by Dick Kirby
Meanwhile, Roach intensified his enquiries which quite apart from recovering more stolen property, now included searching for Martin. His parents’ address at Finsbury Park was raided; Martin was not there, but more property stolen by him was, as well as seals and dies for forging passports and Green Card insurance forms. Colin Black told me that Martin used ‘Liquid Metal’ (a tube consisting of gallium-containing alloys with very low melting points which are liquid at room temperature) to copy a passport’s embossed stamp from which he would make a very authentic looking die.
During the search of the flat at Langtry Road, among the items of property seized was an A–Z directory and an officer was given the job of scrutinising every page to see if there were any tell-tale markings that might reveal where offences had been committed, as well as the location of where stolen property might be stashed. Inside one particular page was a sketch showing a stream, a reference to garages and the Great Cambridge Road, together with the letters ‘VW’. It took the officer two more days before he was fairly certain that he knew that the place he was looking for was situated in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.
The garages were identified and by lying on the ground and raising the bottoms of the shutters, the officers saw a Volkswagen van in it. One of the partners of the managing agents for the garages was a Justice of the Peace; upon hearing from the officers that they believed that stolen property was in the garage, he accompanied them there and opened the door. The registration number of the Volkswagen minivan, EMM 173J, revealed that it had been stolen between 14 and 17 January 1972; later enquiries revealed that David Martin had been the person responsible.
Inside the van was a whole mass of stolen property and after examining it back at the police station, papers led the officers to a car park at Heathrow where they recovered a Citroën containing a large amount of photographic equipment, passports and chequebooks. More camera equipment was seized from the old North London Air Terminal in Finchley Road. And at West London Air Terminal they found an escape kit – chequebooks, credit cards and passports in another Citroën.
A receipt found in the flat at Langtry Road related to a safety deposit box at Harrods; a search warrant was obtained which revealed that the box contained chequebooks, credit cards and stamps, made up to forge entries in Post Office Savings Bank Books. These stamps neatly dovetailed with the Post Office books found at Wood’s address. The gang had gone to various Post Offices, opened accounts in nominal sums and provided false names. The stamps were made up by using letter stamps, bound around corks with wire. They were set in the name of the Post Office and when they were inked and stamped gave a good facsimile of a genuine entry stamp. Amounts were entered in the columns with false initials and fraudulent withdrawals were then made: simple but highly effective and very lucrative. And in a cottage in Hertfordshire, local constabulary officers, acting on a tip-off from Roach’s squad, discovered stolen hi-fi equipment.
Janet Norman-Phillips was still on the loose and it was known that she was using stolen Barclaycards and cheques to live on. Roach and his team were aware of the Barclaycards she was using, so the chief security officer at Barclaycard was contacted – he had previously worked with Roach on the Fraud Squad – and every morning the investigators were telephoned with her latest string of offences. On a large blackboard, they could chart her movements which, from Derby, went directly south to Southampton and then back to London. With luck, they would be able to determine the next area where she would strike and effect her arrest. In the event, her apprehension was carried out following a violent and dramatic incident – which had nothing to do with Roach and his team – by young officers who were not even aware of the existence of Martin, Norman-Phillips or anybody else.
On 2 January 1973, plain-clothes officers from Hyde Park police station had been detailed to carry out an observation in Hyde Park’s underground car park, due to a spate of thefts of and from vehicles parked there. Officers included 25-year-old Temporary Detective Constable (TDC) John Kelly and Police Constables Wally Hammond, 30, and Mick Edwards, aged 31. They saw a white BMW enter the car park, driven by a woman – this was Janet Norman-Phillips. The car had been stolen by her between 12 and 15 November 1972 but the officers were not aware of this. However, Norman-Phillips was equally unaware of the officers’ presence and she got out of the car and tried to open the boots of three other unattended BMWs. The officers stopped her and she stated that she was looking for a friend’s car, since she wanted to leave a note under the windscreen wiper; however, her actions were not consistent with someone wanting to leave a friend a message at the other end of a car. She agreed to accompany the officers to the police station but said she wanted to obtain evidence of her identity from her car. It was a trick, and a good one; as soon as she was inside her car, she slammed the door, locked it and started the engine.
