by Trevor Grove
There was nobody guiding the jury around. We remembered that George had said he had only once been upstairs. Blindfolded, he had been half-pushed, half-carried up to the bathroom one day, convinced that they were going to kill him there. He had been in a state of terminal terror as they led him to the side of the bath. But they only wanted him to have a proper wash. He had left his fingerprints on a hair dryer.
It was on our own initiative that we looked into the garage, discovering that there was a door leading straight from there into the house. So George could have been unloaded from the boot and taken inside – or strolled in unaided – without any of the neighbours observing what was afoot. That had not previously been clear to me.
We got back into the bus to drive to Lanark Road, reversing the order in which events had occurred on 24 March. It did not take long.
The NCP car-park in Lanark Road would win a location manager’s approval as the setting for a kidnap. It is an ill-lit, low-ceilinged place with oil-stained floors and shadows in the corners. One would feel a prickle of unease parking there at night, among the squat pillars and the tick of cooling car engines. We could see BMWs, Mercedes, Rovers and a Porsche. There was a long, low Ferrari lovingly wrapped in a bright red dust-sheet. Our two parties – judge, barristers and clerk in one group, jurors and usher in the other – milled around talking in low voices, like visitors to a grotto.
We had seen the police photos. Now, feeling rather self-conscious, we were able to stand by the bay marked out in faded white paint where George thought he had parked. I tried to imagine him hearing the sound of running footsteps behind him: whirling round, the sight of a hooded man wearing an anorak and motor-cycling gloves approaching through the gloom. Could it be a joke? That had been his first thought, he had told the court. Knocked against a car with a hand over his mouth, then forced face down on to the gritty concrete floor, he was aware of two other men struggling to pinion him. It was no joke.
Even when he raised his head, he could see only one of the three. The man loomed over him ‘like a giant’, holding a gun. Several hands tried to force a leather hood over his head: claustrophobia and panic. He fought and kicked to stop himself being crammed into the boot of a car. The boot lid was slammed on his ankles again and again to make him pull them in. He screamed. A man jumped in beside him. The lid closed. Claustrophobia and panic again. The car started up and swerved out into the street. No one had heard his shouts for help.
We timed the opening and closing of the garage doors and examined the other exits. We paced out the alleged length of the alleged gunman’s alleged run towards George, keenly aware of the difficulty of judging distance in such unscientific circumstances. Bob wanted to re-stage the attack among ourselves. The message was conveyed to the judge. The answer came back: no. Decorum was preserved.
We were bussed back to the Old Bailey in a somewhat muted mood. I was unsure whether our outing had really enlarged our understanding or merely titillated our curiosity. In my own case, the visits had sown a couple of nagging doubts. Was it logical that a gang of professional kidnappers would choose a hideaway so close – less than a quarter of an hour’s drive – from their victim’s home, rather than some isolated place in the country? And wasn’t it strange that none of the residents of Hogan Mews had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, given the closeness of the houses and the smallness of the mews?
CHRISTMAS IS COMING
It was the night of Jeffrey Archer’s shepherd’s pie and champagne Christmas party. John Major was there. His government was tottering towards electoral defeat in a few months’ time. Top Tories were disembowelling themselves with the self-absorption of suicidal samurai. Yet the PM himself was boyishly animated, surrounded by a knot of admiring women. The condemned man enjoys a final fling, I thought ghoulishly, still in juryman mode.
The language of politics is full of courtroom metaphors. After eighteen years of mixed fortunes, the Tories would be described as being in the dock, defending their record, putting their case to the public and submitting to the judgement of the electorate. Rasher columnists of the Woodrow Wyatt persuasion might fall back on that other journalistic standby, claiming the jury was still out. Actually, by December ’96 the jury was positively hammering at the courtroom door.
