In Vino Veritas

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Well, he could not have refused without arousing suspicion,’ Vicary explained, ‘and putting the pen tip to his lips – that was just a moment’s absent-mindedness, a lapse of concentration. So, tell me, why is the Economic Crime Unit interested in him?’

  ‘He is believed to be a money launderer,’ Escritt advised, ‘and not just any money launderer but a very major player. His name gets mentioned in that capacity from time to time but nobody knows where he lives or where his base of operations is. He charges seventy pence in the pound – it’s a high rate – but he comes up with the goods and he can handle big money. Give him a thousand pounds of sequentially traceable money and he’ll give you three hundred untraceable in return. But he only works in large, very large sums.’

  ‘How does he do it?’ Vicary leaned back in his chair. He felt intrigued.

  ‘Well, that is what we’d like to have “a wee chat with him about” as my Scots grandfather would have said. He was a police officer in Glasgow.’

  ‘Ah … I thought I detected a faint Scottish accent,’ Vicary observed warmly.

  ‘Yes, it’s still there. I grew up in Scotland until I was about twelve, when my parents relocated England. But to continue … McLaverty aka Woodhuyse will have his overheads, like any businessman. He’ll have an army of gofers … probably young women who will be working naked.’

  ‘Naked!’ Vicary exclaimed.

  ‘Of course,’ Escritt replied. ‘All quite normal, all quite usual. In fact, the last laundering operation we raided we found thirty women working in a unit on an industrial estate. The top man rented the unit and installed the girls, all with criminal records, so they knew the rules – no skimming or it’s a damn good hiding.’

  ‘Yes.’ Vicary nodded slightly. ‘I know the sort of hiding you mean – one that will put her in hospital.’

  ‘So all the girls had difficulty in obtaining employment … they were girls with habits, girls with children, they were the sort of girls whose only other way of making a living was to sell themselves on the street. So they turned up for work each day, working a normal nine to five, entered the unit, stripped naked and sat down in front of a long table, fifteen down one side and fifteen down the other. Quite a liberal atmosphere, apparently. Music on the radio, chatting away whilst they worked, smoking if they wanted to smoke but only loose cigarettes and lighters were allowed. They were supervised by a couple of “matrons” – no men around at all for the most part.’

  ‘Why naked?’ Vicary asked. ‘And what were they doing?’

  ‘They were breaking up the sequence of notes stolen in a payroll robbery. Forty million pounds,’ Escritt told him. ‘You must remember it?’

  ‘Up in Peterborough … five years ago,’ Vicary replied. ‘That job?’

  ‘Yes, but it was seven years ago.’

  ‘Time flies.’ Vicary sighed. ‘Goes too damn fast.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Escritt also sighed. ‘And the girls were naked to discourage them from skimming, slipping the odd fifty-pound note into their pockets, and no cigarette packets or boxes of matches for the same reason. And it wasn’t just the notion of theft, it was also and mainly because if sequenced notes got into the wrong hands it could blow the whole operation … which is in fact what happened. That’s how we cracked the case. Each girl was given a large wedge of sequential money, and from that wedge they took one note at a time and put the note on one of twenty piles in front of them, so eventually each girl was sitting in front of twenty piles of non-sequential notes, with many hundreds of pounds in each pile.’

  ‘Neat,’ Vicary commented.

  ‘Yes, but all very labour intensive,’ Escritt replied.

  ‘I can see that.’ Vicary stroked his chin. ‘But please … carry on.’

  ‘So when each girl was left with twenty piles of non-sequential notes in front of her, one of the “matrons” would go along the line and take one pile from each girl and put them in the same sack or bag which contained one pile in front of each of the girls.’

  ‘So further breaking up the sequence,’ Vicary commented.

  ‘Yes, exactly.’ Escritt nodded. ‘So the “matron” then had thirty sacks or bags, each containing one and a half thousand pounds, in new but non-sequential notes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Vicary replied softly. ‘I see how it works.’