TDC Kelly flung himself across the bonnet, PC Hammond managed to smash the driver’s window but Norman-Phillips put the car into gear and drove straight at PC Edwards who managed to fling himself out of the way. The car roared off, with TDC Kelly hanging on to the wing mirror and windscreen wipers with Norman-Phillips swerving the car from side to side in an effort to dislodge him. The car tore into Park Lane and then Norman-Phillips swung the car hard right at Brook Gate and smashed into a crash barrier; she was travelling so fast that the impact caused Kelly to be hurled into the air, hitting the road twenty-three feet away; his shoulders were fractured in three places. The girl had been knocked unconscious, having hit her head on the windscreen as the result of the crash; but after a short spell in hospital, she was arrested and questioned. Her admissions to the officers resulted in the recovery of even more stolen property and she too was charged with a variety of offences, including the attempted murder of a police officer.
Martin had since been arrested and by now the crime squad were wise to his antics; they had discovered one of his escape ploys. ‘His trick was to chew some paper when waiting to be booked in,’ Colin Black told me, ‘then he would place the wet wad of paper into the lock keep as he was placed in the cell; this would stop the tongue of the lock engaging into the keep. We always double-checked the cell door with him in custody.’ Black and his colleagues would then be posted to sit outside his cell twenty-four hours a day – ‘Very boring!’
Now, once more, Martin was remanded in custody. It had been a lengthy, complex and an extraordinary inquiry and Roach and his team had every right to be pleased with themselves. They had recovered over 900 items of property worth by today’s standards in the region of £320,000 – and their expertise, plus the courage of the Hyde Park officers, would later bring well-merited commendations from the trial judge and the commissioner.
Most importantly, they had smashed a gang of sophisticated criminals, who individually and severally had been involved with conspiracies to steal mail, to obtain money from Post Offices by means of forged instruments and to pervert the course of justice, quite apart from the car thefts and burglaries of which Martin was the undisputed leader.
Let Eddie Roach describe just one example of Martin’s cool nerve:
One example of the audacity of David Martin took place when he broke into a Bentley saloon in an underground car park, under flats in Hampstead. He, in his normal way, cleared all of the papers out of the glove compartment, together with a bunch of keys. On studying the papers, he discovered a receipt for a private aircraft refuelling. The receipt was on an American Express account from which he saw the card was due for renewal in a week’s time. He rang the American Express company, identified himself as the customer and said that as his card was due to expire shortly and he had to travel to the States, could they please send him a new one immediately? The next morning, he hung around the flat, saw the postman go up to the door, waited until the postman had gone, then he opened the door with the keys he had stolen, took the American Express letter, left everything else, closed up and left.
Now he had been re-arrested Martin was remanded in custody at Brixton
prison; however, the man who boasted ‘No prison will hold me!’ had a reputation to live up to and on Wednesday 30 May 1973 it was put to the test.
Prison Days
Brixton prison in South London was not high-security in the way in which Belmarsh prison is, which was opened in 1991; it was simply a remand prison for housing prisoners awaiting trial. Built in 1820, it was intended to house 175 prisoners; on 30 May 1973 there were approximately 770 prisoners incarcerated at Brixton. ‘D’ wing housed twenty prisoners thought to be security risks – Martin was one of them.
Between 1968 and 1972 annual armed robberies in the Greater London Area rose from just twelve to sixty-five. During the previous few weeks a gang of determined, armed bank robbers – they were known as the Wembley Mob – had been arrested and charged with a number of those robberies in which a total of £1,250,000 had been stolen. They had been remanded in custody at Brixton and they were rightly apprehensive regarding their ultimate fate. One of their number, one Derek Creighton Smalls – known as ‘Bertie’ – had appeared at Harrow Magistrates’ Court on 3 April and the rest agreed to give evidence against them. The gang decided not to wait to discover how compelling Smalls’s testimony might be; they already had a shrewd idea. Outside help was needed for them and it was not slow in materialising.
