Gangbuster (7 page)

It was very quickly apparent that this job was something special. They said I’d be away for some time and to go home and pack some bags and get up to the Yard as soon as possible. And don’t say anything to anybody.

I went home, packed a holdall and reported in to the Yard. I met the fellow officer who was to be my partner on the operation, DC Andy Nicholau. This pleased me, he was someone I knew well and had the utmost admiration for. He was more experienced than me, had more service than me and had been one of the trailblazers and innovative thinkers in the setting up of the Yard’s undercover squad. I was happy to be working with him, even though at this stage neither of us had a clue what we were heading for.

The only briefing we had at the Yard was that we were being dispatched to Birmingham, headquarters of the West Midlands police force on an important undercover assignment. We would meet local officers there who would tell us what this secret mission was
all about. We were given the confidential number of a senior police officer to ring as we approached Birmingham on the M1. Then we’d go to an appointed place named by him for the meeting. We were told to book into a particular hotel, leave there, find a secure land-line phone, ring in the details of the hotel and our West Midlands police contacts would come and pick us up. It was the type of cloak-and-dagger stuff I revelled in. We knew the job had to be big.

Within minutes of phoning in, two senior West Midlands detectives came to pick us up — DCS Ron Canter and DI Alex Davidson. They sat down in our hotel room and for the first time told us of the enormity of the job we had been asked to undertake.

They had evidence that one of their own detectives, Sergeant Michael Ambizas, was trying to hire a hit-man to kill his lover’s husband. They had clearly dug deep into the background of Ambizas before calling in SO10. He was, they said, a bit of a flash character who liked the high life — casinos, top restaurants, designer suits and beautiful women. He swanned around town in a top-of-the-range motor, a playboy with charm, guile, and not a little style. Suspicious West Midlands police chiefs had recently transferred him from regular CID duties to their training establishment where he taught young officers the art of detection. Our operation was to come as a salutary lesson in detection for him at the end of the day.

Ambizas, at 34 unmarried but with a string of affairs behind him including a Page Three pin-up, had approached an underworld figure in an illegal gambling casino and asked if he could put him in touch with a professional hit-man from London. The
target was to be his girlfriend Anona Murphy’s husband. He was offering £20,000 for a successful hit on Shaun Murphy, a convicted crook and a domestic thug.

Now, there’s all sorts of police corruption, but conspiring to kill someone … it doesn’t get much worse than that. It focused our minds on the profound importance of the task at hand, for all concerned.

The West Midlands police force was, at that time, a beleaguered and much pilloried organisation following a series of scandals, notably the Serious Crime Squad being disbanded and some of its officers standing trial. They’d become the whipping boys of the national press. We knew, and West Midlands force knew, that we could not afford to fuck this up.

We began meticulously planning our tactics and decided what roles we would play. My colleague, Andy, was going to be the main negotiator of the contract killing and I was going to be his trusted henchman who would help set up the murder. We were the double act up from the Smoke, hired hitmen with no qualms and no conscience.

Andy first contacted Ambizas by phone.

‘I believe you’ve got some business for us to attend to.’

‘Yes, but I can’t talk on the phone.’

They arranged to meet at the Holiday Inn. Ambizas and his girlfriend arrived spot on time and took the lift to the second floor. Andy met them as they got out, put a finger over his lips to indicate silence, then got them into another lift and went up to the fourth floor where I was waiting in our room, hidden tape recorders on. Then it was down to the
business of murder.

Would-be victim Sean Murphy was a well-known ‘face’ in the West Midlands with a penchant for guns and a nasty addiction to wife-beating. Ambizas wanted Murphy dead because he was having a passionate affair with Anona and intended to set up home with her. He was prepared to hire us for twenty grand to get Murphy out of the way. Anona would get a hefty insurance pay-out plus an inheritance which would be hers once Sean was 6ft under.

