The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  This was a plot that required great nerve. ‘Does George have that kind of nerve? How many people do you know who would be prepared to risk £200,000 on the turn of a roulette wheel? This takes nerve, real nerve, doesn’t it? This is a world where one day someone can be a millionaire, the next living in the Rose Court Hotel.’ What if he’d gone to the well once too often to beg the family for funds?

  One had to hand it to Mr Curran. He was really singing for his supper. He quoted Dickens [Bleak House), the Bible (George was Nicos’s ‘prodigal brother’), the Duke of Wellington (‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything’) and Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty (‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’). Some of these allusions, I fear, may not have hit their target, given the state of English education. Nevertheless, seeds of doubt had definitely taken root.

  ‘Compare Zografos as a witness with George Fraghistas. Was he evasive? Was he arrogant? Was he rude? Was he argumentative?’ (Would he add, in the famous words of the late Mr Justice Caulfield, referring to Jeffrey Archer’s wife Mary, ‘Has he not fragrance?’) ‘Young men can do foolish things; that’s as old as the world. It’s foolish to get involved in the schemes of older men … He’s lazy. He doesn’t stick to his books. But, oh, who should cast the first stone? [The Bible again.]

  ‘We only have the weak weapon of the spoken word to defend Mr Zografos. I ask you to take up that weapon.’

  Michael Corkery QC

  As soon as Mr Curran sat down, Mr Corkery stood up. His wig was slightly askew and he had a watch-chain looped across his tummy. He wanted us, the jury, to know that we were the inheritors of an eight-hundred-year-old tradition that went back to Henry II. Juries then as now had to give due attention to the evidence, ‘without fear or favour, without affection or ill-will … The facts are for you.’

  This was flattery and flummery. Then came humour: ‘We are all a bundle of prejudices. Remember W.C. Fields: “I’m not prejudiced: I hate everybody equally.”’ And then – I am not sure what came then except that as the afternoon wound to a close, I recall Mr Corkery – who incidentally prosecuted the renegade Labour MP John Stonehouse – somewhat improbably saying, ‘Some of you may have been brought up as I was on Kipling. Do you remember the Just So Stories?’

  The next morning, Day 60, Mr Corkery took us on a little etymological excursion. The word ‘kidnapping’, he said, derived from the eighteenth-century ‘kidnabbing’, the practice of grabbing little boys and shipping them off to America as slaves. Then we got down to business. He told us that it was our question early in the trial, when the jury had sent up a note asking if Mr Fraghistas had any gambling debts, that had gone to the very heart of the case. The implication was that, but for us, the Crown would have skimmed past it. I dare say there was an outbreak of silent preening in the jury box.

  Mr Corkery enjoyed his little jokes. How would George have gone about recruiting his henchmen? ‘There is no job centre for kidnappers.’ Ah, well, as Mr Korkolis had said, Greeks and Mediterraneans in general are more open than some to shady propositions. This was not meant to be a racist remark, but ‘in some parts of the world you can’t cross the road without crossing someone’s palm with silver’. Fraghistas and Korkolis might have had quite a lot in common: a streak of quasi-dishonesty. ‘George is a fake. If you have such a suspicion, your suspicion should be changed from a suspicion into a firm belief.’

  It was unsettling to hear George being called a heartless liar by this pleasant, fluent man. (I noticed Mrs Fraghistas get up and leave the court, looking distressed.) If all the kidnap paraphernalia suggested a kidnap, Mr Corkery continued, it also suggested a completely bogus set-up, ‘with everything you need to fake a kidnap – handcuffs, masks – you know the drill’.

  He drew a heart-rending picture of Monsieur Mereu being strip-searched, hustled about by non-French-speaking coppers at Notting Hill, spending a night in the cells in his police-issue paper suit and blurting out: 'I was nice to George. I gave him cigarettes and fruit.’ Miss Korner, he sneered, had had a nerve to say that this was the most telling remark in the whole case. (Well, wasn’t it?)

