Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  ‘I spoke to Paddy in Spain, and he explained that a deal he had arranged in Morocco had now fallen through. A boat laden with cannabis, which he had agreed to meet to transfer the load onto my vessel, was being watched off the coast of Dakar by customs officers, and so nobody would go near it. Paddy told me to tell Patrick to sail to Tenerife instead, where he would receive further instructions. I did pass on Paddy’s instructions, but Patrick left for home the same day, leaving me to sail the Melanie. Because of delays and a never-ending stream of misinformation, it was agreed that I should sail to Casablanca to pick up a man who was going to show me where the boat was moored in Tenerife.

  ‘After the man had boarded and we were in the open sea, he said that we were no longer heading for Tenerife. I was to sail to Dakar instead. I had no charts to go to Dakar, and the Melanie wasn’t fit to sail there in any event. What I did was call in at Morro Jable, a port in the south of Fuerteventura, in the Canaries, and I told the Spanish authorities there that I had engine trouble. I telephoned Paddy and asked him what was going on. Why was I being told that I had to go to Dakar? Paddy said that I should just go there and not ask questions. He would have a crew waiting there to take over from me when I arrived. So, I sailed to Dakar, but on the way we had gearbox failures, engine failure. You name it, we endured it. The Melanie was not up to making such a long voyage. She could have sailed to Tenerife and back, but that was her limit.

  ‘When we arrived in Dakar, the people that met us wouldn’t even pay for a new GPS aerial, which is vital for navigation. Whilst they sped around in Mercedes sports cars, snorted cocaine and hired groups of prostitutes, the crew and me were botching the boat up with soldering irons and second-hand parts. Without a GPS aerial, which would have cost £400, the Melanie would not be able to locate and rendezvous with the boat loaded with drugs. I tried to explain that sailing without one was pointless, and when my protests fell on deaf ears I said that the Melanie was not going anywhere. This resulted in the men promising me that I could have as much diesel as I needed, fresh water and a new GPS aerial. The diesel wasn’t readily available, and so I was told to store as many empty drums as possible on the deck so that the boat the Melanie was meeting could fill them up.

  ‘When I was happy that the Melanie was seaworthy, I told the men that the other crew that Paddy had promised could now take over. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was told that there was no replacement crew and I had to skipper the Melanie with my crew. Almost as an afterthought, the men said that I would be paid £1 million when the drugs had been landed in the UK. I tried to refuse their offer, but my crew and I were beaten and threatened until we agreed.

  ‘We sailed from Dakar with a Cuban man aboard. It was his job to liaise with the crew of the boat that we were sailing to meet. On the second day, their vessel appeared, and as it approached I threw a crew member a line. I shouted out, “This is an aluminium yacht. I will never be able to go alongside you with the yacht fenders.” The next thing, rifles were pointing at me and they were all shouting, “You will!” I had no choice other than to comply. The moment I pulled alongside the boat, the fenders just splintered, and it smashed all the side of the Melanie, and so I just cut the line. I spent the rest of the day doing makeshift repairs. As I did so, the crew from the other boat began loading a hundred bags of cannabis onto the Melanie. They said that they had very few supplies on their boat, and so they helped themselves to most of our supplies. When I asked for the 600 gallons of diesel that I would need to make the journey back to England, I was given just 140 gallons of sludge. It destroyed the Melanie’s engine within two days, and we were left listing in open sea. We had a hell of a job on the return journey, running electrics on a petrol generator with only five gallons of fuel, and eventually that ran out.

  ‘When I left England, I told my girlfriend that I would only be three days, and here I was into my ninth week at sea. We were so hungry we stopped two ships for food and water that we had happened upon in the middle of the ocean. I had been told that when I was 20 miles from England we would be met by another boat, which would load the drugs and take them inland. However, when we reached the agreed spot, there was nobody there apart from a trawler, which I later learned was manned by customs officers.

