I don’t share the outrage at the decision not to prosecute the police officer who killed Ian Tomlinson. Henry Porter says:
The public needs to see justice done. Instead the DPP’s decision sends a message that the police are immune from prosecution
The police didn’t need the DPP to send that message. They already knew. I’m not outraged because I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I’m weary. I’m almost surprised the case got as far as the DPP. Here’s why, let me tell you a story.
In 1995 I was asked to help a woman who owned a pub in London. There had been a fight in the pub, a group of men attacked the manager with pool cues and he fought back with a Samurai sword, cutting one of them quite badly. The man who was cut was the son of a police officer.
When the police arrived, they found no sword. They were furious and searched the place. In a safe, they found a large amount of cash.
A few days later a heavy from South London came into the pub and asked to speak to the woman. I know this; I was standing with her at the bar when he entered. They went off to one side and chatted, then she came back and he left. “I can’t believe what just happened,” she said. But she wouldn’t say why, just asked us to wait with her.
A bit later a very well-dressed man came in and the same thing happened again. This time when she came back she did say what the problem was. The man was an intermediary, acting on behalf of the police officer running the fight/sword case. He had found the money in the safe. If she gave him £20,000 he would screw the case up. If not, he’d charge the manager with affray, a serious offence with a maximum sentence of, I think, seven years.
I arranged for a subsequent conversation she had with the intermediary to be tape recorded secretly. I still have a copy of the tape. On it, she can be heard asking how she could know the guy was connected with the officer. Hey, the man said, we’ve been doing this for years. He then, incredibly, reeled off a list of graft, bribes they had taken for one thing or another, all round the East End of London.
Yeah, but how do I really know, she asked. A couple of days later, the man came back with a copy of the charge sheet from the police station. Only an officer involved in the case could have got that, he said. Yes, but how do I really know, she asked.
The man said that at a particular time in a particular restaurant, he would be having coffee with the police officer. He suggested she be there at a different table, to see them together. What actually happened was that I walked in, took a few flash photos of them, handed the camera to someone else outside, then went back in and asked for a quiet word with the officer.
We had tape, videos and now photos. I explained this. And I explained that we had no intention of using them against him, but that his demand for cash had to go away. I made it clear we didn’t even want him to drop or screw up the case against the bar manager, just drop the demand for money. He agreed.
Then the dapper intermediary was arrested for something unrelated and, for some reason, he blurted all this out to the police. I had a knock on my door, and opened it to find a Detective Chief Superintendent and a Detective Inspector from CIB2, the internal corruption unit of the Metropolitan Police. Heavy guns.
I was interviewed twice in Tintagel House, their headquarters in Vauxhall. They interviewed the woman and the manager. They investigated the case fully, knew about the tapes, the videos and the photographs.
What do you think happened?
The detective took early retirement on full pension.
Until I got to the punchline, I was wondering if this’d turn out to be Ali Dizaei … !
Why didn’t you publish?
I didn’t publish because I was helping the woman, who wanted to settle the whole affair as quietly as possible. At that time, and no doubt today too, if you were a London publican you wanted a working relationship with the police, not the copper’s mates looking for a chance to do you over.