by Trevor Grove
Detective Sergeant Martin Hawkins ran the police operation in the field, reporting back to DCI Vanner at the Yard or Mrs Fraghistas’s flat. He looked a little like a Photofit of John Cleese, complete with moustache. At first he did not cut an especially impressive figure. He had sad eyes and a mild, somewhat hesitant manner which belied his long experience on Scotland Yard murder squads and in the Organised Crime Group. But as he explained the sequence of events that led up to the arrests of the kidnappers and the release of George Fraghistas, there was something about his evidence that gave it an extra believability.
He himself had had to take some very difficult decisions very quickly on 2 April 1996. A man’s life was in mortal danger. The police had no idea how many kidnappers they were dealing with, whether they were armed or what they would do to their hostage in extremis. DS Hawkins was also responsible for the welfare of the men and women under his command. Some of them were young and inexperienced – he did not even know their names. Yet he was modest about his own role and disarmingly frank about the risks he took and the mistakes he made. Despite that, one was left in little doubt that it had been a brilliant piece of detective work.
This did not stop Korkolis scavenging relentlessly for evidence of a police conspiracy. Was Mr Hawkins really telling the court that he had led the assault on Hogan Mews without thoroughly reconnoitring the premises, without knowing who was inside, without arming his men and without even a pair of handcuffs between them? Yes, said Hawkins candidly. He knew it was dangerous but in his judgement there was no time to do anything else. They were lucky. Apart from George it turned out there was only Mereu inside, although – Hawkins nodded ruefully in the direction of the wrestler in the dock – ‘he’s a big lad.’
MOBILE SECRETS
Sifting what was relevant from what was not was becoming impossibly hard. Hours and hours had been spent dissecting the competence of the police and questioning their honesty. Yet so far the defence had produced not a particle of evidence suggesting there had been a conspiracy. We jurors had to decide whether to clog our minds with all this stuff in anticipation that the evidence would eventually be provided and everything would slot into place – or simply switch off, leaving room in our overloaded memories for more telling material yet to come.
Whenever Korkolis was on his feet, he appeared to be leading us through a maze from which there was no discernible exit – although he always gave the impression he knew exactly where he was going himself. The court was not always helpful either, quite often talking to itself above our heads and plunging us into further mystification. ‘Does Mr Korkolis realise that if he reads from this statement it may be made an exhibit?’ interposed the judge at some point. What was so dangerous about that? We already had dozens of exhibits. And anyway, whom was he asking? Certainly not us. By three o’clock most afternoons the jurors were sighing like whales coming up for air.
Fortunately, there were comic interludes. Do judges have special training which includes making laboured jokes? If so, Judge Goldstein must have graduated with bonus marks for self-mockery, since he would alert us to what was coming with an ‘I know this sounds like a typical judge’s remark …’ before leading into his punchline: ‘But what is a pair of intercoms?’ Here is another good one, provoked by a mention of pre-programmed numbers on a mobile telephone: ‘I must be the only person in England who doesn’t have a mobile phone. Do you mean that if you press the number you get Auntie Ada?’
Not to be outdone, Miss Korner, who may have ambitions to be a judge herself one day, came up with her own rib-tickler: ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said in her best Grenfell-ese, ‘what a transceiver is.’ She was rewarded with murmurs of ‘Nor do I’ from around the court, in which I felt the jury should have joined out of politeness, though Eddie could probably have delivered a five-minute lecture on transceivers and their uses without a note.
The judge got an even better response when he was provoked by a piece of paper from which Korkolis had begun to read: ‘This is all very cosy. Mr Korkolis has copies of this document. So does the witness. But neither I nor the jury know what on earth is going on.’ By courtroom standards, the chorus of ‘Nor do I’ which greeted this sally was full-throated. This time the jury joined in.