Murphy had accumulated a spurious fortune. He was a classic wheeler-dealer, entrepreneur, company director, call it what you like, and had done a bit of porridge along the way. No Sunday school teacher, but he didn’t deserve to die, and certainly not at the instigation of a serving police officer.

Ambizas seemed convinced from the start we were a genuine hit team. We came up with an elaborate scam to lure Murphy into a position where he could be assassinated in the driveway of his house. His business address would be fire-bombed, he would be phoned, and we would shoot him as he rushed from his home to deal with it.

‘Sounds good,’ Ambizas enthused.

We would supply the rifle for the job. We’d arranged for a Heckler and Koch semi-automatic to be available from a firearms unit if we needed to show it. We got Ambizas and Anona to supply photographs, maps, car numbers, descriptions, known movements, everything a hit team would need to know. We went out and recce’d the property as they would have expected and found a perfect spot from which we could deliver a clean hit. There was a sturdy tree we could perch up overlooking the front
drive, no obstructions in the line of fire. I was a lot more athletic in those days so it wouldn’t be a problem.

The two of them were hooked. They never doubted our credentials. We were the professional hardened killers they had anticipated. We gave them a ‘shopping list’ of what we wanted in preparation for the hit. They had provided some items, but we needed to buy a bit of time to report back to our bosses at the Yard.

‘We’ll be back when you get the rest of the stuff,’ we said.

We needed to leave them to sweat for a couple of weeks, to see if they really did want us to go ahead. If they’d come back and said, ‘We’ve changed our minds and we don’t want him killed after all,’ our case wouldn’t stand up in court. Intent was all important. And we had to be careful not to incite or encourage the crime — that would be entrapment. We needed to be very precise with our evidence. We were, after all, dealing with one of West Midland’s serving detective sergeants who knew the law. And we wanted to leave the pair no legal loopholes to escape through.

A phone call from Ambizas. They had decided to go ahead with the hit. Andy and I returned up the M1 to Birmingham as hired assassins. Throughout the dealings, I’d been in the background as Martin Scott, the suitably sinister minder, the muscle. Doesn’t need to know all that’s going on. I wore the hat of being thick — some unkind folk may say rather too well — but it was an act I could switch on or off. It often allayed suspicions if you didn’t seem too bright, and weren’t present at all the conversations. But I was listening all right, thanks to the hidden electronic
bugs in our hotel room.

As the hit was set, Ambizas and Anona produced the first half of the £20,000 contract cash. I was asked to count the £10,000 in a hotel room at the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham. They had apparently struggled to cobble the money together. Ambizas had cleaned out his building society account and Anona had flogged off jewellery. But they were still £200 short. Ambizas offered Andy a cheque for the balance. He turned round and said, ‘You must be fucking joking.’ Ambizas had to rush out and get it from a bank cash till to make up the shortfall … brand-spanking-new notes in numbered sequences. Perfect evidence. The £10,000 was kept in a brown envelope which Anona had stuffed up her jumper. There was surprisingly little emotion as we sat talking murder for money.

I pretended that I wasn’t happy with crisp cash point notes and told them in my best ‘thicko’ voice they could be identified and used in evidence if the job went bottoms up and we were all nicked. I told them, ‘I only take used notes.’ It was all bluff because we knew then that the trap was ready to be sprung and armed police would be coming through the door of room 5032 in 30 seconds flat. The game was up for the Casanova cop and his lady. The sting went off on schedule and as the cops crashed through the door Anona gasped, ‘Oh no,’ and nearly fainted. Ambizas was visibly shocked. He said, ‘Someone has jumped the gun, lads,’ and claimed
he
was setting
us
up for being contract killers.

