Between 2012 and 2022, Line of Duty told the story
of AC-12, a fictional anti-corruption unit that
famously went after bent coppers.
But over 15 years prior to that hitting our screens,
before that series was dreamt up by its creator, Jed Mercurio,
a little-known unit of the Met was being secretly set up
to crack the cycle of corruption
that had infiltrated the country's biggest police force.
I was shocked.
Drug dealing, kidnap, armed robbery being carried out by
police officers was almost fiction, but it wasn't.
It was a reality.
Amid the scandals that engulfed the early nineties,
a few brave senior police chiefs
decided a new tactic was needed.
This could be a film. You couldn't make it up.
A tactic that would go after those directly responsible
for the corruption to catch them in the act.
Greed, ego, power. It's all out there for grabs.
The fact that it was nicknamed
the Ghost Squad sums it up really.
No one knew it existed,
and that's exactly how they'd want it.
That unit's name was CIB3,
and for the first time, this is its story.
In the early 1990s, the Metropolitan Police was
facing a number of challenges and the allegations of
corruption that dogged the organisation in the 70s and 80s
threatened to rear their ugly heads again.
The unsolved murder of a private investigator
called Daniel Morgan whose business partner
was subsequently linked to corrupt Met Police officers,
was just one of several high-profile cases
that was bringing the Met into the spotlight
for all the wrong reasons.
In the early 1990s, cases of corruption were still arising.
The Metropolitan Police attitude to it was damage limitation,
first of all, because it usually followed publicity.
A newspaper would highlight a case of corruption
and the Met would react against that,
and then things would continue and again,
another case would come up.
So, it was damage limitation each time.
Sometimes it wasn't just the popular newspapers
who did these stories and examined the corruption,
but also very influential was the Times Newspaper,
establishment newspaper, and it highlighted
that police corruption still was still going on and highlighted
a particular case where a senior detective was saying
that he could ring up anyone at any station across London
and they'd fix things, and he was actually used the phrase,
'We're firm within a firm.'
There were major concerns that corruption was spiralling
out of control in certain pockets of London.
At the Stoke Newington in North London,
public outrage and demonstrations about misconduct
were becoming commonplace, adding to the pressure
already mounting on the Met.
There were always demonstrations going on,
and especially in Stoke Newington and some of the other
police stations nearby, there were demonstrations
about how people had been stopped and searched,
the behaviours of police officers.
So, I'm aware of that because some of the officers
that I was going through my training with,
so you do your training, then you'd go and meet up again
every month for this continuous training that you had to do.
So, when you met up again with officers that had gone to
other police stations, their attitudes had changed
because they were a lot more confrontational
because of the demonstrations.
A scandal involving an informant and a detective called
Roy Lewandowski threatened to shatter the already
fractious relationship between police and the public.
There was a corrupt relationship between a drug dealer
called Pearl Cameron who sold rocks of cocaine,
rocks of crack from her house, and that became known
because she was dealing with a lot of people.
Sometimes up to 80 wraps a day, which is quite a lot
of material and word obviously got to the police,
but she was protected by a particular
corrupt detective called Roy Lewandowski.
He got money from Pearl Cameron.
She paid him up to a thousand pounds a week
for protection money, and in turn, she gave the names of
and details of people who were buying drugs
from her to Roy Lewandowski.
He was then able to either make arrests
or steal the drugs from the buyer or sometimes do both.
The Met launched an investigation dubbed Operation Jackpot
as a result of public and internal pressure,
but it was clear corruption wasn't
confined to Stoke Newington.
The thing about corruption at Stoke Newington
was it was highlighted through various reasons,
but it was probably going on at just about every
police station to various degrees.
There were certain branches or departments
that had reputations, and even like when you wanted to
contact them legitimately for help in dealing with a case.
After nine o'clock in the morning, you'd ring a pub
because they'd be in a certain pub,
or you'd drink a certain club in... wherever they were.
