The prosecution claimed that the curtain went up on my personal drama in The Elbow Room on 9 May, when Jack told me he had been left ‘a bit dry’ after a guy he was trading with had been ‘topped’ in Amsterdam.
I knew he was talking about drugs, it was alleged, because I told him I had a mate who could supply him with large quantities of cocaine on a regular basis. Two weeks later, Jack and a pal, named Ken, came down to London with a football – signed by the Newcastle United team – to be auctioned at John Corbett’s pub, in aid of St Christopher’s Hospice.
I arranged for them to stay at The Selsdon Park Hotel and met Jack and Ken there to talk further about supplying cocaine. It was claimed that I told Jack that I never went near it and only put people together, ‘ ‘cos I’ve too many eyes on me’.
Nine days later, I introduced Jack and Ken to Ronnie Field and Bobby Gould at The Mermaid Theatre, where drugs were discussed. On 18 June Jack invited me and Ronnie Field to Newcastle and paid for us to fly there on the following Wednesday.
On Thursday 27 June, it was alleged, me and Field agreed to supply Jack with five kilos of cocaine every two weeks for two years and said the first exchange would take place at the Selsdon Park Hotel the following month.
On 25 July, Field and Gould met Jack and Ken at the hotel, but the exchange was aborted and re-arranged for the following night at The Swallow Hotel, at altham Abbey.
That exchange did not happen either, it was said. But Field and Gould did hand over two kilos of cocaine to Jack at The Swallow the following Wednesday evening, in return for £63,000 – and I had set up the deal.
My defence was that the curtain went up on 21 March, when an undercover cop, called George, infiltrated my son Gary’s funeral to ingratiate himself with Patsy Manning.
The point of this was to be introduced to me so that I could, subsequently, be entrapped into committing a crime. Believing Jack and his pals to be wealthy drug dealers, I agreed with Ronnie Field to pretend to be drug dealers ourselves to get some money out of them.
I was all geared up for the trial to begin on Monday 14 April but, first, vital issues of law had to be thrashed out before Judge Michael Carroll in a pre-trial hearing called a voire dire. If I doubted what a huge mountain I faced, that first day convinced me. The judge seemed not only heavily biased against me, but anti Mr Goldberg, too, particularly on the subject of jury protection.
The Crown Prosecutor, John Kelsey-Fry, pressed for a twenty-four-hour guard on the jury because, he argued, the consequences of conviction to a man my age might prove an incentive to me – or someone with my interests at heart – to try to interfere with the jury.
To give this ludicrous idea credence, he suggested that because of the large amount of cocaine involved in the case, I had access to lots of money and could afford to pay someone to nobble the jury.
I found it hard to believe, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. The notoriety of the Kray name had done me many favours over the years, but it was bound to be bad news for me in court, despite all that rubbish about being innocent until proven guilty.
Mr Goldberg showed his fighting qualities by arguing a strong case against jury protection. Quoting Lord Hailsham – ‘Everyone is entitled to a fair trial by an untainted jury’ – he said it was impossible for me to have a fair trial if the jury was prejudiced. And they would be if they believed they were being guarded because one of the notorious Kray family was in the dock. Quite simply, I would be starting the trial ten points down, he said.
I sat there, shaking my head. To get at the jury, a member of the public would first have to be able to recognize them, and that was impossible because the gallery is situated directly above the jury box and every juror is hidden from view. The only people able to see them – apart from me –were the lawyers, the police, reporters and court staff. What was Kelsey-Fry trying to insinuate? That some underworld pal of mine would peer down from the gallery, select a likely candidate, then try to bribe he or she to get hold of a juror’s name and address? How nonsensical!
The only way to see the jury was to get into the court itself. But that was impossible: everyone going into court had to produce identification and pass through a metal detector, watched all the time by two armed policemen. Even journalists were directed to the public gallery if they did not have a valid, and authorized, Press Card. So, Joe Public had no chance of even getting anywhere near the door of the court.
Mr Goldberg fought several battles on the jury protection front, but, in the end, lost the war: the judge ruled that the twelve ladies and gentlemen would, indeed, be guarded round the clock.
The injustice of this surveillance, as the judge insisted on calling it, angered me, but I was grateful to Mr Goldberg for fighting it all the way. He was a pugnacious guy and clearly showed no fear of Judge Carroll. It bode well for the bigger battles that lay ahead.
