.


The Afghan links to a very British organised crime group…………

(from the top) Nasr, Dawes, and Jamil Karzai

The Afghan links to a very British organised crime group…………


FAMILY of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai have formed connections with a British gangster who is wanted for major drug trafficking and murder and has been conducting a money-laundering operation from Dubai.

A four month investigation by journalists has uncovered evidence that three nephews of the Afghan president – one of whom is a former Afghan MP and another is a government intelligence chief – are linked to Robert Dawes, a 39-year-old drugs kingpin who has figured in eight separate national UK crime investigations but has evaded capture.
Dawes, named by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in recent court documents as a “highly significant international criminal” is currently in prison in Dubai fighting extradition to Spain where the authorities want him to face trial over a 200-kilo haul of  82 per cent purity cocaine discovered outside Madrid in September 2007.
He is also wanted in Holland where he was named in court as the man who ordered the murder of an innocent school teacher, Gerard Meesters, in Groningen in November 2002. Meesters was targeted simply for being a relative of someone who had crossed Dawes.
Detectives in Britain are understood to want to interview Dawes about major drug trafficking in heroin and cocaine, money laundering and the unsolved murder in October 2002 of David Draycott from Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, who like Meesters was assassinated at his home.
Dawes fled the UK for Spain nearly ten years ago and has spent much of his time shuttling between the Mijas Costa and Dubai. In the intervening period police swooped on members of his cartel, including his brother John and father, Arthur. Both were jailed in 2005 for drugs offences and money laundering.
Since 2007 Dawes has stayed in Dubai running a money-laundering operation. Dubai has long been considered a magnet for money-laundering, particularly in relation to Afghanistan, where much of the political elite has second homes.
It was at the centre of last year’s scandal over the misuse of Kabul Bank by its shareholders, who had been loaning to themselves in order to buy property there. The US embassy in Afghanistan estimates $10m a day leaves the country for Dubai, much of it the proceeds of illegal activity from the country’s heroin trade, the leading export of the country.
Reporters began investigating Dawes’ connections with the Karzai family in November last year after receiving information that Jamil Karzai, a nephew of the Afghan president, had been seen at Dawes offices meeting the Briton’s right-hand man, Raphael Nasr.
An undercover reporter approached Manchester-born Nasr, who is also on the radar of the SOCA and the Guardia Civil, posing as a broker representing a client looking for business partners in Afghanistan.
Dawes and Nasr jointly run Argosta Emirates General Trading, a Dubai-based company, and Nasr also controls Syncon, a construction company registered to operate in Afghanistan.
In telephone conversations Nasr boasted of strong links not only to Jamil Karzai, but also his brothers, Yama and Ajmal. Yama Karzai now occupies a position within the Afghan intelligence services. Nasr also stated that Yama’s brother Ajmal Karzai is now the president of Syncon.
Although he was initially wary (“I’m not talking to a reporter or something? It’s just that I’m going to be introducing you to some people and they can help in there”) Nasr said his connections could easily facilitate work for the reporter’s client.
He said: “Yama is like my brother. I am in Kabul often and stay with his family. He has just been made head of four departments and is a general. I could ask as in favours from him.
“Obviously of course we have ways of getting in, we have ins, there are people who are favoured there, do you understand?
“The president now [of Syncon] is Ajmal Karzai. He was working with the US government on special operations and then left the government because the job they gave him was to do with drug enforcement which he didn’t [want], which was a high risk kind of job.
“So you know again, you’ve got a gentleman there who knows, who took me to three ministers just via a mobile telephone call.
“Of course we are going to give you favouritism, of course there is, it’s all over the world.”
Nasr said that contruction contracts in Afghanistan given to “triple A companies” could be sub-contracted out to the reporter’s client for an “administration fee”, but only with the use of his connections to open doors.
He said: “We can go sit with them and they say give us a five percent, three per cent administration fee and that’s your contract. Whereas they wouldn’t do that with other people.”
Nasr put the reporter in telephone contact with Jamil Karzai, who was in Dubai. The Afghan, who heads the Youth Solidarity Party, was an MP in Kabul until losing his seat in 2010.
Jamil Karzai, who was a regular visitor to the Argosta offices, told the undercover reporter: “I know him [Raphael Nasr] from Dubai, so he has been to Afghanistan, there are a lot of things we can do in Afghanistan it’s a matter of being here and witnessing for yourself what I can do or what we can do.
“Raphael is our best friend and is now kind of family now….we can do good business there if we all get together we can have something really good.”
He confirmed that his brother Ajaml was the president of Syncon, adding: “He [Nasr} is our friend, so [of] our friendship there is no doubt, but still you know me or my younger brother Yama, we are not in a business deal with him yet, but our elder brother, he is or he is going to to be the president of his company in Afghanistan.”
Asked about Dawes, Karzai said: “I’ve spoken with him, yeah, I’ve spoken with him I think a couple of times, through Raph by telephone.”
Both Karzai and Nasr were keen to effect a meeting with the reporter in Dubai or Afghanistan to discuss projects further.
Journalists have also obtained a document from Dawes’ associates which show a complex money laundering plan for Dawes’ cash rich drugs business. Plans drawn up for Dawes, who also has a company called the English Laundry in Dubai, recommended using Malta and British Virgin Island based-companies in order to avoid detection.
Court papers relating to the conviction of Dawes’ brother, John, who was jailed for 24 years in 2005 for drug trafficking offences, conservatively estimate that more than £1 million per month was being laundered by the cartel.
Dawes was arrested in Dubai in 2008, apparently relating to a warrant emanating from Spain. Two weeks ago at a Madrid court three Britons and a Columbian, were jailed for between eight and seven half years. Dawes identified by SOCA and the Guardia Civil as the man behind the haul.
However, Spanish police have since been told by Dubai officials that Dawes will not be considered for extradition until his sentence for money laundering offences is completed. They have refused to tell the Spanish authorities how long that will be and Dawes has boasted to associates that he will be free shortly after bribing Dubai officials and paying out £1 million for bail. Dawes is known to have at least four false passports and law enforcement agencies fear he could flee Dubai before facing extradition.
When confronted Nasr admitted he was friends with members of the Karzai family and Robert Dawes but denied he was involved in any criminality.
He said: “I have not done anything criminal. How can I have done anything wrong as I have not been arrested.
“Is it a crime to be friends with certain people. This is a crazy situation. Listen, be very, very careful what you print,” he said.
Jamil Karzai denied when confronted that he knew anyone called Raphael Nasr or Robert Dawes.
He said: “Are you trying to blackmail me? I speak with lots of people lots of the time. I am a political figure so people want to speak with me. I have been to Dubai several times and maybe I get to meet with ex-pats there in restaurants from time to time. I do not know this man. I totally deny knowing these people [Nasr and Dawes],” he said.
Robert Dawes was named in Dutch court papers as the man responsible for ordering the murder of innocent schoolteacher Gerard Meesters, shot eight times on his doorstep in Groningen, Holland in November 2002. The shooting was believed to have been carried out in revenge for Meesters’ sister Janette stealing a tonne of cannabis resin from Dawes’ organisation. Daniel Sowerby was jailed for life in 2007 for the shooting and his accomplice Steven Barnes received an eight year sentence. Both refused to testify against Dawes for fear of reprisals against their relatives. Dawes, from Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, has been targeted across Europe by crime fighting agencies and has figured in eight separate national investigations in the UK since 2001 including the most recent Operation Halbert led by SOCA. So far he has evaded capture for the crimes he is wanted for.

