Real Hard Cases

by Robert Jeffrey

  The counterfeit films were mostly sold at car boot sales and markets. With thousands of bargain hunters in one place, many of them not in the least worried that they were buying pirated goods provided the price was right, Barrowland was ideal for the pirates.

  At first, FACT gave me Scotland and Newcastle to cover. They supplied a company car and told me to get on with protecting the interests of their members which included most of the major film-making companies and the BBC. Apart from the Barras, my patch included the huge Ingliston Market adjacent to Edinburgh International Airport. I may say that, right from the start, I got assistance, whenever possible, from the Glasgow Trading Standards folk though the same could not be said of their Edinburgh counterparts. We had some early successes and some fun. My old contacts in the underworld and my knowledge of the way the Glasgow neds work helped me curb some the excesses at the Barras where you could buy DVDs of recently released Hollywood films for a fiver. Well, some were recently released but some were even newer than that as this tale of a Glaswegian picked up at the airport will show.

  A well-known shoplifter, let’s call him John Kerr, had just flown in to Glasgow from the States with hundreds of silk scarves in his possession. There was nothing new in that but he also had a videocassette that had a label reading Men in Black on the spine. This started the customs guys talking about what to do with the film. Kerr interrupted them to say he knew an ex-cop, a guy called Les Brown, who worked for the film companies. He knocked them out with the remark that I had arrested him on a murder charge many years ago!

  I got the call but, before heading on to the M8 to the airport, I phoned FACT’s head office to ask about Men in Black and was told no one had heard of it.

  Before customs officers and I got down to the pirate film stuff, they wanted the full story of the murder charge so I gave it to them. The first time I met Kerr, I was told that he was a highly skilled shoplifter – the best in the city, perhaps the best in the country. He was based in a pub on the banks of the Clyde and such was his fame that he shoplifted to order, getting the actual goods his customers wanted rather than stealing any old rubbish and then trying to find a sucker to buy it. He dealt in the best of stuff.

  An example of his style was the time he was approached in the pub by a guy who wanted a really expensive suit on the cheap. John eyed the guy up in a manner reminiscent of a hangman calculating a villain’s drop or an undertaker sizing you for a coffin. He told the punter to come back in an hour and, when he duly returned, he was offered three perfectly fitting Daks suits at £100 each or £250 the lot. The gear had been stolen from Frasers in Buchanan Street. Although John Kerr was known to the store’s staff, he still had the ability to nick stuff without being spotted. Incidentally, he told the customs guys that he hoped some of the silk scarves would be sold to the sales assistants in Frasers! That was the guy I arrested for murder.

  I had received a call to assist a beat constable in trouble at a house in the Gorbals (at the time I was in the serious crime squad). There had been a fight between a notorious cowboy builder called Gallagher (who specialised in defrauding old folk with fake roof repairs) and another man. The two had apparently been fighting over the ‘lady’ who owned the house. In the course of the scuffle, the cowboy had been bottled and staggered from the flat gushing blood. He was found dead nearby. Just before the body was discovered the other man had, for some reason, mentioned my name to the cop. He had fled by the time I arrived, but the constable’s description made me convinced the suspect was Kerr. We checked a lot of his known haunts before finding him, sleeping like a baby without a care in the world, in a bed in a flat in Castlemilk. It seemed a shame to wake him but I tweaked his big toe and, before he knew much about what was going on, he was locked up in Craigie Street nick, just off Victoria Road, charged with murder.

  There was laughter in court a few months later when Kerr was in the dock in the High Court, explaining that he was awakened and arrested by ‘Big Les’. This prompted the judge to ask, ‘Who is Big Les?’ ‘Him,’ said Kerr, pointing across the court to where I was sitting. The charge was reduced to culpable homicide and he got eight years. ‘Just what Big Les said would happen,’ said Kerr. More laughter. The judge’s face was, as they say, a picture.

  With all that history out of the way, back at the airport, we turned our attention to the pirate video. We released Kerr and I went into action to try to find out about the film. It was a top-class comedy starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones though, to me, some of the supporting cast looked like they really had been dropped in from outer space. At this stage, the film had not even been released for showing in cinemas. We called Hollywood and found that the film was still in production and the first cuts were only available to the editor and some of his staff. I was asked the serial number at the start of the film that Kerr had and Hollywood confirmed that the number referred to Men in Black which was still in the editing suite!

  The next call was from the FBI, asking me to find out from Kerr how the hell he had got hold of such a film.

  He told me:

  At the far end of Broadway, at the foot of the Twin Towers, there are several short streets that lead down to the river. One is a dead end. As you enter this street, there’s an expensive shoe shop and next to that a Chinese shop. That’s where I bought the film for ten dollars.

  The feds and a posse of New York’s finest, in their uniforms, raided the place and picked up 500 pirate videos. It turned out that the man behind the bootlegging operation worked in the Hollywood studio’s editing suite. It was a satisfactory conclusion but I couldn’t help wondering about the greed of folk who would steal films that had not even been released and reviewed and sell them for peanuts. Kerr was pretty pleased with himself and asked what his reward for his role would be. ‘You don’t go to jail,’ I told him.

