Five time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
The dates and places of the robberies:
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Who was the most corrupt officer in the Met’ and the City of London Police? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of Great Ormond Street Hospital in Bloomsbury, WC1; three streets north of Kyu Soo Kim the sadistic Korean landlord who tortured his tenants, two streets north-east of the killing of Jean Stafford, the same building where the Camden Ripper was arrested, and the street where a blotto Russian spy blabbed a little too much about his “secret” - coming soon to Murder Mile. If you hate the sound of kids crying because the stupid snot-covered little git’s got something stuck up their nose, ear, eye, arsehole, or any available orifice not currently being blocked with a toy, a jelly-tot or a car key, then avoid Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. Yes, they do amazing work for sick children, but where there’s misery and grief, there’s always someone who is there to exploit it. I’m talking about ‘chuggers’, charity muggers, those bored students who pester you into donating £20 a month via direct debit, even though only part of what you pay, if any, actually goes to the charity. On 19th of November 1993, 64-year-old Commander Hugh Moore, the third most senior officer in the City of London Police challenged a bogus ‘chugger’ who claimed he was raising funds for the hospital. Commander Moore was assaulted and fought back sustaining abrasions to his face, arms and legs, although he survived the attack, eleven days later, he died of heart failure exacerbated by the assault. Commander Hugh Moore, a respected officer of 38 years service and recipient of the Queen’s Police Medal, was buried at Bells Hill Burial Ground in Chipping Barnet, around the time he was due to retire. But when Hugh’s overworked heart finally gave out, it was that unprovoked act of violence by a greedy conman which ensured that one of the biggest secrets in the Police’s history would vanish forever. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 340: The Real ‘H’. In 2012, the BBC launched the TV drama series ‘Line of Duty’, a police procedural following the exploits of AC12 (Anti-Corruption Unit 12), based on the Metropolitan Police’s A10, established in 1971 to root out corruption within the force. Currently filming, this seventh series of ‘Line of Duty’ will unravel the conundrum of who is ‘H’, the Police’s highest ranking corrupt officer, who many believe was fictional… …but he wasn’t, he was real. Across the mid-1970s, security vans were being successfully robbed in the Met’ and the City of London at a rate of 1 every 11 days, and being well organised and professional, few of the felons were caught. On Monday 3rd of May 1976, as they did every week, on the third floor, deep within of the Daily Express newspaper offices on Fleet Street, two guards for Securicor unloaded 8 sacks containing the weekly payroll of £175,000 (£1.7 million today) behind the secure doors of the cashier’s office. It was signed for, and the 12 workers within were ready to dole it out, being in an era when many were paid in cash. The delivery was as routine as it had been so many times before, until a second set of guards arrived. Wearing identical dark blue overalls, black boots, crash helmets with the Securicor logo and their faces obscured by realistic beards and wigs, brandishing shotguns and pistols, the fake security guards burst into the payroll office, shouted “it’s a raid”, and ushered the staff to raise their hands, as they grabbed the cash. Two real guards barricaded themselves in a conference room with a £20,000 bag, but the fake team weren’t here to haggle, and within seconds, they calmly walked out with seven full bags. The raiders were fast and professional, they each had a job to do, they executed it with precision, and escaped the same way they had got in by ‘walking with purpose’ down the maze of corridors to the back entrance (avoiding every locked door or guard), with no-one stopping them as they blended in. On Shoe Lane, they hoped into a transit van and sped north, switched to a faster getaway car which were both later burnt out, and although shotgun cartridges were found and two detectives from the ‘Flying Squad’ reported they were chasing them through London, they all got away. The money was never found, no-one was arrested and it was so well planned, detectives assumed it was an inside job. But who? Someone at the newspaper, a security guard, or a cashier? They stole a fortune, but it wasn’t a one-off robbery. 