News story -
A Jamaican “Yardie” gangster who committed a spectacular armed robbery in Nottingham was shielded from justice by London detectives who had been using him as an informant. Senior Yard officers even attempted to abort his trial before the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General intervened personally and insisted that it should go ahead.
Eaton Green, aged 27, was shielded from Nottingham police by London detectives who failed to disclose vital intelligence and then fed misleading information to the Crown Prosecution Service, the trial judge and the Nottingham detectives. The Crown Prosecution Service have now lodged a formal complaint about Scotland Yard’s behaviour.
At one point during the Nottingham police inquiry, Green’s handler, Detective Constable Steve Barker, allowed him to walk away from a meeting even though Nottingham detectives had asked for him to be arrested. A High Court judge who took over the case said he was disturbed and alarmed by Scotland Yard’s behaviour, which he described as “obstruction”.
The explosive story of the Yardie informer is disclosed today for the first time after a joint inquiry by The Guardian with Granada TV’s World In Action. Our inquiries show that Green, a professional gunman from Kingston, Jamaica, spent two years in London as a paid informant for the Metropolitan Police. During that time, he routinely dealt crack cocaine, robbed other dealers, used a firearm on the streets of London and broke immigration laws.
In their handling of Green, Scotland Yard rode roughshod over immigration law. Green, himself, had no legal right to remain in the country, yet, within months of becoming an informer, he had been given permanent leave to stay. One senior detective admitted last week that immigration officers had accepted “spurious” arguments. On at least four other occasions, London police allowed other Yardies to remain in the country despite having detailed information about their illegal arrival.
Green was finally jailed for six years last month. Sentencing him, Mr Justice Smedley described Scotland Yard’s treatment of their Nottingham colleagues as “obstruction”. He said: “I am very disturbed at the way in which those responsible for handling Mr Green as an informant appear from the evidence I heard at the trial not only to have failed to co-operate but possibly to have impeded inquiries, and that causes me alarm.”
An assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard is conducting an urgent internal inquiry. The Yard’s official position is to deny the allegations. They claimed last night that no-one from the Metropolitan Police had ever tried to abort Green’s trial. However, transcripts of a conversation between the trial judge and Crown counsel record counsel saying that two officers from Scotland Yard had been “pleading with me to abort the entire trial and I said I was not going to.” And last week, a senior Yard source acknowledged privately that they had tried to “pull the plug” on the trial in order to protect the informant.
Scotland Yard are also claiming that DC Steve Barker did not realise that Green’s arrest was being sought by Nottingham officers when he met with him. However, the head of Notts CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Phillip Davies, confirmed that his officers had travelled to London to arrest Green and one other suspect: “During the course of the trial the court heard how on their arrival, contact was made with Metropolitan officers, including PC Barker, and their assistance was sought in locating and arresting both men.” The Notts officers eventually located and arrested Green with information supplied by the Department of Social Security.
The Yard claim to have told Notts police about Green’s informing when they first met them, but DCS Davies said the truth had not emerged until the trial, 15 months later. “It would have been helpful if we had known this in advance.” He said informants were essential. “However, there are stringent guidelines and procedures which must be observed if the integrity of the system is to be maintained.” The judge in the first trial, Judge Pollard, found that Yard officers had led their colleagues in Nottingham to believe that Green was a minor informant who had turned in a couple of cases of dishonesty. “To tell Nottingham that would put them off the scent nicely,” the judge said.
The Yard claim that a secret text about Green’s informing, which they supplied to the Crown Prosecution Service and the judge, was written according to agreed procedures and was not misleading. However, the head of East Midlands CPS, Mr Brian McCardle, told The Guardian that the text had broken procedures and that it was “unrealistic and ludicrous” to claim that the text made clear Green’s role in betraying his fellow defendants. The judge in the first trial, Judge Pollard, reviewed this text and concluded that it was misleading. “Why not tell the judge the true position?” he asked.
Judge Pollard ruled that the Metropolitan Police had not set out to manipulate or abuse the system but only to protect their informant. “In a strange but wholly understandable way,” he said, “they were trying to uphold law and order.”
* The Informer, World In Action, ITV, tonight, 8.30 pm
Feature
JUST before two o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday July 8, 1993, a slim young black man with a scar across his right cheek was walking down Mandela Road in Newham, east London when a group of detectives surrounded him, handcuffed him and arrested him for possession of firearms and conspiracy to rob. It was, by the standards of policing in the 1990s, an apparently unimportant event.