  We held frequent meetings on video bootlegging. Some were good copies but the quality of others was dreadful – sometimes the videos were produced from a film taken by a crook sitting in a cinema with a camera. Hollywood execs used to fly across the pond, no doubt at huge expense, to talk to us about the problem. They didn’t have much of a sense of humour or realism and, on one occasion, when I pointed out that the problem would go away if they made their videos cheap enough to challenge the pirates, I was met with a deafening silence. Cutting the profit was clearly not a route that appealed to them.

  It was a curious business and one of the big problems was not nabbing the sellers but finding who was making the copies. Once we raided a place in Coatbridge where sixty recorders were action at one time, all churning out the bootleg stuff. It was also difficult to get cases to court. Procurator fiscals consider problems in rough areas to be more pressing than pursuing the odd pirate video and protecting the profits of wealthy film companies. In my seventeen years with FACT, not one video pirate was sent to jail.

  However, that didn’t stop us trying to nail them at every opportunity. I remember being asked to assist on a visit to video shop in London’s notorious East End. The guys in the south had not bothered to tell me that the place was owned and run by a local gangster hard man who had earlier refused FACT access to the shop unless they had a search warrant, which they didn’t have. This time, three of us went in to the shop where we were confronted by the owner whose face was crisscrossed by Mars bars as the Glasgow cops call scars. I asked this fearsome character if there was any chance of a cuppa. He replied that we could have tea but it would take a minute or two as the kettle was on the blink. I said that was OK and we would take a wee look at the back shop while he was seeing to the tea. Through the back, we found VCRs hammering out copy after copy of pirated films. Life on the hard streets of Glasgow helps you develop the kind of brass neck you don’t get in more genteel parts. On another occasion in London, I remember an Asian shop owner naively asking if we were going to look into the basement. ‘We are now!’ I replied. More VCRs were churning away and this time it was copies of Asian films that we found.

 
Back at the Barras we had identified an easy-going young guy (let’s call him Ian) who was coining it in and I despaired of getting the police interested – in their view, they had bigger fish to fry – but I got a break. A new officer, Pat Ferguson, had arrived at London Road Station, the cop shop nearest to the Barras. Pat and I were on the same wavelength. He wanted action. I was called to a Sunday-morning meet. More than a hundred cops were there plus plain-clothes officers who had been doing undercover work identifying targets. On a signal, we descended en masse, even blocking off streets round the market. Forty illegal stallholders were arrested and the seized goods piled high in the police gym where the TV reporters and the newspaper crime guys assembled to look at the haul. I was asked on camera how much the goods were worth. I immediately said ten million pounds. When the fuss was over I was asked by the divisional commander of the raid how I had arrived at that figure. With a straight face, I told him it was easy for an expert like me. Happy days.

  The travelling to and from Newcastle, which was originally in my patch, was becoming wearing and I was delighted when Richard Armstrong was taken on as a FACT investigator based there. He was a tiptop acquisition and we worked well together. On one occasion, in the Johnstone area, we intercepted and charged the drivers of fourteen ice-cream vans with possession of pirate videos. They were fined £400 each.

  When videos pass from hand to hand or are given to charities, sometimes it is not all that easy for folk not in the business to know what is genuine and what is not. FACT’s head office asked me to look in on the world-famous Rachel House Children’s Hospice at Kinross in Fife, a place where very ill young children are looked after with love, care and understanding. We had no real problems and any slight concerns were amicably dealt with. After promising to help in any way I could, I left the hospice.

  I was soon put to the test in my new role as gofer for Rachel House. Two of the youngsters, both very seriously ill, were great fans of Glasgow Rangers and had said they would love a visit from a player. An ex-cop I knew was then head of security at Ibrox, Rangers’ stadium. We knew we had to work fast and a visit was quickly arranged to take place in a couple of days’ time at 3 p.m. I phoned the hospice with the good news and Mrs Notman, then in charge, asked which player would be coming. I said I didn’t know but that someone from the club would definitely be there. At the appointed hour, the two young lads were in the car park wearing their replica Rangers football strips when a Parks of Hamilton coach pulled up and out stepped the entire team. Some household names were in tears on the way home.

  The Hollywood connections also helped me help CHAS (the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland). They asked me to run a raffle and I needed prizes. I knew the folk at Disney and asked for a holiday for four people. ‘Paris?’ they asked. ‘Florida,’ I said. And they gave me it. American Airlines chipped in with flights and, with the assistance of Maq Rasul of Global Video, we sold 30,000 tickets at a quid each – neat little raffle! Still on the show business tack, Sharleen Spiteri, the lead singer with Texas, came to the hospice’s Glasgow office and was snapped during a photo shoot putting a smart new nameplate on its door. She and the band became big supporters of CHAS, as did Ewan McGregor.

  Soon I found myself having to do some FACT negotiating with Stagecoach and I met the company’s millionaire owners, Brian Soutar and Anne Gloag. Always at the cutting edge in the transport business, they had decided to entertain their bus passengers with videos and I had to advise them on the situation with regard to licences. I always enjoy a bit of a wind-up and had some fun with this nice couple, both of whom offer great support to various charities. I always referred to their vehicles in the good old Glasgow terms as buses. The luxury coaches – complete with video equipment – were, in their owners’ eyes, something rather more special than buses. They didn’t talk about buses. Whenever we meet now, we have a laugh about that day and ‘life on the coaches’ as we should perhaps say.

