Authors: Paul Britton
Simmens asked, ‘So the police make contact?’
‘No. Pedigree makes contact. The blackmailer doesn’t know the police are involved.’
The lawyer expressed concern about paying money and setting a dangerous precedent for the future.
‘It’s a matter for you and the police whether or not you choose to pay something or not. If you say no, absolutely, then you have to reckon with this man carrying out his threat in some way. It’s your decision.
‘I suggest you pay a limited amount, just enough to keep him playing the game and stop him carrying out his threats. But you can’t do things entirely his way; you’re playing but not doing exactly what he wants; there are problems, you’re sorry, you’re trying to help … that sort of thing.
‘Right now he has most of the control but gradually we can wrest that away from him as long as we keep him in play.’
Simmens asked, ‘How do we do that?’
‘You don’t,’ said Baker. ‘We do it for you. We place the advertisement in the newspaper and see what happens. I want to put some of my men into Pedigree on a dedicated telephone line. We want our man to call.’
On 31 August, the following message appeared in the Daily Telegraph personal columns: ‘Sandra, happy birthday darling. Want to help, must talk, phone 0674 ******. Love John.’
A second letter arrived, this time providing a list of accounts at the Halifax, Abbey National and Nationwide building societies. Each had been opened in the joint names of John and Sandra Norman over a two-month period beginning in September 1986. The savings books, cash withdrawal cards and Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) were sent to an accommodation address in Hammersmith, West London.
This put a whole new number into the calculation. There were literally thousands of automatic teller machines throughout the country with customers allowed to draw up to Ł300 a day from each of their accounts.
The blackmailer could withdraw the money from anywhere, removing it bit by bit from thousands of different locations. He could get someone else to collect it for him - possibly a team of people. The ramifications were enormous. Normally, the most dangerous moment for any blackmailer is at the pick-up point - the specific place and time when he breaks cover to collect the money. This time there were thousands of pick-up points - how could the police guard them all? The concept was brilliant.
When David Baker told me the details, I sensed his disquiet. Much of his prior thinking had been based on the belief that they’d catch this man when he tried to pick up the payment.
There was an up-side, however. You can’t pass enormous amounts of money through automatic tellers. For someone to get Ł500,000 it would mean making tens of thousands of withdrawals. Each time he punched in the PIN, the computer would show us exactly where and when. We could track him, in a fashion, and look for patterns to his movements.
This man had shown an awareness of how police gather information. He knew that accounts could be traced and descriptions sought about who opened them. So he did it all by mail, never having to set foot into a branch office and risk being filmed by security cameras. He also knew about accommodation addresses and that no-one ever notices who comes and goes; or you can have someone pick things up for you. In two years of planning, he’d created a complete ring of dead ends. It was fascinating but immensely frustrating.
‘We’ve found something like this before,’ said Baker.
‘Where?’
‘In Norfolk. Someone took a shot at Bernard Matthews, the turkey farmer. The blackmailer wanted Ł50,000 and used almost the same MO - building society accounts using false names and accommodation addresses, cash-point cards, the full bit. Surveillance was a bloody nightmare.’
‘What happened?’
‘He didn’t take enough precautions and kept going back to the same cash-point machines. That’s how we got him.’
‘And where is he now?’
‘Banged up. He got six years.’
Baker second-guessed my next question. ‘As far as we know he worked alone,’ he said. He added, ‘The trial judge refused to allow details of the plan to be published because he said it was so clever
‘Which means that someone independently came up with the same idea or someone found out.’
‘Exactly.’
The police negotiators stationed at Pedigree stalled for time, slowing things down and apologizing for the delays. They didn’t make concessions but neither did they challenge the blackmailer. They used language such as, ‘Yes, we understand your situation but you must understand ours. We’re taking you seriously, I guarantee it, but we can’t just put Ł100,000 in these accounts, people ask questions - the tax office, our accountants, the main board. We have to keep this quiet, you understand. We have to be careful.’
