Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace's Brighton

5: Bad Business

Never underestimate the power of the criminal mind.

Crime can realize profits that would shame many FTSE 100 companies. With the international drugs market worth an estimated £320 billion per year, it’s no surprise that disrupting and dismantling organized crime has been one of the most enduring challenges and priorities for governments across the world in recent times.

Major league criminals operate on a truly global scale. Grace finds himself reflecting, while waiting for Amis Smallbone to emerge from a pub full of old-world villains in Not Dead Yet, on how local criminal rivalries in Brighton had been surpassed by the pressure brought by faceless yet ruthless overseas mobsters.

A huge number of people amass fortunes through top-level crime. It would be foolish, however, to assume that comes from next to no effort. Far from it. Only the strong survive. Weak, lazy criminals wither into oblivion, jail or an early grave thanks to turf wars and smarter opposition.

To be a successful criminal requires acute business acumen worthy of any multinational conglomerate’s boardroom. A forensic understanding of profit margins, risks, opportunities, markets and one’s competitors is the lifeblood of all successful entrepreneurs, on whichever side of the law they operate.

Business guru Alan Deutschman coined the oft-repeated catchphrase ‘Change or Die’. Indeed, in 2007 he published a book on this philosophy. Never has this been taken quite so literally as in the criminal world. Villains who fail to adapt to keep one step ahead of the law, to have the edge over their rivals or to capitalize on new opportunities are never far from a cell door or an early grave.

Brighton and Hove has always been a nest of enterprising speculators. The vibrancy of the place, coupled with a ubiquitous can-do attitude, means that if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. There is a reason why it features in the www.startups.co.uk list of the ‘top twenty places in the country to start a business’.

The knocker boys were probably the first criminally minded modern-day chancers to get rich in the city, but many have followed in their footsteps.

David Henty and Clifford Wake could never be accused of being small-time crooks. Friends from school, they had a hunger that burned inside them. Their desire to accumulate colossal wealth was matched only by their antipathy to taxes. They felt that faceless government bureaucrats had no right to fritter away the money they earned through the sweat of their brows. No, only they should decide how their profits should be spent.

Both in their early thirties, Henty and Wake had served long and mainly successful apprenticeships climbing the greasy pole of Brighton’s criminal underclass. Henty had been brought up in Moulsecoomb, a compact council estate, developed after the First World War as a site for ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’. It is a warren of narrow streets with rows of small semis crammed along its pavements. Henty used to be sent out from there by his father on burgling errands. He learned to trust no-one, though, as even his own dad would short-change him.

They would try any scam from antique theft, stealing and selling on cars to manufacturing forged vehicle documents. They knew how to spot the chance to make a fast buck. Henty came from a family who were well known in the antique and art world, hence his expertise and reputation preceded him. Both, though, were only too aware that rivalries, capture and incarceration were all occupational hazards.

But beneath all this, they were businessmen. They carefully weighed up the risks, forecast their turnover and took their decisions based on cold, calculated assessment. Was the gain worth the pain?

Grace has to deal with people from across the sociological spectrum. In Looking Good Dead, he considers the various layers — mainly defined by wealth — that make up the diverse bulk of the city. He reflects on the contrast between the genteel retired set whiling their days away watching Sussex play cricket at the County Ground to those of a similar age who by day beg for their next meal, and by night bed down in windswept seafront shelters. He has also been around long enough to know that the criminal classes range from subsistence thieves who melt into the background at the first sign of a police car to the ones at the top of their game living a life of faux respectability in their mansions behind security gates and high-walled perimeters in the Dyke Road Avenue area. Henty and Wake made it their life’s ambition to claw their way up this ladder, and no law was going to stop them.

In the early 1990s, the UK was at the tail end of a property boom. Vendors were still making silly money on get-rich-quick schemes buying and selling houses. Mortgage companies couldn’t keep up with business and no-one looked too carefully at how credit-worthy applicants actually were. The risks were low for financiers as, if the borrowers failed to pay, the property in question would have soared in value and they would be quids in.

David Henty had never earned an honest buck in his life. He certainly didn’t have payslips or audited accounts to prove his income. That did not seem to matter to the bank manager who chose to lend him £175k — 100 per cent of the purchase price — to buy the prestigious 1 Wykeham Terrace. Providing Henty could make the monthly payments, cash of course, and the property continued its meteoric rise in value, how could he lose?