  Otherwise, of course, his client had remained almost completely silent. ‘There is a right to maintain silence,’ said Mr Corkery. ‘Let us consider this historically. History is not a bad thing …’ In Mr Corkery’s mother’s own lifetime a defendant was not even allowed into the witness box, for fear he might incriminate himself under the stiletto-like questions of clever barristers. Now the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 allowed the jury to draw such inferences as appear proper from the accused’s silence. ‘It is a matter for you whether you hold his silence against him.’

  What were we to make of Mr Korkolis? ‘Mr Korkolis feels everyone is against him. He is eccentric. But in this country we are accustomed to eccentrics. He has made lots of points – good, bad and indifferent. So many good points got lost in the fog of telling. Mr Korkolis is clearly wrong about some of his accusations. But he is what he is. Make allowances. He has chosen to defend himself. That is not easy in a foreign country. The court is a strange environment.’

  As for Mereu, he had no criminal record. He was a Graeco-Roman wrestler, a lover of sport. His fingerprints were on L’Equipe, the French sports paper found at Hogan Mews. Anyway, he had had nothing to do with renting the house or the cars; he had made none of the telephone calls; he had not bought the Sten gun – ‘sorry, ha ha, stungun …’ George had said that one of the men in the garage looked like a giant. ‘Who is this giant?’ boomed Mr Corkery, leaning towards the dock. ‘Any giants back there?’ It was an absurd bit of pantomime.

  The key words in the charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment were ‘against his will’, we were reminded. If George Fraghistas might have faked his own kidnap, it would not be against his will. ‘Have the Crown made you sure and certain? We have made it clear to you, beyond peradventure, that there is the greatest doubt.’ The same three words applied to the count of false imprisonment: against his will. If Fraghistas might have faked it, the verdict would have to be not guilty.

  Mr Corkery invited the jury to send Monsieur Mereu back to France as he had arrived in this country, a man without a blemish on his character.

  David Owen Thomas QC

  ‘Words, words, words, words. Is that all you blighters can do?’ From Kipling we had moved on to Shaw; but it was a good beginning and summed up the jury’s feelings very satisfyingly. ‘You, members of the jury, have already sat in this courtroom for half as long again as Noah was sloshing about in the Ark.’ This was an excellent point: we were setting new, positively biblical endurance records. Go on, Mr Owen Thomas.

  Mr Owen Thomas reminded us we must not ‘dump’ all our verdicts together, something which had indeed been worrying us. He said he had no complaints about Detective Sergeant Hawkins. (Mr Hawkins’s face looked not a jot less stony: it must be hard for police officers to sit through this sort of thing trial after trial and hear themselves labelled as incompetents and perjurers.) ‘It is very bad advocacy to repeat things,’ he went on, and the jury’s faces lit up with hope. He peered amiably at us over his half-moon spectacles, blinking like the Dormouse at the Mad-Hatter’s tea party. ‘In order to liven things up, I have tried throughout this trial to find a different way of saying “No questions” from time to time …’ Loud laughter drowned the rest of the sentence. Small furry models of Mr Owen Thomas should be sold to tourists at the entrance of the Old Bailey.

  There were some lively moments. He adopted a West Country burr to mock the suggestion that the city was a better place for a kidnap hideaway than the country, ooh-arrr. He sought our sympathy for Moussaoui, banged up in a London police station, by asking us to imagine ourselves imprisoned in Spain by those chaps with hats that turn up at the front which they don’t wear any more. He scored with the jury by saying that our proposed experiment with the car boot should have been carried out – by the Crown and before the trial began
. Losing his thread at one point, he said, ‘I know you are sufficiently alert to spot any deliberate – I mean accidental – mistakes I make … There, I nearly made another one: Zográfos, not Zografos: I keep making him a Russian.’

  One reason why he had not put Mr Moussaoui into the box was that he had seen Mr Korkolis being ‘badgered about’ by Miss Korner under cross-examination. He reminded us of one dispute: ‘She would not let go of the bone. It was like having an Alsatian at one end and a terrier at the other. Yet the following morning the Alsatian sat down, put out its paw and apologised.’

