by Trevor Grove
The second problem for the jury is that, having come to terms with the idea that the Crown and the defence cannot both be right merely because they look suave and talk BBC English, they must decide which of them to believe. The jurors’ minds will ultimately be made up not solely according to the evidence they have heard and the witnesses they have seen. The final pitch for their votes will come in the closing speeches. This is each barrister’s final chance to plead his or her case. Apart from the judge’s summing-up, these will be the last words the jurors take with them into the jury room.
THE CLOSING SPEECHES
Joanna Korner QC
It was 2.20 p.m. on the fifty-seventh day of the trial, 11 March 1997. Joanna Korner unfolded herself like an anglepoise lamp and turned herself sideways to face the jury. In American courts, the lawyers are free to roam about as theatrically as Peter Snow on election night. Here we are more restrained and our learned friends are confined to their places. This means there is little room for gesticulation, or they will knock their junior’s wig off. Nor can they eyeball the jury at close quarters unless, like Mr Curran, they happen to be sitting next to it. So all the art must go into the words. And so as to ensure that the words sink in, members of the jury, rhetorical devices are employed to hold the jury’s attention, such as saying ‘members of the jury’ at every opportunity.
Miss Korner began by reminding us that the anniversary of 24 March, the day of George Fraghistas’s kidnap, was approaching. This was largely because a case due to last six weeks had been immensely prolonged by Mr Korkolis’s decision to defend himself – which he had a perfect right to do. ‘Professional and personal lives have been disrupted.’ The length of the trial had had ‘a tendency to emphasise the minutiae over the whole’. The role of the other defendants had been blurred and filtered through Korkolis, on whom the focus had concentrated. There had been too many subsidiary issues: George’s gambling debts, the finances of his shipping company, the role of the police. The case was not about any of these, she said. What it was about was whether George set out to defraud his family or whether he was the victim of a carefully planned kidnap. Few of the facts were in doubt. It was the explanation for them that was in dispute.
Korkolis had put up a great many arguments and allegations. ‘When you’re on a sticky losing wicket, if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick,’ said Miss Korner, sending a humdinger of a mixed metaphor towards the stumps. But we should concentrate on the evidence: Zografos’s fingerprint on the gun’s ammunition; the saliva traces on the balaclavas; the strand of George’s hair found in the leather mask; the syringes; the mattress in the kitchen. There was the testimony of the police doctor who had thought the handcuff wounds on George’s wrists were several days old, not self-inflicted just before the arrest. Above all, there were those incriminating tapes, which Korkolis claimed were deliberately recorded to make the kidnap look authentic. ‘Members of the jury, you may think that if ever there was an explanation that defied credulity, it was this one.’
There was ‘not an iota of evidence’ against the police, despite Korkolis’s promises to provide it. No one had once suggested that the police had planted evidence. If there were inconsistencies among the police witnesses, they were the result of human frailty, not a deep-laid plot.
The next morning, Day 58, Miss Korner resumed vigorously, suggesting that the whole defence case had been concocted after seeing the evidence disclosed by the Crown. This seemed to me a very telling point. Apart from the mentions of discussions in Belmarsh Prison, this was not a notion that had occurred to the jury, since the rules on prosecution disclosure had never been explained to us. It suddenly became pretty plain, in retrospect, that Korkolis & Co had had a chance to match their defence with great cunning to what they knew would be the main thrust of the Crown’s argument. On top of that, Korkolis had been clever enough to make up some of his case on the hoof, responding to prosecution evidence produced in court and coming up with the odd ambush – introducing documents that not even the other defence counsel had seen, for example. He had also been quick enough to exploit one or two of the jury’s questions with impressive dexterity.
‘Members of the jury,’ said Miss Korner, folding her arms in a confident manner that seemed to invite the agreement of all reasonable persons, ‘doesn’t this case stand or fall on what you have seen of the two protagonists?’ Mr Korkolis used false identities: almost no document in the case would lead the police to him. And was his personality really that of a man taking orders (i.e. from George)?
Korkolis had told us he was a man continually taken advantage of by people whom he had trusted. Despite all this, ‘He was prepared to place complete trust and confidence in a man he hardly knew.’ He was a great recorder of business conversations. There were plenty of unexhibited tapes to prove it. ‘Why, in view of his own history of being betrayed, did he not tape any of his conversations with Mr Fraghistas before and during those nine days?
‘You have had an unrivalled opportunity, not given to many juries, to assess this defendant,’ she went on. He was plainly an extremely gifted, highly intelligent man, with a remarkable memory. But he was a manipulative man. He was not on trial for his personality, or for being insulting: he was abrasive, to use a neutral or semi-neutral term. But he became more so in the face of difficult questions …
As for Zografos, one had to regret seeing a young man led into perdition. He was not stupid. But he became ‘bound up’ with Mr Korkolis.
She turned to Mereu and Moussaoui. ‘Despite their builds, they are shadowy figures in this trial. They have always remained in the background. They were there as the bodyguards.’ Yet the few brief words Mereu had said to the police when he was captured were important. Not only did he ask how many days in prison he might face; he also wanted the police to know he had been kind to George, and had given him cigarettes and fruit. Wasn’t this one of the most significant remarks in the whole case?
