ONE OF the biggest inquiries ever conducted into a complaint against police has confirmed Guardian reports of chaotic management and law-breaking in the relationship between London detectives and Jamaican Yardie gangsters who were working as police informers.
I was sitting in a crack house not far from Kings Cross station in the middle of London. There was Vinnie the pimp, with his bare chest and his cigarette; a skinny blonde prostitute called Beverley who was so broke that she was using margerine for make-up; and Heather, a pick-pocket, who was about to go off to work in the big department stores in the West End.
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A Jamaican Yardie gunman who was jailed for 14 years for his part in a spectacular armed robbery is expected to walk free from the Court of Appeal today after Scotland Yard conceded that one of their most highly prized informers had lied in evidence against him.
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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.
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The Anglican Cathedral of Liverpool is like a mountain. Its great brown bulk soars up over the life below and, high above the houses with the boards across their windows, beyond the sight of the shops with grids of steel across their glass, the summit of its spire is lost in the clouds of a grey English evening. It is the biggest Anglican church on the planet and, tonight, it will be full.
No one ever said it was going to be easy. Daniel had spent years getting in and out of trouble. He’d been thrown out of school without taking his exams, he’d fallen out with his parents, he’d started thieving for a living in Brixton, he had been taking drugs and then he’d got shot. So when, last summer, at the age of 18, he decided to change his whole life and go to college instead, he knew it was going to be hard.
She was a middle-class white woman with an elegant style and piles of blonde hair. Her husband was an insurance broker with a taste for the good things in life. They had two daughters, aged 14 and 9, and they lived together on the edge of a provincial city in a £250,000 house with two tall poplar trees and a brand new BMW parked in the drive. Often, in the evening, they would go off together to a restaurant or a club, picking up a fine time on his American Express Gold Card.