  In short, it was all knockabout stuff. The judge scribbled away placidly – perhaps he was preparing his summing-up. He raised his eyes when Mr Owen Thomas said, ‘In March 1966 … Did I say 1966 …?’ and the judge muttered, ‘It just seems like that.’

  It was around three o’clock when Mr Owen Thomas dropped anchor. ‘Members of the jury, I have finished. When you retire, do please remember the points which I and Mr Corkery have made, and consider the case against each accused quite separately. Remember where the burden of proof lies. If it may be that George Fraghistas entered into this matter knowing full well what it was all about, you cannot convict.’ He sat down.

  The judge beamed. ‘Members of the jury: another milestone is reached.’

  There was only his summing-up to come. We took an illicit photograph of ourselves back in the jury room. ‘Thumbs up or down,’ I suggested jovially. The others were not amused.

  I tried to pull together in my mind the four very different closing speeches we had heard. One thing stuck out: the only really successful defence tactic had been to impugn the honesty of George and his evidence – given so many months ago we had almost forgotten what he looked like. Nevertheless, doubts there were and, as we had repeatedly been reminded by defence counsel, we had to be sure beyond reasonable doubt.

  But it was significant that no one besides Korkolis had seriously questioned the honesty of either the police or the Fraghistas family. And I was left with several insoluble conundrums. First, if the kidnap had been faked, why was it necessary for George to have four accomplices when he could almost have managed it on his own? Second, once the gang knew the police were on to them, why didn’t the wily George order them all to make a run for it, leaving him to explain that he had ‘escaped’? Third, would the family really have been so forgiving and so obsessed with their good name as to give evidence on George’s behalf if they knew he was to blame? Finally, if George really was the ringleader and knew everything that had gone on, why on earth didn’t he give watertight evidence? He need never have mentioned the ‘helium’ voice changer; he could have got over the unlockable cupboard door problem by saying he knew there was someone sleeping outside it; he could have claimed to have been moved to other rooms in Hogan Mews, just in case he had left fingerprints there. No, the conspiracy theory just did not make sense. And yet, and yet …

  THE SUMMING-UP

  We were approaching the climax of the trial. Very soon now the jury would be on its own and everything would turn on us. Once we were sent out, nothing anyone outside the jury room could do could alter our minds or gainsay our decision. We were the ultimate fact-finders in this case. The majesty of the law was about to abdicate and cede the throne to the man on the Clapham omnibus. It was a mad notion, an awesome act of faith in the reasonableness of the common man and woman. Now there was only the judge to give us a last chance to make sense of it all and avoid some catastrophic blunder.

  The accused, their guards and their interpreters peered over the edge of the dock looking like the relics of a Chinese beheading. There was an item of housekeeping: a last-minute exhibit was given an official number – 103. It was a photograph of the ground-floor lavatory window at Hogan Mews, from which the defence claimed a really determined George Fraghistas might have escaped, had he not been implicated in his own kidnap. It looked barely big enough for a child chimney sweep to fit through.

  The judge launched his summing-up with a great outburst of flattery: 'I agree with Mr Korkolis: you are the backbone of the British justice system … Everyone in this courtroom has noticed the intelligence and perspicacity of the jury.’ Even Mr Korkolis, who had questioned the integrity of almost everyone else involved, had said he was satisfied with the fairness of the jury.

  We must bring an open mind and common sense to bear ‘so as to follow a path through the trees’, he went on. ‘You will accept my directions as regards the law. But you and you alone are the judges of the facts. I am not the thirteenth juror … I am only going to remind you of a minute portion of the hundreds of hours of evidence you have heard – much of it irrelevant.’

  The judge sounded measured and reassuring, working his way steadily through a large ring-binder containing his hand-written notes of the trial. One felt like a horse that had been indifferently ridden and even mistreated for the past four months, suddenly in the hands of an expert horseman.

