Article

Scotland Yardies

(about police involvement in drugs and crime)

On 10th July 1997 a Jamaican national, Eaton Green, lost his battle to avoid deportation to Jamaica. Green's counsel, in seking to resist a deportation order, had argued that Green, a polic informer serving six years for armed robbery, had been told by a Metrolpolitan Police intelligence officer that he would be "protected".

The High Court judge, Mr Justice Jarrett, ruled that the Home Office was not bound by any such undertaking. Eaton Green's original trial, for a robbery in Nottingham, attracted a flurry of media attention because of the revelation that he had carried out the robbery and dealt crack and run a South London protection racket, whiole operating as an informer, and furhter, that Green's handlers (in particular PC Steve Barker) had full knowledge of his activities and attempted to protect him from arrest and prosecution by Nottingham police. The line adopted by the media in relation to this, and subsequent reveltations about "Yardie" informers, was that good "street cops" under pressure, under resourced and unsupported, had bent rules to try to effectively tackle a "Yardie" crime wave. The main proponent of this line is a Guardian journalist, Nick Davies. "How the Yardies Duped the Yard" was the headline of an article he wrote on 3/2/97.

Whether Davies believes what he writes is open to question. The articles themselves read like a damage limitation exercise drafted by Scotland Yard's press office. Their central proposition, though, does not stand up to examination. They do not fit with the facts.

In his 3rd February article, Davies opens with "Ten years ago, Scotland Yard realised that organised criminals from jamaica - the Yardies - were moving into London. By 1987 they wre pumping crack cocaine into black housing estates and establishing their control with terrifying violence. The response from police was chaotic and pathetic. A 1993 official report warned that "unless there is a consistent, aggressive and long term strategy", drug related crime would soar." In fact, Scotland yard's "yardie" strategy stems froma meeting in 1989 between UK police officers and Robert Stutman, then head of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, in which he warned that most crack dealing in the US was controlled by two ethnic groups - Dominicans and Jamaicans - and that these gangs were determined to engineer a "crack explosion" in the UK. Up until 1989, Yard policy had been in the hands of Roy Ramm, who stated soon after his appointment in 1987 "I'm absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as a black mafia or black Godfather operating in this country".

In 1988 armed police raided the New Four Aces club in Dalston to target suspected Yardie gang dealing in cocaine. The raid netted Ł6,000 worth of cocaine - not a significant quantity given that a kilo of coke carries a street value of about Ł160,000. Further Metrtolpolitan Police fiugures for 1989 show 58 grams of crack being seized in the whole year, compared to 331 kilos of heroin, 424 kilos of cocaine and 50,000 kilos of cannabis. In consequence of this, for all the apocalyptic proclamations of the likes of Stutman, police units like Operation Lucy were in fact wound down. The journalist Jim Davison, a former Sunday Times writer, and like Nick Davies, a propoonent of the "Yardie" myth, reports a dscussion with Roy Ramm at the time as follows: "It is a loose association of violent criminals bent on making profits from drugs and then spending them as quickly as possible", he (Ramm) said. Unlike the Mafia or the Colombian cartels, the gangs opted for a "little and often" method of importation rather than large scale smuggling operations."The end result of this is, as Davies reports, a Yardie Squad set up and killed off within six months in 1990, and the establishment of Operation Dalehouse in 1991, to target what the Squad Commander DS John Jones (who I'm sure would throw his hands in the air in Hendon-shaded outrage if numbered as a racist) called "a fairly wide-based criminal fraternity of black British people." So successful were they that this squad also wound up in November 1992. Davies throws up a smokescreen around the reality of Operation Dalehouse. He writes that it "made 274 arrests often for attacks on black victims. John Jones feared tgat part of the problem was that black victims of crime attracted less press attention, and therefore tempted the policy makers at Scotland Yard to ignore them. And all the time that the generals at Scotland Yard were ordering their footsoldiers to retreat, there were more Yardies flowing into London." In truthOPeration Dalehouse did make 274 arrests, but of these only 25 were chraged with serious criminal offences, and the Sunday Times journalist Davison concedes the squad met with a "lack of co-operation from the local community."