So, they had reputations for drinking,
for going to gentlemen's only clubs for behaviours that
were questionable and for removing property
and pocketing it because it was almost like they shared
the property that they came across.
An example I can give you is that we'd do a stop on a car
and if the car had drugs in it, sometimes you'd stop a car,
and the boot would be absolutely full of drugs.
You would then call up the CID to say,
'Right, we need this car transported back and it's...
there's a huge amount of drugs'
or whatever the situation is,
'Or a gun or whatever's in this car.'
By the time that car got back to the station,
it wouldn't be a full boot anymore.
It would be half a boot, or something would be missing,
or the jewellery would've gone, or the gun would've gone.
All sorts of things were not in the car,
and you couldn't explain it and you could never challenge.
You could never say who did this because
it was like a closed circle.
No one's ever going to admit to being the person who took
the stuff and everybody else would say, oh, it happens.
Oh, it must have got lost on the way.
Oh, it was left unattended in the car.
As well as corruption being rife,
it was clear that the infrastructure for reporting and dealing
with corrupt behaviour was at best, inadequate,
at worst, non-existent.
When this started happening, when I first started,
I didn't really know what to make of it and I didn't
really know what was happening.
And then over a period of time you realise
it's happening again and again.
You start putting 2 and 2 together and you realise
that people are taking the property for their own use
or for their gain, but there's nothing you can do about it.
And I remember that I did actually raise
an issue with an inspector, my inspector,
and his words were,
'Well, if you think I'm going to back you against that lot,
you've got another thing coming.'
Because it was just the way it was.
More often than not, if a detective or senior officer
was suspected of corruption,
they'd simply be moved on to a different branch.
In the 1990s, if there was a suspicion that you were
a corrupt officer, what the senior officers there
would probably do is transfer you.
So, they didn't want to get their hands dirty,
they didn't want to be the person challenging.
They didn't have the power or the support
to do anything about it.
So, normally those individuals would either be promoted,
or they would be transferred, and if one of them got
transferred to another police station,
the other corrupt team would then follow
gradually so they'd all get transfers.
The complaints process was absolutely flawed.
It was not fit for purpose.
The complaints department was made up of individuals
who had worked with some of these individuals
and who themselves were corrupt officers,
and it was like the criminal fraternity.
When they talk about being a grass, it's exactly the same.
Being a police officer, you would be called a grass
if you gave evidence against another officer.
'It's better to be looking the other way.'
'It's better to ignore it than to actually taint yourself
and your career and any sort of development
that you have yourself.' That was how it was.
Whilst Lewandowski did eventually go down for 18 months
for stealing 2000 pounds worth of books from
a deceased man's private collection,
Operation Jackpot was largely lambasted for its failure
to convict more suspected senior officers.
The situation reached breaking point in 1993.
There were two Panorama programmes both centring
on a corrupt detective called John Donald,
who worked for the southeast regional crime squad,
SERCS, in short.
Now John Donald had a corrupt relationship with a criminal,
a drug dealer and a drug dealer went to Panorama
and told about his relationship with John Donald
and was filmed handing over money and meeting
John Donald secretly and so on, and they also showed that
John Donald linked with other officers in
important key intelligence roles.
One worked for NCIS, National Criminal Intelligence Service,
and he gave information to John Donald
who then could pass it on to the criminal.
The programmes were to cause major embarrassment
for the Met on several fronts.
They not only highlighted that corruption was out of control,
alleged links to secretive organisations such as Freemasons
but also that they had no clear strategy to combat it.
What was clear from that was that there'd been an
investigation going on into John Donald at the time,
but those investigators who came from the old C.I.B.
old Complaints Investigation Branch Bureau,
they were unaware first of all, that Panorama
was doing any filming involving John Donald,
and they were unaware that there was a separate
intelligence operation going on to John Donald.
In short, they didn't really have a clue.