‘Sit back and consider the unchallenged evidence. Appearances can be deceptive … Consider what the evidence discloses from men caught in the act who have mounted a defence out of desperation …
‘If the defence is to be believed, Mr Fraghistas was a man devoid of all moral scruple … determined to put his family through hell on earth and to submit his mother to mental torture …’
Joanna Korner sat down at eleven-twenty. She seemed to me to have done a thoroughly skilled job of pulling together the most important strands in her case and disentangling the red herrings. She made us cast our minds back to those distant weeks in the winter of ’96 when George had occupied the witness box for a punishing eleven days and when his family and his business partner had taken his place one after another. Despite having endured all manner of insults from Korkolis, she had been dispassionate. And by giving the other three defendants only the most glancing attention, she had astutely left the spotlight on their leader, where it surely belonged, and who was now about to make his own closing speech.
Constantinos Korkolis
Shortly after midday, Korkolis stood up in the dock. He had not had his hair done for the big day. He looked as scrawny and scruffy as ever, a bravura act of gamesmanship which one secretly quite admired. But then came his opening words: ‘I will be much longer than the prosecution.’ Oh Lord. ‘I am going to fight this case on the prosecution evidence.’ He invited the judge and counsel to object to anything factually incorrect about the evidence he would mention.
There followed a very polished little address to the jury, the gist of which was: ‘I didn’t come here to be liked or disliked.’ It was well judged. ‘I am presented by the prosecution as a very intelligent man. I am flattered.’ That is what he meant to say, but it sounded, rather sweetly, like ‘I am fluttered’.
Then he got into his stride, accelerating with his customary unstoppability. Could we accept that a genuine kidnap victim would be fed on steak, prosciutto, and use a hair dryer? The whole Fraghistas family had lied. They were guilty of ‘flagrant pe
rjury. They tell the biggest lies ever said in this court’. They were ‘ruthless persons, who think they have a divine right to do anything that serves their purpose – a Dallas/Dynasty family’. From 1991 to 1996 George had put down £8,400,000 worth of chips gambling at Crockford’s; yet at the time of the kidnap he had just £63.81 in his current account at the Alpha Bank in the Haymarket.
‘You think Mrs Fraghistas is a respectable woman? Ha. She is ruthless like the rest of them. For this family their biggest ordeal was to explain themselves to ordinary people like you, members of the jury.’
This was shrewd. He had been losing us, I felt, with his intemperate attacks. But the appeal to class solidarity probably made an impact with the jury. He proceeded at tremendous, relentless, mind-numbing speed, riffling through documents, criss-crossing the enormous area that the evidence had covered, sowing little landmines of doubt. Why would real kidnappers have chosen Hogan Mews given the proximity of neighbours? Why a cupboard with no lock? Why handcuffs with no key?
It was all familiar, over-familiar stuff. I spotted several snoozers, including two prison officers. One of the barristers looked as though he was slipping into siesta mode but suddenly popped his eyes open wide and stared at me hard, daring me to doubt he ever closed his eyes except in thought. The judge and Mr Curran also seemed to keep looking at us in the most unnerving way. Was this just to make sure we were not nodding off or were they wondering what was going on in our pedestrian minds?
Under such close examination I began to feel like a part of some unwieldy, imperfect mechanism which could not be trusted to perform its function yet which, lamentably, was the only instrument at the court’s disposal. They, the lawyers, were the trained marksmen. We, alas, were their blunderbuss.
Korkolis droned on doughtily. People in the public gallery came, gaped, dozed and went away. One of them fell off her chair. When Korkolis thoughtfully suggested that the jury might be tired and want a break, the judge agreed eagerly, adding that ‘probably none of it is going in’ …
‘Draw near and give your attendance,’ boomed the usher. ‘God save the Queen.’ It was the fifty-ninth day of the trial, 13 March, the anniversary of the Dunblane massacre. (Now there was a case it would have been hard to try dispassionately, had the killer lived.) Korkolis was still in mid-speech, reading out transcripts of the demand tapes at a gallop. The first eyelids in the public gallery closed at 10.35 a.m. It felt as though he were winnowing the evidence like corn, but finding only the chaff. Come to think of it, wasn’t ‘chaff what the wartime RAF called those clouds of tinfoil which they released to confuse the enemy radar?
Korkolis spoke on, apparently without a note, remembering each police witness in extraordinary detail: names, ranks and contradictions in the evidence. He drew attention to the Public Interest Immunity orders that had blocked our knowing if and how the police had traced the mobile telephone calls.
After several false starts he started to wind up. ‘In my life I never cease to be surprised at the depths to which people will lower themselves just to achieve their objectives … Can you fit any of us as criminals?’ He swept his hand like an impresario towards his colleagues. ‘Mr Hawkins was ready to travel in the North Pole to find if there was anything against me … Our picture does not fit to pictures of criminals. Is it possible by common sense to believe such a thing?