The end result was that by 1993, according to Davies, his heroes were reduced to "a hrad copre of half a dozen detectives and immigration officers who were still trying to tackle the Yardies. They had no office and no facilities and were reduced to using the bar of a small pub in Southwark where.. they swapped intelligence and tried to cobble together a strategy.... oficers had been forced to spend their won money to fund operations." It's here that Davies' argument begins to fall apart. Soon after pleading poverty on the anti-Yardie squad's behalf, he revelas that the Drug Related Violence Intelligence Unit (which Davies snidely notes was so named to avoid triggering complaints of racism) ran an informer code-named Andrew Gold who was able to live a life of indulgence, driving around in a Golf GTI, eating expensive meals, drinking fine wines, playing golf, making endless transatlantic phone calls and sleeping in a luxury furnished flat with a view of the Thames - all supplied at the British taxpayers expense." Not bad for an outfit that Davies had earlier told us was reduced to running its operations form a pub back room at its own expense.

Davies provides details of 3 Yardies informers run by one SO11 linked DRVIU. Andrew Gold, we are told, produced a report on the Yardies in London which contaied no useable new intelligence, at a cost of more than $45,000, before returning to Jamaica in January 1994.

Eaton green carried out armed robberies and ran protection rackets inder the proetection of the unit. The DRVIU cannot deny that they protected Green. Cecil Thomas and Rohan Thomas came into the UK on March 28th 1993 on false passports, to work qwith Green. An immigration officer who wroked with the DRVIU, Brian Fotheringham, secured residence rghtts for Green after he married a British national whose child he claimed he'd fathered, even though tyhe child's date of birth made clear that the women in question had been pregnant for four months before she met Green. At Green's robbery trial, DRVIU officers made illegal approaches to both the Crown Prosecution Service and the trial judge to try to protect Green. From May 1994, Fotheringham and PC Steve Barker ran another informer, Delroy Denton, who had agreed to work for the SO11-linked team following his arrest after a raid on the Atlantic pub in Brixton. Immigration's initial assessment iof Denton was as a "dangerous Jamaican criminal, given 16 years in Jamaica for firearms/aggravated burglary offences." Following the intervention of Fotheringham and Barker, Denton was back on the streets. On 19th December 1994, Denton raped a 15 year old schoolgirl. On 1st February 1995 the CPS dropped a rape charge against him on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Fotheringham and Barker continued to run Denton, who byis stage had acquired a reputation as a psychotic, who Davies concedes fantasised about "how he would like to tell a man and a woman that hje was going to kill them, then order them to stay and have sex, and then when the man was too scared to perform, he would rape the woman himselfbefore he blew out both their brains". In April 1995, Denton entered a flat in Brixton and raped and stabbed to death a 24 year old mother of 2, Marcia Lawes. Denton was charged with murder on 29th June 1995. On 29th October 1995 the CPS again dropped the charge because iof "insufficient evidence".

The Number Five Area Major Investigation Pool detectives investigating Denton contacted Fotheringham and advised him of the informers' status as an illegal immigrant. Fotheringham refused to act. Barker, with full knowledge of senior SO11 officers, continued to meet Denton. In July 1996, following further AMIP work, Denton was jailed for life. Nick Davies argues that the DRVIU was starved of "power and leadership" and in consequence, front-line officers, with falling morale, committed errors in the field. "In the background, Scotland Yard's policy makers blocked a series of anti-Yardie initiatives which had been proposed by front-line officers." This is bullshit.

Whatever Davies and the media management teams at Scotland Yard are trying to conceal, the chronology of their cover story makes no sense. The DRVIU was, we are told, set up following recommendations from Detective Chief Superintendent (now deputy Assistant Commissioner) Ray Clark. Clark made 35 recommendations and delivered a report which concluded "It has been made abundantly clear by all I have spoken to that unless there is a consistent, aggressive and long term strategy to deal with Jamaican criminals in London, there will be ever and sharply increasing incidents of murder, violence, drug related crime and crack availability." Davies would have it that "the policy makers at Scotlasnd Yard then sidelined a substantial number if Clark's 35 recommendations", and things then began to go wrong.

But Eaton Green was arrested on July 8th 1993, only 2 days after Clark signed his report and BEFORE the DRVIU was officially established. Both Eaton greena nd Andrew Gold (with his $45,000 budget) were being run by Scotland Yard officers efore Clark delivered his report. Green and Gold were only able to remain in the UK due to the manouevres of immigration officers like Brian Fotheringham. If Scotland Yard policy indded led to the "almost complete breakdown of the Metroplotan Police strategic response (to Yardie crime) and of the formal intelligence gathering and development structure" and if the anti-Yardie squad was really reduced to a Southwark frinking club how and why were the resources to run Gold and Green obtained? If Barker and Fotheringham had already overseen Eaton green's crime spree of their own initiative, and with a PR disaster and the souring of relations between the Yard and Nottingham CID the chief results, why accept Clark's report at all?