The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  THE VIEW FROM THE GALLERY

  The Pantelides trial was listed for 28 July. There are two entrances to the public galleries at the Old Bailey. The one to which tourists are directed is in the newer part of the building. The Pantelides case was to be heard in one of the Edwardian courtrooms, Court 3, so we had to go in by a side-door on Newgate Street, where the notorious prison once stood. On the pavement outside a score of unhappy-looking people were waiting for the door to open at ten o’clock. We were body-searched on the way in and warned that no one could bring a mobile phone or tape recorder into the court. There was nowhere to leave such a thing, which meant at least one perplexed visitor being turned away. I told her that for the price of a coffee she might be able to leave it at Shamus O’Donnell’s pub across the road – information which the security people could just as easily have given her themselves, though of course they never do.

  I climbed six gloomy flights of stairs up to the waiting room. It was a dispiriting place: a large, high-ceilinged room, bare except for two small leatherette settees, a table and a single ashtray. White-tiled walls and, in one corner, an old-fashioned sink the size of a horse trough (which has since been removed) gave the place an air of menace. It made me think of a Third World police station, where the sink might have some hideous role in interrogations and the tiles could easily be mopped clean of blood. This impression grew as the morning wore on and the room filled up. Since there was sitting room for only six people, the rest sat, squatted, or lay on the floor, smoking.

  What appeared to be the population of an entire Turkish-Cypriot village took up most of the space. There were eighteen of them: short-legged moustachioed men, several old women in black headscarves, and a pair of sharp-faced young girls who seemed to be the only fluent English speakers among them. There were also two Spaniards, two Greeks and a Chinese youth. Later this disconsolate crowd was joined by some ostentatiously British Brits: an earringed man with a shaved head, a scar-faced girl with a terrifying cough who never stopped smoking and a gigantic middle-aged Hell’s Angel with a blond pigtail and tattooed arms.

  The Turks were waiting for a verdict. There was a noisy mêlée at the security guards’ desk when it was discovered that none of them would be let in to court unless they had their passports with them. Passports? Yes, said the guard gruffly and refused to explain why. One of the girls burst into tears.

  Later there was another commotion. The earringed tough, the scar-faced girl and the Hell’s Angel had been joined by an angry-looking woman and two fat, crop-haired teenage boys. They all filed in to the Court 2 gallery where I was told a young man was being tried for murder. Ten minutes later the Hell’s Angel was escorted forcefully out of Court 2 leaning on the woman. He was alternately sobbing and shouting incoherently about the ‘poor fucking little bastard’ and ‘this fucking court’ and ‘all the fucking lies’. He was prodded towards the street, roaring like a lion.

  Another five minutes passed while the Turkish-Cypriots gossiped excitedly about what they had just seen. Then the repellent teenagers were hauled out of the gallery too. A police officer propelled them towards the door and told them that if they did whatever they had done again they would not be allowed back in court ever. As it was they were banned for the rest of the day. Later on I saw the whole gang of them sitting outside a nearby pub, their table tottering with empty pint glasses and full ashtrays.

  Eventually Kate and I were allowed to slip into the Court 3 gallery. The courtroom was restful and pretty after the disagreeableness outside. It had a graceful vaulted roof with arched skylights that let in the July sunshine. It was odd to be sitting in court as mere spectators. There were several familiar figures below us lolling on oak pews upholstered in green leather, waiting for the judge. Jeremy Benson, Miss Korner’s junior, was leading for the Crown. Near him was Martin Hawkins. George Fraghistas was there too. In the well of the court sat our old friend Roy the usher. They all looked up at Kate and me and Roy asked cheerily how we were. It was quite like old times. Then he commanded everyone to be upstanding in court and in came the judge: it was Simon Goldstein. Roy told us later that His Lordship had winked at us, though it must have been so judicious a wink that neither of us spotted it.

  The defendant, Kyriakos Pantelides, was led into the dock and sat in a chair immediately below us. All we could see was a tanned bald head with about twenty hairs strung across it, wire-framed specs, a squashy nose and the outline of a thin Arthur English moustache beneath it. He wore a grey suit and polished black shoes. The woman with blowsy orange hair and silver fingernails slumped in a corner of the court was his wife. The judge agreed to prolong Pantelides’ bail on sureties of £300,000 while the trial lasted – so long as someone went and checked that the sureties had indeed been lodged.