Early that morning, two rented Ford Escorts with their ignition keys and their tanks full of petrol were left parked in Clarence Crescent, almost within walking distance from the prison and strategically placed to offer escape to all points of the compass. Newspapers had been folded over the steering wheels as an aid to instant recognition for the would-be drivers. These were the change-over vehicles needed for the escape. At 10 o’clock the initial escape vehicle, a white Ford Transit Rent-a-Van, was left in Lyham Road, close to the rear gates of the prison; thirty minutes later a Lambeth District Dustcart with a hydraulic tipper trundled through the prison’s rear gates as it did every Wednesday morning and commenced collecting the waiting refuse bags.
At 10.50 a warder opened a cupboard to be confronted by three prisoners, two of whom were members of the Wembley Mob, and one of the gang, Micky ‘The Fish’ Salmon, pointed a gun at the warder and his keys were demanded; in fact, the gun was made of soap, blackened with shoe polish, together with silver paper to add to its authenticity but it was sufficiently realistic for the warder to hand over his keys to David Martin. He was not a member of the gang but he had been included because he had previously memorised the warder’s keys and knew exactly which key fitted which lock; and accuracy and speed were essential for the execution of the plan.
Several of the gang were released and they rushed out into the yard and headed for the dustcart. In doing so, they left the doors behind them unlocked and other prisoners, not associated with the Wembley gang, also took the opportunity to escape.
Seventeen prisoners were now in the compound. Philip Morris, one of the Wembley gang, dragged the driver out of the dustcart’s cab, climbed in, and as he turned the truck around, other prisoners leapt aboard. With the prison alarms wailing, the warders rushed out and several of the prisoners grabbed the shovels and brooms from the truck and used them to attack the prison officers; Morris put his foot down and the truck roared towards the rear gates. The truck smashed straight through the wooden gates and the line of warders who had assembled outside in Lyham Road would certainly have been badly injured or killed had the truck emerged any further into the street – but it didn’t. The hydraulic arms of the tipper were in the raised position and they jammed into the overhead frame of the gates.
Eleven of the prisoners stumbled out of the truck and into Lyham Road where they fought a running battle with the warders. Bruce Brown and four more of the Wembley Mob got into the waiting Rent-a-Van, started the engine and put it into gear but neglected to release the handbrake; it gave warders sufficient time to smash the windscreen with their truncheons. As the five men scrambled out of the van, Brown threatened a warder with a club and was cracked over the head with a truncheon. He slid to the roadway, suffering from a fractured skull and the rest of the robbers appeared to lose heart and they too were herded up.
Meanwhile, the four dog teams assigned to the prison were all off-duty but because they and their handlers were housed in married quarters adjacent to the prison, upon hearing the commotion they rushed into the prison grounds, where savage hand-to-hand fighting was taking place and the dog handlers accounted for four of the prisoners who surrendered.
Other prisoners, including Martin, stopped a passing Toyota at the junction with Lyham Road and Chale Road, pulled the driver out and got in. A warder leapt on to the bonnet but before he could smash the windscreen, the car shot forward and he was thrown into the roadway. The Toyota collided with another car, driven by another escaped prisoner. Martin was obviously not privy to the existence of the two getaway cars parked in nearby Clarence Crescent because he by-passed them completely. After a mile, the prisoners abandoned the hijacked car, but Martin and another prisoner hailed a taxi. However, as they drove away, they were followed by a police helicopter; a police car blocked their way in Bedford Road, Clapham and following a fierce fight they too were recaptured. Two other prisoners got clean away.
A number of prison officers had been injured – the number of casualties, one of whom sustained a broken wrist, varied between twelve and nine – and as Detective Superintendent Roy Ranson of Scotland Yard, tasked to head the inquiry into the breakout, told Ivor Mills of ITN, ‘They did a marvellous job, here; we can’t commend them sufficiently.’ Martin might not have agreed with these effusive comments; he was thrown into solitary and, according to prison folklore, savagely beaten up.