16 months later, on Tuesday 27th of September 1977, just after 11am, a Securicor van was pulling into Birchin Lane, EC3, a narrow side street off Lombard Street in City’s of London’s banking district. Having just left the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, two guards for Securicor were delivering £520,000 (over £5 million today) to the rear entrance of Williams & Glyn's Bank at 67 Lombard Street. As before, arriving in a similar transit van to not arouse suspicion, this robbery had been planned to perfection, but executed by a different gang of men in balaclavas for whom patience wasn’t a virtue, what began as a professional heist by experienced robbers, soon descended into a series of cock ups. In the struggle, they shot one of the security guards in the leg. As he began to bleed out, they could only grab half of the money in the van, as their driver panicked and fled. Seeing their getaway vehicle speeding down Birchin Lane and leaving some of the robbers behind, witnesses were stunned as three masked men gave chase to their own transit van, dropping money, cartridges and revolvers in pursuit. Only, the second the robbers caught up with the van, leaving a flurry of notes swirling behind, typically their Transit van got snarled up in the London traffic, and after just 50 yards, the gang split. One half into a Cortina, the others in another Transit, firing shots as they fled, and drawing a lot of attention. With the Police nowhere to be seen, having been alerted to the attack, a passing Securicor van gave chase, rammed the Cortina with its bull-bars, and with it buckled and broken, the raiders (one who was hanging out of the rear doors and bleeding heavily) fled, leaving their cut of the money behind. With everyone in every building on Moorgate hearing the shots and watching this calamity unfold, the gang hijacked a chauffeur driver Mercedes outside the Fuji bank, and as they fled again – shooting as the Securicor van kept ramming them, and spilling more cash across the street – their new getaway car made its way over Southwark Bridge, and abandoning it under the railway arches, they hijacked a taxi at gunpoint, and the robbers finally vanished into thin air, just not as rich as they could have been. With fingerprints, eyewitnesses, bloodstains, smashed cars and bullet holes littering the streets, and security cameras at Williams & Glyn’s Bank having filmed part of the attack, ‘Flying Squad’ detectives reeled in all the usual suspects, and six men were arrested for assault, weapons and armed robbery. In court, it was the detectives’ duty to object to the robbers being given bail rather than being held on remand in prison, but they didn’t. And one by one, all six of the suspects were released without charge. Witnesses were discredited, evidence fell apart, and although it looked as if the investigation had been bungled by the detectives, suspicion had been growing that the gang had been tipped off by the police. But who? A bad apple, or a whole bushel? For years, rumours had been circulating that the Met’ and City of London Police was a criminal gang in its own right, a firm within a firm, where bent coppers gave robbers bail, evidence vanished, charges were quashed, the innocent were ‘fitted up’ for crimes, and junior officers were baptised into the bad practices of their corrupt seniors by taking “a drink” – £50, cash in hand, to do as they were told. Former City of London detective Lew Tassell said, that when his commanding officer, DCI Phil Cuthbert handed him £50 (£350 today) he said “‘I’ve got a drink for you, Lew’… It was expected of me to accept it. It was part of the culture… the higher you went, the bigger the drink”. Corruption was endemic. Word was that it went right to the very top. But who was ‘H’? Since 1972, the A10 anti-corruption unit had been rooting out bent coppers in two key departments in the Police; the ‘Flying Squad’ who tackled armed robbery and CID who handled drugs, murder, fraud and organised crime, with both having a fearsome reputation for brutality by operating above the law. They knew how to fabricate evidence, silence witnesses and corruption existed in a culture of silence. Like the mafia, any copper who ratted-out a bent officer to A10 would find themselves shunned by their pals, demoted by the boss, maimed by masked hoodlums, or taking a swim in a ‘cement raincoat’. ‘Operation Countryman’ was a slow, fragmented and politically sensitive internal investigation, which many resented, but in the early days, it had aided to the successful conviction of three bad apples. Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, head of the Met’ Police’s ‘Flying Squad’ was convicted on 7th of July 1977 of five counts of corruption and sentenced to eight years in prison. Living lavishly, far beyond his meagre salary, he regularly took ‘BIG drinks’ from Jimmy Humphries, ‘Soho’s Caesar of porn’ – whether money, holidays, cars – in return for protecting his gang or influencing investigations. He was the Met’s most senior officer jailed for corruption – and along with Commander Wally Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Obscene Publications Squad who pocketed £53,000 between them in 16 months – it proved corruption wasn’t at street-level, it went to the top. Twelve other officers were convicted and many more resigned. But he wasn’t ‘H’, so who was? Someone at the top was pulling strings and could destabilise any investigation, so a decision was made to move it