by Trevor Grove
Korkolis looked stung: ‘Now you play with me, My Lord. When the prosecution says lies I didn’t see any miscle on your face move.’ There followed a pained outburst, culminating in an accusation that the judge had been conspiring with Miss Korner in private. Korkolis said he was ‘thunderstrick’ by what had taken place. The jury had not the smallest idea what he was talking about, but since this was a familiar experience we would have let it pass had not the judge responded. We were now about to have explained to us one of those points of law which so often required us to leave the court.
Judge Goldstein admitted to us that he had had a brief private meeting with Miss Korner that morning, to discuss a matter of procedure. This was probably unwise, in view of the nature of the case: it would have been better had other counsel and Mr Korkolis been present. But nothing at all improper had taken place. He had told Mr Korkolis about it himself and apologised.
The judge said all this with icy self-control. Inwardly he must have been seething that a matter already discussed and dealt with in the jury’s absence had been flaunted in front of us by Korkolis, accompanied by a tremendous show of ersatz outrage. It was a hucksterish trick, although we missed its significance at the time and the judge scrupulously avoided pointing it out to us.
Court was abruptly adjourned for the day, a sovereign remedy for ill-temper. The jury reeled into the outside world rather earlier than the newly agreed time of 4.45 p.m.
TIME TO ROCK AND ROLL
Day 53. Kept waiting once again. Should prison vans have sirens like police cars and ambulances? It would save the tax-payer thousands of pounds a week in wasted court costs.
At the start of each day we now customarily assembled on the green leather benches in Grand Hall, the jury room not yet being unlocked. Here one could drink one’s take-away espresso and read the papers in much more dignified surroundings than the fifth-floor restaurant.
The Grand Hall is certainly very grand: a multi-domed, many-alcoved vestibule of great size and splendour. Leading off it are the oldest courts in the building, including Court 1. The architect was Edward Mountford, who won the competition to design the new courthouse in 1898, after the City of London acquired the infamous Newgate Prison, demolished it and cleared the site. No longer did passers-by have to carry nosegays because of the sickening stench. The new building was completed in 1907, using some of the stones from that terrible jail. It was opened by King Edward VII. There were four courts and ninety cells.
Mountford was not the kind of architect nor the early 1900s an era to shy away from the grandiloquent gesture. The baroque portentousness of the façade, presided over by the Recording Angel and topped by Justice with her famous scales, has its inner counterpart in the Grand Hall. It seems to have been expressly designed to humble the mighty and obliterate the humble. It is impossible to imagine a modern-day civic edifice being built with such resounding confidence or to such numinous effect. If Edward Mountford had been commissioned by God to design a venue for the Last Judgement, this would have been it. He would merely have added a few tons of gold leaf and powdered pearl.
The budget of £400,000, enormous by contemporary standards, allowed for every kind of extravagance. Richly patterned marble was shipped in from Italy, Greece, Belgium, Scandinavia. There were mosaic ceilings and painted lunettes. Edifying texts were chiselled into the friezes, with dots the size of cricket balls between each word for emphasis:
THE . WELFARE . OF . THE . PEOPLE . IS . THE . SUPREME . LAW.
THE . LAW . OF . THE . WISE . IS . A . FOUNTAIN . OF . LIFE.
Sculpted reliefs representing Justice, Mercy, Charity and Temperance loom down virtuously. They are escorted by rather earthier figures among whom I counted four naked breasts, one bare bottom and eight willies. The lunettes were painted by Professor Gerald Moira. His depictions of great law-givers through the ages look like scenes from the Old Testament. His brief may have been to equate man-made law with divine justice, an aspiration common among lawyers to this day.
To the juror patiently waiting to ‘POISE . THE . CAUSE . IN . JUSTICE . EQUAL . SCALES’ (and wondering what became of the genitive case) all this is rather daunting, which was clearly what the architect intended. But barristers must find it thoroughly uplifting to have their priest-like status confirmed in this basilica of English law. How glorious to cast your eyes ceilingwards and see your lucrative profession allegorised in a painting of Time Protecting Truth From Falsehood. (And how apt that the role of Time in the law’s affairs should be so recognised.) How splendid to be a wing-collared QC gliding silkily across the glimmering marble floor, wig held high and black gown billowing, while mere mortals creep about its echoing vastness like beetles on the bottom of an empty swimming pool.