On 6 February there was a mass diaspora: we were to move from Court 9 to Court 5. It was on a different floor. The lifts were clogged with junior barristers and solicitors manhandling luggage trolleys piled with boxes and binders. A roomful of exhibits had to be moved. The consequence of all this was – nothing. Court 5 was precisely the same as Court 9 in every characterless detail. Even our notebooks and water glasses looked as though they had never budged.
The only novelty was that for a day we had a different jury room. It was not just any old jury room but the one belonging to Court 1, the most famous courtroom in the building. It was a panelled room with a vaulted ceiling, a twelve-foot oak table and a splendid fireplace. There were marks on the wall where the gas-lamps had been. The elderly basin in the men’s washroom was called The Bedford. It was easy to imagine moustachioed Edwardian tradesmen with their collar-studs showing peering gravely at the notice above the fireplace:
To members of the Jury: HM’s judges remind you of the solemn obligation upon you not to reveal in any circumstances, to any person, either during the trial or after it is over, anything relating to it which has occurred in this room while you have been considering your verdict.
It was sobering to think that from this same room, sitting at this very table, juries just like ours sent fellow-citizens to the gallows.
Impressed by our surroundings, Stuart suggested that we might as well do something to live up to them and elect a foreman. This is not normally done until the jury is sent out to consider its verdict. But there is nothing to prevent its happening sooner and quite a lot to recommend it, especially in a long trial where the jury has to take a number of small decisions along the way. So we each put a name on a bit of paper and conducted a secret ballot. I got the job, with Pat and Bob runners-up.
Back in court, an expert witness gave us a lesson in digital telephone technology. This was a delicate subject, to be approached by counsel on tiptoe. By now the jury had worked out for itself that by some means or another the police had been able to use the kidnappers’ ceaseless flow of mobile phone calls to get an idea of their movements. We also knew, which the judge and his Auntie Ada almost certainly did not, that it is impossible to tap digital phones, unlike their analogue predecessors. So they must have had some sort of tracking technique. However, the details were a secret – such an important secret that the whole matter was subject to Public Interest Immunity, as made famous in the arms-to-Iraq affair. (This did not stop the Sunday Telegraph of 2 April 1997 running a report on the subject headlined ‘Mobile phones “tag” owners’.)
Miss Korner and the expert witness had to skirt carefully around the topic. This did not make for ease of understanding. I have a note which records that at some point the judge said engagingly, ‘I have absolutely no idea, as always, what is going on.’ He was probably referring to this evidence on advanced telephonics, made all the more obscure by the PII order he had himself approved.
Even so, we learnt enough to form a sketchy notion of what it was all about. Essentially, digital phone calls are relayed by a network of cell-sites spread across the whole country. Each cell-site covers an area about half-a-mile square, centred around a receiver-transmitter. In urban areas this will probably be located on top of a tall building such as the London Metropole Hotel on the Edgware Road or the YWCA in Earl’s Court Road. So although the operating companies cannot pinpoint exactly where a call is coming from, their printouts do give a general idea of the area. It is not one hundred per cent accurate, because if a cell-site is overloaded it cunningly re-routes the call via one that is less busy. Nonetheless, a motorist making calls as he travelled across London could be tracked, at least to the extent of the direction he was taking.
This was fascinating stu
ff, as well as important evidence. One could sense the police unease that even the little that was being disclosed was now in the public domain. But I don’t suppose there is a serious villain in the land who doesn’t know all this already, and a good deal more. (Almost as interesting, though utterly irrelevant, was the information that the current rate of mobile telephone thefts was about fifteen thousand every month. Perhaps Judge Goldstein felt confirmed in the wisdom of not owning one.)
As St Valentine’s Day approached – the date on which the judge once optimistically estimated we would retire – there was still no end in view. The prosecution case was not over yet. Korkolis, who had not once been hurried during his cross-examination of the Crown’s witnesses, claimed he was being restricted by the court. Perhaps he hoped to benefit from public hostility to PIIs. The judge cracked down: ‘I have given you so much latitude in this trial … I don’t think any other judge in the land would have given you as much. I will give you ten minutes to question this witness.’ The court silently applauded.
