by Trevor Grove
It was a case of black is white. If a suicide chose to make his death look like murder, the outcome would not be in doubt. The question would be: who did the deed? If the men at Hogan Mews heard the other two being arrested in Golders Green down the open mobile-telephone line in the car, why didn’t they make their escape before the police arrived? Or did they genuinely believe they ran no risk of being charged even if caught red-handed?
The mobile-phone set-up in the car was an ingenious wheeze, which baffled both the police and the experts. For a time everyone was perplexed. It seemed to involve a previously unnamed character whom Korkolis referred to as Humphrey Baize.
In order to avoid the source of the ransom calls being pinpointed, the kidnappers equipped each of their two Nokia telephones with what we eventually twigged was a hands-free base (or Humphrey Baize). They were placed side by side in the car, close enough to ‘talk’ to each other. A ransom call from Hogan Mews would be directed to phone A in the car and picked up by phone B next to it. Phone B would be connected to the Fraghistas household. The police therefore assumed that all the calls were being made from a car, which kept moving around London. They never imagined for a moment that the car was merely acting as a relay station.
This led to great difficulties on the Tuesday of the arrests, once the police had managed to spot Korkolis’s car and started to tail it. Because the ransom calls were being made by George, DCI Vanner and his men naturally assumed that the kidnap victim was in the car that was being followed, when actually he was still back in the cupboard at Hogan Mews. If he was in the car with a gun at his head as they thought, one false move by the pursuing detectives could be fatal. It was only when they decided to take the risk of arresting the occupants of the Rover late that evening and George was not with them that the ruse was discovered. That was when WDC Hills picked up Korkolis’s phone and found herself talking to DI Peter Young at the Fraghistas flat. He must have been surprised at the situation. None of the police witnesses had ever come across a pair of mobile phones linked up like this before.
On Day 49 Korkolis made an ill-advised attack on the judge. ‘My Lord,’ he said angrily, ‘I am interrupted continuously. How I can give my evidence in my own way?’ He told the court he had been reading an Appeal Court judgement where Their Lordships had stressed the importance of a judge not interfering with the evidence of someone conducting his own defence.
The judge responded coolly, ‘I look forward to reading what Their Lordships might have to say about this case. In the meantime I shall lose no sleep over it.’
There were signs that the chief witness-cum-advocate for the defence might be winding up. Just before he finished, however, the judge addressed him kindly: ‘Mr Korkolis, if there is anything you feel you have not covered, you will be able to re-examine yourself.’
Korkolis beamed. ‘So,’ he said delightedly, ‘I have the right to re-examine me?’
Sweet Heaven, give us patience.
RISING TO THE OCCASION
Korkolis sat down at 3 p.m. He had been in the witness box for four and a half days, speaking continuously almost without a note. It was an impressive performance. By comparison a Budget speech is a mere sound-bite. It was remarkable that neither tedium nor tiresomeness seemed to have had the effect one would have imagined on the jury. A disengaged observer exposed to Korkolis’s mangled English and hectic delivery, his abrupt mood swings from self-pity to contempt, would not have got through four and a half hours, never mind days, without becoming enraged. Yet somehow our jury seemed to be managing to concentrate on what he was saying without being distracted by how he was saying it. We had become professionalised.
It would be glib to suggest that just being on a jury brings this about. Our own astounding fair-mindedness may simply have been a symptom of imminent brain-death. But they say the office helps to make the man. Even within the much briefer compass of most trials, jury membership does seem to summon up people’s civic-mindedness – perhaps for the first and only time in their lives. Although this is a cynical age, honesty, fairness and justice are concepts nearly everyone believes in, even if they do not personally live up to them.
Those who oppose the jury system because it is too prone to acquit find this incredible. The tendency is to equate sound jurymanship with education and intelligence. This is understandable but not altogether rational. Former Conservative MP Peter Bruinvels complained in the Daily Telegraph a few years ago that there were too many acquittals by juries ‘made up of the unemployed, the lower working classes, and housewives’. In the very limited experience of myself and other ex-jurors I have spoken to, such people are often the keenest to convict. Many of the Sun-reading classes have a positive zeal for punishment.