What they were doing was researching a complaint made
about John Donald by a Bournemouth restaurateur,
that restaurateur claimed and complained officially
to the Met about John Donald demanding £5,000 from him.
And what the investigators into that complaint wanted
was to film John Donald
accepting £5,000 from the restaurateur.
Now, this was in Bournemouth, and unfortunately
the officers investigating had booked to stay in a hotel
that was also used at the same time for a Masonic function,
and a lot of officers were involved in Freemasonry and some
of them were at this Bournemouth hotel at the same time
as these corruption investigators.
And it seems as though John Donald was somehow
tipped off maybe by someone, a masonry friend.
Anyway, John Donald never showed up at the restaurant
to collect his £5,000.
It was a waste of time, and it showed, as well,
how leaks were possible in such a large organisation
as a Metropolitan Police.
What was needed was a total change of strategy.
Why would an officer go into corrupt activity?
It's a difficult question to say why police officers
can become corrupt because it's very complex.
In the main, I think it's greed.
There's an opportunity literally overnight to triple,
quadruple the amount of money and
revenue cash that they can access.
Cash in transit, robberies were commonplace in the 90s,
large quantitative drugs, with that cash that
were too much for some and very tempting.
If you look at a Detective or a Cop and they're restricted
in their lifestyle, they can't do things that perhaps they'd
like to do, and then they're rubbing shoulders
with serious criminals who've got pound notes
hanging out their back pockets.
They live a lovely, glamorous lifestyle, playboy lifestyle,
and they want some of the action
and the temptation is too much for them.
Greed, ego, and the power thing.
Power and control of somebody.
Bit of peer pressure.
Most of them were on squads and those squads,
you wanted to be one of the boys or to fit in.
That's where the team corruption becomes a difficult issue
for maybe younger, inexperienced officers
that get drawn into that corruption.
Some officers are influenced by others, but there are others
who are genuinely just bad people.
They've got access to money, they've got access to power,
and they abuse that power.
In the early 90s, the Metropolitan Police
had a growing problem with corruption.
Major questions were being asked about its integrity
and ability to police the capital.
The top brass widely acknowledged that a radical change
in strategy was needed, and the man given the job was an
experienced long-serving detective called Roger Gaspar.
Known for cracking paedophile rings in North London,
he was a meticulous investigator
who the senior police chiefs hoped
would get a handle on the problem.
I'm Roger Gaspar.
I had been involved in all sorts of detective work
over the years, and I got involved with CIB2 in 1994.
Roger absolute top operator, a fantastic detective,
a history working in intelligence and serious crime.
He was the only man for the job in my book, at that time.
If... you are dealing with a case of corruption,
what you understand very quickly is that this is
some of the most important work for the police service,
undermining the reputation, the quality of the work.
It's undermining the public;
it's destroying the whole point of it all.
So, you had to take action.
Roger's brief was enormous.
Let's not in any way belittle that.
To be given a brief by the commissioner that says,
I've got my suspicions.
I've got some little sniffs and snorts around the organisation
that things aren't very good.
We've got some corrupt officers, but I just don't know
I'm not going to put loads of resources into investigating it
if in fact it's a fallacy and I'm seeing shadows
where there aren't shadows.
So, Roger, can you get out there, get your hands dirty,
get underneath the covers, lift the drain lids up.
What's under those drain lids? What's under the covers?
Is it honest, hardworking cops,
or is it corrupt cops or is it a mixture of the two?
But cracking police corruption wasn't the only
challenge Roger faced, and it quickly became clear
that he had his work cut out.
When Roger Gaspar arrived and took over at CIB2,
he realised he was up against it with the staff there.
Officers that were employed or deployed on anti-corruption
measures were such that they didn't have the skills.
They were often brought from uniform
and didn't have investigative skills,
didn't have the understanding of the techniques
that were being used by corrupt officers.
They had got very little background knowledge.
So, for example, we had one
whose background was Traffic, not detective work.
A lot of them were near retirement.