Many of Brighton’s villains live in swanky mock-Tudor houses in Hove — on streets such as Dyke Road Avenue and Shirley Drive, which Glenn Branson in Dead Man’s Time nicknamed ‘Nob Hill’. Grace, in Dead Like You, shares Branson’s skewed opinion of its residents, musing that while most were squeaky-clean its garish opulence also attracted some of the city’s wealthy ne’er-do-wells.

However with Henty’s artistic taste, which he would exploit later in his career as a successful art forger, he chose this delightful and grand period terraced house just yards from Brighton’s Clock Tower, adjacent to the 900-year-old mother church of the city, St Nicholas of Myra, and on the doorstep of the Western Road shopping centre. This was one of the best located and most well appointed homes in the county.

Like Steven Klinger in Dead Man’s Footsteps, Henty’s steady, suspicious accumulation of wealth had awarded him the police status of ‘person of interest’ some time ago.

I had joined CID from uniform about six months previously and was revelling in rising to the challenge my new Detective Inspector had set me when I joined.

DI Malcolm ‘Streaky’ Bacon was a dapper and immaculately groomed gent. His pencil-thin moustache and ramrod posture gave the false impression he’d been a Regimental Sergeant Major in a previous life. He could easily have been a batman to Brigadier Neville Andrew, the Bursar at the Cloisters school in You Are Dead.

‘We want young blood in the office, Graham, but you will work harder than you ever have before and you will be judged on results,’ was Streaky’s greeting to me on day one.

Julie and I had just bought our first house together and had become engaged to be married. She knew what CID would mean. Long hours of hard work. She was no stranger to that herself, however. She had become a check-in supervisor at Gatwick Airport. A sixteen-hour shift dealing with multiple flights, anxious passengers, long delays and stressed staff was a normal day at the office for her. On the plus side, it meant that short, last-minute holidays to anywhere in the world were there for the taking. She gave me so much support and encouragement while keeping me grounded at home. I landed one in a million with her.

Just as well. I was working like a trouper.

The networks and characters behind the crimes I was looking into were fascinating. While in uniform I’d had little insight into the machinations of the city’s underworld. The work there was very reactive. Here as a detective I was paid to get under the skin of every criminal and see what I could unearth.

I was surrounded and supported by colleagues who had for decades been trawling the gutters of the city’s criminal networks and I was absorbing everything I could from them. In the few snatched hours each day that Julie and I had together in our new two-up, two-down starter home, I would regale her with tales of derring-do, of how we had busted this scam or tracked down that villain. I was relishing this new life.

We had been paying more and more attention to Henty. So, when he bought his new pad we started to look even harder, just as he knew we would. Police scrutiny was expected in his world. It was always safer for him to assume that the police were watching and listening, rather than not. For his own sanity he had to balance this with not becoming paranoid. With this attitude, he was able to have some fun in his predicament.

David and Cliff used to meet in a lovely little cafe in Stanmer. This tiny, beautiful village comprises a farm, a dozen cottages, a church and a manor house in stunning parkland to the north east of the city.

Soon aware the police were observing them regularly and suspecting that surveillance officers were hiding up in a barn opposite their meeting place, they took to donning crash helmets as they arrived and then spending hours sipping coffee, soaking up the heat of the roaring fireplace that was the centrepiece of the coffee shop. They did not have that much to say to one another, but they delighted in the thought of the cops freezing their extremities off in the dung-infested cowshed over the road, while they nestled in the warmth.

One of their scams around this time was the forgery and distribution of MOT vehicle roadworthiness certificates and car tax discs. Through their network of printers and ‘fencers’ they had practically saturated the city with these fake documents. In the days before any databases or electronic detection devices, police officers had to rely on a keen eye and their own judgement when assessing the validity of any documents. Henty and Wake’s products were of fine quality and rarely, if ever, called into question.

Word got round that they had a talent for making very passable official papers and soon a prominent London-based gangland villain nicknamed Lenny the Shadow got to hear of them. He had earned this sobriquet due to his seemingly mystical ability to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.

Like the evil Marlene Hartman, who sourced street children and sold them for the price of their organs in Dead Tomorrow, Lenny had a criminal network with tentacles that spread across the world. He dealt, not in thousands, but in millions of pounds.

