by Trevor Grove
DEFENCE TACTICS
On 4 December Joanna Korner sat down and Michael Gale QC stood up. Roy the usher had explained the order of play for each of the Crown’s witnesses: first the prosecution’s evidence-in-chief, then the cross-examination, one after the other, by each of the defence counsel representing the four accused, and finally the prosecution’s re-examination.
Presumably someone had also described all this to George Fraghistas. As a citizen of Greece, he would be even less familiar with our courtroom ways than the average Briton, who at least has a nodding acquaintance of them via television. But as Mr Gale began his distinctly hostile line of questioning, the look on George’s face grew more and more indignant. The whole purpose of the adversarial system is to test the Crown’s evidence before a jury. This sounds reasonable enough in the abstract. In practice it often means putting witnesses on the rack and treating them as though it were they who were in the dock. George was obviously ill-prepared for this change of gear. Yesterday he was a victim. Today he was suddenly being treated as a villain.
The defendants’ case was bold and unexpected. They did not deny that they had been caught by the police in flagrante delicto. They could hardly do that, since the events of 2 April 1996 were indisputable. Their argument was that it was no delictum. It was merely a ploy, planned by George and executed by themselves on his orders, to extort money from his own family. What is more, he had assured his associates that it was money to which he was entitled anyway. So the kidnap was no kidnap, the victim was not a victim, and even the ransom was not really what you could call a ransom, more like an advance on his eventual inheritance. The man in the witness box, Mr Gale wanted us to believe, was the ringleader of the plot, driven to this heartless means of helping himself to the family coffers by the shakiness of his shipping business and the size of his gambling debts.
As Mr Gale progressed with his attempted demolition of the witness’s character, dwelling insinuatingly on his financial secretiveness, George’s face took on a grimace of sulky outrage. ‘Are you from the Inland Revenue?’ he burst out at one point. Hitherto he had been a patient, amiable witness, deserving of every sympathy. But Mr Gale had led us upstairs and shown us a Dorian Gray portrait in the attic. It was not such a pleasant sight. What is more, some of its features could be made to fit the now angry-looking man in the witness box.
I found this unsettling. Until now the prosecution account had seemed as watertight as a diving bell. These trickles of doubt were my first intimation that it might not, after all, be an open-and-shut case. Naturally, we were not such fools as to have believed it ever would be. Jurors pick up jury folklore very quickly in the coffee queue and it is conventional wisdom that trials always turn out to be less straightforward by the end than they seem at the beginning. The good juryman’s motto is: ‘I’m keeping an open mind.’ I must have heard my colleagues use it five times a day. It was a pious expression of our conscientiousness, I suppose. It was also a useful mantra to ward off the gusts of confusion that now began to eddy round us.
What really shook me about George was his gambling. He did not merely frequent casinos such as the Ritz and Crockford’s. By night he practically lived there. Sometimes he would jet over to Palm Beach just for the gaming. He played with a dedication and on a scale that were truly astonishing. Pop-eyed, we heard that he regularly put down a quarter of a million pounds in a single evening. Sometimes he lost six-figure sums. Sometimes he won. George denied none of this, though he was clearly embarrassed. He said it was something he hid from his family. He was not proud of it, though he admitted that on one occasion he had had a win of a million pounds. ‘That,’ he said with a sheepish grin, ‘was a highlight.’ So it must have been, even for a man who seemed to regard anything under a hundred grand’s worth of chips as pretty small potatoes. It was not just myself who goggled at this peep into the nocturnal world of London’s high-rollers. The barristers were just as open-mouthed, exchanging incredulous glances.
Here was yet another element of unfamiliarity to be grappled with by the jury. Already we had a multi-national cast-list, swollen by a retinue of interpreters. The defendants were accused of an unusual crime. In response they were putting forward an explanation which was positively Byzantine. The setting had been strange enough when it concerned only the arcane business of international shipping. Now the lights had dimmed and we were being invited to peer over expensively tailored shoulders at baize tables piled with enough chips to buy or lose an oil tanker in a single night.