A law enforcement source in the UK  who has investigated Dawes said: “He is a highly dangerous man who has global connections, uses complex codes in order to communicate with associates and has the ability to corrupt law enforcement officials through access to vast amounts of money made through large scale drug smuggling.It seems more than good fortune that 10 years after he first appeared on the radar in the UK he has yet to face a British court. “

The devil’s advocate may finally face justice

Giovanni Di Stefano will be needing a competent lawyer to avoid extradition

Almost four years ago I wrote about the criminal’s favourite lawyer, Giovanni Di Stefano ,being investigated over allegations that he stripped clients of more than £3 million.

Now it appears the law has finally caught up with him, although it remains to still be seen whether he can wriggle his way out of this one

He is a curious character to say the least. On the one hand he claimed to be a lawyer to some of the most despicable and violent criminals of our time and on the other he appeared to spend most of his time ringing up lazy journalists who preferred to believe his ridiculous claims for a page lead about a celebrity criminal rather than delve beneath the surface of the man dubbed the “devil’s advocate”.

Di Stefano is a serial fraudster and conman who has no legal qualifications to be in a position to defend some of the people he claims to. I have no sympathies for some of the criminals he has duped out of money but there are some cases of genuine people who have suffered financial destruction and miscarriages of justice as a result of being represented by him.

One case in point is Kevin Musgrove who lost £40,000 to Di Stefano after being told the Italian was the best man to get him free. Di Stefano did nothing but seal Kevin’s fate in the Court of Appeal and left him serving an eight and half year sentence for a crime I hope to show he did not commit back in 2000. That wrong will be righted one day and the Criminal Cases Review Commission will shortly be receiving the new evidence which I hope will overturn his case as well as highlighting the corruption involved.

