THE MANUFACTURE OF CRIME
Lies, temptation and entrapment by the police.

An extract from the book "In the name of the law" by David Rose

At the heart of this affair, which came to a head at the end of 1994, was a Detective Constable Alan Ledbrook, the handler for an informant turned agent provocateur called Graham Titley. In at least three cases, Titley instigated forgeries of American Express travellers' cheques. None of them resulted in convictions, and separate judges condemned the police operations in coruscating terms. But by the time the cases came to trial, Titley had been paid more than £100,000 in rewards, with the police repeatedly negotiating with Amex to provide bigger payments. The proceeds of Titley's deceit enabled him to open a beach bar in Corfu.

Titley's involvement with the Midlands Regional Crime Squad began in August 1990, when he was arrested in possession of £10,000 in counterfeit currency. Within a few days, he was providing information to Ledbrook in the hope that he would receive a lighter sentence. He came up for trial in February 1991. He had a long criminal record, starting in 1970 with an indecent assault on a four-year-old girl. His many convictions thereafter were for relatively minor offences, involving cars, burglary and handling stolen goods. In no sense was he a major player in organised crime.

In view of Titley's lowly criminal status, the 'text' composed for the benefit of his trial judge on 6 February, by Detective Superintendent R. Beards, then the Regional Crime Squad's second-in-command, was utterly extraordinary. Pleading for leniency, Beards insisted that Titley could help to smash major criminals throughout the UK and Europe ... who are engaged in the large scale distribution of drugs and counterfeit currency. Even more far fetched was Beards's claim that he might also expose 'paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland, who are using the proceeds of drugs sales to fund their terrorist activities'. Titley had never been to Ulster in his life.

In the face of such a commendation, however, the judge had little choice but to impose a relatively light sentence, gaoling Titley for eighteen months. He was released after only seven, and throughout his time in gaol continued to meet Detective Constable Ledbrook. After release he went to live in Staffordshire.

Towards the end of 1991, the police used Titley to target a Man called David Docker. A grandfather in his early sixties, Docker lived in a modest bungalow in Stoke-on-Trent. By his own admission, in the fifties and sixties he had been an active criminal. But he insists: 'I've not been at the villainy game for twenty years. My business - until it was wrecked by Titley - was factoring: buying and selling ends of lines, overproduction, and so on.'

On the other hand, according to Ledbrook's superior, Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Lowbridge, who also developed a close relationship with Titley, Docker was a big-time criminal. Lowbridge needed authorisation to run an undercover operation, from the Crown Prosecution Service, to protect officers from possible prosecution, and to allow them to put up money to make them look convincing to their criminal targets. He told the CPS in a letter that Docker's far from opulent lifestyle was merely a clever cover. He was in the 'upper league criminal fraternity', he claimed.

Like Beards, he added the spice of national security: 'A more sinister element is that there are terrorist associations.' No evidence to support this assertion was ever produced. Lowbridge added that the proposed operation had been discussed at 'senior management level' and 'authorised in writing by an assistant chief constable' from the West Midlands police.

Titley and the police - set up an operation of labyrinthine complexity to trap Docker and some of his business associates. With Titley acting as the link between Docker and a team of undercover officers, whose identity remains secret, they tried to induce Docker to arrange the importation of a huge container lorry-load of cannabis from Holland, saying they wanted to buy it. Docker at first went along with the scheme - but only in an attempt to get the undercover police 'buyers', who struck him as curiously naive, to pay him up front'. He had in mind only a lucrative con-trick, but his scheme came to nothing.

The drugs angle having failed, in March 1992, the operation switched its emphasis to American Express. A top CPS official, C.W.P. Newall, the director of headquarters case-work in London, gave permission for the police first to obtain and then to attempt to supply Docker and his friends with fake Amex cheques. He promised that if Titley and the undercover officer known as 'Mickey' had to commit offences to trap Docker, they would be given immunity from prosecution. NewaIl made no attempt to verify any of the police claims being made about the value of this operation. With the customary 'hands offÕ CPS approach, he took what he was told at face value.

After numerous vicissitudes, Docker and six others were lured to a hotel on the M1 where fake cheques worth £4 million were being stored in a car boot. They never handed over any money for them and at the point when they were suddenly arrested, they had become suspicious, and had resolved to drive away. They had never actually set eyes on the false cheques. But the police claimed they were conspiring to handle them.

As they waited for trial, without further ado, Titley was paid £37,500 by Amex. The bank's chief UK and Ireland special agent, Sue Simpson, had to forward police submissions made on behalf of Titley to the bank's global security chief based in America. She wrote: 'We do rely heavily on the Regional Crime Squad who are equipped for the extensive surveillance etc. necessary to bring about a successful result. Our goodwill may be affected in a good future [sic] if we disregard their requests entirely.'

Docker spent the next fifteen months in custody, with disastrous effects on his livelihood and health. At last, the case came to trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court in September 1993. The trial was a fiasco. First, it had to be delayed because Titley had disappeared. For many months, defence lawyers had tried unsuccessfully to get the Crown to disclose documents to which their entitlement was not in doubt. They included details of other rewards from Amex to Titley. Even after judge Richard Gibbs ordered this disclosure in a pretrial review, it was not made.

Then it came to Detective Constable Ledbrook's turn to give evidence. He failed to appear, with the police claiming he had had a nervous breakdown. One officer explained his absence in court by saying Ledbrook was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, but his detective partner, who had even been on holiday with him, told the court he did not drink. Ledbrook later took early retirement on the grounds of his health.