‘Court 5!’ Roy the usher broke into my reverie with his customary summons: ‘Time to rock and roll.’ And off we filed, no more than an hour behind schedule. Joanna Korner joshingly told the court that the timing of the trial would now depend on the efficiency of Belmarsh Prison.
Oh?
This was new information. The jury pounced on it. Hitherto we had had no idea where the defendants were being held. Bob the postman was able to tell us more in the coffee-break. Belmarsh was on his delivery route. It was a spanking-new, high-walled, top-security jail in Woolwich, he said, specially tailored for tough nuts. From this we could deduce that in the authorities’ eyes these men were Category A prisoners and dangerous – though that, of course, was precisely one of the issues we were there to decide. Even if they were being held in the Tower of London, we had to think of them as innocent unless and until we found them guilty.
Miss Korner was approaching the end of her cross-examination. She had returned to the three incriminating tapes which Korkolis said he had secretly recorded to help make the kidnap look genuine. We had the translated transcripts in front of us. In one of them a man, a woman and Korkolis himself were chatting in a kitchen about their plans for some unspecified event. Someone was cooking spaghetti. Odd phrases stood out. The moment ‘he’ was alone they’d be waiting for ‘him’ … Once it was all over, the woman could look forward to getting her gold Rolex … ‘In a month at most we will have finished and then we can dance at weekends,’ said Korkolis’s voice. In a telephone call on another tape, Korkolis could be heard asking someone if he was ‘in a hurry to get the suitcase with the money’. This same someone warned that ‘those in the tall hats have got involved …’ (‘tall hats’: Greek-Cypriot slang for the British police).
This someone, the jury deduced, must be a man called Pantelides who had been mentioned from time to time without being, so to speak, formally introduced. What we did know, because Korkolis had let it slip, was that this Pantelides was on bail of £350,000, which was a lot of moolah. Our note to the judge asking who he was and what he was charged with yielded nothing. The jury was not allowed to have the answer to these questions. It was all wonderfully mystifying.
Even without knowing anything about Mr Pantelides, the contents of the tapes seemed pretty damning – as Korkolis claimed they were intended to be. But Miss Korner was aiming elsewhere. Wasn’t it true, she asked, that he made a regular practice of secretly recording conversations with friends and associates in this fashion? It was. He did it for self-protection. In that case, why were there no tapes of his meetings with George Fraghistas to discuss the planning of the fake kidnap – precisely the sort of exchange of which he was normally so careful to keep a record? Pause. ‘Because I never imagined he could lower himself so much to betray me.’ He said it with conviction. And he sounded almost convincing.
Korkolis’s re-examination of himself did not yield much other than that his father was a governor of the Athens stock exchange and his uncle a Greek air marshal. This didn’t cut much ice, even if it was true. But he finished on a note of high passion, addressing the jury. ‘At this crucial moment in my life I am proud to say I didn’t lie. The only support I have is my faith.’ He cleared the witness box of his things and descended, a sm
all, defiant figure in jeans and sneakers, much shorter than his guards.
In the break Kate said, ‘He’s a little weasel.’ Stuart: ‘Come on, Kate, feel free to speak your mind.’ Kate: ‘All right, he’s an effing prat.’ Hubbub of objections from other jurors: ‘Of course he isn’t. He’s as sharp as a monkey. He’s cleverer than Korner. He ought to be a lawyer …’ Etc, etc.
Korkolis now had his own witnesses to call. The first was a phonetics expert. He was on the board of a publication with the marvellously arcane title Forensic Linguistics. His evidence was that George could not have heard someone talking to him in a voice distorted by helium. Anyone doing that for any length of time would probably die.
The next defence witness was Mr Polymeropoulos, an Athenian Mr Toad. He was a plump, balding man, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses and a blubbery smile. He had come to London voluntarily when he had learnt of Korkolis’s difficulties, he said. He had a remarkably vivid recollection of a meeting many years ago at a coffee shop in Kolonakis, when he had seen Korkolis shake hands with a young man. Who was this young man? Why, Korkolis had told him, it was George Fraghistas.