Around this time the province of Hong Kong was just a few years away from being handed back to the Chinese. As the 1997 deadline drew closer, its citizens were starting to panic, many unwilling to surrender their Western lifestyle. Consequently the region was experiencing a feverish rush for British passports. Residents wanted to claim UK identity to preserve the freedoms they had become so accustomed to. As with any surge in demand, the opportunities to make a quick buck were tantalizing.

Lenny saw the gap in the market almost immediately and looked round for a reliable network of forgers who were up to the challenge of making 3,000 UK passports for onward sale in Hong Kong. They had to be available quickly and to a standard that would pass inspection by seasoned immigration officials. He estimated that he could market them for £1,000 each making this a £3-million operation. Half of that would be his, half the forgers’.

David and Cliff were immediately shortlisted for the job. They had proven their worth in all the selection criteria. Cliff was known for his work ethic. If he took on a job, he worked at it slavishly and expected all around him to do likewise. David knew this serious-minded approach would ensure the seemingly impossible timescales would be met. This was business and a lot of money and their reputations were at stake.

They worked out that to provide the passports to the desired quality and in time, they would need three others to assist them. Their cut of £1.5 million would still be very attractive at £300k each, and David was already spending his share in his head.

He had been offered the opportunity to buy a Scottish castle for £1 million with a down-payment of just £100k. The remainder of the money, financed through yet another dodgy mortgage, would be paid back by filling the place with fake antiques and selling them to unwitting rich American tourists. The passport income would solve his headache of coming up with the deposit.

He knew the stakes were high. No government warms to anyone who fakes their passports, especially as part of a get-rich-quick scheme. Both David and Cliff had young families and commitments that lengthy periods in prison would render them unable to meet. They had to consider carefully whether the risks were worth taking.

As any wise businessman would do when faced with such a decision, David sat down and talked it through with his wife. It would be her who bore the burden of supporting the family should it all go wrong. For his part, Cliff needed no second opinion. This was a golden opportunity and there was no way his wife, Jan, would be given the chance to persuade him otherwise.

Having carefully weighed it all up, both David and Cliff made the call to Lenny.

‘We’re in!’

There followed a frenzied period where the pair sought out the skills and materials to create 3,000 passports so perfect that, even under the closest scrutiny, they would be indistinguishable from the genuine article.

They needed the correct paper, identical rexine (the leather-like material used for the distinctive dark blue cover), the right inks and a high-quality gold foil for the coat of arms. Photos would be added later, but creating these little booklets would be no mean feat.

It so happened that Cliff, who had a more modest taste in houses but whose flamboyance came out in his choice of cars, lived in the nearby suburb of Peacehaven, next door to a printer, Barry Cheriton. Unlike the rest of the team, Barry had never once had so much as a parking ticket. His credentials were simply the skills of his trade, and that he got on well with his felonious neighbour.

Cliff went to great, but subtle, lengths to dazzle him by flaunting his glamorous lifestyle. He reassured him of the rewards, should he take up his offer to ‘just do a bit of printing for us’ and minimized the risks by maintaining that Barry would be only a bit player in whom no-one would be interested. It worked a treat; Barry could not resist.

Barry was like a gangly love-struck teenager in this new underworld. He would do anything to impress Cliff and David. They treated him like the liability he was. His blundering ways together with his habitual tendency to lie his way out of any corner meant that he needed watching closely.

To produce 3,000 fake passports Barry could hardly use his employer’s presses, so they had to find a safe place for him to work that had all the right machinery and where no-one would ask questions.

Wilson Press, in nearby Uckfield, was well known as the place where many extreme right-wing publications were printed. Owned by Holocaust denier Anthony Hancock, it was no stranger to clandestine printing runs, nor to police surveillance. The day staff had long since learned to ask no questions. It was the ideal place to rent overnight for Barry to print a few passports. None of the team particularly liked Hancock, but this was business and they knew they needed him. A few thousand pounds would be enough to buy his silence, an essential guarantee when working a scam on this scale.

The irony was lost on no-one that a place so accustomed to promoting racism and intolerance was to be used to enable 3,000 people to enter and reside illegally in the UK.

When they needed to, David and Cliff claimed that their materials were to help them manufacture personal organizers. It was enough to satisfy even the most curious.

While this lucrative new project was taking shape, they were starting yet another scam. Music cassettes, even then, could cost up to £6 a throw. They worked out that if they could find a way of producing counterfeit versions for a fraction of that, they could put on a decent mark-up, yet still retail them for far less than the High Street.