Now Korkolis wanted to question George Fraghistas himself, having had no chance when Mr Gale was still his counsel. The judge rolled his eyes: ‘I am not having that gentleman back.’
Korkolis: ‘How am I going to deal with this?’
Judge: ‘I’ve no idea, Mr Korkolis.’
THE CROWN CONCLUDES
From my home-written notes …
Day 43. St Valentine’s Eve. We sang happy birthday to one of the jurors in the green marble lobby outside Court 1. It was also Jennifer’s birthday in Friends, someone reminded us. One girl asked another, in the hearing of a disapproving statue of Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker prison reformer, ‘Did you watch Friends last night or were you having sex?’ She didn’t watch Friends. Thinks: What about a docu-soap called Jurors?
A nice young doctor was in the witness box. It was he who attended to George after his release. He explained that ‘police surgeon’ is an old-fashioned term. Nowadays the correct description is ‘forensic medical examiner’. Patrick Curran asked him to define a bruise. And what was the definition of a scab? The forensic medical examiner got rattled. It was embarrassing to see his confidence and carefulness shaken. Could George’s wounds have been false injuries, maybe self-inflicted? ‘The pretence is consistent with the reality,’ replied the doctor through clenched teeth.
Joanna Korner (aside): ‘Everything in this case is disintegrating.’
Nicos Fraghistas was recalled all the way from Athens at Korkolis’s request. He was invited to confess that the two of them, Nicos and Korkolis, were acquainted before the kidnap. ‘The only Korkolis I know is a pop singer in Greece,’ sighed Nicos.
Ah, said Korkolis, but in an allegedly inaudible bit of one of the taped ransom conversations, Nicos could be heard saying the name ‘Korkolis’. He wanted the jury to listen to it. So we all donned headphones, looking like competitors in a 1950s radio panel game. What we heard was ‘crackle mumble mumble phone calls mumble mumble crackle’. Not ‘Korkolis’ but ‘phone calls’, we told the court, seizing a unique opportunity to speak.
So Mr Fraghistas had been brought all the way from Athens for the sake of this one question about this one tape? The judge was not pleased. Nor would the British tax-payer have been.
Day 44. The super-alert jury spotted an inconsistency. One of the police tapes recording the ransom calls at Mrs Fraghistas’s flat came out mysteriously blank. The batteries were flat: they had not been checked, said the police. But the jury – Bob, in fact – had heard mention of a back-up tape recorder. Perhaps the missing conversations were on that? We sent a note to the judge, feeling very on-the-ball.
Nudged into action by the jury Korkolis, ever the opportunist, asked for the detective sergeant who had been doing the tape recordings to be brought back into the box. Poor DS Don King. ‘This witness has come back four times,’ remarked the judge, ‘just because he had the misfortune to be in charge of putting tapes in the machine.’Mr King explained what had happened regarding the tapes and why the back-up recorder was useless if the main machine was out of order. It was not reassuring. There had been a cock-up. On the best interpretation, the police looked startlingly improvisational.
Day 45. Today the judge said we were in ‘the death-throes of the prosecution case’. Hooray.
Day 46. There should have been fireworks and dancing in the streets. Joanna Korner got to her feet and said, ‘My Lord, I can hardly believe what I am going to say, but on the forty-sixth day, that concludes the case for the prosecution.’
SELF-EXAMINATION
At 12.48 p.m. on 19 February Korkolis stepped down from the dock and walked over to the witness box, accompanied by a cortège of two prison officers and his interpreter. The court watched him take the oath with some trepidation. Under normal circumstances, a defendant choosing to go into the witness box would be questioned by his own barrister, giving his evidence-in-chief, before submitting to cross-examination by the other defendants’ lawyers and the Crown. Korkolis was to be both advocate and witness: a riderless horse liable to career in any direction, for limitless distances.