They didn't really do any investigations.
As well as issues with personnel, there were problems
with the infrastructure that could potentially compromise
any secret investigations that were carried out.
If we'd started to do any covert work,
we had a problem that we had to go and borrow
for the same equipment as the corrupt people were using,
and this is a small technical unit.
We would have to go and borrow equipment.
And if we took the last bit of equipment and another
operational team then asked for some more stuff
and we're told, oh no, sorry, the last one's gone out to CIB2,
you had this sort of natural knowledge that flowed
around in the service.
None of it necessarily that were deliberate,
but this needed to become professional.
This is not rocket science.
If you go, look at the cycle of how you build
a successful investigative capability
you can't go out of the front door poking about in the dark.
You'd be chasing your tail.
You will never achieve anything.
You've got to understand what's the intelligence picture
that's going to inform how I operate.
Now if you look on a national scale, national security
for the country, you've got the investigations that go on,
but the people who are gathering the intelligence
to arm the investigations are the security services.
Internationally, MI6, home is MI5.
They will be developing the intelligence
and they'll be handing it to the police and to
the investigation to turn that intelligence into evidence.
So as night follows day, you had to have
something like the Ghost Squad.
The fact that it was nicknamed the Ghost Squad sums it up.
No one knew it existed.
No one knew what they were doing
and that's exactly how he'd want it.
The name might've sounded like something from a Cold War
espionage thriller, but the reality for
Roger was a little less mysterious.
He shut himself off in an upstairs room secretly
from the rest of CIB2, to try and assess the level
of corruption throughout the Metropolitan Police.
I wanted to have a team that nobody would know about,
that would not be recognised,
and I wanted the secret team to be eyes and ears
who could actually collect new evidence.
Early on a Sunday morning, Gasper decided to get 10 senior
officers together that he trusted for a secret meeting.
He asked them all to list detectives they suspected of being
corrupt, a staggering 83 names were drawn up
and subsequently analysed for links and connections.
Many names were connected
to the Southeast regional crime squad.
What he found was that it was still fairly widespread,
particularly in pockets, and he started to devise a scheme
of dealing with it and argued that there should be an
ultra-secret unit set up, which would gather intelligence
on the police, and then another unit attached to it would then
act on that intelligence and try and catch police and criminals
at it together in their corrupt relationship.
And he was building up dossiers on what he saw
as being the corruption picture within the Met.
He slapped that onto the commissioner's table.
Good morning, sir, some light reading for the weekend.
Light reading it wasn't.
The report painted a damning picture for the then
Commissioner Paul Condon.
Unlike the last big purge, a decade earlier when
corrupt officers were dealt with through forced retirements,
it was decided that this time arrests and convictions
were essential in order to restore the Mets' credibility.
When the intelligence picture became clearer
from Roger Gaspar's report, the commissioner sat down
in a dark room with a wet towel on his head and thought,
well, how the hell am I going to then investigate this
effectively to the point where it's not going to be
so expensive and exhaustive, it's going to grind the whole
of the Met to a halt.
And he came up with a plan which said,
'Well, I'm going to have to get the best detectives
that I've got, and I'm going to have to form a really proactive,
strong investigative arm, and they can use all the tactics
that they've used in the past against top criminals,
international criminals, and I want them to be let loose
on the corrupt cops in the Met.
Roger Gaspar's work with the Ghost Squad
was widely acknowledged for establishing just how
widespread corruption was within the Met,
but it had limited success when it came to gathering evidence
that was usable in court to prosecute corrupt officers.
What came next was a game changer
in the fight against corruption.
Following his report, the decision was taken to form a
new unit called CIB3, whose objective was to carry out
proactive operations for the first time to catch corrupt
officers in the act with irrefutable evidence
that would lead to convictions.
I don't think you can underestimate how significant
the formation of CIB3 was in the history of the Met.
This was an opportunity to do something that had never
been done before, in the way they went about it,
which is about creating a squad of premier operators
in the world of investigation.