As far as I could gather, what Mr Goldberg had to do in the voire dire was to persuade the judge to kick out evidence that would have an adverse effect on proceedings once the jury was sworn in and the trial proper began. He wanted all my conversations – on and off tape – ruled inadmissible, because of the way the undercover police had incited me to commit a criminal act. For me, though, I felt my best chance lay with discrediting the police with the evidence of our surprise witness, Michelle Hamdouchi, a buxom blonde in her early thirties, who had been in The Elbow Room for my seventieth birthday celebrations.
She was the woman Brian had gone home with in the early hours. What he did not know was that she had made a statement to my solicitor eight months before, in which she claimed she had had sex with Brian that Thursday night, and a further sexual encounter with him at The Swallow Hotel on 27 July.
When Brian gave evidence at the voire dire he denied he had sex with Michelle, and claimed her arrival at The Swallow Hotel was a ‘complete surprise’ to him. I was elated, because Michelle was a believable witness and if her evidence didn’t brand Brian a liar, then testimony from the staff at The Swallow Hotel would. That night, I went back to my prison cell, convinced that Brian would be discredited in the eyes of the judge and that he would rule his evidence inadmissible in front of the jury.
Once again, I was totally wrong.
When the judge made his ruling at the end of the voire dire, he said he was ‘unsure’ of what had happened between Michelle and Brian; that, even if he felt he was lying, he would not exclude his evidence, because the relationship was unrelated to the conversations between me and the undercover police. He went on to rule that all taped and untaped conversations were admissible and that, indeed, the whole prosecution, as presented at the voire dire, would go before the jury.
If Mr Goldberg was disappointed, I was mortified. The judge, I felt, had trumped our best card.
Before falling asleep that night, however, I consoled myself that everything would be different in front of a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women could not fail to be impressed by Michelle’s honesty and see through Brian’s lies.
The following Wednesday morning, 14 May, the twelve who were to decide my fate were sworn in: seven women and five men. As each stepped forward to take the oath, mid-morning sunshine brightened the modern courtroom. The silence was deafening. Sitting in the dock in my navy-blue suit, light-blue shirt and dark tie, I clenched my fists at my sides and looked at each person closely, trying to read them. What backgrounds did they come from? What were their beliefs? Were they intelligent people, able to take in and understand a trial likely to last six weeks? Were they capable of judging me on the evidence? Or would they prejudge me on my name alone?
Of course, it was impossible to know, but all those thoughts raced through my mind in the fifteen minutes or so it took to swear them all in. They were the people, chosen at random, to decide whether I would walk out a free man or be locked away. All I could ask for, that dramatic morning, was that they were honest citizens who would take their roles seriously. And that they would believe my version of what happened the previous summer. Not the prosecution’s.
As Mr Kelsey-Fry rose to outline the prosecution case, I glanced up at the public gallery to my right. Judy was not allowed to attend because she was due to be a witness, but I expected certain friends there that first day. There were none. The gallery was deserted, except for Robin and a woman who had become fascinated with the Krays’ exploits after reading Me and My Brothers. How times change! When Ronnie, Reggie and me went on trial at the Old Bailey in 1969, queues for the gallery formed two hours before the court opened.
Nothing Mr Kelsey-Fry said that first morning shocked me. I’d been warned to expect the worst and I was long enough in the tooth to know that the prosecution would paint a black picture.
There were two sides to my character, he said. One was an affable, slightly down-at-heel, but popular, character. The other was a man prepared to be involved in the drugs trade, a man who said he would never physically handle drugs, but who pulled both ends of a deal together.
I was pleased to hear Mr Kelsey-Fry tell the jury, up front, not to let my name influence them, even though the fact that I was the Kray twins’ brother may explain some of the facts of the case. ‘No man is his brother’s keeper,’ he said. ‘Whatever his brothers may or may not have done thirty years ago cannot, in any way, adversely reflect on this defendant. Their actions can’t help you determine this man’s innocence or guilt on these charges.’
I steeled myself not to glance at the jury for their reaction. It was vital that they separated me from the twins. I stared straight ahead. I knew Mr Goldberg would have a lot to say on that subject. All I could do now was sit there and listen to how me and the other two were arrested; how Jack and his pals were not all they were supposed to be.
