Mr Benson alerted the trial judge to one conversation between Anthony Spencer and a member of the gang which had purportedly been bugged by ‘the Dutch authorities when both men are known to be in England’. However, despite having flown in the Dutch telecommunications experts in preparation to defend the use of the bugs, late guilty pleas were accepted by the prosecution, which meant the issue was not debated in open court. Benson’s proposition to the trial judge, and one which was accepted as wholly possible by security experts, was that the mobile phone can be controlled by remotely infecting it with a piece of software either by text or other message not visible to the target. The method had been considered urban myth until, in 2006, a court application made by the FBI in a case against two Mafia families revealed that roving bugs were being used in the United States. In 2009, the US National Security Agency voiced fears that European-based terrorists and organised criminals had been turning to Skype, software that allows phone calls to be made over the Internet, as a way of thwarting state eavesdropping. Mobile telephones, unlike personal computers, have no firewalls, making them easy targets for the implanting of rogue software through texts or other means.
‘The technology has been available for a number of years and to my knowledge was first used by the FBI against Mafia targets,’ one security expert told me. ‘Basically if you have the phone number and the IMEI [International Mobile Equipment Identity] number of the target and you then have the collaboration of the phone network service providers, a piece of software can be installed which turns your mobile phone into a roving microphone or a roving bug as it is known. That software can be installed physically or remotely without the knowledge of the target. The software can then be used to trigger the phone as a mike at will or by voice activation so you can not only hear two sides of the conversation on the phone but also any activity within a few feet of the infected telephone.’
One recently retired head of a UK CID force confirmed, ‘The technology has been available to the Security Services and SOCA for a number of years now. I can only tell you that it was never used or made available to my own force.’ While the debate over the inadmissibility of bugging material in British courts is ongoing, it may be only a matter of time before the authorities are forced to concede that they only have the prospect of a conviction in some gang-related cases if such intercepted material is allowed into court.
Anthony Spencer pleaded guilty, along with his lieutenant, former prison governor Jogendranath Rajcoomar, aged fifty-nine, also of Keresley, Coventry. Spencer was jailed for five years and three months, Rajcoomar for three years and nine months. Six other men also pleaded guilty to their role in the conspiracy to import and supply 140 kilos of amphetamines and cannabis.
ROBERT DAWES, JOHN’S brother, was proving a more difficult catch to land. Intelligent, ruthless and with powerful connections, but wanted in three countries – the UK and Spain, for drug smuggling, and Holland, for questioning over the execution of teacher Gerard Meesters – he esaped arrest until June 2008, when he was caught as he flew into Dubai airport from Spain. The Spanish authorities had been after him for several months in connection with a multi-million-pound haul of cocaine. Caught up in the Dawes sting, which had been conceived, planned and executed by officers from SOCA, was an innocent British pensioner.
Trevor Wade wakes every morning in the small cell in Leon, northern Spain, which has been his home since September 2007, and wonders what he has done to deserve his misfortune. Trevor is no spring chicken. He is entering his late sixties and has a history of poor health, including prostate cancer, angina and a crumbling spine. He, his wife Anne, and their two children were looking forward to a quiet retirement when Trevor’s ill-health forced him to give up first his work as a lorry driver and then his work for a firm of private investigators. When a supposed friend asked him to accompany him to help out with some driving on a four-day trip to Spain, he worried about leaving his family for a few days but Anne convinced him that a break would do him good and would get him out from under her feet. But the decision was to propel Trevor and his family into a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Trevor had known Karl Hayes for some eight years through the haulage business and thought he knew everything that he needed to know about him. But he had no inkling that Hayes had become indebted to the Cartel run by Rob Dawes and had been working for them for more than five years, helping to smuggle drugs and launder money. As far as Trevor was concerned, when he set out from his Lincolnshire home on September 5, he was simply helping out Hayes by doing a bit of driving from England to Spain so that Hayes could pick up some payments due for the fruit and vegetable transports he carried out between Valencia and the UK. After an uneventful journey through France, the Mercedes car the two men were travelling in began its journey into Spain. As they approached Madrid, Mr Wade was told by Hayes that the car was overheating and he needed to pull over to allow the engine to cool.
In a letter from his cell in Leon, Spain, Wade explained what happened next.
When we pulled up I got out of the car to stretch my legs and then saw this man approach Karl, who was still in the car, and began talking to him. All of a sudden Karl got out the car and handed his car keys to the man who then got in and drove off. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and asked Karl what it was all about. He said ‘It’s okay he’s English and he is going to check the water system for me’. I told him he was crazy and he would never see the car again. I was puzzled but he assured me the car would come back so we then went into the bar for a coffee to wait. After about 45 minutes the car came back and the English man now had another man with him travelling in a red Ford Kia The three of them all began talking and I just kept out of it, thinking this was none of my business, but when I got back in the Mercedes I noticed a large carton on the back seat of the car which was not there before. I alerted Karl to it and he said it was nothing to worry about that it was just cigarettes which the other man had asked him to take to Valencia. I knew Karl transported fruit and veg from Valencia so I assumed that must be where he was going to pick up the money owed to him. We drove off from the coffee bar and the Red Kia was in front of us. Karl said the other two men were going to show us the road out towards Valencia as far as a service station a few miles away. I knew we needed some more diesel so I said no more. When we got to the service station Karl got out to fill up the car while I went in to the service station to pay. After paying, I walked back out and then just as I was about to get in the car I was grabbed from behind and pushed against the car. I could see Karl on the floor surrounded by other men and they were all armed. At first I thought the petrol station had been robbed and they wanted our car as a getaway but then I realised as they handcuffed us, as well as the men in the red Kia, that they were plain clothed policemen.