Having procured a copying machine that could create duplicates to industry standards and hundreds of thousands of blank tapes, all they needed, once more, was a printer and a press for the labels and inserts. The timing was perfect. It transpired that Barry could churn out very passable artwork. He and Hancock’s machines had never worked harder in their lives, all under Cliff’s unrelenting supervision.

Soon box-loads of crystal-clear chart-topping cassettes were on the streets, changing hands for £1 each or £3 for five. Given that they only cost 50p to make, the profit margins were impressive.

Henty and Wake could not believe the demand. They had staff employed on shifts each running off hundreds of copies a day. It was netting them £1,500 per week.

However, selling such huge quantities of counterfeit goods at markets and car-boot sales is not the best way of staying below the police radar. It was this that flagged up that Henty and Wake had engineered this new racket. We knew nothing yet of the passports.

Police surveillance showed them dashing around the city stashing boxes at various garages and houses. What did not seem to fit were the trips to London to faux-leather factories and the purchase of yards of gold foil. No-one had seen a tape decorated with either of these. Clearly there was some multitasking going on.

By researching possible uses for those materials, supported by intelligence coming in, we became aware of their passport project. At first we thought that they were just trying their hand at making a few to see what they turned out like. Never in a million years did we think that they stood to make nearly £300k each, nor did we realize the connection to Lenny.

As we were trying to fathom out exactly what was going on, 1 Wykeham Terrace was playing host to a thriving cottage industry in counterfeiting. The kitchen had been taken over for the shaping and cutting of rexine, the bath was filled deep with dye to achieve just the right hue for the covers. Other rooms were used for the drying, stitching, quality control and packing operations. They were certainly working hard for their money.

Their business brains ensured they adopted a creative approach to any problem that threatened to derail their production. Old-style passports had two elongated ovals cut into the front cover. One would reveal the holder’s name, the other the document number. They wrestled with how to recreate these shapes in a way that would look like the real deal.

When they were forging car tax discs, they faced the same quandary in replicating the perforated circular circumference. In that case, they found that a metal pastry cutter hammered onto the paper did the trick perfectly. Applying the same principle, they carefully manufactured a razor-sharp steel die to strike down on the cover. They were delighted with the results.

When the pages arrived from the printers, David spotted a problem. The background on any official document is always, deliberately, incredibly busy. On a passport, however, it is overlaid with the multicoloured image of a complex crest. Barry had not spotted this. Its omission was an error that could fatally scupper the whole project.

David and Cliff were furious. How could Barry have been so stupid? They needed a solution and needed it quickly. It would ruin all the pages to run them through the printer again. This could set them back weeks.

Barry had a suggestion. ‘I could design a template to match the genuine one and build up the colours using screen-printing.’

‘What, on every page of every passport?’ asked an incredulous David.

‘It’s the only way. We’ve come too far and I’ll work night and day. It’ll take some time but it’s do-able.’

‘OK. It had bloody better be. We’ve got one and half million quid and a reputation to protect,’ threatened Cliff.

The date was soon set for David and Cliff to travel to London and show Lenny the samples of their handiwork. Barry had to sweat blood to rectify his schoolboy error in time. The others took deliveries of the freshly corrected pages on a daily basis and with care and precision stitched them together into more than acceptable imitations of UK passports.

As the day loomed, the counterfeiters were exhausted. They had known that to earn a prize of this size they would have to graft, but this had taken even Cliff’s industrious nature to new levels.

A sense of achievement and impending prosperity prompted David to treat his wife to an intimate dinner at the world-famous English’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in Brighton’s Lanes. Generally acknowledged as the city’s oldest and finest seafood restaurant, over the years it has hosted the rich and famous, such as Charlie Chaplin, Dame Judi Dench and, of course, Peter James.

There, they excitedly planned their future with riches that just months ago would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Castles, holidays, fast cars; nothing was beyond their reach.

The following day, Cliff had to pop out to sort out some problems with the tape production leaving David, Barry and one of their helpers putting the finishing touches to the samples before the trip to London later in the day.

As with several large-scale police operations in those days, the investigative arm of CID knew little of the hundreds of hours of surveillance or the huge intelligence case being built by those in covert roles. We only found out about what had been happening on the day itself. This was all to do with operational security — the need-to-know principle that ensured the risk of leaks was kept to an absolute minimum. The downside was that we had to play catch-up. To keep an operation secret the painstaking evidence-gathering often had to wait until after the arrests had been made. This meant taking statements and securing exhibits relating to events that had long since passed.

