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 Amb
izas 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.
6: scum of the earth
David 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.
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