  ‘So then they’d have a coffee break, and each girl would then be given another wad of sequential money to put into twenty piles of non-sequential money, and so the production line worked like that all day until five p.m. when the fat lady sang. So at the end of the day there would be sixty thousand pounds of non-sequential money in ninety or so bags … one and a half K in each bag.’

  ‘Yes,’ Vicary replied. ‘Then …?’

  ‘Well, what happened then is that another set of gofers arrived – males this time – each taking ten bags apiece into their cars, and they would drive round certain pubs in London, usually struggling pubs or small independent betting shops, where each bag would be sold for one thousand used in untraceable notes,’ Escritt explained. ‘So the publican, or the casino or betting shop manager made a swift five hundred pounds on the transaction and mixed up the stolen money with his legitimate takings and then banked it.’

  ‘So neat.’ Vicary cleared his throat. ‘So very neat. You’ve got to hand it to him. Simple and neat.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Escritt replied. ‘That operation was washing thirty-six thousand pounds each day. They didn’t work on Sundays … no religious reason, it was because they thought it might make the activity in the unit look suspicious if they didn’t have at least one day off each week, especially since every other unit was shut down on that day.’

  ‘Understood.’ Vicary nodded. ‘Again … sensible.’

  ‘They also distributed the money further afield, out west to Bristol and north as far as Newcastle and the other large industrial cities in the north. It was a nice, steady operation, cleaning one hundred and forty thousand pounds plus each month … one million and six hundred plus a year.’

  ‘But,’ Vicary commented, ‘that is still just scratching the surface of the forty million they had to launder.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and they also knew that,’ Escritt smiled, ‘so they did other things as well, but the slowness of the operation was their downfall, that and a girl from the ghetto. As they say, “You can take a kid from the ghetto but you’ll never take the ghetto from the kid”, and one girl couldn’t prevent herself from stealing. Just one note, but it was all that was needed. She was daft or deft depending on how you look at it – probably both. Anyway, she dropped a fifty-pound note on the floor when the “matrons” were distracted, put her foot on it and began to crunch it up with her toes.’

  ‘Deft,’ Vicary commented, ‘as you say.’

  ‘So at the end of the day she walked with the other girls to where their clothes were, keeping herself in the middle of the pack to disguise the slight limp she had because she had to keep the toes of one foot curled up so as to hold the note, but once she had put her sock on that foot she could then stand and walk normally and did not draw attention to herself. Heavens, she took a risk doing that but she was a lowlife individual and, later that evening, because of that, no pub or shop would accept the fifty-pound note, suspecting it to be moody in one way or another … either stolen or forged …’

  ‘As they would,’ Vicary commented dryly.

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s a lot of money for a small businessman to lose,’ Escritt replied. ‘A day’s profit before tax in some cases.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Vicary commented.

  ‘So … the girl asked her flatmate to take the fifty-pound note to the bank the next day and change it for five tens, offering the flatmate five pounds for her trouble,’ Escritt continued. ‘A fair ten per cent. The flatmate agreed because she was long-term unemployed and five pounds was two days’ food money for her. Anyway, she didn’t look to the bank staff like the sort of woman who would get hold of a fifty-pound note legitimately and so th
ey asked her to take a seat, which she did. The bank checked the serial number of the note and found it was bent and called the police. The local bobbies took her to their nick and contacted the Economic Crime Unit. So we talked to the girl and she seemed kosher – just doing a favour for her flatmate while the flatmate was at work, for a small drink. So we gave her back the fifty-pound note and told her to tell her friend that the bank wouldn’t change it because the staff seemed suspicious of her. We knew we’d recover the note easily enough.’ Escritt added quickly, ‘And if we didn’t, what’s fifty pounds out of forty million?’

  ‘Not a lot, I grant you.’ Vicary inclined his head with a smile. ‘It’s a loss you can cope with.’