Professor Glanville Williams in The Proof of Guilt is also pretty scathing: ‘There is no guarantee that members of a particular jury may not be quite unusually ignorant, credulous, slow-witted, narrow-minded, biased or temperamental.’ Nor there is. But it would surely be easier to find a judge who exemplified at least the last three of those qualities than a dozen people on one jury who exemplified them all.
Of course it would be desirable if most jurors were literate, reasonably well educated and capable of following an argument. It would be desirable if most of the population were, too. Professor Williams is only stating the obvious when he asserts thinly that:
Persons whose ordinary occupations are of a humble character rarely qualify as first-rate intellectual machines. They are not accustomed to giving sustained attention to the spoken word, and many will have a narrow vocabulary and range of idea.
Quite so.
But I wonder how many criminal cases really require to be judged by ‘a first-rate intellectual machine’. In Britain not all that many, I would guess, apart from frauds or those involving abstruse medical or technical evidence. (The monstrously complicated civil cases which juries try in the USA are another matter altogether.) Anyway, first-rate intellectual machines have a known tendency to be sopping wet liberals, hag-ridden by political correctness. I expect Mr Bruinvels would agree. Pack the juries with them and the acquittal rate would take off like a jump jet.
The professor would probably judge that the jury in R. v Korkolis and Others contained about as much intellectual machinery as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. But besides being considered responsible enough to vote, drive cars and bear children, we also seemed to have common sense, good humour, scepticism and patience. These strike me as far more useful qualities for the task in hand than a wide vocabulary or ‘range of idea’. And in my view it was the jury system itself – the fact that we were forced to act together in this rather daunting undertaking – that helped bring these qualities to the fore.
Perhaps the four juries I have served on, including this one, were unusually blessed: no mavericks, fanatics or mutineers, no race problems and no nobblings. There are plenty of horror stories. Policemen on the one hand and liberal lawyers on the other will roll their eyes if you are too fulsome, quoting terrible miscarriages of justice. There are experts in the United States who make millions of dollars a year advising lawyers on jury selection. So the composition of a jury must be important. I must be wrong in thinking that any old twelve good men and true will more often than not rise to the occasion, whatever their sex, race, class and education. What a terribly sentimental, populist, irrational view …
CROSS-EXAMINATION
It was Patrick Curran’s turn to get to his feet. He was appearing for Thanassis Zografos, the youngest of the four men in the dock. His cross-examination of Korkolis was not going to be easy: would he go along with the defence line as it stood, or would he try to put some distance between his client and the older man? If he went too far in that direction, he risked undermining Korkolis’s case. Not far enough and, should the jury find the latter guilty, Zografos and the other two would go down like skittles.
The strategy emerged pretty soon. Mr Curran’s first questions concerned the Rose Court Hotel in Paddington, where Zogr
afos had worked as a sort of super-receptionist after he dropped out of his computer course at the South Bank University. He was an amiable young man who had run errands and acted as interpreter for the hotel’s residents. One of them, a man called Sidiropoulos, was singled out by Mr Curran: an elderly former millionaire who had spent a good deal of his fortune at the tables. Korkolis, who was also a regular customer, agreed that he and Mr Sidiropoulos had made something of a pet of Zografos and used to take him out on sprees to the Victoria Casino in the Edgware Road.
Mr Curran painted a rather cosy picture of the hotel as a microcosmic Athens-in-exile, peopled by companionable Greeks who smoked, drank coffee and gambled together, stayed up late and got up later. Zografos, we were to understand, had been dazzled by these knowing men of the world.
So that was to be the line: a nice young boy, tempted into a low-risk blackmail operation by an older man whom he admired. Korkolis had told Zografos it was not an illegal plan; it was morally justified: George was only seeking his due from his own family. And in any case, they could not be prosecuted if George refused to give evidence.
