CHERUB: Maximum Security (8 page)

On 26 December 1968, Kurt Oxford and Jane Hammond landed in Las Vegas and booked a suite at the Desert Inn resort and casino. Kurt purchased a two-carat diamond ring and the next morning, he took his eighteen-year-old girlfriend on a limousine ride to a wedding chapel. After the ceremony, Kurt and Jane changed into swimwear, got drunk at the poolside and began losing heavily at a floating blackjack table
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Kurt took offence when another blackjack player called him a fool. Kurt punched the man out and ended up being hauled into a back room by casino security. He was taken to the local police station, where the Las Vegas police ran a routine check. They found that Kurt had skipped bail on a Nevada assault charge five years earlier, following a fight between rival motorcycle gangs in Reno
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Less than six hours after getting married, Kurt was locked up in Las Vegas county jail, facing a three- to five-year sentence. Jane pledged to stand by her husband, but was then shocked to discover that her husband had violated his California parole and that police there wanted to question him about an unsolved murder
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Kurt Oxford was extradited to California. On 24 January 1969, five days before his trial for murder was due to begin, Kurt became involved in a fight in the prison exercise yard. A guard fired a warning shot, but the fight continued and Kurt received a shotgun blast in his chest. He died of his wounds in the prison hospital eleven days later
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Jane Oxford – International Arms Dealer

By the time she turned nineteen, Jane Oxford had run away from her family, amassed a half-million-dollar fortune (equivalent to $2.6 million today), got married and seen her husband die in prison. Jane had no police record, apart from a missing persons report filed by her father in Oakland. Fearing a public scandal, General Hammond had honoured the bad cheques and compensated Fowler Wood for his stolen car
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Some people might have quit while they were ahead, but Jane Oxford spent the 1970s transforming herself from a thief into a big-time black-market weapons dealer. The business of stealing from the US military thrived. When the army launched an investigation into the large amount of missing equipment and tightened up security, Jane developed more sophisticated techniques for relieving the US military of its weapons. Every American base had its share of bored, broke and homesick servicemen who were willing to turn a blind eye, or drive a truck off-base in return for a car, or enough cash to put down a deposit on a home
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The next step in developing the business was for Jane to bypass her Mexican connection and deal directly with people who wanted to buy the stolen weapons. She travelled the world using a variety of aliases and disguises, making contacts with terrorist groups, drug tsars, local warlords and dictators. Jane brokered deals to sell weapons from all over the world, but most of her profits continued to stem from her unique web of corrupt contacts within the US military
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T
HE
G
HOST

In 1982, a retired member of the Brigands bike gang called Michael Smith was arrested at the gates of an army base in Kentucky, after attempting to pass a security check with a truckload of mortars. Smith had lost the paperwork given to him by an associate of Jane Oxford and stupidly tried to carry out the robbery using crudely altered paperwork from a previous raid
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Smith had been involved in dozens of military supply thefts over the preceding decade. He offered to give the US military police information on Jane Oxford and her organisation, in return for a light prison sentence. Smith was stunned by the answer the US military police gave him: not only was nobody looking for Jane Oxford, they’d never even heard of her
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Following Michael Smith’s tip-off, Jane Oxford went from being an unknown to a spot on the FBI’s most wanted list. The FBI, CIA and US military police set up a two-hundred-person taskforce to bring Jane Oxford to justice. The trouble was, almost nothing was known about her
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After fourteen years of successfully stealing American weapons, Jane had put distance between herself and the day-to-day operation of her organisation. Nobody knew who her deputies were, what country she lived in, if she’d married again or had children. Jane had made no contact with her parents since leaving home sixteen years earlier and the nearest thing to an up-to-date picture was the photograph found in the uncollected personal effects of the late Kurt Oxford. It had been taken in the Las Vegas wedding chapel in 1969 and to this day it remains the most recent photograph of Jane Oxford on FBI records. After numerous stings, surveillance operations, attempts at infiltration and twenty million hours of police work, Jane Oxford is still at large. The FBI task force chasing after Jane call her The Ghost
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C
URRENT
S
TATUS
OF
J
ANE
O
XFORD
’
S
O
RGANISATION

The world is now awash with cheap, illegal weapons produced in former communist countries. Consequently, it is impossible to turn a profit stealing everyday weapons from the American military. Nowadays, it is America’s high-tech weapons that are of interest to black-market weapons dealers
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Since 1998, it is believed Jane Oxford has orchestrated more than twenty carefully planned thefts of high-tech equipment from the US military. Stolen items have included night-vision sights for sniper rifles, unmanned miniature surveillance aircraft, radar-jamming equipment, plasma-injecting anti-tank shells and surfaceto-air missiles. These relatively compact loads are easily smuggled across the US/Mexican border and each one is worth millions of dollars to the right customer
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The latest and most serious act was the theft of 35 PGSLM Buddy missiles, which were crossing the Nevada desert en-route to a British military cargo aircraft. After this theft, Jane Oxford was promoted to second place on the FBI’s list of most wanted criminals
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A
N
U
NEXPECTED
B
REAKTHROUGH