‘The truth doesn’t matter in some cases. When the police have gone so far, a conviction must be secured by any means. I came to this trial expecting everything to be fair … But Miss Korner was throwing mud.’
And then it was back to us, the target of his pleas. ‘For me being tried by a jury is the best guarantee. A British jury. This is the pillar of your justice system: twelve independent people, sober in your vote, accountable only to your conscience. It’s your view that counts. Your legislation is very wise in this. Just you will decide. Nobody else. Members of the jury: the only thing that counts – and we have hopes – is you. Your verdict, if not guilty, would be a strong message that a British jury cannot be cheated.’ He ended this rather fine eulogy to the jury by reminding us that other victims of police fit-ups such as the Guildford Four would be looking to us.
It would have been quite an affecting coda to Korkolis’s maiden closing speech, had he not then turned on Judge Goldstein with an ill-judged attack on the bench’s integrity. ‘Very wisely,’ said Korkolis, ‘senior judges in this land have said it is most undesirable for a judge to interrupt the evidence-in-chief of a defendant … The judge is not allowed to show any disbelief even if the defence is laughable … The judge can show his disbelief by facial expressions. It cannot be written down if it’s by facial expressions. The other defendants and I turn our eyes to you for an impartial trial. So far as I am concerned you are not impartial in this trial.’
Mr Curran swivelled his eyes skywards. The usher looked astounded. The judge turned slightly pink and adopted his sunbathing lizard look, but let him finish. At twelve-thirty Korkolis sat down. Chatting casually afterwards, some jurors seemed amazed at Korkolis’s nerve. ‘It doesn’t matter what the verdict is for the kidnapping,’ said one. ‘Surely he’ll get twenty years for contempt.’ While he was about it, why didn’t Korkolis accuse the judge of having a numbered Swiss bank account of his own, joked another. Stuart’s comment was succinct: ‘If the galleys were still around he’d have the biggest effing oar in the boat.’
All the same, Korkolis had done what I presumed he had set out to do. Where Korner had seemed to clear the air and sort things out, Korkolis had succeeded in talking up a sandstorm. As Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, one of the jury system’s most constant critics, told me when I interviewed him for this book: ‘I always used to say, if you were a defending counsel, the prime duty you had was to throw up a smoke-screen in front of the jury. You weren’t there to help them; indeed quite the contrary. Your best chance of getting your client off was to so confuse the jury that they’d say at the end of the day, “I can’t say beyond reasonable doubt that this case has been proved.” ’ Sir Louis might have given this novice advocate a sardonic pat on the back.
Patrick Curran QC
Mr Curran did not waste a second before stressing to the jury that he represented Mr Zografos, not Mr Korkolis. He gave us one of his stares. Then he said forcefully, ‘As regards the concluding part of Mr Korkolis’s speech, insofar as I understood it I do not adopt it.’ He backed this up with another stare.
Evidently he wanted to keep something of a gulf between his client and Korkolis. But not so great as to cause the entire defence case to topple into the void. We the jury had to consider one single question, said Mr Curran, steering a careful course: did we accept, so as to be sure, that George Fraghistas had told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? ‘You have heard those words more than any other jury in this court this year.’ If we were not sure, the verdict must be not guilty.
Miss Korner had asked the jury to consider whether George was the sort of man who could have helped send four innocent men to jail. ‘If it’s his neck or their neck,’ said Mr Curran, ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’
The mention of Miss Korner brought home the fact that her place was empty. Her capable junior, Jeremy Benson, had apologised for her absence. She had had to appear elsewhere. But still, it seemed odd for her not to be there during her opponents’ closing speeches, as though she were either over-confident of her case or careless of the outcome.
Mr Curran was scornful of Miss Korner’s airy dismissal of the tax-dodging allegations made against George. Smiling and wagging his thumb at his vacant seat, he reminded us of the absurd moment when Mr Gale had asked George if he had laughed at something he said. George had said no and covered his mouth. But this was a lie, Mr Curran almost shouted. ‘Those who can be trusted in small things can be trusted in large things.’ It was an incident we all remembered – but an utterly piffling point. Was Mr Curran scraping the barrel?
His goal was clearly to discredit the Crown’s principal witnes
ses: ‘There is no case for reverence towards the Fraghistas family. [He misread our jury’s very mixed feelings in that regard.] You as a jury are judges and judges cannot be respecters of persons. Each witness must be looked at coldly, making allowances for eccentricities, mercurial temperament…’ We should be aware of George’s ‘acting ability’: could someone who had been through such an ‘unimaginably terrifying experience’ have been so cool in the early telephone calls? Wouldn’t he be a mental wreck after his ordeal? ‘Do you know the feeling when you’re particularly nervous? It’s certainly a feeling familiar to members of the bar …’
This was needlessly ingratiating. We had listened again and again to the tapes of George talking to his secretary Wendy on the first day after his capture. Whatever Mr Curran maintained about their coolness, I for one had already decided there was a distinct quaver in George’s tones.
When George had broken down in the witness box on being shown the leather mask, ‘within seconds the strong voice came back,’ Mr Curran bellowed. ‘Are you prepared to rule out some dark and murky corners in that man’s life?’