Unbeknown to Wade, the carton in the back of the car and five others in the boot contained 200 kilos of cocaine with a purity of eighty-two per cent. It was worth £7 million wholesale or approximately £22 million at street value. Wade, along with Karl Hayes, Andrew Cunliffe, another British subject, and a Columbian, was charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine. SOCA had had Hayes on their radar for more than a year and, having allowed one shipment through, had tracked the Mercedes car electronically from Boston, Lincolnshire, to Madrid. Also in their sights was another British lorry driver, Brian Kelly. As the job progressed SOCA investigators sent communiqués to the counterparts in Madrid detailing what they knew about Hayes and Kelly and linking both of them to Rob Dawes. In one, SOCA officers stated, ‘Our information indicates that Brian Kelly born 20 April 1954 is on route to collect 100 kilos of cocaine from Spain and to transport it to Belgium. After receiving a legitimate cargo Kelly will go to meet one of Dawes partners in Madrid to collect the 100 kilos of cocaine. We have received information that Karl Hayes, on behalf of Dawes, has travelled by car to Spain this afternoon to be able to see that the lorry meets its destination.’
The following day, a new note was sent by SOCA to Madrid: ‘Ou
r information indicates that Hayes is travelling to Spain to supervise the delivery of a quantity of cocaine to Brian Kelly. We suspect that given the distance of travel that Hayes has a travel companion. We suspect that the last time Hayes did this journey he collected the drugs and passed them on to Kelly.’
Wade’s case was backed by statements made to SOCA by Karl Hayes and his partner Paula Sharp, who ran the transport firm SOCA suspected had been used by the Dawes Cartel. Hayes claimed he was acting as an agent provocateur to try to nail members of the drugs gang after his son had died from a drugs overdose. He has been visited in the Spanish jail at least five times by SOCA officers who have offered to help him get a reduced sentence from Spanish prosecutors in return for information about Robert Dawes. ‘I have made it clear in my statements that Trevor’s involvement in this situation was as a favour to me to help me drive from the UK to Spain,’ says Hayes. ‘As a friend I should have made all the facts and my full intentions known to him. Had I done so, I am sure that Trevor would not have been in my car that day with me. Trevor and his family don’t deserve this to happen and if he were to die in prison the damage to his family would be immeasurable.’ More corroboration that Wade was innocent came from Paula Sharp, Hayes’s partner at Sharp’s Haulage. She stated, ‘Karl was needed back in England for the weekend for other duties and so I made a suggestion that he took Trevor Wade with him to share the driving and hence get back for the weekend. This is indeed what happened and Trevor Wade has been innocently caught up in the consequences.’ SOCA’s own communications to Spanish investigators indicated there was no intelligence that Wade was involved in the drugs deal. Indeed, a communiqué stated that there was an unknown man in Hayes’s car who they presumed was merely ‘a travel companion for Hayes given the distance of travel’.
Wade’s wife, Anne, has been campaigning for his release through Fair Trials International, the Foreign Office and her MP. She is the only breadwinner in the family now, working long hours to keep the family afloat financially as well as mentally. Every day she tries to find a way through the mountain of bureaucracy which is preventing the truth coming out.
‘I have only been able to go to Spain to see Trevor once and I fear that he will die in prison without being able to see his two children again,’ she told me. ‘I am at the end of my tether. There is no way that Trevor would have agreed to accompany Karl Hayes if he thought there was anything dodgy about it. I just can’t believe this has happened. I keep thinking I will wake up and it will all have been a bad dream but this has been going on for two years now. Now Trevor has been told it will be another year in prison before a trial starts. He is just being left to rot in prison while the guilty ones are either going free or are being offered cuts in their sentence. The Foreign Office and Fair Trials have been doing what they can but SOCA have not been very helpful. SOCA officers have been to visit Karl Hayes at least four times in prison in Spain and have told his ex-wife they have agreed a deal for him which will give him a reduced sentence in exchange for information. I have asked them why they have not been to see Trevor and they have told me it’s because he is not involved and has nothing to offer them. The whole thing stinks, particularly when you look at the way the British Government did everything they could to help free the Lockerbie bomber to get him back to Libya because of his prostate cancer, when he has been convicted of killing hundreds of people.’
Stranger still was the languid response of the law enforcement agencies in both countries towards the main target, Rob Dawes. There was a huge intelligence file on Dawes, including identification of businesses he had on the Costa del Sol, properties in Mijas and business interests in Dubai, where he sometimes based himself. He was being tracked all over the globe. Trevor Wade had been arrested on 6 September 2007 and yet it took another nine months for the authorities to track down Dawes. He was only arrested because he made the mistake of thinking he was immune from an international warrant in Dubai. And as of July 2010, two years after his arrest, there was no sign of him being extradited to any of the countries which had accumulated so much information about his brutal methods and drug smuggling.