Theoretically, the twelve members of a jury share a wide enough variety of knowledge and experience to have a collective grasp of what is going on in court. In practice, as we were discovering, a jury can easily find itself embarked on a journey without maps in completely alien terrain.
What was one to make of a man who gambled as heavily as George? Did it mean he was as unreliable as an alcoholic, or as devious as a drug addict? We did not know. Stuart the Rangers supporter had a weekly accumulator bet on the football results: he had once come within a whisker of a whopping win. Ex-schools inspector Magnus told us he used to bet on general elections, though after barely recovering his stake money in ‘92 he had no plans for ‘97. But apart from these two we were all non-punters (if you excluded our lottery syndicate) and had no means of forming a useful view. Copies of George’s current account produced by the defence showed his bank balance going up and down crazily, without ever plunging seriously into the red. Over a period, he seemed to come out even.
If the defence team calculated that the jury would be revolted by evidence of such profligacy, or repelled simply by the careless wealth of George Fraghistas, they were probably going to be in for a disappointment. Had he been a home-born toff in the Lord Lucan mould, the reaction might have been more hostile. But George was Greek and therefore a non-combatant in the class war. Besides, his rather modest, unflamboyant manner was disarming. He was neither a jet-setter nor a spiv. He did not drink, he told us. He could not even be accused of starving his wife of his company to feed his habit, since he was a bachelor. All the same, if Mr Gale’s probing did not produce a blanket condemnation, it did strike home with one very telling revelation. This concerned George’s bouncing cheques.
Mr Gale explained that top casinos are accustomed to give favoured patrons credit by letting them fill in house cheques for an agreed amount. The casino then presents these cheques at the client’s bank and, after the usual period for clearance, the sum is transferred to the casino’s account. George used this facility frequently. However, in a couple of instances a while before his kidnap, cheques for sizeable amounts had been returned, with a request for representation. In other words they had bounced. Despite courteous reminders from his creditors, George had done nothing about them. By the time of his kidnap, one casino had resorted to making sharpish telephone calls to goad him into action.
This was evidence, Mr Gale quite reasonably suggested, that Mr Fraghistas was in financial trouble and that the duns were after him. So here was a motive for devising the scheme to terrorise his family into parting with a multi-million dollar ‘ransom’. What is more, it was suggested, a man who knowingly bounced cheques for large amounts of money was by definition dishonest and could not be trusted to tell the truth, even under oath.
George struggled to refute this last point but he was not convincing. He claimed that signing cheques which he knew would not be covered by the bank was his way of rationing his gaming, since any casino holding his dishonoured cheques in the till would not let him play. In any case, bouncing cheques on casinos was not really dishonest, since they were used to it: for example, he said, even establishments where he owed money still invited him to lunch as an honoured guest and friend of the house.
These explanations sounded disingenuous at best and at worst plain babyish. Mr Gale’s harping on the theme of tax avoidance had, unsurprisingly, done George Fraghistas not a jot of damage. But the matter of the worthless cheques seemed to me to have dented him near t
he waterline. Had it not been for what one might call a presentational problem, the impact would have been even greater.
The problem was Michael Gale QC himself. I have no doubt that Mr Gale is a very able barrister. His oratory was remarkable. For one thing, when it wasn’t targeted witheringly at George Fraghistas, it seemed to be addressed over the heads of us rude mechanicals in the jury box to some invisible audience of impressionable law students. For another, it demonstrated those perhaps rather neglected, old-fashioned rhetorical skills, the sustained sneer and the condescending put-down. ‘Come, come, Mr Fraghistas,’ he would say in a snappish tone that Jeremy Paxman might have envied. He had an extraordinary mannerism of asking George a question, then abruptly turning his head away to smirk at the jury. ‘D’you follow me?’ he would say, looking down his nose at us but addressing him.