It was a textbook case for the undercover unit. I was pleased for West Midlands police because they had been mullered over the Serious Crime Squad
business and the guy we were working for, Ron Canter, was one of those officers who’d had his name dragged through the mire for no reason other than that he was in the West Midlands police force. We found him to be one of life’s lovely people. And Alex Davidson, a short, stocky, rugby-playing Scotsman was tough and feisty but a lovely man with it. They were excellent to work with. They didn’t have the experience of undercover operations that we’d had at the Yard and were led by us throughout. They were happy to be guided by our expertise and knowledge and the result was a highly successful joint operation. Rank never came into it, there was never any neccessity to remind anyone of who was in charge; we were respectful of their rank, they were respectful of our skills.

Sadly, that wasn’t always the case. You’d sometimes encounter a rank-obsessed prick who made life awkward for everyone and turned a difficult job into a nightmare. We’d been in and out of Birmingham like ghosts. No one except Ron and Alex knew we were there. Ambizas had a lot of connections in the job and they feared one leak could have blown the whole operation. And nobody knew when we had gone. Just the way we liked it.

Ambizas stood trial at Nottingham Crown Court in September 1990 charged with conspiracy to murder and was jailed for six years. He was convicted after we had given evidence to the jury from behind screens so that our faces would not be seen by anyone apart from judge, jury and lawyers.

Anona delivered a slap in the face to Ambizas by pleading guilty to the charge, then giving evidence against her former lover. The jury was told about
terrible violence in the Murphy household which had nurtured the murder plot. It seemed that Shaun, even though he no longer lived with Anona in their Tamworth home, often went back and subjected her to both physical and sexual abuse. He had shot their young daughter’s Rottweiler dog and ill-treated a pony and a kitten. The full extent of her abuse never came out because she said she was just too frightened to disclose all the dreadful details. Shaun Murphy sounded an all-round nasty bastard and you could begin to see what a desperate state she had been in when she and Ambizas began planning his murder.

But there was no love lost between them when they finally parted company. They didn’t even exchange glances in court as he was taken off to prison. Anona was set free with a one-year suspended prison sentence after the judge said she had been driven beyond all reasonable limits by her husband’s reign of terror in their home. It transpired that Ambizas had fallen for Anona while he was on the rebound from an affair with a glamorous police cadet-turned-model called Gina Waddoups. She fell hook, line and sinker for his Mediterranean good looks and they had a torrid fling for nearly five years. She reckoned he looked like Omar Sharif and she and her three sisters thought he was a real charmer.

Gina, a Page Three girl and a right stunner, had been engaged to Ambizas but their romance hit the rocks when she left the police and moved to London to do topless modelling. The threats Ambizas made to her and her new boyfriend were apparently frightening enough for them to report it to the police. She said she knew he was trained in firearms use, kept guns under the bed and she was terrified he
might try to take his revenge on her.

Some people thought Abizas and Anona had got off pretty lightly in court but we often felt in undercover cases that the judiciary were a bit sceptical of our techniques despite the good results we were getting. The attitude of some judges in the late ’80s – early ’90s – and possibly still even now was that undercover operations ‘just aren’t cricket, you know’. There is something about it that unsettles them. I think perhaps they think they are losing their control over part of the legal process. The police are running off doing things for which the courts haven’t got a great weight of judicial precedence to rely on. They think, perhaps, that the police are becoming too inventive and doing things not legislated for and they don’t particularly like that.

Sometimes you’d find that, having given evidence after an undercover operation, the sentences were less than if a conviction had been achieved through conventional police work, like steaming in with a sledge-hammer, waving your warrant card and yelling, ‘I’m a police officer.’ Methods have changed because times have changed. Today’s villains are smarter bastards and we’ve got to keep pace with investigative techniques. At the end of the day, my job wasn’t about getting people massive sentences. I was the great pretender in order to clean the streets of as many villains as I could by the methods I knew best.

D
avid Norris sounded pretty chipper when I spoke to him in his local pub to fix a business meeting for the following morning.

‘Take care, Blex,’ he said as he rang off.

Half-an-hour later, he was lying dead on the pavement near his South London home, pumped full of bullets from point-blank range. For David Norris’s ‘business’ was the the most dangerous in the world – police informant.