The parallels between the democratic process and trial by jury are quite illuminating, after a couple of glasses of Lord Archer’s Krüg. The great mass of uncommitted voters who swing elections reach their verdict in much the same way as a jury: by assessing the evidence, listening to the advocacy and judging the honesty of the witnesses. Anyone querying the fitness of juries to try serious criminal cases is poking a sharp stick into the belly of democracy. ‘Each jury is a little parliament,’ Lord Devlin said. You cannot logically mistrust the one without condemning the other. You might even argue that a jury trial is a purer expression of popular will than a general election. Malice, bias, credulity and boredom influence both undertakings. But at least the juror, unlike the voter, is untainted by self-interest.
The following evening my wife and I were invited to another Christmas party, given by Jonathan Aitken’s mother. His disastrous libel case against the Guardian was still some months away. Had I known then that he and his lawyers would argue successfully (on grounds of complexity, upheld on appeal) to have it heard before a judge alone, without a jury, I would have been very surprised. Aitken had been a journalist before he went into business and became an MP. Any newspaperman objects to the idea of libel juries setting damages. But when it comes to judging whether a person’s reputation has been unfairly harmed, who fitter for the task than twelve members of the public? After all, it was a jury that had acquitted Aitken of charges under the Official Secrets Act earlier in his career. To avoid the jury in this case did not look good – and, as it turned out, did him none.
That morning the jurors had exchanged Christmas cards, some containing printed verses. The ceremony took place in the jury restaurant with all the punctiliousness of Japanese salesmen swapping business cards. ‘Stuart, Terrie, Trev, Anna … these are for you.’ The GPO two, Bob and Sophie, must have felt quite piqued as one hundred and thirty-two envelopes changed hands without their aid. Terrie was keen on arranging a Christmas party: should we book a table for twelve at the Café Rouge? Oh, no, said some: too posh. Too late, said others. Let’s wait and see, suggested those with grim experience of office Christmas outings. A tipsy jury would lead to fines, for sure; maybe even a mis-trial.
The festive season was putting out green plastic shoots all over the Old Bailey. Holly leaves sprouted in unobtrusive corners. The jury restaurant started trailing its special Christmas lunch menu. One half expected Roy to turn up in false whiskers and a red bobble-hat. Merry greetings had been pinned up in the jury cloakroom, where there were sometimes as many as three people passing the time of day, slowly and inaccurately hanging up coats and handing out numbered discs. One snowy morning I came in wearing my one and only hat, a dark blue trilby. I handed it to the heroically lethargic West Indian in charge that day. When I collected it later, I discovered he had folded it up like a newspaper and stuffed it into my coat pocket, ruining it for ever. Perhaps this was why Mr Gale stuck to a bowler.
SELF-DEFENCE
By now Nicos Fraghistas had taken the stand. He was trimmer and more youthful than his younger brother George. He seemed to fizz with nervous energy. After the trial was over, at a funeral in Oxford, I got into conversation with a solicitor from one of the big City law firms. It emerged that he knew Nicos. How come? Oh, through water skiing, of course, he replied. Water skiing? He might as well have said bird-watching or amateur theatricals. He could see I was puzzled. ‘Didn’t you know Nicos Fraghistas is a champion water-skier in Greece? We ski together every summer.’
I could not fault Miss Korner for not eliciting this information about Nicos’s aquatic prowess, even had she known about it. It was of no conceivable relevance to the trial. But in retrospect it helped to explain his debonair manner
. There was a Jack Lemmonish jut to his chin as he gave his answers. He smiled a lot and peered eagerly around the courtroom. He had to be persuaded to sit himself on the little flap-down seat hinged to the back of the witness box.
Nicos was temperamentally incapable of giving yes or no for an answer. He would rattle on excitably for several minutes, only to conclude by saying with a radiant smile, ‘My Lord, may I elaborate?’
My lawyer friend at the funeral told me that the faster a water-skier is capable of taking a slalom course, the shorter he has his tow-rope. So far as his evidence was concerned, Nicos seemed to prefer the long-rope approach. We sat back and allowed ourselves to be entertained.
On Wednesday 18 December we spent the morning lolling about in the jury room. It was a longer than usual point of law. Lunchtime approached. Something was afoot. Leanne, the usher with the lip-liner and big eyelashes, was standing in for Roy that day. She confirmed that there was a major development. We fell to speculating. My own guess was that one or both of the Frenchmen was going to change his plea. Up to this point the two elderly barristers representing them had said almost nothing in court, merely ‘adopting’ the cross-examinations by their learned friends Mr Gale and Mr Patrick Curran, representing Zografos.