A section of the jury soon began logging every ‘D’you follow me?’. One of the interpreters sitting in the dock realised what was going on and grinned appreciatively. The witness was less amused by his inquisitor. ‘You’re out of your mind. You’re crazy,’ George exploded at Mr Gale after a particularly inflaming proposition of the ‘I put it to you, Mr Fraghistas’ variety.
A jury’s job is to reach a verdict based solely on the evidence. But it would have to be composed of archangels not to be swayed by ordinary human likes and dislikes. It seemed surprising to me that Mr Gale could not detect the effect his approach was having. After one of his more pointed accusations, George gave a snort of derisive laughter. Instantly Mr Gale fixed him with a headmasterly glare. ‘Did you laugh?’ he barked. George’s soft face crumpled like a small boy’s. ‘No, sir,’ he squeaked, though we all knew he had and we all knew why he’d said he hadn’t. Some childhood lessons are never forgotten.
I had the impression that even the judge found Korkolis’s counsel trying, though Mr Gale was a recorder, a part-time fellow-judge (and a much admired one, according to Roy the usher). Once My Lord rapped him for clumsy use of language; another time he gave him exasperated guidance over the course of his cross-examination; and he ordered one particularly insensitive sally to be struck from the record altogether.
Not yet two weeks into the trial and our opinions had been set oscillating like a bank of echo-sounders. Mr Gale was scoring some palpable hits. He had raised niggles about George’s financial probity that would not go away. Yet he was doing so in a manner liable to provoke as much sympathy for the prosecution’s principal witness as doubt about his testimony.
POLICE VIDEO
We discussed all this fairly freely among ourselves whenever we could do so without being overheard. We had not yet been given our own jury room in which to forgather and pass the time during breaks for points of law. To begin with we didn’t even have anywhere to sit, but had to stand about in a gaggle outside the lifts, sometimes for what felt like hours. The seats outside the courtrooms were reserved for witnesses and lawyers, with whom we were supposed to have no contact whatsoever. This was understandable. Roy the usher told us alarming tales about witnesses – even defendants on bail – brushing up against jurors and whispering the antithesis of sweet nothings in their ears.
In fact the Old Bailey is so pressed for space that jurors frequently find themselves caught up in a highly improper mêlée of lawyers, police, witnesses and journalists. Besides, there was only one set of loos for either sex on each floor, so inevitably there were times when I would find myself in the next stall to a barrister or witness. We would stare fixedly ahead at the tiles in awkward silence, though by now we all knew each other as well as people can who have never exchanged a word but see each other every day.
The safest place for the jury to swap views was in the lift, which bore a prominent notice saying: ‘Do not discuss cases while travelling in this lift’. When there were just the twelve of us inside there would be a spontaneous outbreak of contempt-of-court ribaldry. As the trial wore on, we began to be treated more like grown-ups: we were allowed to use the seating outside the courts, so long as we could be trusted to keep to ourselves. Later still we were awarded the privilege of our own jury room. This had the advantage of being private and of possessing its own lavatories – one for boys, one for girls – but the disadvantage of forcing us to spend a lot of time hugger-mugger round the table. The chatter was distracting if one was trying to read a book or fill in New Zealand immigration forms. On one thumb-twiddling morning the subjects under discussion were as follows:
The colour of cigarette filter tips.
Religious divisions in Glasgow, with special reference to football.
Does the Pope keep a mistress?
What did everyone think of leather sofas?
Boxer shorts for men: the pros and cons.
Inevitably, there was also a joke from Magnus. Question: ‘What are a monk’s vices?’ Answer: ‘Nun.’ Bob observed that Kate was putting on some make-up. ‘Hey,’ he called to her in a spurt of wit: ‘Old paint-your-wagon!’ Whereupon twelve Lee Marvins of either sex burst into a spontaneous chorus of ‘I was born under a wanderin’ star’ which must have startled Judge Goldstein in his room next door.