They're audacious in the way they operate, adventurous,
but within the parameters of the law,
they were gathering evidence to take corrupt cops
to the Old Bailey, to grip the rail and then we had
the best barristers in London prosecuting.
The man tasked with leading this team was Dave Wood,
a career detective with vast experience in
tackling serious and organised crime.
He was a very experienced detective.
He was so thoughtful, very strategic, but very operational.
So, he could kick a door in at six o'clock in the morning,
but he could also write a strategy at 5 in the afternoon.
That's a wicked combination.
And behind Dave Wood was a team of detectives,
all experts in their field, whose integrity was unquestionable.
They were pulled in from various departments
of the Met and regional police forces.
The officers that were called to CIB3 were basically
handpicked and they were chosen for their different skills.
There was those officers that were very, very good at
interviews, for instance, gathering intelligence,
gathering information.
Then there was investigators.
To maintain CIB3 secrecy and to avoid the leaks
that blighted CIB2, detectives were recruited in secret
without even knowing about the unit's formation.
Nobody knew what we were going into
and why they were being called.
And all of a sudden there was this briefing
by the Deputy Commissioner at the time
to say that we've got a big problem.
You've been handpicked. You are here to fight corruption.
I was shocked. I was taken back.
I wanted to stay on the drug squad, personally.
I didn't want to go to this newly formed unit,
and I think quite a few of my peers were colleagues.
They were the same because it was an unknown.
But as news of CIB3's existence started to filter through
the Met its new recruits had to face down more than
just catching corrupt police officers.
There was a stigma. The general feeling was;
people are being targeted. There's no corruption.
Rubber heelers, I think is the term that they use.
We were sort of looked at and not trusted.
We all of a sudden thought, we don't really want to be here.
We don't want to do this.
But once the arrests started happening and once the cases
started going to court, there was a complete wind change
in that actually people didn't realise what magnitude it was,
what the corruption was.
And once they started to realise armed robberies
being committed by police officers, drug dealing
being committed by police officers, stealing large quantities
of cash being committed by police officers,
all of a sudden, the attitude completely changed.
I think it did become fairly exciting
because the police had never done this before.
It was a new challenge.
Key to CIB3 getting results was its shift in strategy
and it was clear to its new recruits
that the Met were leaving no stone unturned.
Before CIB3 counter-corruption wasn't taken seriously, really,
and it didn't have the resources thrown at it to actually
investigate to the point of gathering evidence, that was
sound evidence, that could be used in the prosecution.
It's easy to get intelligence, it's easy to get information,
but actually to get evidence of corruption is very difficult.
The formation of CIB3, I think was A)
a turning point and extremely significant
in the fight against corruption.
Never before had so many resources from a proactive side
been thrown into dealing with anti-corruption
or dealing with corruption.
So, we were given those resources, not only we were given
the resources, we were allowed within reason, obviously,
and legally, allowed to push the barriers, which we did,
and we had the equipment to deal with that.
And as well as having the resources,
the infrastructure was changing too.
The main difference between CIB3 and what had gone before
was that it worked in total secrecy.
There were two units within CIB3, one gathered intelligence,
followed up suspect officers, followed them,
they bugged their telephones, bugged their homes,
talked to associates and so on, did financial inquiries
about them, and when they got what they thought was
evidence of wrongdoing of corruption, that information
would then be passed over to the active side of the CIB3
who would then act on this information
and try and get evidence, try and get people to talk.
Gathering evidence in this proactive manner was essential
if CIB3 was going to have a chance of
turning prosecutions into convictions.
In the past, a lot of investigations for corrupt cops
spent years going through appeals.
People wriggling like fish caught on the end of a fishing line,
trying to get off, trying to find any angle that they possibly
could to make a legal argument that makes them walk away.
So that's no different to investigating serious crime,
of course, but I think it becomes even more pertinent
when you're looking at corrupt cops because
I mean, they know the system.