These detectives came from Nottingham and, as they headed back up the M1 that afternoon, they carried with them an intelligence profile of their captive. Name: Eaton Leonard Green, known as ‘Leon’. Born: September 21, 1967 in Kingston, Jamaica. Age: 27. Address: various flats in London since February 1991. The detectives knew, too, that Eaton Green was a known associate of Jamaican ‘Yardies’ who had become notorious among police forces around the world for their ruthless approach to drug dealing. They suspected he had been involved in a spectacular armed robbery in Nottingham five weeks earlier. Nevertheless, they believed they were dealing with a straightforward case.
But one key fact was missing from their profile. Eaton Green was a Scotland Yard informant – not some casual squealer who occasionally traded his way out of trouble, but a full-time, registered intelligence asset with his own code name, a top secret file, two specialist handlers and a two-year history of supplying high-grade intelligence on the Yardies to the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, Customs and Excise, the Jamaican government and the New York District Attorney. Eaton Green was Scotland Yard’s secret weapon in the war against organised crime. He was also a potential source of bitter embarrassment for those who had been handling him.
Over the next two years, that apparently routine arrest was to trigger a chaotic chain-reaction in which rules were broken, documents shredded, officers’ sworn evidence was rejected, unspecified damage was inflicted on the war against international crime, while two police forces spat blood over each other’s behaviour, and a thunderous row reached into the offices of the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions.
In the process, the arrest of the Yardie grass exposed two worlds which previously had been screened from public view: the London Yardies, who brought their violence and clumsy criminality into the United Kingdom in the early 1990s; and the intelligence section of the Metropolitan Police, known internally as SO11, who took on the Yardies and thus moved into a new era of police operations, stumbling over guidelines and making highly contentious decisions on the borderlines of illegality.
At its heart, the story of the Yardie grass is about deceit. Eaton Green deceived everyone around him – his friends, his lovers, his co-conspirators in crime – and betrayed all of them to his handlers at Scotland Yard. But Scotland Yard, too, were forced to deceive: allowing a man to break the law in order to enforce it; jeopardising the course of justice in order to preserve it; masking the truth from prosecutors and the court and even from their brother officers in order to protect it. In a joint investigation with Granada TV’s World In Action, the Guardian has uncovered what happened.
It all began in Kingston, Jamaica, where Eaton Green grew up in the back streets of a profoundly unstable society, one foot in childhood and the other in a world of shootings and casual corruption. When he was 12, he abandoned school altogether and plunged into the vortex of political violence which swirled around the election of October 1980 as political parties merged with criminal gangs in a grab for power. Green joined supporters of the PNP, the People’s National Party, who put a gun in his hand and took him out to shoot their enemies. From that day, he was a professional gunman.
The neighbourhood where he lived, Tel Aviv, was the home of a PNP street gang who were known as the Max Gang until they found enough arms and recruits to claim ownership of the whole place and started calling themselves the Tel Aviv Crew. They ran the drugs and controlled the all-night drinking shebeens and if anyone got in their way, they shot them. They had handguns, shotguns, fully automatic M16 machine guns – some of them supplied by a senior politician in the PNP. As they grew bigger, they started to look abroad, to New York, Miami and London.
The crew was divided into three gangs: the Rapid Posse, the Kremlin Posse, and the Desert Posse, to which Green belonged. In his first 10 years as a gunman, he was arrested six times, for illegal possession of firearms, murder, shooting with intent to kill, and on several counts of robbery with violence. Twice, witnesses failed to appear to give evidence against him but nevertheless he spent the best part of five years behind bars.
By February 1991, Green’s devotion to guns was catching up with him. He was awaiting trial for shooting with intent to kill and, although he had managed to fix himself some bail, there was no sign of the witnesses disappearing. If he was convicted he faced long years in the medieval conditions of St Catherine’s Prison. To make matters worse, he heard that he was about to lose his bail. On February 12, he ran. He boarded a British Airways flight to London and, carrying a passport in his own name, walked through Gatwick Airport and headed for north London.
Within days, he had picked up on friends from Kingston, and melted into the scene, carrying a gun in defence of his crack-dealing friends, hanging out in Steppers wine bar and the Fiveways Cafe in Brixton, drinking and playing cards in the illegal gambling houses that now hide among the newsagents and the grocers shops on Kingsland High Road in Dalston. But in May of that year, everything changed. That’s when he started grassing.