  ‘So the next morning we followed the girl, who had stolen the fifty-pound note, and found that she went to a street corner in Tottenham where she and other girls waited for a private hired motor coach. The coach picked the girls up at eight a.m. and drove them out of London, up into Hertfordshire and to an industrial estate near Stevenage. They were picked up again at the end of the day and taken back to the street corner. We had a wee chat with the motor coach operator who also proved himself to be genuine and believed he had a contract to run some workers up to the industrial estate six mornings a week and collect them again each evening, Monday to Saturday inclusive. He was happy with the contract because he was able to use his oldest vehicle for the job, and he gave the drive to his youngest son who had just turned twenty-one, got his public service vehicle operator’s licence and needed short runs to get his hand in before being given the long-distance drives. We asked him to carry on with the service and not to say anything to anyone … then we spent weeks on surveillance and notified other forces who kept the various “drops” under surveillance.’

  ‘The pubs, et cetera?’ Vicary clarified. ‘And private betting shops in other cities? Those are the “drops” you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Escritt nodded. ‘Anyway, this was about one year after the wages snatch and their operation had been running smoothly in that time … and we raided.’ Escritt smiled broadly. ‘Oh, boy, did we raid them … coordinated raids at two p.m. on the same day across the UK.’

  ‘Middle of the day?’ Vicary observed.

  ‘Yes. We needed them all to be at their designated places of employment … the women in the counting house in Stevenage, all the pubs, privately owned betting shops and small casinos open for business, and we made lots of lovely arrests. All the gofers we lifted at their homes; all the girls and the two “matrons” we lifted at the industrial estate. They all started singing like canaries and named the lieutenants and the top man. He was a geezer called Dominic Hughes: well-heeled background, fee paying school … quite a posh felon.’

  ‘Did you arrest the guy who stole the money?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘No … sadly,’ Escritt grimaced, ‘that was the downside of it all; we just got the washerman and the washerwomen. Dominic Hughes claimed ignorance of the actual thieves and we believed him; we bought his story. It was all done by word of mouth … as it often is among the criminal fraternity. The word went out that forty million pounds in traceable notes was up for sale and all the bids were put in by the established money launderers … and our man …’

  ‘Hughes?’

  ‘Yes. Posh, well spoken, classy Dominic Hughes – he put in the winning bid. He was able to offer twelve million pounds in untraceable money.’

  ‘That is seriously big money,’ Vicary observed, ‘when you bring it down to the scale of the individual human being.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Escritt nodded in agreement. ‘As you say, sir, when you bring it down to the scale of the man in the street … well, it’ll pay your gas bill.’

  ‘I’ll say.’ Vicary breathed loudly. Then he added, ‘You mentioned other methods of laundering money?’

  ‘Oh, yes, if Hughes was solely dependent upon his thirty women and the dodgy bookmakers and pubs and small casinos and his fifteen or so bag men, then it would have taken him five years to recover his outlay, then another twenty-plus years on top of that to fully wash the forty million, and the great pressure comes from the Bank of England which changes the design of its notes once every few years, and if the design changes all dirty money in the old design is worthless. So any laundering operation has to be done as rapidly as possible,’ Escritt explained. ‘So other methods are used.’

  ‘Such as?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘Well, the easiest and yet also the most costly is to sub-contract to smaller laundering operations – the guys who can handle one million pounds at a time. So it was that Hughes bought the forty million for thirty per cent of its face value, then sold a million here and there for forty per cent of its face value, then he made one hundred thousand pounds in a single transaction. Ten such transactions will net him a million in untraceable money, and it was when telling us this that Hughes first mentioned the name Leonard McLaverty, or Elliot Woodhuyse. So it seems that in the intervening years McLaverty has grown from a small operator to a large one, and has filled the vacancy left by Hughes.’

  ‘Neat … a neat way of laundering money,’ Vicary observed.

  ‘Yes … yes, it is, but it is hugely expensive, selling ten million for one million. It gets rid of the dirty money very quickly but at a very small return,’ Escritt explained. ‘So, the best returns are obtained by minimally disrupting the sequence and then making cash offers for property in Continental Europe, or buying high-end big boy’s toys like light aircraft and luxury yachts or big girl’s toys like diamond tiaras, with all purchases done abroad so the money gets laundered in unsuspecting foreign banks. Then, when the sale has been completed, the launderer resells his acquisitions.’