Meanwhile Trevor still sits in his cell wondering what has been going on. At worst, like Kevin Musgrove (see Chapter Five), he was a victim of his own naivety, guilty of trusting someone whose background and intentions were concealed from him. He learned the hard way that no matter how closely one follows the letter of the law, it sometimes pays to be more careful about who your friends and business associates are. Prison life in Leon would have broken many lesser men but what he lacks in physical strength he makes up for in mental fortitude, and he and his supporters are determined to see him back home with his family.
Every evening, he gets to make a five-minute phone call. During one of these calls, he told me his daily routine. ‘We get up at 7.30am, then it’s down for breakfast, which is usually a cup of coffee and a two-inch piece of sponge cake. Lunch can be anything from a bowl of soup, which is usually tinned French beans mixed up with water and a roll. Two days a week we get some fish, which is boiled to nothing and in a bit of liquid which is usually cold and slimy. We don’t get any fresh vegetables ever, everything is army surplus tinned stuff, which comes from the barracks nearby, I guess. If we are lucky we get a sausage sometimes or a slice of fatty belly pork at the weekend. The only thing I can honestly say I look forward to is the bit of Spanish tortilla we get sometimes. There is no kind of work or education regime here like you might get in a British prison. They stick us outside in the yard for a few hours every day, and in winter and spring it’s bloody cold sometimes. There is nothing in the cells except for a bunk and chair and table I am sharing with three other people. There is no distinction between prisoners in here. I am in with terrorists on one side and paedophiles on the other, bloody scary at times.’
Trevor’s situation contrasts sharply with that of Gavin Dawes, cousin of Rob and John Dawes. He is, at the time of writing, residing in HMP Lowdham Grange in Nottinghamshire. He has good meals three times a day, access to an Xbox, Sky television and a phone in his en suite cell. Dawes is serving fifteen years. Amazingly he has access to his own Facebook page from his prison cell and, in his own words, is living the life of Riley. He may well be out in five years and allowed to go on home visits in three to four years.
Meanwhile SOCA insists it cannot extend any further help to Trevor Wade. ‘SOCA has an obligation, under the relevant statutory disclosure provisions, to make available to the Spanish prosecutor any material in our possession that would assist in Mr Wade’s defence or undermine the prosecution case,’ said a spokesman. ‘[But] the proceedings in relation to Mr Wade and Karl Hayes lie firmly within the jurisdiction of the Spanish authorities. We do not have the authority to offer a benefit to any prisoner on behalf of another jurisdiction.’
As in the case of Kevin Musgrove, it is to be hoped that justice will one day be served.
MYSTERY CONTINUES TO surround the disappearance of James Brodie, the man who pulled the trigger in the Marian Bates murder. Rumours, some wild, circulated regarding Brodie’s fate from the day he disappeared, including: that he was shot dead on Colin Gunn’s orders twenty-four hours after the botched jewellery raid and then was fed to pigs, or that he was buried under new buildings on the site of the old Sporting Chance pub, or that he fled and is safely hiding out in Portugal, Spain or Ireland. In October 2007, there was a fresh appeal for his whereabouts but all enquiries – which even had police digging up land in Flintham – drew a blank. Rumours also circulated that an extensive dig carried out on land in Blidworth was connected to the search for Brodie’s remains. Either way, police remain convinced that Brodie was executed within forty-eight hours of Marian Bates’s death because it was feared his capture would bring down the rest of the gang.
Arrests were made in April 2010 for the murder of David Draycott. Police had been able to use new technology to recreate the scene of the shooting which they said provided significant new evidence. But after a few
days’ questioning, the two men arrested, aged twenty-two and thirty-three, were released without charge.
In June 2008, Vincent ‘PG Man’ Robinson passed away after a long battle with cancer.
In September 2008, Kevin Warsop, who had been been arrested with Colin Gunn back in 1998 over an incident outside the Astoria nightclub, threatened to shoot police officers and blow up his house during a twenty-four-hour siege at his home in Raymede Drive, Bestwood. The stand-off began when the thirty-nine-year-old Warsop refused to let officers into the property after his wife had dialled 999 following a domestic incident. Warsop made a gun gesture at the officers and said he had a firearm. ‘Just see what happens if you come in,’ he told police. ‘Just see what happens to the first one of you through the door.’ A nearby school was closed the next day as the siege continued, homes were evacuated and the gas supply to his house was cut off. The siege eventually came to an end when five officers entered the house and arrested Warsop after a struggle. No gun was found. Warsop was subsequently jailed for twenty-one months after admitting making threats to kill and threatening to damage property with intent to endanger life. Nottingham Crown Court heard that the father of two young children had taken parenting courses while in prison and intended to move away from Bestwood to avoid criminality. ‘He recognises, even knowing where his roots are, that he is going to have to move away if he is going to put his past behind him,’ said his barrister.
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