  The jury panel marched in and were called into the box by name. Kate and I examined them with professional curiosity. None of them made any attempt to be excused. They were a much younger lot than we had been. Only one of them, a man in blazer and tie, was over thirty, I guessed. He would probably be the foreman. The rest were a clean-cut lot who looked only slightly apprehensive, swore their oaths by Almighty God and sat bolt upright in their antique, cruelly narrow seats. As with us there were six men and six women, though unlike us one of these was a young black girl in a brimless leather hat which she wore every day of the trial. One juror, a handsome young man, asked the usher to guide him through the oath as he had trouble reading. The red-faced clerk, who seemed to be suffering from the same affliction, stumbled abominably as he read the indictment.

  Mr Benson presented the case against Mr Pantelides. It was bizarre to hear the long, complex story of the Fraghistas kidnap, which had cost us so many weeks to unravel, briskly and dispassionately encapsulated into a morning’s narrative. It was clear the Crown was going to rely chiefly on those two tapes of conversations with Pantelides that Korkolis had secretly recorded. ‘Members of the jury,’ said Mr Benson, ‘you may be wondering what happened to the other four men. They were convicted …’

  George took the stand. It was as though we had gone on to fast rewind. There he was again, dark-suited, white-shirted, clutching his mineral water bottle, just as he had done eight months earlier. Mr Benson asked him about what happened at the Lanark Road car-park at about six o’clock on the evening of Sunday 24 March 1996. George began to re-tell his story, how he had parked his car and was getting out of it when – he faltered. He turned away from the court and fell silent. His body began heaving with suppressed sobs. There was a long pause during which no one in court said a word. Then a halt was called to the proceedings. The jury was sent out. What would they make of this, I wondered. It was exactly the same as when we had seen George confronted with the leather hood. They could have only the sketchiest idea of the double ordeal he had already been through. The judge was concerned that they should be put in the picture.

  Surprisingly, that was the last they heard from George. From then on he was present merely as a spectator: the judge and both counsel rather suddenly agreed that his testimony was not really necessary. The polished young barrister acting for Mr Pantelides, Mr Fulford, explained to the jury that thanks to their decision, ‘this unfortunate gentleman will not have to go through the horror of living through his experiences again’.

  Without the victim’s evidence, the rest of this short four-day trial seemed to lack a centre of gravity: it was not so much Hamlet without the prince as Macbeth without Duncan. When Jeremy Benson asked DS Hawkins to help him read the tape transcripts (‘Can I ask you to play the part of Mr Korkolis? And I will be Mr Pantelides’), the proceedings took on a surreal air. Pantelides warned Korkolis in the middle of the kidnap that ‘the tall hats have been involved’. He was asked by Korkolis at one point whether he was ‘in a hurry to get the suitcase with the money’. The jury must have been thoroughly perplexed. What was a 67-year-old Greek-Cypriot dressmaker of unblemished character doing having such conversations with a man he suspected of being the kidnapper
of George Fraghistas? It was all tremendously confusing.

  After barely an hour’s deliberation, the jury found the defendant not guilty. The oldest of the jurors was, as I had anticipated, the foreman. He and his colleagues looked quite confident that they had reached the right decision. I was not altogether surprised. Mr Fulford’s closing speech had been persuasive. While he admitted that Mr Pantelides’ failure to alert the police of what he knew about the kidnap had been ignominious, there were serious doubts about his being a participant in the plot itself. Those doubts were evidently enough to persuade the jury that they could not be sure of the defendant’s guilt. Only an hour earlier the judge had summed up with immaculate fairness, stressing that word, ‘sure’, just as he had with us. It had echoed loudly in my own head as I went off to have a coffee and await the verdict. I wasn’t sure I would have been sure of the defendant’s complicity.