  ‘For less than he paid for each?’ Vicary clarified.

  ‘Oh, yes, often for significantly less so to achieve a quick sale because the speed of the operation is of the essence, as I said.’ Escritt paused. ‘Dominic Hughes, our man, became quite chatty once he realized the game was up, and he told us that if he hadn’t been rumbled then he anticipated that he would clear about fifteen to twenty million at the end of the operation. From that he had to subtract his outlay of twelve million, leaving him three to eight million of clear profit, and once his gofers and lieutenants had been paid then he would have pocketed anything from two to seven million … straight into his numbered account. That’s not bad for about a year to eighteen months work – two years at the very outside. It’s still a nice little tax-free earner for an individual: two million pounds for two years’ work, and that is the lowest estimate and the longest time. If he put his mind to it he could possibly have cleared seven million in about a year.’

  ‘He collected fifteen years, I believe,’ Vicary commented, ‘if this is the case I am thinking of.’

  ‘Yes, he was sentenced to fifteen years, but …’ Escritt opened his palms in a gesture of exasperation, ‘… he knew the rules. He knew how to play the game; he knew very well how to manipulate the system. His was a non-violent crime; no one was injured in either the robbery or the laundering of the money. He made a show of remorse, he joined the Christian Union, he volunteered to clean the toilets and he never gave any bother to anyone. He got a rapid transfer to an open prison and was released on licence after just five years. He kept his appointments with his probation officer for a year, as he was required to do, but when the year expired the licence was discharged and he dropped off the radar. He vanished like a thief in the night, which I suppose is what he was … and possibly still is. What he’s doing now is anybody’s guess; he’s either gone back to what he’s good at doing and is washing dirty money somewhere or, more likely, he’s retired to the sun and is living out his life in luxury.’

  ‘Did you recover any of the money?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘Only partially. We raided when just less than half of the forty million, about twenty million, was still in his storage facility waiting for rinsing. We put our forensic accountants on to the trail of the washed stuff. My heavens, they are a determined se
t of weasels – totally single-minded. I wouldn’t want one of them on my tail chasing me for undeclared income, but our man Hughes knew how to hide money, turn it into washed cash and then pay it into numbered bank accounts or bank accounts opened under an assumed name both here and abroad, and that is what McLaverty, aka Woodhuyse will be doing; that is why he was found to be at home during the working day yet claiming to be a city stockbroker. He won’t be going anywhere near the washroom. That job he’ll have delegated to one of his lieutenants.’

  ‘So what do you know about him?’ Vicary sat back in his chair.

  ‘Not as much as we would like to know but his name is linked by our informants to being the main man in the laundering operation of the Southampton job … another payroll snatch. One of the gang has turned Queen’s Evidence and is now a protected person. He has given evidence which, if he repeats in court, will put McLaverty, or Woodhuyse, away for a long spell … if we can find him, and now it looks like we have, indeed, found him. The Southampton job was the snatch of a cool sixty million, which is being washed somewhere at the moment. The notes keep turning up here and there but can’t be traced back to their source. But sixty mill – that will take time to wash, and McLaverty/Woodhuyse will not be anxious to leave London or the UK until it’s been laundered. So while he’s here we have a chance to fondle his collar. His name is mentioned by other informants and, as I said, we believe he has grown to fill the void left by Dominic Hughes.’

  ‘I can see why Woodhuyse is on your most-wanted list.’ Vicary smiled. ‘How was the money exchanged?’

  ‘Our informant says it was done in a disused aircraft hanger.’ Escritt cleared his throat. ‘Two lorries – one owned by the laundry man and the other owned by the gang who did the job. But the top men were not there, just their seconds … their middle management, if you like, and neither gang knew the other. It was all arranged by word of mouth. A team of gofers carried the dirty money out of one lorry and into the other, and carried the untraceable money back to their lorry. McLaverty paid thirty per cent – eighteen million in untraceable notes …’