It already seemed plain to me that, even if the defence story of a conspiracy involving George proved to be true, and that therefore there had been no actual kidnap or false imprisonment, the men in the dock could at least be held guilty of blackmailing the Fraghistas family. Might Mereu and Moussaoui not see some merit in cutting and running now, pleading guilty to one of the charges and avoiding any deeper quicksands that might lie ahead? Maybe all four of them would take that line? It seemed ominously plausible. I for one would be desperately disappointed if our trial came to a premature end that very day.
The trial did not come to an end that very day: quite the reverse. At two o’clock in the afternoon the jury was called into court. We were in a state of keen anticipation. The judge addressed us directly. Mr Korkolis, he told us, the principal defendant, had decided to dispense with his barrister, Mr Gale. From now on Mr Korkolis would represent himself.
There was a kind of weary fatalism in the judge’s voice. Perhaps it was a fore-echo of what he feared was to come. Carefully he explained that everything possible had been done to alter Mr Korkolis’s decision, but that the defendant had every right to stick to it. This would add difficulties to the jury’s task and to everyone else’s, he said. It would certainly extend the length of the trial. But there it was. Did he roll his eyes ceilingwards and sigh? I rather expect he did.
The jury was removed so that further legal niceties could be explained to Mr Korkolis. I felt a pang of sympathy for him. I tried to imagine what it would be like to conduct a highly complex case with no legal training and in a foreign language from the confines of a cell in one of Her Majesty’s overcrowded prisons.
As we mooched about outside the courtroom discussing the likely fallout from this bombshell, Mr Gale sloped past, heading for the stairs. He had his bowler hat on and was carrying a briefcase. He looked thoroughly peeved. I felt a stab of sympathy for him too. To be publicly rejected in this fashion must be a pretty rare occurrence in a QC’s CV. Was it possible, I wondered, that Korkolis’s brief to him had simply been too outlandish for him to present convincingly? Was that why this experienced barrister (rather a hero of Roy the usher’s, I later learnt) had papered over the thinness of his case with sneers and innuendo? ‘Tell you what,’ said Bob, as we watched him make his exit, ‘why don’t we say, “Mr Gale, you’ve been sacked. D’you follow me?” ’ Everyone laughed cruelly.
When we reassembled in court there was an empty space where Mr Gale had sat. His junior soon followed him out. Mr Korkolis was in his same seat in the dock, flanked as always by his own interpreter on one side and Zografos on the other. The difference was that now he was barricaded behind the boxes of documents he had inherited from his ex-counsel. In front of and below him was his solicitor, sticking gamely to his post: a thin-faced, anxious-looking young man. As Korkolis’s only guide to the law and go-between with the court, I guessed his problems would henceforth be multiplied a hundredfold.
Korkolis himself was now an object of extra-close attention. He presented a small, wiry, putty-coloured figure. He was not altogether unappealing. He could have been the cousin of an old friend of mine, a bazouki-playing Queensway restaurateur called Stelios at whose gingham-covered tables I drank too much retsina in the 1970s. Stelios always offered his regular customers a glass of brandy on the house. ‘This was my grandfather’s brandy,’ he’d say solemnly, though no one believed him. Korkolis looked as though he could turn on the same sort of twinkly Hellenic charm.
In contrast to the starched white neckbands and shiny shoes of the lawyers, he wore a baggy grey round-necked sweater with no shirt underneath, from which his head emerged like a tortoise’s. His hair was cindery and his skin gleamed with an unhealthy prison pallor. Only his thick black eyebrows and perpetual half-grin animated his face.
After the ponderous condescensions of Mr Gale, Korkolis was rather a tonic. He picked up where Mr Gale had left off, cross-examining Nicos as coolly as could be. His English was heavily accented and rapid. He seemed to have tuned in to the cadences of courtroom delivery with an uncanny ear. His questions were larded with the word ‘alleged’ and phrases like ‘it has been suggested that’.