That was it. Just the one meeting a very long time ago – oh, and another a month or so later, maybe? Polymeropoulos smacked his lips and wobbled his head invitingly. He agreed that he had not clapped eyes on Korkolis for ten or possibly twelve years. Miss Korner asked him if he was what is known as a professional witness. He affected to be horrified, denied it, smiled ingratiatingly and trundled off to catch the next flight back to Athens.
Korkolis had finished dealing with himself and looked quite satisfied with his performance. The jurors were left to ponder why. Either he was a first-rate actor, or he genuinely believed he had shown the jury what he wanted them to see. We would not hear any more long perorations from him until his closing speech. That was sure to be a marathon performance.
A SUITABLE BOY
Thanassis Zografos had dressed smartly for his début in the witness box. This is what most defendants and witnesses do (unless of course one is Richard Branson, who remained resolutely tie-less in court throughout his victorious libel case against GTech lottery mogul Guy Snowden in January 1998). Obviously the intention is to convey respectability. It is a ploy that sometimes fails grotesquely when the younger, rougher element try it on. An earringed skinhead in a shiny-new, boxy-shouldered suit looks even more sinister than he would in a T-shirt and trainers. If not hoodlum black, the suit is often a sickening shade of green or brown.
There are usually a number of these slightly menacing characters in the morning queue to get into the Old Bailey. The white boys look like underfed bouncers, cupping cigarettes and jerking their shoulders in a hopeless attempt to look cool. Blacks who go in for the jacket-and-tie routine often draw the line at leather shoes or cutting off their dreadlocks and look even more uncomfortable. It is all rather odd when you consider that it is not the judge these people need to impress but the jury, whose male members are generally the worst-dressed people in the courtroom.
Perhaps that was why Korkolis, who said he used to be a snappy dresser, chose to stick to his prison garb. By contrast Zografos had metamorphosed into a tidy-looking young man in a brown blazer, blue shirt and mosaic-patterned yellow tie. His thick black hair was carefully combed and fluffed up at the back. His pale, handsome, big-jawed face looked newly shaved. He flashed the jury a smile as he took the stand. It was a smile aimed squarely at the mothers among us, I would say. There was no doubt of the role he was going to play. We had had a foretaste of it during Mr Curran’s cross-examination of Korkolis. It was to be that of the wide-eyed innocent led astray in the big foreign city.
Between them, he and Mr Curran managed it very well. The story that emerged was methodically told. This in itself played in Zografos’s favour, a blessed relief after the mad verbosity of Korkolis. His English was near-perfect, rather better in fact than some of the jurors’.
The young Thanassis was born in 1971 in Trikala, a small town in central Greece, and grew up as ‘a country boy’. He would be 26 in April. His father worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. His mother and his brother had been to visit him in prison, Mr Curran was keen to let us know.
His education had been at the village school and then in Corinth. After school, he had worked as a labourer, managing to fit in English lessons. When he was 20 he went to Athens and enrolled in a crash course in science, maths and English, paying his way with part-time jobs. His ambition was to go to university in England – which would have the incidental benefit of getting him out of National Service.
He won a place at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster, to do a B. Eng. in computers. He dropped out of the course because, he said, although he was good at lectures he was lazy at revising. He left his hall of residence in Streatham and moved into the Rose Court Hotel in Paddington, where he became a full-time receptionist and interpreter for the Greek residents, many of whom stayed there while on visits to the UK for medical treatment. He would accompany them to their consultations. In 1993 he returned to his studies, enrolling in a software engineering course at the South Bank University. In 1994, alas, he dropped out again.
Zografos explained all this with becoming modesty. He was rueful about his academic failures. Mr Curran skilfully brought out the boyish vulnerability of the young Greek far from home. ‘Were you happy?’ ‘I was lonely, but I was all right,’ replied Zografos, squaring his shoulders bravely.