‘Jack was an undercover police officer,’ said Mr Kelsey-Fry. ‘As you will know…it is a legitimate weapon in their battle against serious crime for the police to attempt to infiltrate the underworld, posing as part of that world to attempt to expose criminals. And when they are successful…it is no defence for those caught to say, “If I’d known they were police I wouldn’t have supplied them with drugs.”’
I shook my head. No defence! I believed I was enticed into a crime that night in The Elbow Room. All the talk I gave Jack on the tape the following morning was rubbish. If he hadn’t followed it up with a phone call the next week, we’d never have seen each other again, I’m sure of that. As it was Kelsey-Fry spelled out the financial aspects of the cocaine deal and the reporters rushed for their calculators and worked out that five kilos of cocaine every two weeks over two years, at £31,500 per kilo, had a street value of £39 million. My whack, they reckoned, was £8 million. Predictably, the next day’s papers, under headlines like: ‘CHARLIE KRAY OFFERED COPS £39M COCAINE’, had me as the mastermind of a deal that would make me a multimillionaire.
If it had not been my neck on the block, I’d have laughed. How ridiculous!
For the next two days, barristers on both sides, the jury, me and even the judge, put on headphones to listen to the tape recordings on which me and Ronnie Field had allegedly incriminated ourselves. When I’d read the hundreds of pages of transcripts while on remand, I could not believe them. Jack and his pals had seemed so genuine it made me sick to realize they were phoney and had been secretly and deviously taping us all along. Now that I was going to have to listen to everything – all the drinking and laughter and joking – I felt worse. I’d been duped.
The first tape was recorded in The Wake Green Lodge when Deano gave Patsy his birthday present, but the prosecution wanted the jury to know only about the next morning when Jack brought up the subject of Amsterdam again.
‘I got let down badly…my guy got taken out,’ I heard Jack say.
‘Did you really?’ I said. ‘And you’re looking for some more, or you wanna buy some more?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’m looking for some more.’
‘You’re looking for some to buy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, a mate of mine might be home this weekend. I know someone who’s got five hundred.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Five hundred. And the paperwork. In and it’s paid for. It’s there.’
‘Yeah?’
‘So they’re very good and they want the transport. I’ll get that anyway. I’ve got the transport.’
I went on, ‘My people just go, do it…a lot is happening at the moment, but once something happens, I’ll let you know.’
Jack said, ‘Sweet,’ then added: ‘I do “charlie” and I do the smoke.’
‘It’s gonna be another, I think, three or four weeks. Regular, regular, regular, a lot of it, you know what I mean?’
‘Are you in a position to talk a price, or will I have to talk to him?’
I said, ‘Well, we’ll wait till we know.’
‘Okay.’
Later on the tape, Jack asks about the ‘charlie’, and I’m heard saying, ‘If anything happens, oh that, that won’t be for I think another three or four weeks. Then, when it starts, it will be regular all the time.’
A minute or so later, Deano is driving me from The Wake Green Lodge to the coach station. I’m heard giving Jack my phone number and arranging to see him when he comes to London. Then I say, ‘I’m just waiting now. But that other thing will be…home grown, a lot of it. It’ll be good, I’ll tell you, and that should be regular.’
I took off my headphones and glanced at the jury. From my point of view, what we had all heard sounded awful. What were they thinking? I tried to push negative thoughts out of my mind. I had my answers to everything said on those tapes. When it was my turn to speak, they would hear why I said what I did.
The prosecution then covered my meeting with Jack and Ken at The Selsdon Park Hotel on 23 May, and I’m heard saying, ‘…it’s a bit embarrassing to fucking go and admit it, like, when I was up there last time, but what’s happened, you know, I lost about fucking a hundred grand on a deal.’
Jack said, ‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘Well, I did, and, er, it put me on the floor, ‘cos I got money coming to me, but it don’t come in, ‘till, like certain times.’
‘Yeah?’
‘But, yesterday, things came together, like, didn’t have to, some people and, er, things they came together. I set it up.’
‘Yeah?’
‘And this was…the awkward thing.’
‘Uh, uh.’