He was arrested in Brixton for a minor traffic offence by an enterprising young constable named Steve Barker, who found he was carrying an offensive weapon. Green claims now that he was so sick of being exploited by political groups and drug gangs that he decided to take his revenge by volunteering to betray them. However, his former friends point to the fact that his arrest put him in immediate danger of being extradited back to a Jamaican jail.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that at 1am on May 24, 1991, Green sat down in Brixton Police Station with Acting Detective Constable Steve Barker and began his new career as a registered informant, code named Aldridge Clarke. He was a professional, paid up to pounds 1,000 a time for his assistance, and he proved to be a devastatingly good worker. Over the next two years, he supplied 168 detailed intelligence reports, describing the names, contacts, movements and crimes of everyone he knew in the Yardie’s London colony. Steve Barker passed it all on to the intelligence specialists in SO11.
In his reports to Barker, Green tracked the arrival in London of one Yardie after another, as the Jamaican posses expanded their empire: Tapper Zoochie moved into a house in Tottenham, put up a steel door and started importing cocaine through Jamaica and the US (with a .45 by his side); Killer moved to Dalston and started selling crack cocaine; Pepsi, the top man from the Rapid Posse, moved to Nottingham and started selling crack; Blackbeard moved in with a girl called Debbie in Shepherd’s Bush and started selling crack; Nookie moved in to Forest Gate and started selling crack.
They all used guns. Green explained how the ‘rude boys’ – the ordinary members of the Yardie posses – drank all night in shebeens like Maxim’s in Dalston, almost all of them with a handgun in their pocket. ‘Everybody in London carry a gun,’ he said. Sometimes, when they were feeling good, they whipped them out and fired live bullets into the ceiling. ‘Saluting the music,’ they called it. Alternatively, they shot people – in a casual, almost bored kind of way – and Green reported it all. ‘Nitty Gritty was killed by Supercat . . . There was a shooting at the club in Arcola Street, Stoke Newington . . . Steve chased a man into Kingsland High Road and fired three shots at him . . . Banbury and Pecos robbed everyone at Harry’s Cafe with guns yesterday . . . Ritchie was shot in a bar in Hackney by Thin Hand Barry . . .’
Hardly a week passed without Green contacting Barker. They met in police stations, in a Sainsbury’s car park, in a Home Office building. Sometimes Green simply called in by phone with his latest report; once, when Barker went to Jamaica, Green called him there on his mobile. Barker recorded Green’s news on Registered Informant Reports for SO11 and fed extracts to three specialist incident rooms which were targeting crack dealers.
Barker also linked Green with the district attorney’s office in New York, so the DA could track Tapper Zoochie’s contacts with dealers in Manhattan and watch out for Puppy Dog, ‘who is now out of prison and has his M16 back’ and for Roamy, who had settled in 91st Street, Queens, but who ‘has just smuggled a Taurus automatic handgun from New York to Jamaica’. As he filed each informant report, DC Barker added his own official assessment of Green’s performance: for access, Grade A; for accuracy, One. There was no higher rating. Eaton Green was a jewel in Scotland Yard’s crown. Unfortunately, the jewel was a fake.
Despite all of the fervour with which he sold the secrets of his friends, Green was not primarily an informant at all. He was a Yardie. And he acted like one. There is clear evidence that he was committing crimes while he was working for SO11. The Home Office has produced strict guidelines which insist that: ‘The need to protect an informant does not justify granting him immunity from arrest or prosecution.’ However, there is also evidence that, on occasion, Scotland Yard knew Green was breaking the law and were willing to let him get away with it.
Green’s former associates now all say the same thing about his life in London: he was a professional cocaine dealer who habitually carried a gun to enforce his deals. Green himself admits that he routinely and illegally carried a gun around London and also that he frequently fired it. He was never prosecuted for this. Wherever he has gone, Green has left behind him, like footprints, the allegation that he sold crack cocaine. On the frontline in Brixton, on the pavements in Dalston, from men who are in prison, from women who once shared his bed, the story is always the same: Scotland Yard’s man was peddling crack cocaine to street dealers near the Fiveways Cafe in Brixton; and on Kingsland High Road in Dalston; and in the crack houses in Nottingham. That is how he made his money. And Scotland Yard had reason to know it.