Further messages were exchanged and on 28 October the first of five controlled payments was made into the Norman accounts. During the next seven weeks Ł56,000 was lodged but the police had arranged to block most of the accounts so that money could only be withdrawn from two investment accounts at the Halifax Building Society. Already the balance of control was subtly shifting.
Pedigree, of course, denied any knowledge of the account difficulties, telling the blackmailer it was obviously a building society mistake. They couldn’t be expected to ring up and ask why - the extortion attempt was secret.
Meanwhile, the Leicestershire CID was organizing one of the biggest undercover surveillance operations ever seen in Britain. Codenamed Roach, it involved hundreds of detectives from various regional crime squads who were staking out automatic teller machines at Halifax branches. Even with such a huge task force, it still wasn’t possible to cover them all.
At the same time, the building society’s main computer was programmed to slow down its response to requests for cash and to alert the police as soon as the relevant PIN codes were punched in.
A week after the first payment was lodged, a cash withdrawal of Ł300 was made at Reading, south of London.
Afterwards, they were made almost daily from machines as far north as Glasgow, as far south as Exeter and as far west as Aberystwyth in Wales. Most were made after 11.00 o’clock each evening.
‘He’s not going to use the same machine twice,’ said Baker, disappointed but not surprised. The chances of a quick arrest were diminishing but there were still some positive signs. No contaminations had been discovered and with each new withdrawal the blackmailer risked being picked up by one of the surveillance teams.
The geographical spread of the withdrawals prompted questions about whether it might be the work of a gang rather than an individual. Could one person be covering so much territory?
At home in my office I’d set up a map of Britain and was marking off the locations of each new collection. An interesting pattern began to emerge. The blackmailer would withdraw money on consecutive days in locations such as Dalston, Aberystwyth and Bristol. It was almost like a circuit which could bring him back to London where a significant number of the withdrawals were being made. Studying the motorway system, I reasoned that a single person could be making the collections and, if so, he was probably living near London, although there weren’t enough details to make it immediately obvious exactly where.
What else did I know about him? It wasn’t a young man’s offence, not a twenty-three-year-old. No, he’s fully mature and able to reflect and be patient; he spent two years waiting to launch his plan and for a twenty-three-year-old two years can seem like for ever.
He has the freedom to travel overnight so he won’t work nine to five in an office, otherwise he’d have to take sick leave or holidays and that attracts attention. More likely, he’s unemployed, retired or doing shift work. He’s probably not married or living with someone; he’d have to answer too many questions about where he goes at night and how he gets his money.
Looking for the signs he left behind was different from my previous police cases. There was no crime scene to analyse and the events weren’t the grisly product of a perverted mind or sexual deviant. Instead of seeking emotional or sexual gratification, this offender was motivated by greed.
Every burglar, bank robber, kidnapper, embezzler, rapist, terrorist or vandal is a unique person. Good or bad, no two people are the same and each time I interview someone, or get called in by the police, there’s a different person that I have to try to meet in my consulting room or find within a crime.
In some ways it’s easier to deal with people who are motivated by greed or revenge because they’re more easily understood; they’re closer to the rest of us. We can understand the motivation, whereas we struggle to comprehend how some sadomasochistic psychopath could rape and mutilate another human being.
We all know about people fiddling their tax returns and overstating their lost luggage claim, but we don’t use nasty words like fraud or extortion. Instead, it’s considered almost fair game to put something over on the government or an insurance company. Consider this, if someone found a foolproof way to rig the National Lottery so that no-one suspected and a particular set of numbers came up, how many of us would be tempted? Greed we understand.
*
Each time the money ran down in the Halifax accounts, the threats became more aggressive and strident. Growing frustrated and tired of the excuses, the blackmailer made a telephone call to a supermarket in Basildon, Essex, on 6 December. A male voice instructed office staff that a tin of Pedigree Chum had been contaminated.