‘But I’ve put fucking five grand up yesterday. And that was it as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Until I get this, mind you. It’s only gonna take a couple of fucking weeks, it’ll be done, but, and it’s knocked me bandy.’
‘Yeah,’ Jack is heard to say.
‘But there you go, you have to do these things if you’re going to get anywhere. You know you gotta do something about it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, fucking, if it comes, that’s why I lost all that money. It’s so good and if it comes, like well, it will now, it will happen, so outstanding, so like now, it’ll be done, it’s, if it does and it goes steady and fucking.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Like you had a chance with this…’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s the other gear, obviously, you know.’
‘Which?’ Jack is heard to ask. ‘The smaller gear?’
‘No, the other.’
‘“Charlie”?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’ll know more. It’s going to be a lot and it’s going to be regular…’
‘Yeah?’
‘Be the right price as well.’
‘Yeah? What are they talking about?’
‘’Cos I don’t want to meet…’
‘Obviously.’
‘I don’t never get near it, and they all know it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I put people together and do this and running about. I ain’t…I said it won’t be my partner, it’s me fucking make a big business out of it. It wouldn’t be true and my brother, it’ll affect him in the nick…’
‘Yeah?’
‘Right, I’ve done it all, I’ve committed all these things in my life, so I now have to take, steady on, you know, ‘cos I’ve too many eyes on me.’
I have to admit I squirmed when I heard myself, not so much what I was saying, although that was bad enough, but the swearing. Anyone who knows me is aware that I never use foul language. I can’t understand it. I must have been drunk.
We talk about the signed football Jack has brought for John Corbett’s charity evening, then I’m heard saying that we’ll go to The Blue Orchid, in Purley.
The next morning, Jack rang me, and I’m heard saying, ‘Went for a little drink, didn’t we? My pal, Steve, wasn’t there, he had to go do something. But we had a good night anyway.’
Kelsey-Fry seemed to place a lot of significance on Steve. I would learn why later.
The next stage in the scenario was The Mermaid Theatre variety show, on 2 June, which Jack invited himself to when he stayed at The Selsdon Park Hotel. There were a few hundred people from all walks of life at The Mermaid and I introduced many to Jack and Ken. The only two the prosecution wanted the jury to know about, however, were Ronnie Field and Bobby Gould. Jack claimed I took him into a corridor to introduce him to them, and we talked about drugs.
Three weeks later, Ronnie and I were royally entertained, no expense spared, at the fabulous Linden Hall Hotel, just outside Newcastle, and this is where Jack came on strong. The morning after a heavy drinking night before, he invited us into his hotel room and quickly got down to business. It was all recorded.
He started off, ‘Well, the reason we’re here, I suppose, is the “charlie”…we want to do the business with that…we want to know how much regular and, obviously, how much, you know.’
A few seconds later, I was heard to say, ‘At the moment we’re guessing, but we know it’s gonna, it’ll be all right, it’s just we ain’t got it. I mean, we know it will be all right.’
Ronnie said, ‘…it’s like good, like good gear. We know we can come to an agreement on the price.’
After a brief discussion on price and delivery, I’m then heard speaking in a low voice, ‘I’m not exaggerating, but if you had a ton tomorrow, we’ve got people who’ve got the readies immediately.’
Brian replied, ‘Well…we’re not going to be introducing to somebody else. We’d rather just…’
Ronnie broke in, ‘You won’t see no one else.’
And I said, ‘No one else? Only Bob. You know he’s working now. That’s it.’
Ronnie repeated, ‘You won’t see no one else.’
‘No one else,’ I echoed.
Seconds later, I was heard saying, ‘What we’re talking about now, we got people that do hundreds a week…now he can do, he can do, forty a week…easy.’
‘I can do forty of this a week,’ Ronnie agreed.
‘What, the blow?’ Jack asked.
‘No,’ Ronnie said. ‘The “charlie”.’
Jack is heard to question whether he should ring me and Ronnie says, ‘Charlie don’t know where these boxes are.’
And I say, ‘…I don’t want to know and he does it, and that’s how we do it all the time.’