  George Fraghistas met me outside to say goodbye: he was off back to Athens the next day. Was he disappointed? He shrugged. Perhaps the evidence was too slight and muddling. Besides, the man had already endured three weeks in prison as well as many months on bail.

  We shook hands. The next time I was likely to see him would be at Korkolis’s appeal hearing, whenever that was likely to be. George would not need to be involved, except as a spectator. Nevertheless, he thought he would want to be there, perhaps to complete the catharsis. It was sobering to reflect that the drama into which he had been pitched on a quiet Sunday evening back in March nearly a year and half earlier was not over yet.

  I strolled along Fleet Street and down to the Embankment. Every other person I passed seemed to be a tourist. It was the last week of July. The concentration of foreigners was nearly as remarkable as at the Old Bailey – where that day’s trials had included the usual numbers of African, Mediterranean, Asian and East European names. How many eager sightseers, I wondered, visited the most famous courthouse in the world only to discover a compatriot of theirs sitting hauntedly in the dock, charged with some unspeakable crime? That would give a certain frisson to their London sojourn.

  The woebegone Turkish-Cypriots whom I had encountered in the public-gallery waiting room had spent three days in that dismal place while the jury was out. I had got into conversation with a white-haired old man who could barely speak English. We were sharing an ashtray. He told me that the case concerned a murder. And what was his relationship to the defendant, I asked. ‘He is my grandson,’ he said sadly. I spoke to one of the young girls. She had spent some of the long hours sitting on the floor with her head in the lap of an old woman, perhaps her grandmother, the old man’s wife. Was she also related to the man in the dock? ‘Yes,’ she said with an exhausted smile. ‘He is my husband.’ Good luck, I said automatically, without knowing any of the details of the case.

  By the last day of the Pantelides trial they had all disappeared. Hung jury, a policeman told me: there would be a re-trial. What sort of a murder was it? ‘Contract killing,’ he thought. ‘Nasty business. The victim was beheaded.’

  And I’d said good luck to that anguished young girl – and meant it. Perhaps it was the camaraderie of the courtroom that had prompted me. I suppose that is a danger in hanging around a place like the Old Bailey for too long. Defendants, lawyers, court officials – even jurors and spectators after a while – must become almost blasé about the banality of human awfulness. It could make one both too cynical – and too forgiving.

  I bought a coffee at one of the floating bars along the Embankment and sat out on the deck, eyed by greedy seagulls. It was low tide. The river smelt pleasantly of mud. I thought of George’s shipping business. He had told me that afternoon that he felt unable to go on living in London. The city that had been his home for nearly fifteen years had become a hostile place, liable to ambush him with unsettling recollections. He was selling his house. Crime disrupts a victim’s life in ways the criminal can barely imagine. For the professional villain a crime is a finite action with no after-effects – unless he is unlucky enough to get caught. For the victim it can be more traumatising than a bad car accident. Some years ago I was attacked by three men not far from the Old Bailey, just the other side of Ludgate Hill. I was knocked to the ground and given a kicking and ended up having my face stitched in the A and E department at Bart’s. Ever since then the sight of a group of young men walking along a pavement towards me turns my pulse-rate up a notch. I am sure my attackers never gave the matter another thought.

  Korkolis had brutally damaged not just one man’s peace of mind but that of his whole family. The most shocking aspect of the Pantelides trial so far as I was concerned was to hear discussed in court the full extent of Korkolis’s previous record. He had been a relentless crook. He had been in prison twice in Greece. He had been sentenced to a third term which he had fled the country to avoid, using one of his false passports to get away. Interpol had issued an extradition warrant for his arrest.

  In order to paint his client, Mr Pantelides, in a better light, Mr Fulford made the most of Korkolis’s villainy. They do not come much worse in this world than Mr Korkolis,’ he told the jury grimly. ‘The prosecution and the defence stand shoulder to shoulder on this man: kidnapper, blackmailer, extortionist, fraudster …’ This was the full, no-holds-barred curriculum vitae which had been concealed from our jury, quite properly, but was now being dissected as dispassionately as a corpse in an anatomy lesson.

  No wonder Judge Goldstein had told us we were the victims of a monstrous deception. What a relief that we had managed not to be deceived.

