Transcription
My name is Alastair Morgan. My younger brother, Daniel, was murdered in 1987, and I have been fighting for justice ever since.
Hi, I'm Neil Woods. I'm a former undercover police officer. And part of what I do now is I investigate corruption within policing. This is how police corruption works.
Woods: We rely on our police for the rule of law, but often, our police get corrupted. And what this means is that they are no longer acting in our interests. They are acting on somebody else's interests or their own interests. There is no more important asset to organized crime than a corrupt police officer, because that corrupt police officer is useful in so many ways.
Morgan: Criminals need corrupt officers. They want somebody who can get rid of a statement or who can alter a surveillance log, or these tiny things. Corrupt police officers also can interfere with an investigation and make a case fail at court.
For me, police corruption is anything that deviates from the oath to police the public without fear or favor. It's quite a neat little phrase, that, "without fear or favor," but it means you don't take bribes, right? Without favor, you don't look after people who are important to the exclusion of people who are less important or seen as less important in our society. "Without fear or favor" is a good way of compressing all that.
So, a corrupt police officer can be put in place by getting somebody who's called a clean skin. They have no previous convictions, and they are coached to join the police, and they remain an asset. And some of them will remain a sleeper asset, where they're not put at any risk. So they're only used for particular types of corruption. Sometimes they are used to help manipulate a third party who is another cop to help use information to blackmail them.
Other information that is really useful to organized crime is information about someone's movements or where someone lives or a phone number or something like that. The more sinister use of information like that is to target rivals. Organized crime always have rivals. Violence is never very far away, because control of the market means a lot of money. And if someone is a threat to that, then violence is used and corrupt police are used to help facilitate that violence. That is something that is a regular use of corrupt assets.
The most common form of corruption that I'm aware of is what we call noble-cause corruption. Now, this is where police do something which is corrupt, but they do it not for their own financial gain, not because they're involved with organized crime, but because they want to catch the bad guy. And they see that the system is against them, and if they'd just tweak the rules a little bit, they've got more chance of getting a conviction.
As an undercover police officer, I saw myself as fighting drugs and organized crime, but I am guilty of some noble-cause corruption. These police approached me and they said that their target for the operation was committing burglaries on old people. And he was doing some very sinister things when he came into their bedroom. He also happened to be a drug dealer. So I was being sent in to quite legitimately investigate him and catch him for dealing drugs.
Now, a fundamental part of the rules was that you must not act as an agent provocateur, which means you must not cause someone to commit a crime if they wouldn't have done anyway, but you must also not cause them to commit a more serious crime than they would've done. Now, this guy wasn't capable of kilos. He just wasn't. But I talked him up. I said I need larger and larger amounts. And he would not have tried to supply a kilo. He ended up adulterating an ounce right down to a kilo. So it was presented as a kilo, and he was caught with a kilo, but it was less than 1% pure. But he pleaded guilty to the trading of a kilo and got substantially more time in prison.
Now, that was wrong of me, but it goes to show how easily you can get fired up by the need to catch dangerous people as a police officer and how noble-cause corruption can creep into it. So I'm guilty of it as well. Now, the problem is that leaves the officer or officers open to manipulation and blackmail where they become puppets for the organised crime.
Now, I know that I upset a lot of police officers when I talk about corruption, because, it's understandable. Most of them, they're good people trying to do the best they can with some pretty crap laws, really. But we have to understand the extent of this, and we have to be clear-eyed about this. We have to be honest about this. It's the only way we have a chance of dealing with it.
Sorry, I — you know, this narrative is something I've gone over so many times. Daniel was my younger brother by a year. At the age of 37, he was murdered with an ax. So it was vicious, brutal, savage attack. Within three weeks, I was convinced, because of the events that took place, there had been police involvement in Daniel's murder, which was a terrifying prospect.
My brother expressed concerns about police corruption about a month before his murder, which was the last time I saw him alive. And he said, "Oh, it's a bent copper." And he named a name, which I cannot, could not recall. It went out of my mind. And then he said, "Alastair, they're all over the place down here." I learned later, a year later at an inquest, that he believed his partner and Sgt. Fillery from the murder squad had been involved in a robbery. And he was thinking of going to an outside force. And then two days later, he was dead. Sidney Fillery, who had been accused of involvement in the murder by another witness, he'd left the police force and within a year was running my brother's company with Jonathan Rees.
After years and years of investigations, some of which, in retrospect, I know were corrupted, an exhibits officer in the first investigation, he was disciplined or given words of advice. And I think that is the only penalty that anybody has suffered. In 2021, I took the decision to sue the Met Police. I do all of everything in consultation with my solicitor, who has stood by me for decades and advised me, helped me keep my sanity in dealing with this, A, he said there are grounds, there are legal grounds to do it. And, B, it's probably the only form of accountability you are ever going to get from these people. And I think accountability, I've been wanting that for 35 years.