Finally, the Crown came up with the disclosure which had been missing for so long. To the astonishment of the defence, it transpired Titley had been paid several other rewards by American Express, most recently just weeks before the trial. Suddenly there were far too many unanswered questions, judge Gibbs dismissed the charges as an abuse of process, delivering a ruling of unusual vehemence. There had been 'bad faith in deliberate concealment or failure to disclose material evidence', he said. He had an 'open mind' as to why Ledbrook was unable to appear. But without him, there could be no fair trial.

After the collapse of the Docker case, the Police Complaints Authority began an investigation. Yet despite this, and the comments made by judge Gibbs, the CPS remained determined to press ahead with two further pending prosecutions - both of them involving Titley, forged Amex cheques, Detective Constable Ledbrook and the Midlands Regional Crime Squad. Moreover, months before these cases came to court, the Police Complaints Authority declared its inquiry had a 'possible criminal dimension'. No fewer than thirteen police officers had been interviewed under caution.

The first case was against a man from the Manchester area called Graham Redford. It bore striking resemblances to the Docker imbroglio, and was dismissed without a jury being sworn in by a judge at Leeds Crown Court in November 1994. The second case was more serious: it was Titley's biggest prosecution. It concerned not merely a supposed attempt to purchase forgeries, but an operation to print counterfeit cheques with a face value of £20 million. Unfortunately, this was an offence which without Titley and his police handlers, would never have taken place.

After Docker's arrest, Ledbrook and his colleagues helped Titley to leave the Midlands altogether, and he relocated in South Wales. There, in the autumn of 1992, he inveigled himself into the acquaintance of Bernard Wilson, a self-employed Cardiff print salesman facing bankruptcy, as a result of bad debts caused by the recession. Wilson, a thin, nervous man who had always taken pride in supporting himself and his family, had no convictions or any other kind of history of involvement with the police or criminals. A less likely master forger would be hard to conceive.

Titley offered him a 'partnership', making exaggerated claim about his own business expertise, and lent him £2,000 over several weeks in an attempt to keep him afloat. Only then did he first suggest forgery. Wilson admits he agreed to fake innocuous items such as Equity cards, but is adamant that from the outset, he refused to have anything to do with counterfeit money or anything which might cause others harm - such as vehicle MOT certificates. But having taken this bait, he was doomed.

Titley introduced him to undercover police officers working with the Midlands Regional Crime Squad despite the fact that Wales did not form part of its territory. They, of course, posed as criminals. Within a few weeks, Wilson found himself the object of escalating threats: if he did not co-operate, Titley told him he and his family would be harmed. "I thought I was dealing with the Mafia,' Wilson said later. One night, Titley and two other men drove him to the middle of the Severn suspension bridge. They said that if he did not agree to organise the printing of fake Amex cheques, they would throw him off.

Meanwhile, Regional Crime Squad officers, including Ledbrook, were once again negotiating personally with American Express to obtain a 'reward'. Yet they also deliberately misled the bank. They had intelligence about a huge counterfeit conspiracy, they claimed, saying cheques worth $30 million had already been printed - although none were yet in existence. The police told Amex to provide an 'up front' payment of £10,000 saying they needed this to show good faith to Wilson and his co-conspirators'. In fact, as the officers knew, Wilson and the seven other hard-up printers he recruited to manufacture the cheques needed this money to buy the specialised colour printing equipment they needed before any counterfeiting could begin. Amex duly coughed up.

It was not until April 1993, by which time the entrapment scheme had been running for several months, that the Midlands Squad informed its South Wales counterpart of the 'crime' about to take place. The Welsh officers, led by Detective Chief Inspector Albert Reakes, met Ledbrook and one of Amex's top security men, Special Agent John White. To their credit, they insisted no reward should be paid until after the end of any trial, when the true worth of the Midlands officers' informant could be properly assessed. According to a statement Reakes made later to the PCA investigators, White 'promised faithfully that no payment would be made until we had authorised it'.

On the weekend of 14 May, the printing operation began. The South Wales officers swooped on the workshop the same day and arrested Wilson and all his colleagues. However, White did not keep his promise. He paid the first instalment of a £50,000 reward within a week of the arrests, with the rest following shortly. A few weeks later Reakes phoned him and asked if any reward had been paid. White's own statement to the PCA said: 'I said we hadn't. That was not true. The issue of the reward payment was, as I saw it, a matter for our company and the Regional Crime Squad who had Titley registered as an informant.'

By his own account, when he learnt what had happened two months later as a result of the disclosure at the trial of Docker in Wolverhampton, Reakes was astounded. He added: 'John White apologised profuselyÕ. I can recall him saying, "I'm sorry I lied but I was told not to tell you."

Unaware of the full picture until a late stage, Wilson and his associates pleaded guilty at a pretrial hearing in the summer of 1994. They could have expected to be gaoled for ten years, despite the fact that for all of them this was a first offence. Later, when the full trial began at Swansea Crown Court in September, they tried to change their pleas to not guilty. However, judge Hugh Williams refused to allow this, saying it would serve no purpose, because he was not minded to send any of them to prison at all.

His comments on Titley and the Midlands Regional Crime Squad were still more outspoken than those made by judge Gibbs in Wolverhampton the previous year. He said 'This was a scandalous, corrupt incitement which led to the defendants being fitted up to commit crimes none of them would have dreamed of committing otherwise. At least one serving police officer from the Midlands Regional Crime Squad knew or believed that the informer was acting as an agent provocateur. The informer was not only acting as agent provocateur, but was doing so when he was being handled by a serving police officer from the Midlands.' At a further sentencing hearing in December, he added that the police operation amounted to 'skullduggery and an abuse of power'. He gave all eight defendants short suspended sentences.

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Surely the wrong people were convicted (but are they untouchable)

This extract was taken from just 6 pages of this 358 page book (201-207).
"In the name of the law" buy it and read the rest.

 

 

 

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