The entire criminal justice system was infiltrated by
organised crime gangs, according to a secret Scotland Yard report leaked to The
Independent.
In 2003 Operation Tiberius found that men suspected of being
Britain’s most notorious criminals had compromised multiple agencies, including
HM Revenue & Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service, the City of London
Police and the Prison Service, as well as pillars of the criminal justice
system including juries and the legal profession.
The strategic intelligence scoping exercise – “ratified by
the most senior management” at the Met – uncovered jurors being bought off or
threatened to return not-guilty verdicts; corrupt individuals working for HMRC,
both in the UK and overseas; and “get out of jail free cards” being bought for
£50,000.
The report states that the infiltration made it almost
impossible for police and prosecutors to successfully pursue the organised
gangs that police suspected controlled much of the criminal underworld.
The author of Tiberius, which was compiled from intelligence
sources including covert police informants, live telephone intercepts,
briefings from the security services and thousands of historical files, came to
the desperate conclusion: “Quite how much more damage could be done is
difficult to imagine.”
The fresh revelations come a day after The Independent
revealed that Tiberius had concluded the Metropolitan Police suffered “endemic
police corruption” at the time, and that some of Britain’s most dangerous
organised crime syndicates were able to infiltrate New Scotland Yard “at will”.
In its conclusions, the report stated: “The true assessment
of the damage caused by these corrupt networks is impossible to make at this
stage, until further proactive scoping has been undertaken.
“However a statement by an experienced SIO [senior
investigating officer] currently attached to SO 1(3) gives some indication of
the depth of the problem in east and north-east London: ‘I feel that at the
current time I cannot carry out an ethical murder investigation without the
fear of it being compromised.’
“The ramifications of this statement are serious and
disturbing and provide a snapshot of the current threat to the criminal justice
system. Additionally the fact that none of these syndicates have been seriously
disrupted over the last five years provides an insight into the effectiveness
of their networks.”
In one case identified by Tiberius, a leading criminal was
acquitted of importing cannabis after he allegedly “bought” members of the jury
hearing his case. A named police officer “was involved in some way or another”,
according to the report.
Tiberius also revealed the Met was concerned at the time
with a national newspaper story on the ability of the Adams family to escape
the law by penetrating the criminal justice system.
In 1998, police appeared to have finally made a breakthrough
when Tommy Adams was jailed for more than seven years for importing cannabis.
However, the article cited by Tiberius stated that the “only
reason the Adams family had allowed the prosecution to succeed and had not
resorted to bribery or intimidation to thwart it, was because the other
brothers wanted to teach Tommy a lesson for getting involved in crimes they had
not authorised”.
The article concluded: “Witnesses terrified into silence,
dodgy jurors, bent lawyers, bent policemen and bent CPS clerks – all are part
of the same cancer eating away at justice. A cure for the malady will not be
easy to come by. Perhaps we should begin by acknowledging that the patient is
sick.”
Tiberius disclosed that the Met interviewed the journalist
who wrote the story after the murder of Solly Nahome, a Jewish money launderer
credited as the “brains” behind the Adams’ criminal empire. The reporter stated
one of her journalistic sources on the family was a corrupt police officer but
did not disclose who it was.
Another case of corruption beyond the Met, identified by
Tiberius, included intelligence of alleged foul play within HMRC, which is
supposed to lead the UK’s fight against white-collar crime such as money
laundering.
In 2000, according to Tiberius, a key police informant was
secretly helping Scotland Yard with an investigation into the importation of
£10m of heroin by a Turkish gang in north London.
The deal went wrong, the informant was tortured in a cellar
and “an attempt was made to sever his fingers with a pair of garden shears”.
His associate was also attacked and had “three fingers chopped off with a
machete”.
The henchman Tiberius alleged had committed the assaults was
the son of a named Met detective, who repeatedly tried to impede police
inquiries into the case, according to Tiberius.
He also had a corrupt
relationship with a named detective sergeant then based in Marylebone police
station who is suspected to have “organised cheque frauds”. Research conducted
by The Independent suggests that none of the three men has ever been
prosecuted.
The Turkish drug dealer was later convicted and told police
he was an HMRC informant. He said he knew of “corrupt contacts within the
police” and had a Cyprus-based customs officer as a handler who “took money off
him”.
Alastair Morgan, whose brother Daniel was murdered in 1987
before he could expose links between Met officers and organised crime, told The
Independent: “Despite all the protestations by police that things have changed
since the ‘bad old days’, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
“The police have no desire to tackle this. It would be too
damaging to have it all aired in open court. The Met is a highly political
organisation.”
Scotland Yard said: “[We] will not tolerate any behaviour by
our officers and staff which could damage the trust placed in police by the
public. We are determined to pursue corruption in all its forms and with all
possible vigour. All such allegations and intelligence are taken extremely
seriously.”
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