It was at the Rose Court Hotel that he met Mr Sidiropoulos and his friend Mr Korkolis. He described Mr Sidiropoulos as an ex-millionaire. (Joanna Korner, sotto voce: ‘Is that an occupation?’ Patrick Curran: ‘It is for some.’) As for Korkolis, he was ‘very different from now’: he was well dressed, self-assured, much less excitable and had plenty of money. They chatted. ‘Mr Korkolis discussed mainly business if I can say.’ Zografos became involved in some of this business, in particular a somewhat shady property company.
Zografos’s first day was a success. He had politely directed most of his remarks directly at the jury. We had had the full benefit of his smile. When he frowned with concentration, his eyebrows writhed like caterpillers, which demonstrated how very much in earnest he was being. He had come across as a good-hearted, homespun lad, perhaps a touch naive.
I began to see a new problem shaping itself – one which faces a great many juries these days because of the growing practice of trying several defendants together in one trial (partly because of the organised nature of modern crime, partly to save money). Until now everything had centred around Korkolis. For the first time I became fully aware of how tricky it was going to be to treat each of the defendants separately. So much would depend on what we made of their relationships with each other. For example, there had been a time when I thought Korkolis and Zografos might have been lovers, remembering the gay magazine at Hogan Mews. There was a general view by now that Korkolis might be homosexual (which the police confirmed after the trial). But Mr Curran had made a point of getting his client to tell us he had a girlfriend. Korkolis could be extraordinarily persuasive, as we knew. Was it possible that Zografos was so impressionable he had let himself believe it was a fake kidnap, even though it wasn’t?
As we packed up for the day, someone said, ‘Why can’t we just be told the facts, and then judge?’ If only it were that simple.
Day 54. Another late start. Zografos missed the Belmarsh bus. The judge said the prison governor had rung to explain that it was all due to a monumental unmentionable word – a cock-up, presumably. Or perhaps it was just that Z took longer to dress these days, now that he had become so respectable. He arrived looking apologetic. Cunning Mr Curran greeted him as if he were a valued acquaintance rather than a remand prisoner accused of a cruel crime. ‘Mr Zografos, good morning,’ he said warmly and enquired after his health.
Zografos had had no reason to doubt that George Fraghistas was the instigator of the fake kidnap plan. He was offered $70,000 to take part. Why sh
ould George be so keen to go ahead? Well, said Zografos, he had come across ex-millionaires of this kind before, ruined at the gaming tables. One, who had made masses of money in Nigeria and lost it all in a year at the London casinos, had died of a heart attack on the steps of the Rose Court Hotel itself. He assumed George was such a desperate figure.
‘Tell the court in your own words, watching His Lordship’s pen, what happened then,’ proceeded Mr Curran. And Zografos took us back to the Lanark Road car-park, the drive to Hogan Mews, the purchasing of cigarettes for George, the shopping expeditions for prosciutto (from Selfridge’s), steak, fried chicken (‘not Kentucky but very like’) and Hàagen-Dazs: all exactly as George himself had told it but for the fact that in this version George was a willing participant, who had climbed into the car at Lanark Road entirely of his own free will. Korkolis had told them that if things went wrong and they were arrested they were to say nothing. George would not prefer charges nor help the prosecution. It was easy money, safe money.
When Korkolis cross-examined him from the dock, Zografos did not look at him. This was interesting. How much clear water was Zografos trying to put between himself and his ex-Svengali? I tried to imagine Korkolis as he had been described in his glory days: dapper, confident, reassuring. Zografos called him ‘sir’. Was that indicative of their real relationship or just a ruse to suggest he was still in the thrall of the older man?
Mereu’s counsel, Michael Corkery QC, had not got much to put to Zografos: ‘Did Mereu have any English?’ Zografos said, ‘Only one word.’ Mr Corkery: ‘I won’t ask you what that word is.’
The ruddy-faced David Owen Thomas QC, for Moussaoui, was of the Rumpolian school of advocacy. For some unexplained reason he wanted to know if his client and Mr Mereu did press-ups and ‘other unpleasant things of the kind that went on in the army’. ‘They jogged,’ Zografos replied. ‘You can do too many exercises without special equipment.’