In May 2004 a troubled fourteen-year-old boy named Curtis Key escaped the night curfew at an Arizona military boarding school and ploughed through a set of locked gates in his commandant’s car. He parked up at a nearby liquor store, picked up a bottle of Coke and asked the clerk for vodka from behind the counter. When the clerk asked for proof of age, Curtis Key produced a handgun and shot the clerk through the heart. He calmly emptied half the bottle of Coke on to the floor, topped up the bottle with vodka and took a long drink. CCTV cameras inside the store filmed the entire event
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On the way out, Curtis spotted a man getting out of a Jaguar. After shooting the driver and his girlfriend dead, Curtis took the Jaguar and drove more than twenty miles at high speed, slugging the mixture of vodka and Coke the whole time. When he heard the sirens of three chasing police cars, Curtis – by now paralytically drunk – pulled up at the roadside. He picked his gun off the passenger seat, pushed the muzzle against his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet jammed in the chamber
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Under Arizona state law, anyone aged fourteen or over, charged with a serious offence such as murder, can be tried and sentenced to the same prison term as an adult. In October 2004, Curtis Key was deemed mentally fit and given life without parole. This sentence means Curtis will spend the rest of his life in prison. He is currently one of the 270 offenders serving time in the specially built young offenders unit at Arizona Maximum Security Prison, known by its staff and inmates as Arizona Max
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Bizarrely, Curtis’ parents did not come forward after his arrest. The home address registered at the military school turned out not to exist and Curtis’ school fees had been paid from an untraceable bank account in the Seychelles. Curtis claimed that he had lost his memory and remembered nothing about his mother and father
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Arizona police suspected Curtis was protecting a parent or parents who were wanted criminals and sent his DNA profile to the FBI. The profile showed there was a 99% chance that Curtis was a descendant of General Marcus Hammond, who had agreed to give a DNA sample to the FBI team trying to locate his daughter
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There was only one possible explanation: Curtis Key was the son of Jane Oxford
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W
HAT
U
SE
IS
C
URTIS
O
XFORD
?

The FBI were delighted. The unearthing of Curtis Key was the biggest breakthrough in the twenty-two-year hunt for Jane Oxford. The FBI didn’t let on that they’d uncovered Curtis’ true lineage and mounted close surveillance on him. They sent an officer into Arizona Max to work as a guard on Curtis’ young offender unit and carefully monitored all his communications, both with other prisoners and with the outside world in the form of letters and telephone calls
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Jane Oxford was clearly working behind the scenes. Her connections within the biker community put out word inside Arizona Max that Curtis was untouchable. Anyone trying to bully, extort money, or otherwise harm Curtis could expect both themselves and their families on the outside to face savage retribution. Two prison officers on Curtis’ unit also reported to their superiors that they had been approached by a mysterious biker, offering them $1,500 a month if they agreed to look out for Curtis and occasionally smuggle items into his cell
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While Jane Oxford was doing all she could to look after her son, the FBI’s hopes that she would stick her neck out and try to visit Curtis were never realised. Apart from his lawyer, the only people on Curtis Key’s list of approved telephone contacts and visitors were two men from Las Vegas who claimed to be Curtis’ uncles. Covert DNA tests carried out on the men showed that they were not blood relatives of Curtis. Despite this, the men were put on the approved contacts list and the conversations that took place during their visits were bugged
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Curtis seemed to know his visitors well and they clearly had contacts with his mother. The men are still under FBI surveillance. Unfortunately, this surveillance has yet to yield any useful information on the activities or whereabouts of Jane Oxford
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As Curtis’ first months in prison passed by, the FBI became convinced that their big breakthrough had turned into a damp squib. To minimise the already slight chance that anyone would dare to harm Curtis, his visitors informed the prison authorities that his real name was Curtis Oxford, and told Curtis to reveal his true identity to fellow inmates. Once this secret was out, the FBI realised that the chances of Jane ever visiting her son had shrunk to zero
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E
SCAPE
&
I
NFILTRATE

If Jane Oxford wasn’t planning to visit her son in prison, the next best thing would be if Curtis got out and someone could follow him back to his mother. The FBI studied a number of options for getting Curtis out of prison. They looked for legal loopholes that would get Curtis off the hook and considered a scheme where the Arizona police miraculously discovered new evidence that would make Curtis look innocent
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The problem was, clear video footage showed Curtis shooting the clerk in the off-licence; he had pleaded guilty in court and the feelings of the families of his three victims also had to be taken into consideration. Besides, Jane Oxford has spent the last thirty years sniffing out FBI stings. If her son was miraculously released from prison, she would undoubtedly smell a giant rat
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The FBI realised that Jane would be less suspicious if her son escaped from prison. They devised an elaborate plan that they called ‘Escape and Infiltrate’. It involved sending undercover agents into Arizona Max as prisoners. The agents would win Curtis’ trust and then announce that they had found an escape route. They would offer Curtis a chance of escape; in return, they would ask Curtis to get Jane Oxford to protect them and set them up with false identities in another country
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Jane Oxford might be suspicious, but the FBI reckoned that if every detail of Curtis’ escape was made to look absolutely real, including the faked murder of a prison guard and a full police alert to recapture the escapees, she might just buy it
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If the agents managed to pull off their escape and hold Jane and Curtis up to their end of the bargain, they would gain unprecedented access to Jane Oxford’s organisation and perhaps even make contact with Oxford herself
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The FBI agreed that it was a risky plan. They rated the chances of success at less than one half, and the undercover agents would be at serious risk of death or injury at the hands of other law enforcement agencies that would be out trying to recapture them. But the biggest stumbling block was that under Arizona law, juveniles may be tried as adults and held inside adult prisons, but they cannot be held
‘within sight or sound’
of adult prisoners. If the FBI want to get undercover agents to befriend Curtis Oxford, they will have to wait until he turns eighteen and is moved into the adult population of Arizona Max. This is not due to happen until 2009
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