They were given clear evidence of his involvement with firearms and crack in an alarming incident at a pay party in Loughborough Road, Brixton, on the night of November 23, 1991, some six months after Green became an informant. There were 300 people in the house, all dancing and drinking and shouting and smoking and in the middle of it all, Green ran into a well-known Brixton figure, known as Stepper Dan. The two men started to argue. One of them shouted, ‘Shoot me then. You’re always saying you’re gonna shoot me. Shoot me then.’ That’s when the firing started. By the time it was over, 30 seconds later, Green had a bullet in his stomach and Stepper Dan had taken one through his right arm.
There was an explosion of activity in the party. Guests scattered. Green and Stepper Dan grabbed hold of each other and crashed down the stairs, dropping their guns as they fell. Green was bleeding profusely. Stepper Dan’s arm was broken. No one wanted the police on the scene, so no one called for an ambulance. Instead, someone fetched a VW convertible and drove both men to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell where doctors patched them up, though Green lost a kidney. Unfortunately for Green, they discovered as they undressed him that he was carrying two rocks of crack cocaine in his jacket pocket.
Stepper Dan alone was charged with attempted murder and possession of a firearm; Green was placed on an ID parade but he was never charged with the shooting; two weeks after the incident, on the advice of police, the charge against Stepper Dan was withdrawn by the Crown Prosecution Service on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Green still faced prosecution over the crack cocaine found in his pocket. Briefly, he was charged with possession of cocaine with intent to supply. The charge never reached court.
According to his former associates, Green was not only selling crack to street dealers but was also taking the opportunity to rob some of them at gun point. In tonight’s World In Action, one woman describes how she saw him smack his gun into an African dealer’s mouth before stealing an ounce of cocaine and a roll of cash from him. She says he often sat in a local gambling house with his gun in front of him, selling and stealing as he pleased.
After surviving the shooting incident without seeing the inside of a courtroom, Green was arrested twice more during his career as an informant. On August 25, 1992, he was caught up in a drug squad raid on a house in Queensdale Crescent, Shepherd’s Bush; he was released on bail and was informed later that he faced no charge. On January 13, 1993, he was caught up in a raid on a house in Loftus Road, Shepherd’s Bush and found himself charged with possession of cocaine with intent to supply. The case never came to trial.
In their determination to make maximum use of Green, Scotland Yard also embroiled the immigration department of the Home Office in an extraordinary series of decisions which left immigration law in tatters. The first of these involved Green himself. Having arrived as a visitor in February 1991, he had no legal right to stay in the United Kingdom. More than that, he was an active criminal who had jumped bail on a serious charge in Jamaica and was liable to be returned instantly if he came to official notice. Nevertheless, he was granted a right of permanent residence.
According to internal Home Office paperwork, he secured this right by virtue of his marriage to a British national. This was a curious decision. Green applied for the right to residence in July 1991, six weeks after becoming an informer, on the basis of his imminent marriage to a woman named Sharon Clarke. Only a few weeks earlier, however, he had made an identical application on the basis of his imminent marriage to a different woman. If immigration officers suspected this was a marriage of convenience, they were evidently reassured by the birth, on November 21, 1991, of a boy named Keston, whom they accepted as the natural son of Green and his new wife. Their confidence was misplaced: Sharon Clarke was already four months pregnant with this child before she ever met Green. She did not even name him as the boy’s father on the birth certificate. The immigration officers also accepted, after ‘copious checks with the police’, that Green had not come to police attention.
Either Scotland Yard lied to the immigration service so that they could keep their informer in the country; or the immigration service colluded with the Yard in the hope that they, too, would receive useful intelligence from him. During Green’s two years as an informant, Scotland Yard allowed a sequence of Yardie gangsters to enter the country illegally, even though Green gave details of their movements to his handlers, who duly passed them on.
AT 9pm on June 11, 1992, for example, Green telephoned Barker to report that a Yardie known as Blackbeard had just arrived illegally from Kingston. Green provided the name, address and telephone number of the woman with whom Blackbeard was staying, his physical description and a note that he had previously been deported from Notting Hill. Nevertheless, Blackbeard was allowed to stay in the UK where, according to subsequent reports from Green, he regularly sold crack, drove around London with a Luger and .45 automatic, staged an armed rip-off of another Yardie and, on one riotous night, crashed his girlfriend’s car into three parked vehicles belonging to members of the public.
In the same way, Green warned that a Kingston gunman known as Showie was being summoned to London. Green provided his real name and explained that he had previously been deported from Brixton, but Showie arrived unimpeded and was sighted a few weeks later at the scene of the murder of Christopher ‘Tuffy’ Bourne, then regarded as the most powerful Yardie in London.