Call them what you like – squealer, grass, snitch, nark, snout – it’s a fact of life that the police can’t do without them. They are the bread and butter, the inescapable mainstay of the undercover work I was involved in. We couldn’t function without them. The squad’s ability to operate, its results, its success or failure invariably mirrored the quality of its informants and the way they were handled. They are
a necessary evil in the battle against crime. At the same time, I have no hesitation in describing them as the utter, total, pits of the earth. And I reckon I’m more qualified than anyone to say that because I’ve worked with hundreds, most of them utter scum.

I’d known Dave Norris as an informant for a couple of years. As grasses go, he was in the big league. It came as no surprise to me at all that he became the victim of a carefully planned and ruthlessly executed hit. He’d grassed on dozens of fellow villains; he’d got cocky, too many people had got to know what he was about. It was only a matter of time before someone took him out.

I’d phoned him at his local, the Fox in Belvedere, South London, on a Sunday evening in April 1991 to fix up a meeting for 8.00am the following day when he was going to give us some information on yet another firm of villains involved in drug-dealing. He’d made thousands of pounds grassing up his cronies for years. This was another potential earner for him. I was driving to the meet the next day with a colleague when I heard on the radio that a man had been gunned down in Belvedere. Before I heard the name, I knew it was going to be Norris. Sure enough, it was, blasted to death when he stepped out of his car near his home as he returned from the pub. A
two-man
hit team on a powerful motorbike took him out with merciless efficiency. He’d begged for his life after the first bullet sent him crashing to the ground. He offered the killers money to spare him – to no avail. His frantic wife, Debbie, ran out screaming for mercy for her dying husband, but they were clinical professionals and finished him off with a volley of shots to the head before roaring off on a powerful
500cc Honda motorbike. It was a classic gangland hit. And one of my best informants was the victim.

I couldn’t feel anything when I heard it on the radio. At the end of the day, informers are playing a dangerous game for money. Getting yourself splattered over the pavement is an occupational hazard. I’ve worked with some of the most successful informants the police have ever had and got to know what slippery bastards most of them were. I always tried to have an air of detachment from them. You sometimes had to purport to like them, pretending to want to work with them to get the best out of them. But deep down I was always thinking, ‘Thank fuck you’re not a mate of mine.’ They are grasses and they would sell their grandmother for money.

These people are totally unprincipled, callous bastards. They earn from crime for years then change sides when they want to eliminate the opposition, or when they find themselves in the shit, or when they want revenge for some matter or other. Or just to earn a nice few bob from the police funds. Those doing it for revenge, stitching up a rival they hadn’t got the bottle to do themselves, would come running to Old Bill and prop up the target. I personally find that abhorrent. But, professionally I had to set that aside, smile politely and get on with the job. I had to associate with these people, go out drinking with them even, spend a lot of time with them, get to know them, their motives, build a relationship. You had to do it by the book for the powers that be because their registration documents as informants have to be noted accordingly as to what their motivation is. My personal opinion is that they are shitbags of the highest order because I just don’t believe in their ethos. But needs must in a dirty world …

Norris, of course, was one of them. When I first met him he had already begun his career as an informant giving information to the Regional Crime Squad about a variety of crooked enterprises. I met him when I was doing undercover operations for the Central Drugs Squad at Scotland Yard. He was a very well-connected villain. It naturally followed that he was able to give information of the highest quality involving other like-minded and well-connected criminals. But he was notoriously difficult to handle, in as much as people were never 100 per cent sure of which side of the fence he was on, if indeed he wasn’t playing both sides from the middle, running with the fox while hunting with the hounds. He was likely to prop up a job he’d be earning out of, getting his
rake-off
, then in turn would be rewarded by the police for grassing up his cronies. He was definitely having an each-way bet on many occasions. Grassing is bad enough, but that sort of double-dealing is grassing at its worst. I’ve often said that if there is a heaven and a hell and these grasses find themselves in hell, I just hope the Devil’s got a witness protection programme. Even he is going to have a number that he’s going to have to re-house.