As every Grace novel reminds us, briefings are the centrepiece of any investigation. They are the place where information is shared, snippets of intelligence checked out, updates given and priorities set. Roy Grace is deft at ensuring that during his, there is control and structure yet even the most junior officer feels able to speak up; it is often they who have the nugget that all the others have been waiting for.

I did just that myself once when I plucked up the courage to suggest Ian McLaughlin as a suspect for a homophobic murder. It was him. It turned out he had killed before and did so again while on day release from prison in 2013. He will now die in prison.

This one, however, was really more of a chat. The venue was the nicotine-stained, threadbare-carpeted CID office that had the appearance of having been equipped at a car boot sale; each battered and bruised piece of furniture was different from its neighbour. Each workstation, however, was the nerve centre of dozens of investigations into man’s appalling inhumanity to man. As Grace reflected in Dead Simple when revisiting that self-same office, each desk appeared as if ‘the occupant had abandoned it in haste and would return shortly.’

The information was a tad light on detail. All we knew was that we were going to storm 1 Wykeham Terrace, and a few garages dotted around the city. There was only sporadic mention of tapes, printers and passports. All I picked up was that ‘stuff had been happening’ and we needed to crash through Henty’s door to find out exactly what.

I was still working with DC Dave Swainston and I felt incredibly privileged to be learning from such a seasoned master; he relished the most complex and arduous investigations and what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

On hearing of hundreds of thousands of tapes, and a hint of the counterfeiting of passports, Dave volunteered to run the investigation, as it would be something different to get his teeth into. I knew, given how closely we worked, if Dave took this job on then so would I. I couldn’t wait.

This was long before the days of Local Support Teams who now would crash open doors and secure premises needing to be searched. This raid was down to us suits.

Off we went, crammed into our oh-so-identifiable unmarked CID cars. Anyone watching us screech, in convoy, up the traffic-choked North Street towards the Clock Tower would have wondered what on earth was going on. So did I.

It really wasn’t essential to race to the target address. The only point at which it becomes necessary to go hell-for-leather is when you risk being seen by your quarry. Frankly, tearing up the road was nothing more than ego-boosting, adrenaline-pumping fun.

As we cleared the Clock Tower, the cars juddered in unison to a halt opposite the ivy-clad, stone-arched entrance that provided Wykeham Terrace with privacy from the outside world. Today it worked to screen us as we squeezed out of our three-door saloons, allowing us a few more seconds of surprise.

Eight of us raced up the flint steps into the courtyard in front of the imposing Tudor-Gothic facade of the terrace. Now was the time to rush.

We sprinted out of the shadows and leapt up the steps leading to house number 1. DS Don Welch, a rugby-playing, marathon-running giant, booted open the huge front door.

As we raced in creating an ear-splitting din with our shouts of ‘police’, ‘stay where you are’, and ‘nobody move’, we heard pounding footsteps and shouts above us. A door banged and it became clear that whoever we had disturbed didn’t want to hang around to say hello. Dave and I raced up the stairs, knowing that whatever their intentions, the architecture of the building would make any escape attempt futile.

Behind Wykeham Terrace sits Queen Square. Between the two is a ten-foot-wide void that drops four storeys from the rooftop. Only the bravest free-runner would have any hope of leaping across and we, of course, had officers watching and waiting on the other side.

As we reached the first landing, I was distracted by a terrifying scream followed by a thud then further shrieking coming from outside. Dave and I turned and found a doorway to a narrow balcony overlooking the backs of the houses. My gaze turned towards the sickening cries coming from the depths below. I could just make out in the shadows a crumpled figure writhing around.

‘Help me. Help me.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘we’re coming to get you. Where does it hurt?’

‘I’ve bust my ankle.’

‘OK, OK, we’ll get help.’ I shouted to the stricken fugitive. ‘Well, he’s going nowhere,’ I quipped to Dave.

At that moment, I heard more shouting above.

‘Come down now. You’re going to kill yourself,’ yelled a detective hidden from our view.

‘What of it,’ came the reply, ‘I’m stuffed.’