One morning in December we trooped down to a tiny courtroom just off the Grand Hall which is a sort of electronics studio for the playing of taped and filmed evidence. We were to see a video shot by a cameraman from the Met minutes after the police stormed Hogan Mews. We were a very rum audience: lawyers, witnesses, jurors, defendants, interpreters and prison officers, all pressed together on rows of chairs in a space smaller than a Soho preview theatre. (I learnt after the trial that George was able to look over Sophie’s shoulder and read her notes. He made out the word ‘chips’ and glumly realised that she had homed in on the gambling.) The judge and the clerk of the court sat facing us, just feet away, watching on their own monitor.
The video was silent and rather eerie. This was our first sight of Hogan Mews except in photographs. The camera wobbled slowly from room to room, lingering meaningfully on a pair of handcuffs and a mask, inexplicably on a detergent bottle, messy heaps of clothes and an unflushed lavatory bowl. At one point George was standing in the doorway of the cupboard, pale, stubble-chinned and wearing a dressing gown. The silence was broken when we heard him say something about his mother, addressed to one of his invisible rescuers. Had someone telephoned her, he asked indistinctly. Like the moment when he was shown the leather mask in the witness box, this was a rare bit of direct, living evidence which the jury could judge with its own eyes and ears, even if it was only on video.
The film was played through twice. Comparing notes afterwards, four things appeared to have stuck in the jury’s minds: the kidnap paraphernalia such as the handcuffs and the mask; the copy of a gay magazine lying on a table in the living room; a close-up of a Polaroid photograph torn into shreds; and the brief glimpse of George himself. It was at this point that we began to play detective. All juries do it to some extent, I suspect. (It was one of the accusations levelled by the defence against the Louise Woodward jury.) The temptation to second-guess the police is just too great. In our case we were to have so much time to reflect and so much contradictory evidence to go on that the Sherlock Holmes in each of us would have a field day.
It was the magazine that got us going. Which of the defendants was – or were – gay? Could bachelor George be gay himself? This was a theme we never quite let go of throughout the whole trial, though our curiosity was not finally satisfied until after the verdict.
The Polaroid: why had it been torn up into confetti-sized morsels? Should we ask if we could piece it together if the police had not already done so? (Daphne the Scrabble-player was keen to volunteer for this task.)
And George: was his demeanour as shown in the video really that of a newly released kidnap victim? Shouldn’t he have been crying or breaking down or something, rather than smiling and composedly asking if someone had telephoned his mother? There was much uninformed speculation on this score. (Months later I learnt that George himself was struck by hi
s own appearance: ‘I was quite scared when I saw the video. Looking myself at the video it doesn’t show like I was locked in the cupboard. I am quite normal.’)
Back in Court 9 Mr Gale was still on the attack. George had by now taken to responding with a repertoire of shoulder-shrugging, eye-rolling and mute appeals to the judge. Once he broke out with an angry ‘Are you out of your mind?’ which earned him a rapping from the bench. At one point in the taped telephone conversations between George and his brother, Nicos appeared to lose his temper. Mr Gale implied that this was because Nicos had begun to suspect that George was not the victim of a real kidnap. George reacted to this suggestion fiercely, casting aside decorum. His brother was not getting at him: he was getting at the kidnappers through him. ‘Nicos was trying to break Petros’s balls,’ cried George. ‘But in the process he was also breaking my balls.’
We were now into the third week of the trial, an important watershed for self-employed jurors. This was the point at which Stuart and I could raise our loss-of-earnings claims from the £40 or so a day payable during the first fortnight to a munificent £89.60. It was confirmation that we were now senior wranglers, long-serving jurors, and very welcome too, considering the potential earnings both he and I had been losing until now. Later the sum would go up again, to just over £96 a day. ‘Not bad, eh, Trev?’ said Stuart. He rubbed his hands with the satisfaction of an escapee from the cash-flow crisis which is the lot of the self-employed in modern Britain. Not bad at all.