Despite the fact that Dave Norris would stitch up friends and enemies for cash rewards, he was, in fact, quite a likeable bloke if you were talking pub mates. He was sociable, jovial, he had diverse interests ranging from fishing to greyhound racing, and was keen on women even though he was married and not averse to an away game with a bit of crumpet as long as Debbie never knew – a few plus points over the average grass. You could go out on the piss with him and quite enjoy yourself. A lot of cops who mixed
with him did genuinely like him. For a lot of them, of course, he was their first insight into dealing with someone from the underworld, a real villain.

Cops by and large are precluded from associating with villains. They aren’t allowed to associate with gangsters except, of course, registered informants. I’ve always found that a bit of a contradiction because surely informants reflect the very worst of criminality. These treacherous bastards live in a twilight world; they straddle the fence and hop from one side to another depending on whatever circumstances suit them. It’s got to make them automatically the most dangerous of any type of villain. Yet they are the only ones the police will authorise you to mix with … people with just about the most confused set of standards you can ever imagine. Many, many police careers have been ruined by the mishandling of informants. They either suffer from the Stockholm syndrome, metaphorically getting into bed with them, or rubbing them up the wrong way to such a degree that they lose their trust and therefore the source of the information they’re depending on. I’ve never been able to fathom it out. Surely a copper is better off having a pint with someone he knows is an out-and-out crook but would never for the life of him want to be a grass, allowing them to share a conversation about any number of other things and getting to know each other’s attitudes without ever having to bring up the subject of criminality. You’re a cop, I’m a villian, we know where we stand, let’s talk about the football or the racing or any number of purely innocent subjects. It doesn’t work that way. Informants have given the police as many problems as results over the years. By
their very nature, you never know with certainty which side of the fence they are on. I think sometimes they don’t know themselves. Always an eye on the main chance.

Norris was, by and large, in the informing business for money, coupled occasionally with a desire to take out the opposition on his patch. He was originally a coalman as a young man but he soon decided that lugging sacks of anthracite around was far too hard a way of earning a crust when there was villainy as an alternative. He was suspected of involvement in armed robberies, though not convicted. He would do anything, in the ‘Arfur Daley’ sense, that would be a ‘nice little earner’. He knew the ‘right’ people. He’d handle counterfeit currency or stolen goods, and he would be involved in drug deals; there was nothing that was off limits to him. He was utterly ruthless in the way he eliminated other criminal gangs by informing on their crooked activities.

Towards the end, he was doing so much work with the police that it became an open secret in south-east London that Dave Norris was a grass. It was an odds-on certainty that some day one of those rivals would take revenge. His name had been on a bullet for a long time. He had grassed so many people up that the police ran out of ideas on how to protect him from being identified as the source. He got careless. He didn’t give a toss. He didn’t think it out. He was so desperately keen to grass more and more people up and make money out of it, which he did handsomely, that with every passing day he was putting himself in more and more danger. I’ve always been a gambling man and I wouldn’t have given him better than even
money of making his next birthday.

Just half-an-hour before he was shot, he was fixing the meet with me to grass up yet more villains, another drugs gang. The word had been out for him for a long, long time. He was so active the police had had to set aside two batches of officers to deal with him. A colleague and I were handling him more or less on a daily basis for his drugs work and long-standing colleague Jim Clarkson, a DI on the Regional Crime Squad at East Dulwich was handling his other crime stuff – counterfeit currency, stolen gear of every variety, art thefts, this, that and the other. That’s how prolific Norris was.

He was discussing a future job with Jim Clarkson over a few pints in the Fox in Belvedere on the night he died. I rang him in the bar there to check that he was OK for the next day’s breakfast meet on a new drugs job he was putting up. That’s how he worked, moving from one cop to another with more underworld information.