Eddie Roach was furious that Martin had escaped, albeit temporarily; he called for statements from the police officers who had arrested him and discovered that Martin had been dressed in light slacks, a shirt and a suede leather jacket with fringes in the sleeves. Unconvicted prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes but this was a privilege, not a right. As a known escaper, the prison governor had housed Martin in the secure wing, but although in theory the governor could have insisted that Martin should wear prison issue clothing with yellow patches on the trousers, this was seldom if ever done at Brixton. Nevertheless, Roach submitted a report to the Home Office which probably coincided with the inquiry carried out by Superintendent Ranson and ensured that from then on Martin was handcuffed to two officers when he was conveyed to and from court.
The time had come for a reckoning with Martin and it arrived a fortnight later; he and his co-conspirators appeared at the Old Bailey before His Honour Judge Edward Clarke QC (described by defence lawyers as being ‘fearsome’) on an indictment containing thirty counts. All of the co-defendants – with the exception of Martin – pleaded guilty. Janet Norman-Phillips was sentenced to a total of three years’ imprisonment, Clive Green to two years’ imprisonment, Bruce Wood to twelve months’ imprisonment and Hugh Bestic to Borstal Training.
Martin did not plead not guilty – he looked up from the book he was reading and simply told the judge, ‘I do not recognise this court’ and that being so, there was little reason to appoint counsel for the defence. It was a ridiculous (and not to mention provocative) way to behave but His Lordship simply smiled thinly and said, ‘Very well, Mr Martin, continue reading your book’ and instructed the clerk of the court to enter pleas of not guilty. His trial lasted just three days and it took the jury no time at all to find Martin guilty of everything and on 14 June 1973 he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.
In October 1974, the Wembley Mob who, the previous month, had been sentenced to very long terms of imprisonment, appeared at the Old Bailey to be dealt with for the Brixton riot and breakout. Telling them, ‘This was a mass enterprise prepared with great skill worthy of a better cause,’ the Recorder of London, Sir Carl Aarvold OBE, TD sentenced Michael Salmon, Danny Allpress, Bruce Brown, James Jeffrey and Philip Morris to twelve months’ imprisonment, to run consecutively to their serv
ing sentences.
Also in the dock was 27-year-old David Martin. He received the same punishment. He was now serving a nine-year sentence.
From an early age, Martin had dressed in his mother’s clothes. As he grew older, he also grew out of his mother’s apparel, and so acquired female clothing of his own and at some stage, possibly before or perhaps during his time in the penal system, he became bisexual. In those times, for those in authority – police and prison officers – this also marked him out as wayward. Martin liked to refer to himself as ‘Davina Martyn’ although he was known to the other prisoners as ‘Dave the Rave’ because, as one of them said, ‘he was a raving pouf’. As such, he was mainly ostracised by the other (primarily heterosexual) prisoners who possessed the usual prison prejudices; less so, by the homosexual inmates.
In the grim, austere surroundings of a high-security prison his appearance was quite extraordinary; his shirt could not really be described as such – it was more like a blouse. Martin wore moccasins and his painfully thin legs were encased in painfully thin jeans. At five feet ten, he appeared taller due to the sparseness of his physique and his large hooked nose was framed by his long, flowing blond hair. The overall effect, in ornithological terms, gave him the appearance of a cross between a rather benign vulture and a gorgeously plumed bird of paradise. He formed several sentimental attachments and delighted in stealing away a willing partner from an already formed and stable relationship but only on the understanding that he, Martin, would be in total control of the situation. However, Martin’s long, undulating golden locks and mincing gait also attracted the attentions of very large, muscular and predatory homosexual prisoners. Heterosexual inmates who possessed similar herculean physiques sensibly avoided any kind of encounter with these prisoners and while Martin might have dictated who did what to whom with more amenable partners, this was not necessarily the case in these invasive situations.