In the meantime I look forward to Di Stefano occupying plenty more column inches as he rails at the “injustice” of his very justified arrest. And to those journalists who courted this obsequious man for the sake of a few red top stories…shame on you.

Just call me Mister Gunn……….

“Mister” Colin Gunn, who demands respect when spoken to

 

In yet another depressing sign of the times Colin Gunn, a self-styled gangster who epitomises the worst of the UK’s chav generation has won an important victory for prisoners seeking respect from within the walls of the prison establishment.

As the Sunday Times reported at the weekend, Gunn has now won the right to be called by the title he wishes after a battle with the prison authorities at Whitemoor HMP. Gunn revealed his victory in a letter published in this month’s issue of the prison inmates newspaper Inside Times.
I raise this issue because I have written at length about the misery that Gunn and his cohorts brought to the people of Nottingham and beyond. There is nothing wrong with the idea that prisoners should be addressed in a formal manner; a civilised society should not seek to treat inmates as animals if there is any hope of rehabilitating them from the wrong road they have taken. What is wrong here is that Gunn has been afforded some kind of respectful status in the face of some truly brutal crimes for which he is rightly facing a 35-year tariff. I make no mention of other crimes he hasn’t been convicted of which currently lie in the dusty shelves of detectives trays marked “case unsolved”.
Surely until we start treating the victims of crime with the respect that they deserve, the human rights concerns of the likes of Colin Gunn should be pushed to the back of the queue. Colin Gunn is clearly revelling in this latest burst of publicity because he thinks he has got one over on the system that he is constantly seeking to pervert. His idea of a just world is one where might is right and the mob rules and where he is considered as a role model for others…that seems to me a recipe for the end of civilised society.

The story that Rupert hopes will go away……

THIS week’s Channel 4 Dispatches took the story of phone hacking in Fleet Street further and ratcheted up the pressure on David Cameron’s spin doctor Andy Coulson another small notch. The eloquent and incisive presentation by political columnist Peter Oborne showed just why people should be so concerned about the methods employed by some hacks to bring in the catches from their fishing expeditions.
The documentary succinctly explored the pursuit of celebrities, politicians, police officers and ordinary members of the public among the 5,000 plus victims of the phone hacking affair. It rightly questioned the relationship between some newspapers and Metropolitan Police, though perhaps ventured too far in claiming there was a conspiracy between Rupert Murdoch and the previous Government.
The story of “Sam”, the victim of a horrific sex attack, who has only just discovered that her phone was hacked, is one of the strongest arguments why this case must be properly re-investigated, because I have no doubt that when this story unravels further we will be shocked at just how widespread the illegal accessing of personal information and unjustified snooping has become.
Let’s not forget out of more than 5,000 victims the Metropolitan Police chose to concentrate on just two victims and only the Royal stories being pumped out by former News of the World hack Clive Goodman. The fact that he and private eye Glen Mulcaire were paid off with substantial amounts of money by News International to stay quiet about the frequency of the snooping and who at News International knew about it, should not prevent them from telling the full truth about what was going on inside Wapping. Indeed since they have already been prosecuted and convicted they offer the best hope of getting to the bottom of this story by being interviewed a second time by detectives, this time as witnesses and not under caution. I will also be intrigued to see whether the planned BBC Panorama programme on the phone hacking affair makes it onto the screen next week. As I have written previously, this story is only just beginning to unravel…it is certainly not going to go away

The story that won’t go away…………………..

David Cameron must decide if Andy Coulson (right) is really the right man to be communicating his ideas

THE allegations due to be printed in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine  go the furthest so far in the tawdry tale of phone hacking at the News of the World. Testimonies from former executives and journalists who have worked at the newspaper confirm what every reporter who ever worked for a national tabloid newspaper from the late 1990s onwards has known. It is, I am afraid to say, just the tip of the iceberg.