But the crudest example of the bending of immigration law involved Green’s friend Rohan Thomas, better known as Colonel Bumpy, a member of the Tel Aviv Crew. Between October 1992 and March 1993, Green filed eight different reports on Bumpy, describing him as a top man in the Tel Aviv posse, crediting him with 10 murders and recording, in particular, that he was threatening to murder a witness in a forthcoming trial. DC Barker was so interested that he allowed Green to telephone Bumpy in Jamaica from an office in Thornton Heath police station.
As a result of all this contact, the imminent arrival at Gatwick Airport on March 28, 1993 of Bumpy and his friend, Cecil Thomas, was known to three different enforcement agencies – Scotland Yard, Customs, and Immigration. Green himself paid for their tickets, though Scotland Yard deny providing him with the money to do so. Two different operations were mounted at the airport: Customs targeted the two men for a drugs search and found nothing; Immigration secretly filmed their arrival and covertly copied their passports. Both Jamaicans had criminal records and Bumpy was using a false passport, and yet they were allowed to enter the country.
The explanation for these lapses appears to lie not in some deep conspiracy to import Jamaican gangsters into the UK but in sheer foul-up, part of a wider picture of total disarray in SO11’s attack on the Yardies. It is said now that the SO11 command at Scotland Yard had no day-to-day liaison with officers like Steve Barker who were working on the streets under the supervision of local divisional CID; that they had no procedure to ensure that they obeyed the Home Office guidelines and the law; and that they had no formal system for linking with other agencies, such as Customs and Immigration, and relied instead on individual officers making informal contacts of their own. Green committed crimes; officers allowed him to get away with it. Green imported his associates; officers decided not to stop him. Even though the Home Office guidelines called for senior officers to have the closest possible supervision of informants, the reality was that SO11 had lost touch. Barker was responsible for the Yardie grass, and he had not even qualified as a detective. Scotland Yard’s offensive against one of the most dangerous criminal groups in the world was a muddle.
For two years, the rule-bending and the muddling survived if only because no one else had the faintest idea that any of this was going on. The incident that finally brought the masonry down around Scotland Yard’s shoulders took place in the small hours of the morning on Sunday May 30, 1993, in an old warehouse in Nottingham.
One hundred and fifty people had gathered there for a ‘blues’ party, when, at about 3.30am, five men carrying guns suddenly turned off the music, fired several bullets into the ceiling and set about systematically robbing every single person in the club – credit cards, cash, mobile phones, jewellery, right down to the rings on their fingers.
It caused a sensation in Nottingham, not just because of the sheer brazenness of the crime, but because of the casual violence of the robbers, who beat up several of their victims and shot another in the leg. Detectives in Nottingham went for help to informers in the city’s drugs scene, where they soon discovered two things: the robbers were Jamaican Yardies from London; and no one knew much about any of them, except for one – the guy who had a red bandana tied around his head, the one who started the robbery by firing his gun into the ceiling and yelling, ‘We are the SAD Squad – Seek and Destroy’, and who later fired the shot that hit the man in the leg and stood over him jeering, ‘Bleed, pussy, bleed’. He was a professional gunman from Kingston, Jamaica, they said. No one knew his real name, but he was known on the streets as ‘Leon’. Within a week, the Nottingham detectives had discovered that Leon’s real name was Eaton Green.
At this point, the masonry over Scotland Yard’s head started to creak. However, they did their best to ensure that it did not collapse on them. When the Nottingham detectives started calling their colleagues in London, they were passed on to a young Brixton detective who was now renowned for his knowledge of Yardies – Steve Barker, who told them frankly that ‘Leon’ was Eaton Green and went on to hint that in the past he had used this man as a grass. But no one at the Yard told them the scale of Green’s work or hinted at the edifice of broken rules which surrounded him. As the Nottingham detectives fanned out across London looking for clues, SO11 did nothing to help.
On June 19, nearly three weeks after the robbery, Stoke Newington police reported that during a drugs raid on a house in Belgrade Road, Stoke Newington, they had found Rohan ‘Bumpy’ Thomas sitting in bed and that he had attempted to reach a loaded Luger hidden under the mattress. They said they had grabbed his hand only inches away from the gun.