away from A10, the Met’s own anti-corruption unit, and with the City of London Police (a small force of a few 100 officers tasked with protecting London’s financial district) not having their own anti-corruption unit, in 1973, seasoned detectives from regional forces like Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall (with no connections to the Met, the ‘Flying Squad’ or CID) were drafted in to investigate. It had begun as a rumour, not just from criminal informants, but lawyers, journalists and officers, and with political pressure mounting, ‘Operation Countryman’ needed enough evidence to arrest the king maker in this corrupt house of cards, so others would fall, and it would be seen as just a whitewash. There was no respect by the Met’ or City of London Police for the detectives at Operation Countryman, as in a piss-take to the crime drama ‘The Sweeney’, referencing their country bumpkin roots, they had been nicknamed ‘The Swede-y’. In retort, these rural plods wore a squad tie which summed up their attitude - a small country mouse flicking a mid-digit to a hovering eagle, the Flying Squad’s symbol. The officers of ‘Operation Countryman’ weren’t here to make friends, but arrests… …and although the bent detectives of CID and Flying Squad thought little of the bribes they were taking as these armed payroll robberies were insured, it came crashing down when blood was on their hands. On Wednesday the 31st of May 1978, at the offices of the Daily Mirror newspaper at 33 Holborn Circus, EC1, an eleven-storey tower containing both their news offices and their printing presses, the weekly payroll of £197,500 (£2 million) was being delivered by the green and yellow van of ‘Security Express’. At 11am, as always, as the massive steel shutters were opened, 38-year-old Antonio Castro known as ‘Tony’ drove it into the loading bay, the shutters were closed and padlocked behind them, and inside, Tony and his colleague Mark oversaw its transfer in a wooden box to two Mirror Group security men. It was safe, secure and out of sight, or so they thought. In advance, two of the raiders had already got into the building, and being dressed in printer’s overalls, they blended in. At 11:06am, as the last bag was unloaded from the van, they walked to the shutters, broke the padlocks with bolt cutters, opened them up, and as a stolen Mercedes roared inside, the security manager recalled “all hell broke loose”. The walls echoed with shouting, shotguns were waved, and as the Mercedes skidded into position, the boiler-suited bandits started hurling bags of cash into the boot. It began calmly enough, with hands held high and the guards doing as they were told in this heist which lasted just three minutes, but as the Mirror’s guards fought back, and slammed one of the robber’s wrists in the box, it turned to chaos. Tony rushed forward, and as the robber spun, he was shot at point blank range, just below his heart. With the boot full, the Mercedes roared into Hatton Garden, and with the traffic light and not one single constable anywhere to be seen, as the alarms wailed in this area where several newspapers and banks had been robbed of a fortune in the last three years, they vanished into the distance. They dumped the Mecedes on Dorrington Street, wiped it clean, and switched to a Rover 3500 parked in Leopards Court, later found burnt out, with both stolen weeks before and hidden in the interim. The raid was professional and well-planned having gained entry to this secure building, they knew the timings of the delivery, and to ensure that their guns were small enough to hide in their overalls, but with maximum force, they’d modified long-barrelled 45 calibre revolvers to shoot shotgun cartridges. The security guards gave excellent descriptions of the raiders, as printed in the Daily Mirror, alongside their photofits and offering a £5000 reward for information. The newspaper wanted names and blood. The next day, across their front page was splashed photos of the robbery and a mock-up of one of the robber’s tattoos on his left arm, “3 ½ inches long of a smiling sailor in a red hat and a red stripe across his chest”, as seen by Alistair Scott, whose lorry blocked their path as he was making a delivery, and when the driver shouted “get that f**king motor out of the way”, Alistair went to give him a mouthful, but seeing their guns, he reversed his lorry back, and the Mercedes roared out of Brooke’s Market. It would have been - at this point - that with the robbers having got away Scott free, if they had been arrested by an enterprising young officer with a name to make, the bent coppers could have leant on the witness, fabricated any evidence, and – for a sizeable fee of about £50,000 – if they had ended in court, the dodgy detectives could have ensured they were bailed with the charges dropped. But with a murder charge hanging over them, that’s a lot harder to do. One detective said “this was a cold blooded murder, no more, no less. It was as simple as that. A bastard horrible murder”. 