Later, on the tape, talking about another meeting at The Selsdon in a few weeks, I say, ‘…‘cos we don’t know when we’ll see Steve. He might say, hold up, it ain’t gonna be here till Monday, then…’
Ronnie describes how the cocaine will be delivered, ‘…it’ll be wrapped. Comes in like a, erm, rubber wrapping, like a bag…vacuum sealed. Then it’s wrapped up in tape and it’s got another bag around the outside of it.’
And I said, ‘Will it be wrapped in, or should it be wrapped the same as our one?’
I would later regret chiming in with that comment.
Over the next two weeks, the tape recordings proved that Jack rang me five times pressing me to ask Ronnie to contact him about the deal. And on the third call, on 2 July, he invited himself – with Brian or Ken – to my seventieth birthday party at The Elbow Room on 11 July.
On the Sunday before the party, Jack phoned me and asked me to call him back because he was in a phone box.
I’m heard asking if Jack had spoken to Ron, then saying, ‘I’ve been told it could be tomorrow or Tuesday.’ I then ask Jack to send me five hundred quid as a loan because I’ve not got enough money to get up to Birmingham for the party. When he hears I’m staying at The Wake Green Lodge Hotel, he says that he and Brian will stay there, too. Then, in a phone call on the Wednesday, Jack asks if Ronnie is going to Birmingham.
‘No,’ I’m heard to say. ‘He can’t ‘cos he’s waiting for something.’
Nine days after the party, Jack rang me again and I’m heard telling him, ‘We’re on the verge, but not there.’
‘Okay, mate,’ he said.
‘You know what I mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I spoke to Ron this morning.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know, ‘cos he rang.’
‘Uh, uh.’
‘And I said, fucking drag, innit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Waiting. Gets on your nerves, don’t it?’
On Wednesday 24 July, Jack rang Ron, who is heard telling him, ‘You can put your name to how many you want. We got hundred here at the moment.’
‘A hundred?’ Jack asks.
‘Yeah.’
A meeting is then arranged at The Selsdon Park Hotel at 6 P.M. the following night, when Jack will buy five kilograms of cocaine for £157,500.
Four hours later Jack rang me to say he had spoken to ‘our friend’ and would I book two rooms at The Selsdon for the next night.
Mr Kelsey-Fry told the court that I visited the hotel that Thursday evening, but stayed only fifteen minutes or so. During that time, drugs were not mentioned.
Then the jury was told of another recorded phone call Jack made to me on Friday morning. After asking if I had spoken to ‘our friend’, Jack said, ‘There were some problems last night.’
‘Held up was it?’ I asked.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Was it held up?’
‘Yeah, there was a problem with it.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said.
‘Our friend was going to sort it out for eleven o’clock this morning.’
Jack suggested re-arranging the meeting with Ronnie and Bobby Gould for 6 P.M. that evening at The Swallow Hotel and asked me to contact Ronnie to tell him.
I was heard agreeing to do that.
Then Jack said, ‘Ronnie will tell you, it went a bit fucking horrible last night…there was a couple of clowns came on to the plot.’
At 11.58 A.M. twenty-three minutes after Ronnie had called him, Jack phoned me again to tell me ‘everything’s sorted’, and to ask me if I was going to The Swallow Hotel myself. I said I was not.
The jury then heard this conversation on tape:
Jack: ‘Okay mate, did he tell you about the disaster last night?’
Me: ‘…tell me like, yeah.’
Jack: ‘What a muppet that guy was. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, walking in, he’s just off his face with it, you know.’
Me: ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What, the big guy?’
Me: ‘Oh, yeah, I know. I’ll have a word with someone today.’
It was another conversation I would regret.
That Friday afternoon, Jack rang again, worried that Ronnie had not phoned at 1 P.M., as promised.
I said on tape, ‘No, no, he said he’s waiting, ‘til he gets that thing and then, when he’s got it in his hand, then he’s going to ring you immediately…’
In the end, the scheduled exchange at The Swallow never happened. But something else did, which would embarrass the police greatly. Michelle Hamdouchi, who claimed to have had sex with Brian at her home after my birthday party, arrived at the hotel around 1 A.M., and enjoyed Brian’s company again. Her evidence at the voire dire had rocked the undercover men’s superiors, who knew nothing of Brian’s indiscretion and felt they should have. Hopefully, when she went into the witness box again, she would expose Brian – and possibly Jack – as liars. At best, this would discredit them as reliable witnesses and get the case against me thrown out. At worst, it might persuade the jury to take what they claimed I said with a pinch of salt, particularly when it was backed up only by their handwritten notes, often written many hours after an alleged conversation had taken place.