  ‘I waited until the next night, and when nobody showed I thought, “Bollocks to this. We have got no food, no water and no fuel. If I dump the drugs they will kill me, and so I may as well try and land them myself.” So I got the pilot book out and had a look at this place called the Helford River, where about 50 people live in a village. I thought that was the perfect place to land, but as soon as the Melanie entered the Helford River boats laden with armed police and customs officers descended on me. For some reason, the police thought that the cannabis had been wired to explosives to prevent another gang from stealing it, but that was absolute nonsense.’

  Two months after his arrest, Berriman received a visit at Horfield Prison from Detective Constable William McDougall and another officer, Detective Sergeant Hans Kitching. Unbeknown to the detectives, Berriman had met Brinks-MAT robber Tony White on the maximum-security wing, and he had advised Berriman to covertly record all interviews that he had with the police. White had explained that in 1984 a bank robbery trial had been abandoned after the accused had recorded officers during a prison visit. What the officers said to the defendant in private did not quite tally up with their evidence in court, and so the judge dismissed the case. Berriman felt that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and so he hollowed out an A4 lever arch file full of case papers and hid a small tape recorder in the middle.

  Berriman was usually strip-searched before and after visits, but as he was being visited by the police on this occasion the prison officers refrained from being so rigorous. As Berriman walked into the prison visiting room, he turned the tape recorder on. He knew that the tape would last for only 45 minutes, and so he had to act fast. Rather cheekily, Berriman told the officers that he would not talk to them unless they agreed to be searched by him for hidden tape recorders. Both complied.

  Berriman had been informed by his solicitor that the officers wished to speak to him about a CS gas gun that they had found at his home, but he suspected that wasn’t true. So, when Berriman asked the officers what they wanted to know about the gun, he wasn’t surprised when they said that they had just used that as an excuse to get to see him in prison. The officers did give Berriman a chargesheet with two matters relating to firearms on it, but he never appeared in court for any such offence. For the next 40 minutes, Berriman played along with the police, making light of his situation and appearing to sound keen when they suggested ways in which his situation could be improved.

  At the end of the visit, Berriman returned to his cell and retrieved the tape recording. He passed it to his solicitor at the earliest opportunity. Nearly a year later, when DC McDougall gave evidence at the trial, Berriman’s counsel asked him a series of questions about the prison meeting. Was it true that the officers had told Berriman about two police colleagues’ supposed lesbian affair? Had they urged him to supply information about drugs to them exclusively, promising they could get the judge to cut his sentence? Had they buried their customs colleagues in a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse, even claiming they were ‘conspiring against Berriman’? To each and every allegation, red-faced DC McDougall offered an emphatic denial. But, unknown to the police, Berriman’s tape recorder in the prison visiting room had captured their every word. Now, accompanied by a transcript of the meeting, it was played in court to devastating effect.

  On the tape, DC McDougall spoke at length about two female detectives who were ‘half and half’, adding that, despite their relationship, he had found that bisexual officers were ‘usually a bloody good shag’. DC McDougall had also made an offer to Berriman to encourage him to turn informer. He had said, ‘We can put a letter in to the judge saying you have been very helpful, and he lessens your sentence . . . If you can give us a nice tasty job, that’s some
thing that’s going to help you.’ No one, the officer had said, ‘need ever know, not even customs. Come through me; don’t go through them, because you can’t fucking trust them.’ DS Kitching added, ‘Who would you rather deal with? Billy McDougall or the customs . . . the people who were bloody having a conspiracy around you?’ The officers also suggested they might be able to get Berriman transferred to less burdensome security conditions.

  The prison interview was not the only element that led to the case collapsing and Berriman being acquitted of all charges. He gave powerful evidence of how he had become indebted to Paddy Conroy and had undertaken the voyage only after months of threats and violence, which had left him in fear of his life. On the prison interview tape, the officers appeared to be aware of the intimidation Berriman claimed he endured. Judge Taylor asked the Devon and Cornwall Police to launch an inquiry into the conduct of DC McDougall and DS Kitching, but it was found that there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to bring any charges. Neither officer was disciplined by the police.