I gazed up into the afternoon sunlight and saw David Henty teetering precariously on the rooftop. With nowhere to go, he was stranded, and seemed frozen with fear, looking desperately around for an escape route. Then he peered down into the void, apparently weighing up his options. The sight of his crippled comrade writhing in agony below discouraged him from any attempt to leap.

As Cleo points out to Grace in Dead Man’s Grip after learning that he had been scaling huge chimney stacks, many cops are terrified of heights. I am a proud member of that club. I was petrified that, as the new boy, I would be sent up after Henty.

Lots of voices were pleading for him to come down safely and I was relieved to see him being skilfully coaxed into the arms of waiting police officers. Probably the promise of having a moment to say goodbye to his wife, coupled with the agonizing cries of his companion below reminding him that it would bloody hurt if he jumped, had something to do with it.

Other officers came to guard our crippled fugitive, waiting for the Fire and Ambulance Services to extract him from his impossible position while Dave Swainston and I went back into the house to join our colleagues, assessing the scene.

With time now to survey what we had, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Our timing had been perfect. We had literally burst in mid-production. The kitchen worktops were littered with passport components: offcuts of rexine, strips of gold foil, fake immigration stamps alongside inkpads and odd-looking oval-shaped metal templates. It was the counterfeiting equivalent of a smoking gun.

Only one person, Stephen Tully, a well-known armed robber, had bothered to stay behind and welcome us and, despite his assertions that he had only popped in to see his god-daughter, he was led off in handcuffs.

Cliff Wake, oblivious to what had been going on and having dealt with the tape issue, walked blindly into the gardens at the front of Wykeham Terrace. He was quickly pounced on, cuffed and taken into custody before he knew what was happening.

The search of the house then commenced in earnest. First, though, the SOCOs photographed the damning kitchen scenes. It was vital to capture a record of how we found the house — a factory in full production.

Unlike Grace we did not have the benefit of a POLSA (Police Search Advisor). However, we did go through the house with a fine-tooth comb. We even sent specialists down the chimney of a neighbouring house, as Henty had been seen stuffing something into it, from where they recovered passport remnants.

Henty, years later, would insist that we missed a box full of the finished product hidden in the house, and another in a car parked nearby. He said that he quickly had them recovered and burned while in custody. We never did find very many, a surprise given that the passports were due to be delivered to Lenny, so perhaps he was right.

The man crushed by his fall was quickly identified as Barry Cheriton. As someone unfamiliar with police investigations, we hoped that he would prove the weak link and open up the secrets of this intriguing crime. However, he had more pressing priorities to attend to, like having his wrecked foot and ankle repaired.

As the evening went on, we searched the plethora of houses, garages and printing works identified throughout the weeks of surveillance.

One particular garage was rammed to the rooftop with scores of boxes containing thousands of cassette tapes. Elsewhere was the tape copying machine, pages of inserts, a foil embossing device, tapes ready for sale and reams of paper and rexine. All had to be seized, documented and their movement accounted for from now until the trial. Early in Dead Simple Grace faces the consequences of being unable to explain the chain of the continuity of an exhibit while under cross examination at Lewes Crown Court. This is territory defence barristers invariably attempt to exploit when faced with a damning case against them — like this one.

Dave and I went across to Peacehaven with a photographer to search Cheriton’s house. It had been a long day but one full of surprises and successes. We were running on adrenaline. As we heaved open the up-and-over garage door we revealed a huge tangerine-coloured four-armed screen printer sitting centre stage on the concrete floor. Surrounding this cumbersome contraption were pages and pages to be used in fake passports. A stencil replicating the crest that appeared on each page sat on a table nearby.

‘Bloody hell!’ Dave and I gasped in unison. Having had the whole set-up photographed, we started the painstaking search.

As I glanced at one of the pages, something caught my eye.

‘Dave, how do you spell Britannic, one N or two?’

‘Two, isn’t it? Why?’

‘What about Majesty? J or a G?’

‘J. What are you doing, some kind of crossword?’

‘Thought so. Come and look at this,’ I said.

Dave wandered over and chuckled as he looked at the page that had sparked my curiosity.

The well-known passage on the inside of each British passport proudly proclaims that ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’

The Henty/Wake/Cheriton version, however, started ‘Her Britanic Magesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires...’

‘The proofreader wants shooting,’ said Dave.

We wondered whether the whole batch would have been rejected on this basis by whoever had ordered them.