When Mr Goldberg got up to outline the defence case, he said he faced a ‘unique difficulty’ as far as his career was concerned. He was defending someone called Kray before a jury under round-the-clock surveillance. He urged the jury not to fall into the trap of thinking the surveillance was because they were trying a top-class gangster, despite the fact that I’d been put on AA security, the highest possible. The guard was merely a part of the hype created in my case.
‘It is nothing other than the fact that his name is Kray,’ were his actual words.
I steeled myself when he began describing the ‘defendant’; he had warned me what he was going to say and I knew I wasn’t going to like it. I sat there, squirming with embarrassment, at the sad picture he started to paint of me.
‘Charlie Kray is nothing more than a pathetic, skint, old fool, who lived on handouts from pals,’ he told the jury, in his opening address. ‘Because of the hand-to-mouth existence he has been forced to lead, he has become an expert at “bull”. He’s been doing it all his life. It’s the only way he’s been able to earn a living, because nobody would give him a job.’
The reason Mr Goldberg took this tack is that, in law, simply offering to supply cocaine – even if you had no intention of doing so – is a criminal offence. And I could be heard on tape doing just that.
The only possible defence – and it was a long shot – was to convince the jury that I was conning the police with a load of bull, in order to get some money out of them. I promised cocaine, but I would have promised scud missiles and gold bars if I thought it would help.
Mr Goldberg told the jury to disregard the tapes on which they had heard me speaking of bribing police, their detection methods and phone taps, my contacts with the Israeli secret service, and even my boasts about having killed a man. It had all been nothing but invention, designed to impress people I thought were wealthy drug dealers.
‘You will hear that the defendant has never been a drugs dealer in any way, shape or form,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of a drugs baron who lives like a pauper, cadging fifty pounds here, twenty there? He doesn’t even have a bank account. All you have in the dock is a charming, but gullible, old man, who doesn’t know his limitations, who does not recognize where his charm and bull ends and where the reality of life begins.’
Despite the hurtful personal attack, I thought Mr Goldberg’s address was brilliant. His subsequent attack on the police echoed my own sentiments precisely.
He said, ‘…the undercover officers should be ashamed of themselves for carrying out a deeply offensive operation. With the help of seemingly bottomless expense accounts, they acted as devious agents provocateur, even using Gary’s death to infiltrate into Charlie Kray’s circle of friends. No doubt it was a feather in the caps of several of the officers to have nicked the last of the Kray brothers, but the way they went about it was deplorable.
‘They targeted Charlie Kray…and breached flagrantly their own instructions – not to solicit a person to commit an offence or one of a more serious character than they would otherwise have committed,’ said Mr Goldberg. ‘They lured a foolish and vulnerable old man with no money into a carefully prepared web. They would not leave him alone. They made all the running.’
The tapes the jury had heard of me speaking about tons of cocaine and millions of pounds was nothing more than ‘absurd exaggeration’ as any fool of a detective should have seen, and probably did – but didn’t want to admit it for obvious reasons, said Mr Goldberg. The police must have realized that I was not a big-time criminal with wealth behind me; otherwise why would one of their undercover officers have given me fifty quid for nothing? If you genuinely believe someone is a drug baron, you don’t insult him by giving him that sort of money.
That fifty quid Deano slipped me in Birmingham was the key to the case, Mr Goldberg suggested.
I had mixed emotions when Jack came into court. Part of me was full of loathing for the insidious way he had deceived me; another part pitied him for having to prey on vulnerable old men to earn a living. How, I wondered, did he sleep at night when he spent all day under-cover living a lie?
He stood to my right, behind a screen, hidden from everyone but me. This was ordered by Judge Carroll under a court ruling called Public Interest Immunity, to keep the undercover cop’s identity – and his methods of operation –secret. I did not like it; nor did Mr Goldberg and his team. It gave Jack, Brian and Ken carte blanche to refuse to answer critical cross-examination questions that might jeopardise the Crown’s case.
Jack, the prosecution’s chief witness, wasted no time clutching that cloak of secrecy.