He waved his arms about a good deal. But then so did Nicos, whose outrage at being addressed by the supposed kidnapper and near-murderer of his brother was quickly apparent. Quite soon they were haranguing and interrupting each other as though they were in an Athens kapheneon. The court stenographer must have been going mad. Eventually the judge’s patience wore out. No, I’m sorry, he said, this won’t do. ‘Mr Korkolis never listens to the answers. Mr Fraghistas never listens to the questions.’
It was a very odd situation. Here was the hostage’s brother, who had been the chief negotiator with the kidnappers, being questioned by the very man he’d not been able to speak to during those desperate nine days: the shadowy figure who called himself ‘Petros’, who had allegedly threatened to kill George and had held his frantic mother to ransom for three million dollars. It was now ‘Petros’ who was putting the questions and demanding answers; it was Nicos, the cocksure figure who had hitherto been filled with righteous indignation, who had to answer them. All this was taking place within the polite conventions of an English courtroom. Had the confrontation been held outside the Old Bailey there would have been blood in the gutter for sure. One could sense Nicos’s frustration. Where George had managed scarcely to look at the prisoners at all, Nicos could not avoid doing so, his interrogator being one of their number. Challenged by Korkolis to explain the curt tone he had adopted towards George during the ransom calls he burst out, ‘I was telling you. I was talking to you.’ It was his first chance to address his family’s tormentor face to face.
‘Do you have any underworld connections?’ asked Korkolis unexpectedly. He referred to a telephone conversation Nicos had had from Mrs Fraghistas’s flat with a Greek businessman acquaintance. The call had been routinely taped by the police which was how Korkolis knew about it: we had the transcript in front of us. The businessman had offered Nicos to send over ‘top, top, top people’ to do a little private investigation as to the missing George’s whereabouts. What might it mean? What was ‘top, top, top people’ if not Mafia-speak for heavies? Mr Gale could not have done better. Korkolis was making us think.
He was also making us laugh. His gallant attempts at courtroom legalese occasionally took a grammatical tumble. ‘Did your brother had a Bentley?’ he asked fiercely at one point. At another, reverting to the alleged hostility between the two Fraghistas brothers, he said, ‘You called your brother a wonker!’ He asked one of the policemen who had searched Hogan Mews, ‘Was there anything in the rubbishes incriminating?’
Judge Goldstein looked on with the controlled exasperation of a top bo
xing referee forced to oversee a low-grade wrestling match. He had already made it abundantly clear that he found Korkolis’s prolixity trying. Now he wearily addressed the witness: ‘Mr Fraghistas, you are as bad as he is.’
As the hours ticked by on the courtroom clock – the slowest clock in the world – and the jurors fussed around with their water carafes to keep themselves awake, what had seemed like a chaotically confusing approach by Korkolis gradually took on recognisable shape. He was determined to prove that not only was George in on the plot but that his family had become co-conspirators too. They had quickly twigged what was afoot, wanted to avoid a scandal and had somehow embroiled the police into helping them do so. Korkolis’s tools were hypothesis and insinuation. He deployed them if not with skill then certainly with exhausting relentlessness. His questions invariably started with an ‘if: ‘If you were kidnapped …’; ‘If you were a very experienced detective from Scotland Yard …’; ‘If your own brother was held hostage …’ He would then weave through a complex train of suppositions, concluding with an explosive ‘Answer: yes or no!’
Korkolis’s ‘Yes or no!’ replaced Mr Gale’s ‘D’you follow me?’ as the jury’s favourite catchphrase. Often it left the witness baffled, casting beseeching looks at the judge to intervene. With measured frequency he did so, his patience showing creeping signs of wear and tear. While preserving his courteous manner at all times, he now and then began to sound quite snappy. ‘What we do not do in an English court, Mr Korkolis, is play games.’ One morning he startled us all by his outspokenness. ‘I am becoming quite cross,’ he rumbled. Coming from Judge Goldstein this was the equivalent of a thunderbolt from Zeus.