  Berriman refused to become a police informant, but in January 1996, while Paddy Conroy was safely locked behind bars, three men decided to make sure that he wasn’t about to change his mind. They lured Berriman to a scrapyard on the pretext of him assisting them with Paddy’s appeal papers. When Berriman arrived, he was greeted by masked men wearing forensic-type suits and surgical gloves. They beat Berriman with a claw hammer and baseball bats for more than two hours, leaving him with broken ribs, a crushed elbow, broken fingers and twenty-three staples in his skull.

  Paddy was never questioned by police about Berriman’s claims concerning the importation of cannabis or the assault that Berriman suffered. He was, however, asked by a journalist if he was involved in the attempted importation of cannabis, to which he replied, ‘Fucking hell. I couldn’t find my way to Canary Wharf never mind the Canary Islands.’

  When Berriman recovered from the terrible injuries that he had sustained, he retired from crime and opened a pub, an annex of which he named Smugglers Creek. However, Berriman could never give up his love of the sea and the excitement he derived from his ‘naughty-cal’ voyages. In 2007, the media dubbed Berriman ‘the Booze Pirate’ after he set up a floating off-licence in international waters, 13 miles off the coast of Hartlepool. Berriman claimed that he was getting even with Customs and Excise by exploiting a loophole in the law that allowed him to sell EU bottles of spirits for just £7 and cartons of cigarettes for £15. His first mission to sell cut-price beer, wine, spirits and cigarettes had been thwarted when customs seized £120,000 of cargo on suspicion that duty needed to be paid. After a legal battle, Berriman’s goods were returned, and he once more put to sea, telling reporters from the Hartlepool Mail, ‘I am not fully confident that I won’t be in jail next week, but I believe that I am on the right side of the law. I am not afraid of customs.’

  Shortly after Glover had been recaptured in Middlesbrough after escaping from the prison van, he indicated to a Detective Chief Inspector Dudley that he wished to give Queen’s evidence against Paddy Conroy concerning the kidnap and torture of Billy Collier. In documents that were later disclosed to Paddy’s legal team, he learned that Glover had been informing on him, his family and his friends for years. It was Glover who had told his police handler that guns used to shoot members of the Harrison family had been hidden in the loft of the Happy House. Unfortunately for the police, after they retrieved the guns, they were unable to prove who had put them there, because the property had numerous tenants, none of whom was going to confess to anything. It was, in fact, extremely unfortunate that the police could not find the culprit, because the person who told them about the guns was the very same man who owned them and who had hidden them there.

  Glover wasn’t being public-spirited, nor had he found God. The sole reason he had for giving up his own cache of weapons was that he wanted to do a deal with the police regarding the charges that he faced. This is not an entirely new approach for a criminal trying to save his own skin and evade justice. John Haase and Paul Bennett, from Liverpool, were jailed for 18 years in 1995 for smuggling heroin, but they were freed early for the help they gave in locating firearms that had been hidden around the UK. Their ‘unique’ cooperation – tipping off the authorities about the whereabouts of more than 150 guns – resulted in them being granted royal pardons. The pair were released in 1996 after the then home secretary, Michael Howard, signed a Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

  However, some detectives began to doubt the authenticity of the information, and a subsequent investigation revealed that Haase and Bennett had in fact purchased the weapons and arranged for them to be hidden. Once the guns had been planted, the pair pretended to turn informer and told the authorities where the guns could be found. When the truth had been unearthed, the two men were charged and later convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Haase was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment, and Bennett to 20.

  In the hope of bolstering his bargaining power, Glover had not only told the police about the torture of Collier but had also said that he was willing to give them the names of the men who had driven the getaway cars on the day he escaped from the prison van. Other crimes Glover dangled in front of his police handler were the theft of a Greenpeace dinghy and diving suits, allegedly by Paddy Conroy, and an armed robbery at a club called the Excessor, which had been committed by two men Glover said he could not only name but also incriminate, because he knew where they had hidden the money they had robbed, some of which had been contaminated by red anti-theft dye. Glover also identified by name two men who were allegedly involved in robbing a post office van.