Day 50. Counsel for Mereu and Moussaoui had only a few questions for Korkolis. Their significance was hopelessly unclear. As so often, it was hard for the jury to see what counsel were driving at. Words were left hanging in the air from which nothing could be implied. Would they be resurrected during closing speeches? I tried to log them in my mind for future retrieval, but it was difficult to know what to file them under. How much simpler it would be if the defence lawyers were obliged to present the jury with an outline of their arguments from the very start. As it was, I had a strong feeling these were simply decoy tactics, intended to mislead and set us worrying.
(Later in 1997 new rules came into effect under the 1996 Criminal Procedures and Investigations Act, which do require some disclosure of the main thrust of the defence, especially those areas where there is a disagreement with the prosecution – but only to the judge, not the jury.)
At 11.18 a.m. the Crown began cross-examining Korkolis. Joanna Korner sauntered into action in the manner of a very confident matador confronting a very small bull. Hand on hip, she plainly aimed to show Korkolis up as an all-round poor specimen. He had presented himself as a respectable businessman with his own moral code (Korkolis, interrupting: ‘My one. My own one …’) who had never broken the law. Yet he had a library of false passports – in the names of Nikolau, Kaltezotis, Karpathakis, Rentzepis as well as his own. There was evidence on tape of his seeking to obtain yet another from someone called ‘the Fat One’ back in Greece.
Korkolis was indignant at the suggestion that owning so many false passports was any kind of misdemeanour. ‘I didn’t use these passports to harm somebody, to cheat somebody … I think there are many things more disgusting.’
These were the opening shots in a prolonged battle of wits. Miss Korner came at Korkolis from every angle, accusing him of having gambling debts of his own, giving a false name to rent the £600-a-week house in Hogan Mews, using Zografos as his front man to hide his own identity. Her opponent dodged and sidestepped every attack with extraordinary nimbleness.
Why, when they were renting cars and making other preparations for the plan, did he always get Zografos to do the talking, since his own English was so fluent?
‘I have difficulty how people speaks,’ Korkolis replied instantly, giving Miss Korner a disarming smile. ‘You speak very clearly. But in prison some people sound like Chinese. Three months in court have improved my English.’
Why did he need a stungun? Because he feared for his own safety in Hogan Mews, he said. There had been burglaries there recently. ‘Check please for the bugglers in Hogan Mews.’ Then he offered to use the gun on himself in the witness box, a bravado gesture which the spoil-sport judge prevented him making.
Try as she might, Miss Korner seemed unable to land the killer blow. Korkolis simply would not give up.
Day 51. Should we get into March, the time-span of the trial will parallel the course of the kidnap plot a year earlier almost exactly. We are now into the closing days of February and there must still be at least a fortnight to go. The alleged conspiracy, like the trial, got under way in November. George was seized, genuinely or otherwise, on 24 March and freed on 2 April.
While waiting for the prisoners to arrive we were called into court to be asked how we could help end the trial before Easter. We returned to the jury room to discuss this. Suggestions ranged from offering to sit later in the afternoons to coming in on Saturdays. There were problems with train timetables, an ailing spouse and Bob’s Saturday football matches. I proposed a vote. The hopelessly inconclusive result did not promise well for the future. Eventually we settled for working until 4.45 p.m. on weekdays. Kate was inconsolable: ‘But I’ll miss Pet Rescue,’ she moaned.
Will the extra time in court lead to drowsiness problems? Apropos dozing jurors, John Mortimer has an anecdote concerning an indecency case. A woman witness was giving evidence and was asked what the man in the dock had said to her. She was too embarrassed to repeat it in court, so the judge asked her to write it down. She did, and what she wrote was: ‘Would you care for a screw?’ This document was passed around the jury until it reached Juror No. 12, an elderly gentleman who was fast asleep. Sitting next to him, Mortimer relates, ‘was a fairly personable young lady. She read the note, nudged her neighbour and, when he was awake, handed it to him. He woke with a start, read it and, with apparent satisfaction, folded it and put it carefully away in his wallet. When the judge said: “Let that be handed up to me” the juryman shook his head and said, “Purely private matter, My Lord.”’