The UK police have one of the best records in the world for solving murders. The systems that we have in place are incredible. They're like a well-oiled machine. I've been part of murder-inquiry teams myself a few times, and it's incredible how they function and how efficient they are. Traditionally, in the UK, and certainly around the time of the Morgan murder, the murder-detection rate, the percentage of murders which are solved in the UK, was 90%. 90%. The ones that you don't solve tend to be organized-crime murders. It's shocking it wasn't solved. Like, genuinely shocking. It's quite clear the whole problem was police corruption. And it's quite clear that it wasn't adequately investigated because of police corruption. And then when there were inquiries set up, those inquiries were inadequate, to the point that it's difficult not to conclude that corruption was preventing them working properly.
An informant is somebody who provides information to the police, often referred to as CHIS, a covert human intelligence source, in the UK. So, an informant will generally come into contact with the police when they're arrested for a crime. Organized crime know who within their ranks has just got caught. And they know that they are going to get approached by the police to be asked to be an informant. And so then it becomes a sort of Machiavellian game in how that game, in how that plays out. So often, informants are used to get rid of rivals. Because the market is so competitive, so competitive, that if you get rid of rivals, you actually can make more money. That's the way the market works.
Other ways of informants being involved with the police is they can be paid. And there are some informants who actually earn a living doing this. And informants can get very savvy as to the value, financial value of certain types of information. The trouble is that the majority of informants who present that way, act that way are also working for organized crime.
All of the accountability for the use of informants, CHIS, is internal. All of it. The tasking of an informant has to be authorized by senior officers. But there's nothing to say that those senior officers are not corrupt, either through noble-cause corruption or full corruption. And we know that some of them are.
If a police officer wants to search someone's house, they get a search warrant. In order to get that search warrant, they have to go to a magistrates' clerk and prove to the magistrates' clerk that there is a justification for doing so. The magistrates' clerk will then allow the police officer to apply to a magistrate, and the magistrate will either agree or not. If a CHIS or undercover operative wants to come into your life and if that CHIS, that informant, or undercover operative wants to manipulate you into doing something different, then they can do that. It is the most intrusive thing the police can do. And there is no external oversight at all. It's cops judging cops. And those informants that have that power to come into your life, they're usually criminals, because that's why they're useful.
Whistleblowers do not get looked after in the police in the United Kingdom. My friend [redacted] was in danger of his life for trying to be a whistleblower. He was whistleblowing about corruption and also racism. And his colleagues turned on him. He was bullied. The corrupt cops have a network of supporters, friends, and they will use and manipulate them to fight against the allegation. They will bully them. So there's a directed response by those corrupt cops. But also there is a culture where cops don't want to believe it of their colleagues and will be very suspicious of anyone who is saying anything critical or suggesting them a wrongdoing. They just won't believe it. This is someone that they've been alongside. This is someone who's had their back. This is someone that they've had to rely on, that they've done long night shifts with.
I mean, I know a police officer, former Met officer who came upon serious corruption. He knew about stuff. He was kicking up about it. A man who later became [redacted] for the Independent Police Complaints Commission said to [redacted], my friend, the former police officer, he said, "Well, I'll just drop this. You can get the job that you want." Bribery. Offering to say, you know, you'll get a promotion if you shut up about this. And he wouldn't. But bear in mind that there's also an institutional failure to admit it, because the police have a duty to maintain public confidence. So that means that they don't advertise the extent of the corruption. And they don't want to find out. They don't want the public to think that they're corrupt.
[Redacted] is one of the most energetic and hardworking cops. And he's gone up against organized crime, including transnational organized crime, in his work, but he'd never been in fear of his life until he started whistleblowing on corrupt cops. He had to go into witness protection from the corrupt cops in the Met.
The last defense that the police can have against corruption is the witness protection. Where the police fear that corruption means that those people are not safe, then they are put into a witness protection program, which means they are given a false name, they are moved to a different place. And it's a really brutal thing to have to do to someone. According to the rules of the system, you cannot have any contact, forever, with your friends, your family, your community, anyone you've ever known. And the reason that this horrible system exists is because of how insidious and ubiquitous police corruption is. But of course, even that system gets corrupted. I know someone who worked within the witness protection system. They told me that at least half of their team were actually corrupt and that nobody was safe at all.
The database for the witness protection system is completely isolated from other computer systems. They're not connected at all. So theoretically, they are already bombproof. But of course, any system is only as fallible as the humans operating it. And gangsters don't corrupt computers. They corrupt cops. I myself looked after five protected witnesses. I was acutely aware of the fact that we'd been told the Greater Manchester Police couldn't be trusted in this regard, so that we took the view that we couldn't even necessarily trust the national witness protection system. And we very carefully managed our witnesses for a long time outside that system.