  Saving the best until last, Glover said that Michael Conroy had offered to pay him to murder Viv Graham. Glover told the police that he had considered Michael’s offer but alleged that when he had asked Paddy for his advice he had been told that he was not to get involved, the implication being that Paddy already had everything in hand. An internal police memo written at the time Glover made these wild allegations stated:

  The inmate who provided this information is seeking assistance from the police in the hope that they can move him to another prison to facilitate easier family visits and he is also seeking credit from the judge at his trial for any assistance he can give to the police by way of information. There is obviously no way at this stage of determining whether or not this information has any substance, but he has in the past provided accurate information to the police.

  On 10 November 1994, Glover received a visit at HMP Armley, in Leeds, from a Detective Inspector Stoker of Northumbria Police. Glover had invited him to the prison, as he wanted to know if the authorities were prepared to take him up on his offer. Glover told DI Stoker that he missed his family and that Paddy Conroy had let him down badly so he was more than willing to repeat his allegations in a statement or in person in court. DI Stoker was not in a position to make promises to Glover, and so he said that he would speak to the Crown Prosecution Service on his behalf.

  When he returned to Newcastle, DI Stoker visited special caseworker Mr D. Hyland at the Crown Prosecution Service offices and explained what Glover had proposed. After careful consideration, Mr Hyland advised DI Stoker that no deal could be made with Glover but that if he was willing to assist the police with the matters that he had mentioned, then facts could be made known to Glover’s trial judge, meaning any sentence imposed might be reduced based on the quality of the information he had provided.

  On Wednesday, 23 November 1994, Glover was being held at Market Street Police Station, in Newcastle, while awaiting a court hearing that was due to take place later that day. DI Stoker visited him in the cells, told him what Mr Hyland had said and reiterated the fact that if he did decide to furnish the police with information about himself or others it could earn him a reduced sentence. Glover was devastated. His allegations of theft, robbery, possession of firearms and conspiracy to murder had all been ignored. What, he must have thought, was it going to take to make the polic
e sit up and listen to him?

  When Glover and his cellmate, Kevin Lowe, ended their half-hearted hunger strike at HMP Armley, Glover befriended Ronnie Priestley, an inmate on the same landing as him, who allegedly told him that he was plotting to have a judge ‘done in’. Priestley, from Leeds, was serving four years for offences involving counterfeit perfume. His wife had also been found guilty of committing crimes linked to his not so sweet-smelling business, and she was awaiting sentence.

  His Honour Judge Hoffman, who had imprisoned Priestley, had indicated that he personally wished to sentence Priestley’s wife. According to Glover, Priestley felt that the judge was being vindictive, and so he had decided to have him murdered. Glover agreed to assist with the conspiracy, and a note was smuggled out of the prison during a visit. This note allegedly offered John Chisholm, who was described by Glover as a Sunderland-based hit man, £50,000 to kill the judge. According to Glover, Priestley is said to have agreed to pay the money only if the judge went on to jail his wife. Unfortunately for Ronnie Priestley and John Chisholm, before sentence was passed on Mrs Priestley, David Glover was moved to HMP Winson Green, in Birmingham. I say it was unfortunate because the move that took Glover further away from his family in the north-east was the only reason he had made his ridiculous allegation against these two totally innocent men.

  On Monday, 6 February 1995, Glover was processed without incident by the reception staff at Winson Green and allocated to cell number D3. When officers escorted Glover to his new home, he refused to exchange the clothes he was wearing for prison-issue items. The officers feared that the situation could escalate into violence, and so Glover was taken to cell A1, in the segregation unit. Once there, he was spoken to by a senior officer, after which he agreed that he would wear prison garb and return to his cell peacefully. Glover adhered to his promise, but later that evening he smashed up his cell and fought with the officers who tried to restrain him. Glover is a powerful man, and so it took some time and effort to get him under control, but he was eventually handcuffed, and three officers physically carried him back down to the segregation unit.