  He spent time explaining how the burden of proof lay solely with the Crown, with such thoroughness that one began to wonder how it is that an English jury ever returns a guilty verdict. He told us what we might infer from a defendant’s silence. He told us (again) to apply our common sense. He allowed himself a lighthearted reflection: ‘When this case is long over and memory fades, we will remember Mrs Fraghistas’s remark: “My husband played poker with half of Athens.” ’

  Then he picked his way back along the tortuous route we had travelled together, mapping its twists and turns. ‘This case,’ he said, ‘is all about money and greed. Every approach … brings you back to the same starting point: are you satisfied so that you are sure that George Fraghistas was not involved?

  ‘The Old Bailey has heard in its history some of the greatest liars that ever existed. The defence says George was up there with them, that he was one of the great hypocrites of all time.’ He pretended to love his family but in reality he was prepared to extort money from them and torture his mother. Most despicable of all, he had sold his partners down the river.

  ‘George must have been a very good actor. Remember how the police said he behaved on his release, all those kisses. There was the occasional tear, the refusal to discuss his private money, a collapse. Was this all part and parcel of the act?’ In court, ‘Was George caught out in any obvious lie?’

  The contradictions were laid out before us, with meticulous fairness. On the one hand, on the other: ‘You must decide.’ What did Mereu’s famous remark about cigarettes and fruit mean? ‘It is entirely a matter for you.’ (Every time he said ‘It is entirely a matter for you’ I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle with alarm: the buck was about to stop – with us.) We should not allow ourselves to be sidetracked by small anomalies but concentrate on the big issues.

  ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘there are one or two matters you may find odd about this case. You may think they cry out for consideration.’ There was the matter of the syringes and ‘all that talk about lethal injections’. There was the puzzle of why the men had not made a run for it once they knew the police were closing in. There were those incriminating tapes. What did it all mean? It was, of course, for us to decide.

  Then we were given our final instructions. We had already picked a foreman, so that was done. We must now retire to consider our verdict – our unanimous verdict. We should not even contemplate a majority verdict until he told us we might. ‘You must not feel under any pressure at all. If there is no verdict tomorrow, you will go home.’ (Ah, so there would be no luxury hotel for Bob after all.)

  And that, members of the jury, was that. The ushers solemnly swore to keep us secluded from the world in a ‘private and convenient place’. We gathered armfuls of binders and were led back to our cheerless jury room. Mobile phones were confiscated. We were shown the bell which was our only link to the outside world. We were to ring it to order food and drinks, to ask for an exhibit, to send a note to the judge and, once the moment came, to let the usher know we had reached our verdicts.
Then the ushers withdrew and locked the door.

  DELIBERATION

  Friday 21 March. We were on our own. For about ten minutes we did our best to avoid confronting the fact. We passed around sweets, lit cigarettes, made frivolous remarks. I suppose we were mildly hysterical. We agreed that we would start only when we had all finished our coffees. We drank very slowly.

  The law says that jurors may never tell a soul what they discussed in the jury room during their deliberations and I do not propose to break it. However, I think it is both legitimate and possibly useful to describe what our confinement was like and what we did, as opposed to what we said, during the three and a half days that we were out.

  There is no guidance as to how juries should reach a verdict. They must make up the rules as they go along. Since the deliberations are entirely secret, there is literally nothing to stop the decision being made on the toss of a coin. I was foreman, so it was up to me to suggest how we might proceed. Stuart and I swapped places so that I was now at the head of the table, with the window behind me. First of all, we agreed that whoever was talking should try to address their remarks through the chair and should be allowed to speak without interruption. And no one would be allowed to stay totally silent. That was easy enough.

  Then we had to tackle the problem of dealing with four different defendants, each with three charges against him. We thought the sensible thing would be to discuss the case in general and plough through whatever bits of evidence people were concerned about before taking each defendant one by one and charge by charge.

  I was not keen to have an outright vote at this early stage. I wanted no one to be committed to a view he or she would later feel bound to defend, an approach which, I have since learned, is known as verdict-driven deliberation: you identify the minority, then the rest of the jury concentrate on persuading them to change their minds. Not only might such a procedure lead to bullying, I thought. It could easily provoke exactly the kind of stubbornness one would want to avoid.