A secret police operation to procure a new supergrass has blown up in Scotland Yard’s face leaving officers to fend off allegations of hypocrisy and the suppression of evidence of serious crime including murder, and opening the door to the release of dangerous gunmen from British prisons.
The operation is the latest twist in the bizarre saga of Eaton Green, aged 28, a Jamaican “Yardie” gunman who caused a minor scandal last year when it was disclosed that for more than two years, he had been working as a paid informant for Scotland Yard and that his handlers had allowed him to import known Yardie gangsters into the country. Green’s cover was blown when he was put on trial for an armed robbery in Nottingham. At a re-trial, he gave evidence for the prosecution, as a result of which last October, two Yardies received long prison sentences and Green himself was jailed for six years.
Now, the Guardian has discovered that in November, Green was taken from prison to a Metropolitan Police safe house in London where he agreed to become a supergrass, providing a detailed confession of his entire life of crime. However he proceeded to disclose some information which was so embarrassing to Scotland Yard that, according to senior sources in the Home Office, it has been suppressed. This includes details of more than ten murders in Jamaica, some of them allegedly ordered by leading politicians. Other information in his confession shows that Green lied on oath, a revelation which is likely to allow those who were convicted on his evidence to appeal and go free.
According to Home Office sources, Green has confessed to at least ten murders in Jamaica and to a series of other violent crimes in the United Kingdom during the two years that he was employed as a Scotland Yard informer. There is gathering evidence that his police handlers knew about some of his London crimes and that – in a gross breach of Home Office rules – they protected him when other London detectives wanted to charge him. Previously Green has denied on oath that he committed any crimes while he was an informer; now his own confession shows he was lying.
Green is understood to claim that he carried out some of the murders on the orders of Jamaican politicians. In his statement to the Yard, he has named senior figures who still hold power in Kingston. And yet, according to Home Office sources, months after receiving this information, the Yard has conducted no further inquiry into his confessions of murder, nor have they forwarded the details to the Crown Prosecution Service or Interpol or the Jamaican authorities, all of whom would normally receive written reports of allegations of serious crime on foreign soil.
It is is not clear who is alleged to have blocked the information, but some senior officers at Scotland Yard are said to have been frozen into inactivity by a series of worries: they fear that if the truth about their informant’s murderous history comes out, the Yard will look foolish for employing a professional serial killer without checking his past; they fear that if they embarrass the Jamaican authorities by presenting them with evidence of corruption in high places, they will lose the assistance of Jamaican police who have been supplying them with valuable intelligence on the Yardies; and they fear that if they disclose his confessions to murder, they will have to allow Green to be extradited, in which case he is highly likely to be murdered in prison or executed, a fate from which they wish to protect their man.
In his lengthy confession, Green is also believed to have given a detailed account of an orgy of crime in which he indulged in the United Kingdom, nearly all of it while he was on Scotland Yard’s payroll. According to Home Office sources, other detectives in London came across evidence of Green’s crimes but were blocked from investigating them by Green’s handlers, who wanted to keep their informer at liberty on the streets. Home Office guidelines on the handling of informers explicitly forbid this.
It is understood that Green has admitted that he routinely used a firearm, committed armed robberies, bought and sold large quantities of “crack” cocaine, and ran protection rackets in south London where he and his “crew” extorted money from black businesses. He was never prosecuted for any of these offences and was finally brought to book only when he committed the armed robbery in Nottingham where his handlers were unable to protect him.
Scotland Yard so far have made no attempt to follow up Green’s admissions of serious crime in the UK. According to sources, they continue to want to protect their informant and to avoid admitting that they effectively allowed him a licence to commit crime. They have charged him with nothing from his confession and have failed to send any report to the Crown Prosecution Service. In the meantime, Green has applied for parole and has been told that he will be released from prison this summer, free to return to the streets of London unless the Home Office decide to deport him to likely death in Jamaica. It is a prospect which is causing grave concern to some observers. “Eventually he is going to kill someone in this country,” according to one.
In confessing to this catalogue of crime, Green has demolished the account of his life which he gave when he was the prosecution’s chief witness at Leicester Crown Court last year. At the end of that trial, on Green’s evidence, Rohan “Bumpy” Thomas was jailed for 14 years and Steven Crossdale for 8 years. They were convicted of using guns to hold up 150 people at a “blues” party; “Bumpy” Thomas was also said to have tried to pull a gun on detectives who arrested him. Both men have appealed against their conviction. So far, Scotland Yard has not informed the two men’s lawyers of Green’s effective confession of perjury. It is not known whether they plan to. The revelation is likely to be a fatal blow to the convictions.
Last year’s trials involving Eaton Green were surrounded with allegations of improper behaviour by police. An investigation by the Guardian and World In Action found that in an attempt to protect Green, Scotland Yard officers had shielded Green from arrest by Nottingham, failed to pass on vital intelligence and tampered with internal documents. Officers had then tried to mislead the court and to abort the entire trial, even at the risk of allowing the other Yardies to go free.
Behind the scenes, last year’s furore over Green produced a bitter row between Scotland Yard and immigration officers who had allowed Green to stay in the United Kingdom and permitted his Yardie associates to enter the UK unimpeded. Two immigration officers have lost their jobs in the wake of the affair. Brian Fotheringham, a specialist on Yardies, has been transferred to the Euro Express, checking tourists coming through the Channel Tunnel. His superior, Robert Saltan, is in the process of taking early retirement, officially on health grounds.
The two men have been blamed for the rule-bending surrounding Eaton Green, but their colleagues complain that they have been treated unjustly. Home Office sources believe that rule-bending occured only because Green’s police handlers, who were evidently working without the supervision of senior officers, insisted that it should.
While the immigration service has moved two men from their jobs, Scotland Yard last week disclosed that it had not even conducted a disciplinary inquiry into their officers’ handling of Green. His principle handler, PC Steve Barker, is still at Scotland Yard in the intelligence section, still dealing with Yardies. While his opposite number at immigration was forced to give evidence at Leicester, PC Barker was kept out of the witness box at the trial. His ultimate boss, Commander John Grieve, has moved from the intelligence department to run the Anti Terrorist Branch.
At the end of the second trial, Mr Justice Smedley said he was disturbed and alarmed at the behaviour of London officers which he described as “obstruction”. The Yard’s behaviour was also criticised at the time by the Crown Prosecution Service in the East Midlands and in London, by Nottingham police and by the Notts police authority. The allegations made by the Guardian and World In Action were widely circulated. However, a Yard spokesman last week said: “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve done nothing wrong. There is no need to conduct a disciplinary inquiry, because no-one has made a complaint.”
It is understood that Eaton Green continues to serve his sentence in a safe house, where he is under 24-hour armed guard and where he has spent months producing his confession and living in some comfort, with a television and occasional visits from a girlfriend. Home Office sources say that the Yard hoped to trade Green and his information with law-enforcement agencies in the United States and that officials in the US Embassy in London have been briefed about his confession. What the Yard did not foresee was that Green would embarrass them as much as the Yardie gangs they wanted to expose.