And what you don't want to do is inadvertently
cut a corner, which opens up a right of appeal.
So, one of the things that I think is notable about CIB3
is if you look at their track record, the evidence was so
compelling and persuasive that they ended up either
changing their plea from not guilty to guilty
or going straight to guilty in the first place.
Or in a few instances realising,
'Well, my back's against the wall here,
I've got no wiggle room whatsoever.
I know what I'll do. I'll become an informant.'
And they became a supergrass, and therefore they got
maybe a lighter, lenient sentence in the way of being
dealt with, and they went into a protective custody,
and they were providing intelligence
against other corrupt cops.
In 1997, just prior to CIB3's formation, Dave Wood
and his team went after a former Met detective called
Duncan Hanrahan, who had extensive links
to corrupt officers and criminals in Southeast London,
including a notorious private investigation firm
called Southern Investigations.
Code named Operation Eden, it was one of the
first operations that would put Dave Wood's new proactive
strategy to the test and give the Met its first supergrass.
Investigating serious crime can be really
beneficial if you get a supergrass.
What's a supergrass?
It's someone who's been involved in criminality,
sees there's an opportunity probably to get a reduced
sentence if they basically snitch on fellow criminals.
Now, CIB3, when they were investigating corruption,
were able to use supergrasses in that way.
And probably the most notable early doors
of supergrasses was a guy called Duncan Hanrahan.
But who was Duncan Hanrahan?
Now, Hanrahan was an ex-detective,
and he was acting really as the go-between,
the conduit between the criminal world and those
who are corrupt cops and the criminal world,
they just love a corrupt cop.
It covers their back, it gives them information,
and everyone wins.
The cop gets the money in his back pocket
and the criminal hopefully is being protected.
In this case, Duncan Hanrahan was working
with Southern Investigations who he had previous
suspected corrupt links with when he was a serving detective.
Southern Investigations came up onto the intelligence radar
from an operation which was spanned over a few years,
and they were gathering intelligence as to whether or not
there was corruption within the Metropolitan Police.
And hey ho, the light bulb came up on Southern Investigations.
Run by a guy called Jonathan Reese, an ex-cop,
no surprise there and he was working
very closely with Duncan Hanrahan.
That was really the source of
friction within Southern investigations.
And there are some suspicions that the killing
of Daniel Morgan may have been linked to that,
but that's really never been proved.
Another player within that scenario was, at that time,
a serving Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
Now Sid Fillery, no surprise here either,
he was then employed to investigate the murder of
Daniel Morgan, and it's been well reported that the suspicion
around the corruption of that investigation has led to
actually no result, no outcome of that investigation.
So, all in all, what we're seeing here is an ex-detective
themselves, Jonathan Reese, using Duncan Hanrahan
to his own end to make sure an investigation
of an alleged robbery grinds to a halt,
and then an alleged murder, which linked suspicions
with Reese and Southern Investigations
was then investigated by a serving Detective Sergeant,
who again had links into Southern Investigations,
and that's never actually been concluded.
The relationship between Hanrahan
and Southern Investigations continued after Hanrahan
had left the Met on grounds of ill health.
And what Operation Eden found was that together
they were keen to recruit more bent coppers.
Duncan Hanrahan was an important figure.
He was often seen drinking with Jonathan Rees,
Sid Fillery and Alex Leighton.
Alex Leighton was a sergeant named as corrupt
in the John Donald Prosecution.
They were all Freemasons and met on Freemasons basis.
The behaviour of Duncan Hanrahan, being the go-between
between Southern Investigations, Jonathan Rees,
and corruption in the Met, had no real limits.
A good example of that is that they wanted to find out
exactly what the evidence was on an investigation.
How would they sort of construct a defence
for one of their fellow criminals?