38-year-old Antonio Castro, ‘Tony’ to his pals was a former Spanish soldier who came from Carballo in the north-west of Spain. In 1965, he and his wife Carmen came to the UK with a plan to stay for a year, but as Carmen later said “we liked England from the beginning, we thought the land was like magic”. With his wife working as domestic staff whilst training to be a nurse, Tony worked an orderly at East Grinstead hospital, but always feeling he wanted his life to have meaning and excitement, in 1974, he joined ‘Security Express’ as an armoured van guard and driver. It was a job he truly loved, and as Carmen said, “that job was what he had been looking for all his life”, but he knew it was dangerous. In 1976, two years before, Tony was shot in the ankle during a bank raid, his friends and family asked him to quit, but as Mark, his fellow guard in the Daily Mirror robbery said “he was one of the best… Tony loved the danger. He was a brave man who could never stand by”, even on a pitiful wage of just 84p an hour. He’d been a security guard for four years, and with Carmen now working as a nurse at St Bart’s Hospital, six weeks before, they had just moved into their new terraced home in Wandsworth. It was to St Bart’s that Tony was taken when he was shot, and where he died. Carmen was so shocked and distraught that she had to be sedated, with a friend stating “Tony and his wife knew that this day might come. We told him he should become a waiter, but he wouldn’t listen. It was his job, his life”. A week later, feeling the pressure from the people, the politicians and the newspapers to catch these criminals who always seemed to evade justice, on the 5th of June 1978, Police arrested William Tobin of Albion Street in Rotherhithe, the next day Anthony White of Aragon Towers in Deptford, and found a lock-up full of wigs, masks, overalls, helmets, cutting tools, two pistols and six sawn-off shotguns. On the 11th of June, three men (one who was already out on bail for armed robbery at the time of the heist) were charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, an investigation into murder was opened, and bail was refused. The detectives had everything they needed to convict all three for their crimes. But being leaned on from above, the ID parades proved fruitless, evidence was misplaced, paperwork went missing, and although they had been charged, all three were subsequently bailed, and released. But who had the power to derail an investigation, and to reroute constables on a beat? It is said, that on the day of the Daily Mirror robbery, the officers who should have been guarding the financial district at that time had been sent to Wood Green police station, seven miles north for a forensics course. At around noon, being handed a note reporting the robbery, the officer hosting the course beamed a broad smile – he was the third highest ranking officer in the City of London Police and a respected veteran who had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal - Commander Hugh Moore. ‘Operation Countryman’ were investigating allegations against 84 Met’ officers and 29 from the City of London, accused of bribery, planting evidence and conspiring with robbers and facilitating false bail. But how could they get to him? What they needed was a senior detective who was ready to crumble. Detective Chief Inspector Phillip Cuthbert was the commanding officer of the CID in the City of London Police. Based out of Bishopsgate Police station, the epicentre of the financial square mile’s corruption which was ran by Commander Hugh Moore, Cuthbert openly spoke about how “taking a drink was a way of life”, with officers helping themselves to confiscated goods and making a fortune out of crime. Cuthbert also dealt with Alf Shepherd, a seemingly respectable shopkeeper who acted as the middle man between the coppers and the criminals, who covertly in a café near to Bishopsgate Police station, passed a lot of dirty money back-and-forth to ensure that dangerous men walked free from justice. DCI Cuthbert was cocky, brash, and heavily indoctrinated into the ways that being a bent copper was a good money-making wheeze, in 1978, he tried to bribe DCI John Simmonds, the new Head of CID for the City of London Police, who was formerly part of Metropolitan Police's A10 anti-corruption unit. John was clean as a whistle, honest as a nun, and as they say, “once A10, always A10”. He loved his job, he despised the corruption within, but with Cuthbert as his supposed friend, he got him to talk… …but he needed it on tape. On the 27th of September 1978, DCI Simmonds invited DCI Cuthbert to the pubs for a few pints to chat about the job, the cases and the investigation but mostly grumble about their bosses. Across the next three hours, Cuthbert thought John was a sympathetic ear, but having been fitted with a microphone, he expertly steered the conversation to the corruption, and recorded a wealth of damning evidence. Cuthbert said “CID received silly £50s… all the fucking evidence we gave was bent… I tell you, big drinks came in the robbery squad when