The reason the prisoners were late was that they had been held up in traffic. ‘It was not my fault, My Lord,’ explained Korkolis in cheeky-chappie mode. ‘I was not driving.’
Nor was it the only time the black Maria service held us up. For one reason or another, delays continued to dog the trial. Often we ground to a halt for what the judge called ‘housekeeping’: photocopying new documents, hole-punching, indexing, finding the right tape to play into our earphones. It seemed a terrible waste of everyone’s time and weirdly inefficient.
We had now reached exhibit No. 99. DS Hawkins would leave the court for ten minutes at a time to forage for what he wanted in his glory-hole next door, where the exhibits were stored. I learned later that there had been a total of three thousand potential exhibits at the outset of the trial. Perhaps that included every single cigarette butt found at Hogan Mews. When Joanna Korner confessed at one point that she had lost a document she said: ‘This trial has done things to my brain.’ During the longer longueurs, boiled sweets and glasses of water provided our only distraction. ‘There’s only so much water you can drink,’ Kate complained. The older males nodded, weak-bladdered to a man.
There were compensations, chiefly the challenge of trying to pin down Korkolis’s elusive character as it flitted erratically from mood to mood. One moment he would be all self-mockery – ‘Do I look like a kidnapper? Me? A Greek?’ he asked, looking down at his scrawny, grey-sweatered chest. The next he would turn on the melodrama.
‘The only truth they [the Fraghistas family] spoke was their names. It was all lies – under oath!’
Korkolis attacked. ‘Miss Korner, I don’t know whether you have met intelligent people in your life,’ he scoffed.
The judge jumped in. ‘Would you like to apologise for that last remark?’
Korkolis retreated. ‘I apologise.’
Miss Korner asked him about something that had been bothering me. The vile leather mask which George said the kidnappers had struggled to pull over his head in the car-park was, according to Korkolis, meant for another purpose altogether. It was to be used in the Polaroid photograph which the conspirators would send the family should the ‘ransom’ money not materialise. The terrifying tableau would show the handcuffed and leather-masked George with his mouth zipped up and the gun at his head. But, Miss Korner (and I) wanted to know, w
hat was the point of a photo in which the victim’s face was completely hidden? Korkolis reacted with a tirade about how any family would recognise a son even if his face were covered. ‘Who else would it be? Me?’
Well, yes. You.
Day 52. Korkolis’s long upper lip was prominent today. He was in a truculent mood. He warned the Crown: ‘Miss Korner, you are playing dangerously with the lives of four people.’ When Mr K is pursuing one of his whirling hypotheses Miss JK screws up her face as in a sandstorm. He moves his hands like dolphins.
Miss JK asked: why the syringes? Mr K: ‘Every house can have syringes without having to make a kidnap.’ What about the bandages found in Hogan Mews? What were they for? ‘For miscles.’ What? ‘For training for Mereu.’ The Olympic wrestler and his comrade Moussaoui bandaged their ‘miscles’ to go jogging. ‘Jogging?’ said JK with a Lady Bracknell swoop, astonished that people go jogging in mid-kidnap. K says plenty of joggers use bandages, not just wrestlers. And then, in a triumphant ellipsis: ‘Diana the Princess makes jogging. So she is a wrestler?’
Later Miss Korner asked about the mattress that the police found outside the kidnap cupboard at Hogan Mews. Korkolis poured scorn on this question. The judge moved in like a Dimbleby on an out-of-order panellist. It was not an irrelevant question, he said. What Miss Korner was likely to suggest was that the mattress was used by a guard sleeping outside the cupboard, since the door had no lock. At this Korkolis erupted, accusing the judge of asking the prosecution’s questions on its behalf. The judge looked down sternly: ‘You will say “what a stupid question” to Miss Korner once too often.’
Korkolis wanted us to know that three highly incriminating tapes which had been found at Hogan Mews, apparently referring to the planning and execution of the kidnap, had been deliberately recorded by him in order to mislead the police. The judge said very reasonably, ‘You have just said that everything on this tape is a lie. How is the jury to know when you are telling the truth?’