  Back in London, the film moguls were sick of piracy and, whenever a new blockbuster came out, they were always trying to think of new ways to outfox the perpetrators. However, they didn’t take into account the ways of your average Scottish lorry driver.

  When the movie The Return of the Jedi was due out, the same system was to be followed worldwide on its release. The movement of the copies of the film to the cinemas showing it had to be tracked by organisations like FACT. We had to track one copy from a depot in Glasgow to Aviemore. A national security firm was used to transport it. When I asked the company if it had gone directly from Glasgow to its Highland destination, I was told it had not – it went by way of Edinburgh. I then asked if it went directly from the capital to Aviemore. Apparently not – after Edinburgh, it went to Dundee and, from there, the firm took it to Aberdeen, Inverness and on to Aviemore, the famous outdoors resort.

  We then had to check all was OK on the film’s circuitous journey north so I interviewed the driver of the van that had transported the huge metal containers holding the blockbuster. He said it had been dropped at the cinema and, when I asked him if he had a receipt for delivery, he surprised me by saying he didn’t. He had arrived at the cinema at 8 a.m. and naturally nobody had been about at that time so the valuable film had been left at the cinema’s front door. My report to Hollywood on how we handled valuable films confirmed that, if the pirates in London had tried hard enough, they could have picked up a copy of this film from a Highland doorstep – plus half a dozen rolls and a pint of milk!

  I was beginning to feel I had enough of the Pirates of Britain, never mind the Caribbean, but there was to be another interesting episode before I finally gave up as a guardian of copyright. In 1995, the blockbuster to catch the headlines was Braveheart starring Mel Gibson. In the comfort of my south-side home, I watched the TV coverage of all the stars arriving for the premiere and, as Gibson wandered around in full Highland gear, I began to take more than a passing interest – in fact, I nearly spilled my cuppa – when I saw some people in the crowd start passing around leaflets to anyone who would take them. The flyers featured Mel Gibson in his role as William Wallace, complete with the trademark face paint associated with the film. The idea of the leaflet was to cash in on the pro-Scottish sentiments of the film and encourage people to join the Scottish National Party. It seemed to me a blatant breach of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It was enough to get me to jump into the FACT-mobile early next day and head for the capital and the headquarters of the party.

  The usual frosty receptionist asked my business and I said I wanted to speak to the person in charge. The usual interrogation followed – do you have an appointment and what is your business? With a bit of a frosty face myself, I declared that I was attempting to stop the SNP going into liquidation. That did the trick and, moments later, I was speaking to one of the top bananas in the party, Mike Russell. I told him about the breach of copyright in using the still from the film for political purposes and that only a recovery of the leaflets – virtually impossible – would appease the film-makers. He took a minute or two to realise I was serious.

  After I got home, I received an interesting call. On Gibson’s return to the States, the Hollywood moguls apparently asked him how the trip to Scotland had gone. He told them about the leaflets being handed out and asked if it was OK for the political party to have done that. The answer was, of course, that it was not and Hollywood got in touch with FACT in London. FACT were able to tell the States that their Scottish investigator was already on the case. It was all resolved amicably since the use of the Braveheart picture had been an unintentional breach of copyright and it was resolved on a personal basis between the top people on both organisations with an apology given and accepted.

  There was another Mel Gibson/Braveheart incident in my time with FACT. The film was released in September 1995 around the time the Scottish football team was due to play a friendly at Hampden and the team was staying at Troon before the game. A friend who does video work for the Scottish Football Association said t
hat the players would like to watch Braveheart on video at the hotel. At that time, it was not available in video stores in the UK. But, like a good Scottish fan, I took it upon myself to make sure the ‘boys’ got what they wanted.

  I got in touch with the States and a copy of the film, converted to the PAL format from the US NTSC format, was sent to me. It was all done under conditions of strictest security. As FACT’s man, I insisted the video never left my sight so, down in Troon, I enjoyed a nice dinner with the players before we all settled down to watch Gibson playing William Wallace. The lads loved it but the final scenes of Wallace being tortured got them a bit worked up in anger. One star, already known as a bit of a tough guy on the field, turned to me and remarked that it was a pity they weren’t playing England the next day.

  In recent years, our results against the old enemy have not been too great. Maybe I should ask Walter Smith to make showing Braveheart before games against the white shirts a ritual!

  3

  LIFE AND DEATH ON THE STREETS

  A long career as an investigator, official and private, is guaranteed to make you develop a deep hatred of the drug trade. Time after time, you see at first-hand what addiction can do to people and the lengths it drives them to in order to feed their habits.

  Much petty crime in cities is fuelled by the kind of lowlife who would rob a blind man’s begging bowl to pay for a few grams. All that is bad enough but it is sickening to see what drugs can do to beautiful young women. Prostitutes are often drug users and their addictions force them into a very dangerous way of life on the streets. Some pay with their lives as well as their looks.