In Scotland Yard, there were now large cracks in the ceiling. It was bad enough for police officers to allow an alleged killer to remain at large in the country; but now he appeared to have pulled a gun on fellow policemen. Nine days later, on June 28, things got even worse when Green informed his handlers: ‘The gun that Bumpy got nicked with was a German Luger. That was the gun that they used in a shooting in Nottingham.’ Green was talking about the warehouse party robbery. Scotland Yard now had a choice: they could pass this lead to the Nottingham detectives and risk them arresting Bumpy and discovering how he had come into the country; or they could sit on it.
Nottinghamshire police have since sworn on oath that this information never reached them.
By early July, however, even without much help from SO11, the Nottingham detectives were close on the heels of all five men who had raided the warehouse party. They had found out for themselves that Bumpy was involved and were approaching the Metropolitan Police to have him handed over. They had identified another suspect as Steve Crossdale and arrested him in south London, and identified two others as Cecil Thomas, who had come through Gatwick with Bumpy, and Errol ‘Tall Larry’ Lynch. They were trying to find these two when, unknown to them, Green played another card.
On June 29, he made a series of phone calls to Scotland Yard tracking every move made by Cecil and Tall Larry as they set out for south London with a gun in their car. The Yard used a helicopter to follow the two men’s grey Ford Orion through the streets of the city before mounting an armed ambush and arresting them for possession of a firearm, apparently quite unaware that they were wanted in Nottingham. Now, only Eaton Green was still at liberty.
The Nottingham officers simply couldn’t find him, so they asked the Yardie expert, Steve Barker, if he could help trace him. Barker said he would, but he did not. Instead, at 4pm on July 6, he spoke privately on the telephone to Green and arranged to meet him three hours later at a Home Office Immigration building in Lower Thames Street. DC Barker did not inform the Nottingham officers.
He met his informant at 7pm. The informant report Barker filed after the meeting records that Green named a Yardie in Nottingham who had supplied a shotgun for the warehouse robbery and two others who had bought some of the stolen jewellery, potentially decisive evidence against the men who were now under arrest. This information was never passed to the Nottingham detectives.
And although Barker had known for five weeks that Green was a suspect for the robbery, and although he also knew that Nottingham officers were now actively trying to arrest him, he made no attempt to detain him. Instead, he allowed Green to walk away into the streets of London. Two days later, using information they had obtained from the DSS, the Nottingham officers traced Green to a girlfriend’s house in east London and arrested him as he walked down Mandela Road in Newham.
At this stage, Scotland Yard were still safe. They had made sure that Nottingham police did not know the truth about Green, or the rule-bending that surrounded him, and Green was not about to risk his life by telling anyone. But there was a problem. According to the Home Office guidelines, it was ‘a prime consideration’ that ‘police must never commit themselves to a course which, whether to protect an informant or otherwise, will constrain them to mislead a court’. It was established practice that if police had run an undercover operation which was relevant to a case, they would go to the Crown Prosecution Service at the earliest possible opportunity to agree how to handle it. In the case of Eaton Green, however, Scotland Yard did no such thing. The CPS, like the Nottingham police, were kept in the dark.
Then, on August 10, 1994, as the time approached for Green to go on trial with his four associates, the judge was also put in the dark. SO11 sent Judge Pollard a secret ‘mitigation text’, a device which is used by Scotland Yard to secure a reduced sentence for an informer without blowing his cover in open court. But this text was misleading. It told the judge that Green was an informer and provided accurate details of some of his work, but in totality it persuaded the judge that he was a small player of no great consequence.
As the trial opened at Leicester Crown Court on September 12, 1994, Scotland Yard had concealed Green’s importance from Nottingham police, the CPS and the judge, but, nevertheless, the ceiling was about to fall in. It sagged suddenly during the fourth week when, on Friday, October 14, two defence lawyers went to the judge in chambers and said they suspected their clients had been betrayed by an informer. The judge knew from the mitigation text that this was true and he decided he had to tell them that Green was the traitor. The prosecuting counsel agreed.
That weekend, there was panic at SO11. It is a measure of their loss of control over Green that, even though they had supplied the mitigation text for him, they had never discovered that he was sharing the dock with his victims. If they had known, they would never have named the victims in the text and the law would have allowed them to keep the text secret, as they usually did. But now it was too late to change the text, and their prize informant was about to be disclosed.