The tin had been cut open, spiked with broken razor blades and resealed before being placed on the shelf. Mercifully, it was clearly marked ‘contaminated’.
There were two more contaminations before Christmas at supermarkets in Royston, Hertfordshire and Heyford Hill near Oxford. Again there were warning calls to the store and the police.
I found this interesting. Often in a protracted campaign the blackmailer gets tired of waiting and negotiating and simply goes away; or he gets sloppy and makes a mistake. When control is slowly wrested away from him, he can feel less powerful than he first imagined and decide to pull out. There was no sign of any of this in our man. Almost as if challenging the various scenarios, the blackmailer turned up the heat just when the police thought they had his measure.
‘It’s part of his battle for control,’ I told a difficult management committee meeting.
‘But you said we’d stop him contaminating,’ said Pedigree’s PR man.
‘And we have, until now. Right from the very beginning this man has had each step of the escalation prepared. He knows that Pedigree respond to the commercial threat. He thinks that he can wear you down and you’ll give him everything he wants.’
John Simmens looked disconsolate and I knew they were tired.
‘Eventually, he will move on,’ I said. ‘When he gets frustrated with not being able to get large amounts of money and bored with travelling all over the country, he’ll find a new target. Right now he’s thinking, “The plan works and I can do it to anyone.’”
Shortly before Christmas the stakes rose further when the blackmailer demanded that unless the full Ł500,000 was paid immediately, he would disclose to the media the incidents of contaminated food on British supermarket shelves. For the first time Pedigree realized it was in the centre of a storm. Do they go public or maintain the secrecy? Do they pay the money or continue to drip-feed the accounts?
I tried to be reassuring. ‘He’s always had the power to do this; it’s a prepared demonstration. I think you should stay with him. He’s not going to carry out his threat unless you say, “Get lost, you’re getting nothing.” The moment you do that, he may do it for real with no warning calls.
‘If you don’t withdraw the product and you don’t go public, he’ll think he still has the control and will push for the money.’
Pedigree held its nerve.
Meanwhile, the daily withdrawals continued, each of them picked up by the building society’s central computer. In London the spread of withdrawals were mostly north of the Thames and stretched from the West End to commuter-belt towns in Essex such as Southend. Studying it closely, I reasoned that the blackmailer probably lived in the centre, so I ran a basic mathematical analysis of the withdrawal points. The results put him near Hornchurch, an area slightly to the east of London.
Operation Roach was proving expensive. Even with a massive team of detectives, working in pairs, less than half of the cash-point machines could be covered at any one time. Given the pattern of withdrawals, only the Halifax outlets in the south of England were targeted on two days a week, Monday and Thursday, from closing time until 1.00 a.m.
This carried on through January and February, costing an estimated Ł1 million a week, but the blackmailer always seemed to be one step ahead. Quite remarkably, he never made withdrawals from machines which were under surveillance. Every time the police were active, he’d suddenly go quiet. Why?
Why had the biggest, most expensive surveillance operation ever mounted in Britain failed to turn up a single clue to his identity? Something was wrong and I seemed to be the only person who recognized the fact.
By the beginning of March the ransom demand had risen to Ł1,250,000 and the number of contaminations to fourteen - each preceded by warnings. The blackmailer had withdrawn more than Ł18,000 and the money was running down again, but instead of more threats or contaminations he went quiet.
I think David Baker and his team had mixed feelings. On the one hand they had gained great satisfaction at having kept the blackmailer at bay while having paid him a very small amount of money in corporate terms. The company had also been protected. In fact, every goal had been achieved with the exception of one - catching the man responsible.
Now he had two choices, either he’d give up his campaign or find a new victim.
On 12 March something happened which may possibly have made up his mind. Against the advice of Leicestershire Police, a national newspaper revealed the existence of the blackmail conspiracy against an unnamed pet food company and details of the undercover operation.