The Met, or the Metropolitan Police, is the police of Greater London. So all of the wider city of London. The Met operates in a different way to every other police force in the UK. It has various centralized responsibilities that other police don't have. So, for example, they are in charge of terrorist investigations. They have the National Crime Agency in London as well, so they work closer with the National Crime Agency. And they have other central responsibilities as well. The Met gets a lot of bad press. They get most of the attention for anything that goes wrong, and people want to bash the Met. But I have to say, in this case, the Met does have the biggest problem with corruption in the United Kingdom. It does. I mean, it's hardly surprising. It's by far the biggest police service. There's more organized crime concentrated in London.
There was an internal investigation, an operation called Operation Tiberius in the Metropolitan Police, it's many years ago now, and it showed the sheer extent of corrupt police. And most of those corrupt police were manipulated and corrupted by the informant system. Now, part of the response to that, although there's never been any public response from the Met, that report's never really been addressed, one response to that was the idea that you can defend against corruption by limiting the number of years a source handler can work in that role. And it's limited in most police sources now around the country to five years. And this was seen as a way of helping prevent this corruption that was this development over time, this corrupting over time that was happening. But all that's happened is it's actually cast the net wider for organized crime. It's given them more opportunities and more people to come into contact with. It's completely gone against the Met. And I do know that that corruption still exists.
I have to make something really, really clear about corruption. At least 99% of corruption within the police is caused by the money from the illicit drugs market. There isn't enough value in any other crime to cause the kind of corruption that exists. The black economy with drugs, et cetera, is vast. And the amount of money that these drug barons have sloshing around and to use to bribe, their tentacles reach into every level of the judiciary, the police, politicians. So that kind of money, it creates corruption.
I have had very personal experiences and come up against this corruption. There was lots of pressure on me to get intelligence and find out about a particular gang called The Bestwood Cartel, who at that time were at war with everybody in Nottingham. There was daily shootings. And I'd been on that operation for four and a half months. I'd just got a really significant breakthrough. I'd managed to buy some drugs off one of the lieutenants of Colin Gunn. The next day, we'd been working very long hours, and two of my backup team went off sick. And so I was introduced to two new police officers that had not been involved in that operation before. I met the first one, shook his hand, had no problem with him. The second one, I shook his hand, and the hairs just went up on the back of my neck. This guy was just wrong. So I went to the senior investigating officer for the operation and said, "Look, boss, I cannot have this cop knowing what I'm doing. I just can't. I don't trust him. I won't be able to relax." And he said, "Fine." I didn't think much more of it. But then 12 months later, when Colin Gunn was actually brought down, it turned out that this cop I'd taken exception to, a guy called Charlie Fletcher, was an employee of Colin Gunn. As I say, he was an employee, but he was paid to join the police. And he was paid £2,000 a month on top of his police wages, plus bonuses for good information. He'd been in the police for seven years by the time he was caught. When he was introduced to me, he knew I was undercover. And he was very, very close to finding out exactly what I was up to. Now, at the start of that operation involving that corrupt police officer, Colin Gunn was letting everybody on the streets know that if he ever caught an undercover police officer, he would be snatched off the street and tortured to death. So those were the stakes that we were working with.
The biggest sums of money, black money floating round, are from the drugs world. And that is a major, a major influence on police corruption. Has been for a long time, I think. My view is that drugs are a public-health problem. They should not be criminalized. And that the supply should be taken into the hands of the state in order to deprive organized crime of the funding to corrupt. I think our drugs policy is completely crazy.
I know I upset a lot of British police by talking about the corruption in this country, but we still have at least a claim to the best police in the world. We do. There is a lot to be proud of in the United Kingdom, in our police, but we have the same problem as the rest all around the world, is that organized crime control the drug supply. So in that, we have things in common with every other police service around the world. There really is nothing we can do about police corruption as long as the power is in the hands of organized crime. We can try and tweak our systems here and there. We can try and increase our vetting, but it really won't make any difference at all, because this is about the fact that organized crime are rich, and they are rich because they are in control of the drug supply. And as long as that goes on, police corruption is not only inevitable, it will be ubiquitous.
Producer: So, in the police corruption that was happening that you witnessed, why? Why was that happening?
Well, I think that there were drugs involved in that as well. I suspect, strongly suspect that there were police involvement with drugs in that. Yeah, corruption and racism are two elements of the same thing. How widespread it is, I really don't know. I think you'd have to ask somebody else about that.
My name is Sayce Holmes-Lewis. I was first assaulted by the Met Police aged 14. Since then, I've been stopped over 30 times. This is how police racism works.