So, what Hanrahan did is he approached an honest serving
Detective Chief Inspector, called Chief Inspector Elcock,
who was running the internal complaints investigations
in Edmonton as part of the Met, and he entertained Elcock
over some liquid lunches and was trying to entice Elcock
to investigate what was seen to be a false complaint,
and then reveal some of the information and the evidence
of a current investigation against a fellow criminal.
Elcock being an up and standing honest cop
reports the inappropriate approach by Hanrahan and CIB3
are then able to put a cloak of protection around Elcock
and direct him accordingly to get a snare on Hanrahan
and his criminal activity as trying to
entice corruption within the Met.
He was reluctant to get involved, but he was persuaded
by CIB3 who said, just listen to what Hanrahan's saying
and agree to do this and that for him.
This is a guy that is end of his service, looking for retirement.
It must have been a nightmare for him.
Elcock decided to go ahead, but he was still very worried
about the situation because CIB3 provided
him with recording equipment.
He'd had no training in using the equipment before.
He had no training in playing along with corruption.
Elcock was in an unenviable position,
but without his involvement, CIB3 wouldn't have been able
to gather the evidence they needed to nail Hanrahan.
He was having to please Hanrahan and show that he was
actually corrupt, but he wasn't.
And he was also having to have a meeting with CIB3
to get directions as to how they could
get evidence against Hanrahan.
On one occasion, what Elcock did was he fabricated the police
pocket notebooks to convince Hanrahan he was corrupt.
But all along he was honest,
and he was showing him basically false information.
Elcock continued to play his part as the reluctant go-between
nurturing the corrupt relationship on behalf of CIB3.
It wasn't long before Elcock was introduced to a bigger fish.
There were further meetings with Hanrahan,
but then Hanrahan turned out basically to be
an errand boy for a much bigger personage.
Someone called Martin King.
He had been a detective, a serious detective,
but he'd gone corrupt and had been suspected of
corruption and had left the Metropolitan Police.
He then ran a restaurant and a nightclub and a snooker hall,
and through them came into contact with heavy criminals.
One of the things that he agreed to do, this is King,
agreed to do for the criminals, was to claim rewards for some of
the activities that the criminals had been involved in.
One of them involved a Henry Moore statue,
which was said to be worth a £100,000.
Now, King wanted Elcock to put his name forward,
King's name forward as an informant,
on the whereabouts of the statue.
The reward of £10,000 was paid to King,
who gave £1,000 of it to Elcock.
As the Elcock and King relationship developed further,
so did the favours he was being asked to do.
When asked to get involved in a potential murder plot,
CIB3 were there to step in.
King asked Elcock to get a witness in a forthcoming
prosecution case, a key witness
in a prosecution case to meet with him, Elcock.
And Elcock would somehow manage to get him
to the top of a tower block of flats.
Once there, Elcock could then withdraw, and King's Associates
would move in and push the guy off the top of the
tower block of flats and basically kill him.
At that stage, Elcock got even more nervous
and worried about it and contacted CIB3.
CIB3 said, 'This has gone far enough we better stop this now.'
CIB3 decided then that the operation
had to be called off, and they moved in.
They arrested King and Harahan and hoped that one of them,
or both of them, would turn supergrass,
to save their own skin.
What is a fascinating scenario here is the common thread
is all these players are former police officers.
And what Southern investigations Jonathan Reese
wanted was the ability to be able to get an inside track
of what's going on in the Met and in investigations.
So, he basically was using Hanrahan as a recruiting agency
to approach serving cops to see if they were vulnerable,
to be able to turn into corruption and serve the purposes
of Jonathan Reese and Southern Investigations.
Now, in the custody of CIB3, the investigation team
went to work on King and Hanrahan,
hoping to get them talking.
King happy to take whatever sentence
was thrown at him, refused to talk.
However, the weight of evidence CIB3 gathered
against Hanrahan, resulted in him confessing to
having links with various well-known criminals.
Hanrahan knew he had nowhere to go,
and the only alternative for him to try and get a
reduced sentence at court was to turn supergrass.