  POSTSCRIPT

  It was a dull Thursday morning in late February 1998. Almost a year had passed since our jury delivered its verdict, nearly two since George Fraghistas was kidnapped. London was preparing itself for the great Countryside March that would bring hundreds of thousands of rural folk to Hyde Park to protest that the new Labour government was threatening their way of life. In the holding cells at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand a few dozen of Her Majesty’s prisoners were preparing to make their own protests about their way of life – by appealing against the length of their sentences or the verdicts that had sent them to jail in the first place. Among them were Constantinos Korkolis, Thanassis Zografos, Jean-Marc Mereu and Djemel Moussaoui.

  This was the final act of George’s personal drama. He had told me he would be there for the appeals and so he was, sitting in the well of the small oak-panelled courtroom. He had flown in from Athens the night before. He looked anxious, plainly perplexed at a system of justice that allowed his convicted kidnappers a second ride on the judicial carousel at the tax-payer’s expense. There were other familiar faces in Court 6: George’s faithful partner Petros Poulmentis, DS Martin Hawkins, Mr Curran, Mr Corkery, two junior defence barristers from the Old Bailey saga, Korkolis’s solicitor. We sat and watched as several other appeals were speedily and humanely dealt with: a school security guard convicted of theft, a pair of road-rage toughs, a fresh-faced boy who had crashed the car he was driving when just 15, killing the young girl who was his passenger. Then came Korkolis & Co.

  The two Frenchmen sat in the well of the court, bull-necked and shaven-headed, with an interpreter between them. Korkolis and Zografos were in the dock, crushed between six prison officers – the heaviest guard we had seen all day. Zografos was wearing his witness-box blazer. Korkolis was looking unprecedentedly spruce, in a jacket and tie and with his hair combed.

  In the absence of a jury the proceedings were wonderfully swift. Hearing the appeals were Lord Justice Swinton Thomas, Mr Justice Jowitt and Mr Justice Astill. They each sat behind a green-shaded desk-lamp and a rack of legal reference books, into whose pages they occasionally made a synchronised foray. Lord Justice Swinton Thomas had a rather unfortunate wig which looked like a woolly tea-cosy. Perhaps this was because he was a Lord Justice rather than a mere Mr. They listened calmly to the pleas on the four men’s behalf, occasionally interrupting counsel with brisk questions.

  We heard Mr Curran say on Z
ografos’s behalf that ‘he was completely mesmerised’ by Korkolis – as our jury had suspected. We heard Mr Corkery describe Mereu the former wrestler as a simple man who even now had barely mastered ‘prison English’. We learnt that he and Moussaoui were being held on the Isle of Sheppey so that they could be as near as possible to their relatives in France, which showed a nice touch of consideration by the authorities. Moussaoui was behaving so well in jail that he had been made ‘a hot-plate attendant’ at meal-times, his counsel said. As for Korkolis, who was appealing against verdict as well as sentence, his barrister’s argument was that Judge Goldstein had been unfairly sceptical throughout the trial and had undermined Korkolis’s role as defendant/advocate. Furthermore, in the tongue-lashing he had given the prisoner prior to sentencing him (‘one of the most evil and dangerous men I have ever met’) the judge went over the top.

  The trio on the bench retired to consider their judgements. George paced the corridor and smoked a cigarette. Was it really possible that Korkolis might get a re-trial and the whole horror would have to be lived through once again?

  Eventually the judges returned. They concluded that the trial had been conducted entirely correctly. The jury’s verdict – our verdict – was not unsafe. Korkolis was therefore refused leave to appeal against it. As for Judge Goldstein’s remarks about him, said Lord Justice Swinton Thomas, ‘A judge may be forgiven, after a trial of this length, if he lets off a little steam.’

  But the four men did get their sentences reduced. The clinching argument seemed to be that Korkolis’s twenty-five-year sentence had been the benchmark by which the others’ terms were set. The only way to shorten the time that Zografos, Mereu and Moussaoui were to serve – for which there was a reasonable case, given their previous clean records – was to lower Korkolis’s sentence too. That may not actually have been the reasoning, but it was how it appeared.