On the morning of Monday October 17, 1994, the head of SO11, Commander John Grieve, sent his staff officer to the court to urge the prosecuting counsel, Richard Latham QC, not to disclose their informant. Latham told the judge that London officers were ‘pleading with me to abort the entire trial’. This was a profoundly controversial move. Scotland Yard were minor players in this prosecution, yet they were attempting to kill it and, to this day, Nottingham police and the CPS can find no record of anyone from Scotland Yard consulting them. More than that, if SO11 succeeded, the Met would be allowing Green to get away with armed robbery and with shooting a man in the leg, precisely the kind of move explicitly covered by the Home Office’s guidelines.
All through that Monday, SO11 tried to persuade Latham to abort the trial. Judge Pollard said that one senior Yard officer had even tried to contact him direct, a move which is now dismissed by senior police as ‘insane’. The judge and Latham stuck to their guns and, that afternoon, they told the defence that Green had betrayed their clients. Green was whisked out of the court and held under armed guard. But, for Scotland Yard, all was not yet lost. Most of Green’s story was still secret and, as defence lawyers insisted that they should see his informer file, Scotland Yard continued to try to abort the whole trial.
Green’s lawyers also wanted to suppress the file and applied to the Attorney General for an order to stop the prosecution. Scotland Yard officers attended a series of meetings in the last week of October 1994 involving the Attorney General Sir Nicholas Lyell, and the DPP, Barbara Mills. At these meetings, they continued to fight their corner and finally accepted that their informer must be disclosed only after the Attorney General and the DPP had personally both ruled against them.
The file, however, did not quite live up to expectations. It showed that Green had provided 168 reports, but the first 86 were mysteriously missing. For all the period between May 24, 1991, when he first met Barker, until May 15, 1992, there was not a single report. There was, for example, no reference at all to the shooting incident with Stepper Dan. Scotland Yard said they had been shredded during a routine clear-out of old files. Nottingham detectives found it hard to believe that any police force would destroy high-grade intelligence which was scarcely more than 12 months old and which concerned criminals who were still active on the streets of Britain, and they said so. The Yard stuck to their story.
But that was not all. The judge weeded out any material which was irrelevant to the case. Amongst the material which remained were the two reports from Green which referred to the Nottingham robbery – disclosing that the gun under Bumpy’s mattress had been used at the robbery and naming two people who had bought stolen jewellery. Nottingham police could not understand why they had never been told. But what really mystified them was that at the bottom of these two informant reports, someone had written ‘Liaising with Nottingham’ and ‘Direct to Nottingham’. It was possible that these comments had been written in good faith at the time Green made the reports and that there had been some extraordinary breakdown of communication. Twice. However, it was also possible that someone had tampered with the two reports more recently and disguised a deliberate failure to hand over the intelligence.
By this time, detectives from the two forces were no longer on speaking terms. Judge Pollard listened to both sides and found that during the inquiry into the warehouse robbery by Nottingham detectives, Scotland Yard had failed to pass on key intelligence; that in the preparation for the trial, Scotland Yard had misled the Nottingham detectives, the CPS, and also himself. He rejected sworn evidence he had heard from Scotland Yard officers.
BY THE TIME the court had got to the truth, however, the jury had been kept away from the evidence for nearly a month and Judge Pollard accepted they could not pick up the pieces. The trial was stopped – at a cost to the public purse of some pounds 750,000 – and resumed with a new jury seven months later, in June of this year. With his cover blown, Green admitted his guilt in the warehouse robbery, made a statement to Nottingham detectives and became the Crown’s lead witness.
By now, all those who were directly involved in the trial knew the truth about the Yardie grass. Nottingham police were furious but tried to repair relations with Scotland Yard. The CPS lodged a formal complaint with Scotland Yard about their handling of the case. The DPP, Barbara Mills, personally asked Commander Grieve of SO11 what on earth they had been playing at. Scotland Yard is now conducting its third internal inquiry and insists that all of its systems and procedures for dealing with Yardie intelligence have been completely overhauled.
Colonel Bumpy was jailed for 14 years for his part in the warehouse robbery. Steve Crossdale was jailed for eight years. Cecil Thomas and Tall Larry were acquitted but deported back to Jamaica. And Eaton Green was sentenced to a reduced term of six years. He is now in prison serving his sentence under special protection. Nottingham police have served a deportation order on him. Unless the Home Office step in to protect him again, he will emerge from jail to be flown back to his long-delayed trial in Jamaica. His former friends will be waiting for him. ‘He’s dead,’ said one. ‘He’ll never get off the plane.’
World In Action, The Informer, tonight at 8.30pm.