To quote Sir Francis Bacon, knowledge is power. In the 21st Century that is truer than at any other time in the history of information-gathering because of the wealth of  private electronic data that is now accumulated on every individual through a variety of mediums from mobile phones and email to bank and medical records. I will make no apology here for the wish of every journalist to accumulate “golden nuggets” and “smoking gun”  information in a legal manner. It is the raison d’etre of every journalist to accumulate information, disseminate it and educate the public with knowledge while in the pursuit of worthy stories. What is wrong, and open to criminal allegations, is that the pursuit of that information was blinkered by the desire to provide the public with salacious bits of tittle tattle using illegal means without any recourse to the benchmark question; is it in the public interest? There are plenty of occasions where the “dark arts” have been used to to unearth genuine exclusives which have been in the public interest, but even then, and only then after the necessary checks and benchmarks have been applied. And so we come to Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s personal spin doctor and former News of the World editor. Honestly speaking, I do not have any personal knowledge that Andy Coulson knew what was going on or that he was the only executive directing these activities but I know and have worked with many former News of the World journalists whose words I trust. They say Coulson did know and that he has misled the parliamentary committee about his knowledge. I know from personal experience that phone hacking and “blagging” went on wholesale during his tenure, as one reporter put it “even the office cat knew it was going on”. And blagging information is something that still goes on to this day. These kinds of dark practices also went on every working day at a number of other newspapers including the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Mirror. I recall being told about one Sunday newspaper attempts back in 2002 to access the medical records of a high profile celebrity, who had already been at the centre of  a cocaine and call girls scandal. On that occasion the Met Police also investigated and indeed there was evidence of collusion between newspaper executives and a rogue BT telephone engineer. The enquiry petered out into nothing, no newspaper executives were either arrested or charged, but the story had a ring of truth about it even then. In all but a minority of cases there was no public interest justification for the use of such practices, the journalists involved were merely embroiling themselves in “fishing expeditions” at the behest of their scoop hungry editors and woe betide you if you didn’t come up with that exclusive. But there can be no excuses. This type of activity, if unchecked, undermines the bedrock upon which journalistic ethics stands and it is a  story that is not going to go away. Be braced because there will almost certainly be more to come on this story.

A wake up call for witness protection……

Today’s news that Coroner and QC Karon Monaghan  has called for a review of the the UK’s witness protection services has been a long time coming and is long overdue. If nothing else, Hoods , illustrated just what happens when there is no continuity or depth in the witness protection framework to deal with the real threats that organised crime poses to those ordinary people who speak out against its pernicious reach. It is a tragedy of appalling proportions that it has taken the brutal deaths of two pensioners to reach this stage but as is so often the case, it takes something of that nature to shake us out of the complacency that had been allowed to build up over this area of policing. Joan and John Stirland really did deserve better treatment and there will be individuals and corporate entitities who will never be able to wash the blood from their hands over the Stirlands deaths. There is no doubt in my mind that consideration must be given to a national body set up to deal with witness protection which is independent of local police forces and this should be a fully funded body which can deal with the huge expense and strain on resources which witness protection inevitably creates. As matters currently stand there are people who would be willing to turn their lives upside down and give evidence against major criminals if they had faith in the system. There is very little faith in the current system and the deaths of the Stirlands has magnified that lack of faith. Nobody wants to see the spectre of criminal trials collapsing against the some of the most dangerous villains simply because witnesses do not feel safe but that has become an increasingly common situation in the UK. It will be interesting to see the responses of ACPO and local police forces to this issue, but the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Prosecution also need to have an input into this debate. We saw on the streets of Nottingham how urban terrorism, threats and fear have taken their toll on some of the city’s population and unless we have the systems in place to reassure those who need our protection, it will be a story coming to a city near you soon.

Depressing news from Spain…….

Trevor Wade in happier times

For the past year I have been actively supporting the plight of  a Lincolnshire pensioner who was arrested in Spain after being duped into driving a car which contained £22 million worth of cocaine. Most criminals will tell you they are innocent or have been stitched up and for that reason alone I don’t tend to get involved in miscarriage of justice cases unless there is clear evidence that the person involved is innocent. But I have absolutely no doubt that the case of  Trevor Wade passes that test. Trevor’s plight is detailed in the revised edition of Hoods, so I won’t duplicate those details here but in short, the biggest problem is that Trevor has been held in prison now, without trial, since September 2007. Today I feel an overwhelming sense of anger and sadness after I learned that his lawyer believes a trial may not take place until April 2011. It is frankly shocking that a 66-year-old man in poor health, against whom there is no evidence other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, can be left to rot in a foreign prison without trial for almost three years. I do not blame the Spanish for Trevor’s plight, they were only following the trail given to them by British investigators at the Serious Organised Crime Agency. SOCA has admitted it has no evidence on Trevor Wade but says it cannot interfere in the judicial process of a foreign power. Ditto the Foreign Office. But the fact is they don’t appear to be doing anything else to resolve the matter either, almost as if to say they would rather it was swept under the carpet than admit when a costly mistake has been made. If this had been a case of a foreign national in the UK then Trevor would undoubtedly be home with his family by now, either because there was no case to answer or through abuse of process rules. Even in the unlikely event he had gone to trial in the UK he would certainly have been given bail until the date of the hearing. At present, he is struggling to survive the regime in Leon Prison where the odd piece of Spanish Tortilla is often the only food he looks forward to eating. If there is anybody out there, either in SOCA or the Foreign Office, who has a conscience I would suggest that now is the time to make yourself known because all the apologies and platitudes in the world are going to mean nothing to Trevor’s family if he ends up living out his last days in that Spanish cell.