He began with a surprise: a graceful address to the jury, craving our patience and apologising for ill-treating the English language. By now we were familiar with the line he wanted to take. George Fraghistas, according to Korkolis, had been in financial difficulties. He concocted the fake kidnap in order to extort money from his family without revealing that it was to cover gambling debts. Once the ransom calls started, the family realised they were being duped but decided to play along so as to avoid a scandal. And the police, for reasons only hinted at so far, chose to play along too, pretending that it was a genuine kidnap. They would not bring charges because George would refuse to testify against his four ‘kidnappers’. All of this he would prove, said Korkolis.
‘I draw the conclusion that the family and the police knew from the evidence. For me this is the truth.’
Unlikely? Highly. Impossible? Well, no, not beyond reasonable doubt … Apart from anything else, the very implausibility of his account suggested that only a fool or a madman would have fabricated it. It also had the virtue of originality. The only other case anyone could think of where kidnappers and their victim had made common cause was the Patty Hearst affair back in 1974 – and even then, it was only after the heiress had allegedly been raped and brainwashed that she sided with her captors, the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Best of all, this conspiracy theory allowed the defence to go along with most of the Crown’s evidence – nearly all of it, in fact, except for George’s and some of the police officers’. They could agree that the ransom calls, the arrests, the rescue all took place exactly as described. The only question was, were these events what they seemed? Or were they a charade, a charade in which first the family, and then the key police officers who were helping them, chose to take part?
Had I been asked that question at that moment, I would not have hesitated for a quarter of a second. I personally had no reason for doubting the main thrust of the prosecution case, nor for disbelieving the police. There were strong reasons for thinking Korkolis a liar. What happened over the next few weeks was that this relatively clear view became thoroughly obscured. The fog from Dickens’s Bleak House rolled over us, stirred into maddening swirls by Korkolis, thickened with boredom and endlessly shaping itself into distracting shadows. The ‘truth’, assuming that was what I had been looking at, still gleamed fitfully through the murk. But it was now in competition with any number of flickering will-o’-the-wisps. The defence, after all, had no need to cast light on its own version of events, merely doubt on the prosecution’s.
Korkolis took a risk. He became a character witness for himself. He wanted the jury to see photographs taken in better days. They showed him in various poses: with his dear old mother in Athens, with friends around a swimming pool, showing off a sports car, living the good life in Rio de Janeiro. They were indifferent snaps, which made him look exactly like a tawdry small-time crook.
He must have thought otherwise. ‘I was travelling around the world making business,’ he said grandly. He was vague about what his business had been: playing the stock market, dealing in precious stones, foreign currency, insurance, real estate. He wished us to see a successful, industrious man of the world brought low by ill fortune. All his life, he said, he had been the victim of betrayals. Friends and partners had let him down (‘When I trust people I trust them fully’). They had landed him in various scrapes, for example an unfair jail sentence in Greece which he refused to serve. Instead he fled the country, preferring exile to wrongful imprisonment. He escaped using a false passport. In fact he had several false passports, he admitted, although they were not really false since they had been issued by a genuine official whom he knew. This was a state of affairs that demanded our sympathy, he suggested. ‘It was very inconvenient living with these different passports.’ He also had three UK driving licences.
My brain was swimming. Did Korkolis imagine he was putting himself across as a dashing international wheeler-dealer in telling us all this, a lovable rascal? Or was he hoping to gain points for candour?
Perhaps a bit of both. ‘I have my own morality,’ he assured the court. It was this morality of his that had allowed him to go along with George Fraghistas’s plan to terrorise his family into handing over several million dollars. George and he were not exactly friends, he explained, but as young men they used to frequent the same cafés in the Kolonakis quarter of Athens. They had both done their military service in the navy. Many years later they met at the Casanova Club in London. Then, Korkolis said, they had seen each other by chance in the Edgware Road one day, when their cars were stopped at traffic lights. They had driven to a nearby square and got out to talk. Korkolis had £100,000 worth of gambling debts at the time. George asked him if he would like to earn some easy money. The seeds of the fake kidnap plan were sown.