The next morning I picked up my colleague, DS Bill Trimble, a pleasant, quiet, former long-serving uniformed officer, not the usual hard-nosed Yard DS you sometimes come across, and we were driving to meet Norris for breakfast to discuss the job. The radio was on and that’s when I heard it. When they gave his name, they’d got it slightly wrong – Maurice or something like that, but I knew.

A couple of minutes later, my mobile rang and it was my boss DI Charlie Eubank and he said, ‘Blex, have you heard?’

I said I’d just heard an item on the radio with the name slightly different but I was assuming it was our man.

He said, ‘Yes, it’s him.’

I said, ‘Well, best I don’t bother going to the café then. Norris won’t turn up now.’

Bill, my colleague, was absolutely shell-shocked, aghast at the news. I literally saw the colour drain from his cheeks.

That was the morning I coined the phrase ‘better dead than nicked’, because there had been a lot of suspicion about Norris’s dealings with informant handlers over the years. At one point, one trusted colleague and I were the only officers allowed to deal with him. A lot of people had been struck off the list of handlers because of suspicions they had been got at, backhanders going to and fro, palms greased. I can say, hand on heart, that I was saying that for other people’s benefit, because I’d heard the rumours and I was well aware of some of the shenanigans that were supposed to be going on. I said that if he’d been nicked with a huge great parcel of drugs, he would have sung like a canary taking everyone down with him, in the job or out of it, who had ever taken a drink off him. That’s the sort of person he was. There would have been no loyalty to anyone. He was a grass and he was always looking to cover his backside. He’d have taken everyone down with him to save his skin.

Bill fell apart. I had to take him to my flat and give him a large brandy. He knew Norris well. In fact, he was due to collect some money off him over a betting coup that had come off over the weekend. Bill was a big greyhound man and he’d given Norris a tip and Norris had lumped on it large and he was going to give Bill a drink out of his winnings. Not corrupt, but possibly unwise in the circumstances.

As Bill sat there ashen-faced, I said to him, ‘Come
on, pull yourself together; he’s only a dirty stinking grass who’s got wiped out. It’s not anyone we’re going to grieve for.’

But Bill was really, really upset. To me it was another reminder that you must never get to like these people, never get too close. Never kid yourself they are real friends. You can pretend to like them, but once you walk out that door you don’t have to carry it on.

By the time Bill had regained his composure and we had arrived at the office, there was only one topic of conversation and a murder squad had already been set up. I expected the murder squad boys to be all over me like a nasty rash given the circumstances and my involvement with Norris over the years. After all, I’d spoken to him minutes before he’d been murdered, but to this very day nobody from that squad has ever asked me a single question, ever. Bill kept going to the murder squad almost on a daily basis like he’d lost a friend, giving them all sorts of theories. But I couldn’t give a fuck. Norris was dead, and I’d got other things to be doing. He’d given us some good information over the years, he’d introduced me to loads of criminal gangs so that I could infiltrate them posing as another crook, but he knew the risks.

Rumours had been rife a long time before his death that there was a contract out on him, with a £15,000 price tag to do it quick and keep it neat.

Months of intensive enquiries by the Yard uncovered the fact that the hit was carried out by a professional two-man team from the terrorist heartland of Belfast – Terry McCrory and John Green. London drug barons, possibly the ones he was
about to grass up to me, paid the pair to travel over and carry out the execution. Norris was an easy target. He took no special precautions and seemed to think he was untouchable. The hit happened as he pulled up outside his home in Regency Square, Belvedere, in his flash four-wheel-drive jeep and stepped on to the pavement. The black-helmeted assassins zoomed up on their motorbike out of the dark. Norris started to run towards his front door. He knew the day had come. He was chased by one of the gunmen and was brought down with a single shot. His wife Debbie, who’d been inside with their three kids, ran out shouting, ‘Stop, please stop.’ The gunman took no heed and pumped several more shots into Norris. He died on a patch of grass beside the pavement, a huge pool of blood flooding out around him, with Debbie sobbing her heart out as he died. She was pregnant with twins at the time.