they nicked Roberts”, who they released for the Williams & Glyn job. “We told them to give him a straight run”, meaning to drop charges, and with corruption starting at the top of the tree, Operation Countryman was getting nearer to ‘H’, and Cuthbert was nervous. On the tape, Cuthbert said he feared that “Commander Moore was trying to make me the ’patsy’, I’ve been set up”, and that Moore was “the greatest unhung villain” in London and “a greedy bastard”. Cuthbert blabbed about everyone; ‘Ginger’ Dixon, head of Scotland Yard’s robbery squad, “I used to bung Roy Yorke and it’d go up the fucking top of the tree to the ACs (assistant commissioners)”. As for the robberies; “Moore did the Daily Express job, and I know what he copped on it”, in the William’s & Glyn job “he told the City force not to fabricate verbal admissions against them, but to give them a straight run”, and that “Moore received £20,000 for allowing bail during the Express investigation”. Cuthbert stated “Hughie’s run Bishopsgate and half the City Police for years and years and years”, and when pressed on how much money he’d made, Cuthbert said “I heard word of sixty to ninety grand”. With a confession on tape, DCI Cuthbert was suspended awaiting trial and with Operation Countryman expanded, their ultimate prize wasn’t the detective sergeant and the three detective constables they had so far charged, but the big boss at the top who was controlling all of the Police’s corruption – ‘H’. It was then that it all started to collapse. Some blamed the fact that ‘Countryman’ was ran by inexperienced regional detectives not used to big city ways. Others blamed the fact that the Met’ obstructed their investigation at every turn. On the 18th of February 1980, the Director of Public Prosecutions offered no evidence against DCI Cuthbert and he walked free, they denied immunity for any officers who had cooperated in the investigation, and ‘Countryman’ was handed to CIB2, Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption team, formerly known as A10. The investigation was wound down, convictions were quashed, and even though Sir Peter Matthews, Chief Constable of Surrey resigned in protest as CIB2 was not holding an independent investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Patrick Kavanagh of the Met’ stated “corruption in the police is unfounded”. All the witness statements were seized, and in 1982, following the trial of DCI Phillip Cuthbert and ex- Detective Sergeant John Goldbourn, in a ‘show’ trial which many claimed was little more an excuse to lay the blame on the two officers - as if they were lone bad apples - Goldbourn was sentenced to two years in prison, Cuthbert to three years, and with that ‘Operation Countryman’ ceased to exist. (End) James Miskin QC, said at the trial, “Justice in England has been for countless years the admiration of the free world, and corruption by police officers strikes at its very roots”, but across this six-week trial, he was accused of selling bail to the six men arrested in the Williams and Glyn robbery for £10,000 a head and a similar deal for the Daily Mirror robbery, and although the secret recording had painted Commander Hugh Moore as a criminal, he was questioned, but no charges were brought against him. DCI Cuthbert was hailed as an efficient ‘thief-taker’ and as an unscrupulous officer who liked to trade with criminals and “made no secret of his ambition to get very rich and retire early”. No other officers were convicted, none of the robbers were tried, and the investigation was sealed and filed away. That year, after 27 years of dedicated service to CID and A10, DCI John Simmonds retired having been “hounded out by Commander Hugh Moore”. Moore remained in the Police for 10 more years, being awarded the Queen's Police Medal in the 1992 New Year's Honours, and across his career, he received eleven commendations. He remains a respected, highly lauded officer in the history of British policing. On the 19th of November 1993, having confronted a bogus charity worker outside of Great Ormond Street Hospital, this vicious attack by a conman had left him with several cuts, but with his heart unable to cope, he died 11 days later. Owen Kelly, the City of London Police Commissioner said “he was a modest man. He would be the last to mention his achievements. His death is a great loss to the force and he will be sadly missed… Commander Moore was one of the most accomplished officers ever”. No evidence has ever been put forward to prove that Commander Hugh Moore was ‘H’, a senior high-ranking officer who oversaw corruption in the Police, and no officers testified against him, even after his death. As for the investigation itself, those Home office papers will remain sealed until 2067, so the truth of what happened has died with Commander Moore. Ironically, the unnamed man who had violently attacked him, denied any wrongdoing, he was later released on bail and was never convicted. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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