‘When did you meet George?’ asked Mr Goldberg.
‘Can’t answer that,’ replied Jack.
‘You told Kray and Patsy Manning on tape that 9 May at The Wake Green Lodge was the first time you met George. True or false?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
‘You say on tape that you and Deano are firm friends. True or false?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
‘Did Lisa pose as Deano’s girlfriend?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
And so it went on. It was frustrating for Mr Goldberg because he, like me, believed that the first act in this sad scenario was played out before 9 May, and he wanted the jury to know why.
After a while, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Jack as he ducked and dived his way out of Mr Goldberg’s reach. He denied he was party to Patsy’s birthday present and knew nothing of his musical tastes. But he is on tape, drinking Patsy’s health, when Deano made the presentation of the music system.
An important conversation in the prosecution case was the one I had with Jack shortly after midnight in The Elbow Room on 9 May. He denied that his remark about a guy being ‘topped’ in the ‘Dam’ was an attempt to bring drugs into the conversation. He denied he had breached his instructions – not to incite or procure a person to commit an offence. But if he wasn’t trying to do that, why not mention another city and something less gruesome?
Surely he knew that nothing would have come of that drunken nightclub conversation if he had not contacted me the following week and insisted on meeting me in Croydon?
I don’t know who was more pleased to see the back of Jack – me or Mr Goldberg. Hopefully, the jury, who knew nothing of the judge’s PII ruling, would have been concerned at his refusal to answer all those questions. If they weren’t, perhaps big, fat Brian would do the crown case some damage when he squeezed his nineteen stones into the protected area.
Brian had got his act together after being caught with his trousers down at the voire dire. He now admitted he stayed the night at Michelle Hamdouchi’s home after my birthday party, but denied they had sex. He also denied that he knew she was due to turn up at The Swallow Hotel in the early hours of 27 July, and that she gave him oral sex in his hotel room.
Having heard Michelle’s excellent evidence at the voire dire, I could not wait for Mr Goldberg to start his cross-examination of Brian. I felt that whatever he said, or refused to say – there was only one person the jury would believe. And she didn’t have a Geordie accent!
No doubt in an effort to save himself as much as destroy me, Brian quickly accused Michelle of trying to involve him in a mortgage fraud soon after they met in The Elbow Room. But Mr Goldberg dismissed that, telling the court that Brian had not mentioned that point at the pre-trial hearing.
‘It’s a late invention, designed to blacken Miss Ham-douchi’s name, isn’t it?’ he challenged.
Brian said it was not. But it was an early own goal. I could tell it didn’t go down well with the jury.
After that, it was downhill for Brian. He denied this, he denied that and he denied his bit of the other. All not very convincingly.
To the barely disguised delight of the court and the public gallery, Mr Goldberg called Michelle Hamdouchi. I leaned forward in the dock so that I did not miss one word. At that point, I felt my best chance lay with her doing a demolition job on Brian. She did not disappoint.
In a very soft, husky Cheshire accent, Michelle, a respectable mother of three daughters, told the jury she had travelled down from Birmingham ‘to do what was right’. She said Brian kept asking her if I could come up with a cocaine deal. This was helpful to me, because of the entrapment angle, but it was Brian’s sexual indiscretion that would be the most damaging to the prosecution.
Her account of what happened on 11 July left no one in doubt, I’m sure, that Brian and she had full sex, no matter what he claimed. And when she came to the night of The Swallow rendezvous, she had witnesses to back her up.
Brian denied Michelle’s story that he and Jack – who had been drinking in the hotel bar with Spice Girl Victoria Adams – were expecting her to arrive at the hotel. But Jacqui Cave, a bar supervisor at the hotel, told the court that she had overheard them discussing Michelle – and they even passed Brian’s mobile phone to her to give Michelle instructions on how to get to the hotel.
Brian said he was totally surprised when Michelle arrived and ignored her. But Jacqui and two other hotel staff told the jury that the undercover men were not surprised when she turned up and that Brian was, in fact, very chatty with her.
Michelle’s compelling truthfulness spoke for itself when Mr Kelsey-Fry said he would not be enquiring about her love life and had only one question to ask.
‘Would you agree that Brian was a bit of a plonker?’ he asked.
Michelle smiled: ‘Yes.’