He made widespread admissions of his criminal activity.
But whilst on remand at Parkhurst Prison's
supergrass Wing intelligence was received that Hanrahan
had told a fellow supergrass Ray Brown, they had only told
investigators half the truth, to protect friends.
A further operation was mounted, and conversations
were covertly recorded between Hanrahan and Brown,
confirming the intelligence.
It's not uncommon for someone like Hanrahan who is
a supergrass to try and dupe the investigating officers.
He gave what he saw as a bit of bait, really to the CIB3,
hoping that what he gave them was going to be sufficient.
What he didn't account for is he couldn't keep his mouth shut.
He goes to prison and he's bragging to a
fellow inmate that's what he's done.
So, there's no friendships amongst criminals.
So, the person he's sort of bragging to decides,
'Well, hang on, I could get some discount here
if he is, so can I.'
And he tells the authorities of the lies that Hanrahan had
said to the investigating officers.
He gets re-arrested and it all starts again.
Hanrahan's second round of confessions
proved to be more revealing.
He omitted arranging the theft of 40,000 ecstasy tablets
with a street value of £600,000 from a West London
drug dealer Jason Proctor.
Proctor was the manager of the Good Value Pine Shop in Chiswick
Vincent Arnell, a criminal associated with
Hanrahan ordered the drugs.
Then two friends of Hanrahan, DS Len Guerard and
DC Chris Carter executed a search warrant
purporting to be looking for stolen lighters
when they knew the drugs were at the Pine shop.
The drugs were not taken to the police station,
but loaded into Hanrahan's van nearby, Guerard and Carter
told their boss that nothing had been found.
The drugs were then sold in Scotland with the assistance of
a man called Steven Warner and the proceeds divided.
Warner was a known criminal who was of interest to CIB3
because of his connection to the Adams family
who had links to organised crime in North London.
If they got Warner on board, then he could maybe give them
information about the Adams family that would help convict
some of them because the Adams family
had escaped major prosecutions.
Using undercover officers, CIB3 engaged with Warner
in the hope of securing evidence of criminal activity
and intel on his criminal network.
It wasn't long before they got results.
They knew that Warner was a drug dealer,
so they had an undercover officer who called himself Dave,
get into him to want to buy some drugs,
and the undercover officer did get some drugs,
and then Warner thinking that this was a good contact,
asked him to do some more work for him to get
at a particular witness and to maybe kill a witness.
The intended victim of this sinister plot was a man
called Jimmy Cook, a criminal associate of Jonathan Rees.
Another undercover officer was introduced to Warner as a
contract killer and asked to kill Jimmy Cook for £10,000.
A deposit of £500 was paid, a Browning automatic weapon
provided along with a photograph of the target.
This was enough for investigating officers to arrest Warner.
Warner subsequently admitted a series of serious offences,
including the conspiracy with Hanrahan
to steal the 40,000 ecstasy tablets, the supply
of a kilo of cocaine and incitement to murder.
He also provided new insignificant evidence regarding
the murder of Daniel Morgan and indicated a willingness
to give evidence of corruption against police officers,
including Guerard and Carter.
Operation Eden was deemed a success
because it had got Hanrahan, it had exposed Martin King,
and it had got Steven Warner,
a drugs dealer, and all were convicted.
So, it was a success, and it was a success as well because
the undercover officers were used successfully in a way,
and the sting involving Hanrahan, King, and
Elcock that also worked well.
These were tactics that were adopted later on
in other operations with CIB3.
However, there were lessons to be learned
from Operation Eden, as Warner was sentenced
before he was required to give evidence,
having received what he thought was a lenient prison term,
he then refused to testify against Hanrahan and the others.
In addition to this, Hanrahan's credibility was
brought into question by Guerard and Carter,
who with previous clean records were cleared of any charges.
The lessons learned were harsh, but they would inform how
CIB3 operated going forward
in their fight against corruption.