Having gathered up all the evidence in this anonymous makeshift print factory, we headed back to the nick. Little did I know that over the next sixteen months I would become a master at dismantling and re-assembling this ancient press, as we had to produce it to countless prosecutors, defence lawyers and courts.

Henty and Wake knew their number was up. All their dreams had been shattered. There would be no Scottish castles and no £300k windfall to fund a new life of luxury. They decided to give us one last snub. Normally, reticent villains will at least sit in an interview room even if they ignore every question. It gives them relief from looking at the walls in their six by eight-foot police cells.

David and Cliff, on the other hand, decided that they would not even do that. When asked to step out for questioning they just sat and stared, moving not a muscle. In an irritating act of defiance, they had resolved not to give us an inch.

Based on the evidence that had been amassed in the preceding months, together with the damning scene we had gatecrashed, Henty, Wake and, eventually, Cheriton were charged with counterfeiting passports and music tapes. Tully was lucky, he walked away scot-free.

On being remanded in custody, Wake and Henty had engineered it so they could share a cell in Lewes Prison. True businessmen that they were, they spent their time not lamenting their predicament, but planning their next scam. They needed to cut their losses and find the next opportunity. They plotted and schemed, even though they didn’t know when they would be free to put their plans into action.

Surprisingly, they only remained in custody for three weeks before a bail application was granted. In the next year and a quarter of unexpected liberty, while awaiting trial, they stumbled across a fabulously simple, yet lucrative, scheme involving stolen cars from the Republic of Ireland.

Henty was stopped, late one night, driving an Irish car. The officers, convinced it was stolen, struggled to confirm that fact. David overheard a radio message explaining that there was no protocol with Ireland that would help quickly identify questionable cars.

Always alert to an opportunity, the germ of an idea took root. If that was the case then surely he could import stolen cars on an industrial scale from Ireland, give them new identities and sell them on. Using his trusted contacts, he worked the scheme for months, exploiting the naivety of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority staff into believing his account of legal imports and lost documents, to persuade them to re-register the cars in the UK.

He was caught eventually but not until the scheme had provided a tidy nest egg for his family should he lose his impending trial.

As Grace grumbles in Dead Tomorrow, having inherited a new role that includes reviewing files for forthcoming trials, the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system is almost beyond belief.

The amount of evidence we had to gather over the months was colossal. We needed to source all the material, confirm all the surveillance sightings, cost everything and prove that all three were guilty as charged. One enquiry took us to Gatwick Airport, where a senior immigration officer told us that, aside from the spelling mistakes, these passports were the best forgeries he had come across.

When the trial finally took place, the defence did their best. They queried the exhibits, tried to convince the jury of a host of coincidences, sought to dissuade them from assumptions and attempted to place the whole scam at the door of some of the witnesses. They were hoping that they had sown just enough doubt to win a marginal acquittal. However, the surveillance evidence, the incriminating material we found on the raids and the painstaking tracing of all the passport and tape components, secured swift guilty verdicts.

The sentences were an eye-watering jolt for Henty and co. Five years apiece sent an unequivocal message to other would-be forgers. The spoils may be tantalizing but the penalties are severe even if, like Cheriton, you had a blameless past. As for Lenny the Shadow, he did what all shadows do when you try to shine a light on them. He disappeared.

We are all human and, like Grace when he saw Gavin Daly being led away for murder in Dead Man’s Time, I felt a twinge of pity for the three as they were taken down to the cells. They deserved all they got, but they had taken a huge gamble, the loss of which they and their families would pay for dearly.

Even with the shock of such a long time away, David and Cliff still plotted and came up with projects for the future. Most, if not all, were on the right side of the law, including stocking vending machines in Cyprus, selling discarded plastic to the Chinese and marketing popular paintings online. Others, involving more stolen cars, won Henty nine months in a Spanish prison and Wake later went back to prison for money laundering.

The difference between them and many criminals today is that despite their prolific offending they never bore any animosity towards the police and never complained about their comeuppance. And, being businessmen, they had other people and schemes in place to ensure that the money kept rolling in.

Twenty-five years on, Dave Swainston and I spent a very pleasant morning with Henty reminiscing over the old days, swapping war stories and musing about some of the ‘what-ifs’ of those days when we were on opposite sides of the law.

He and Wake knew that all businesses have their ups and downs, and our ups were their downs. They never failed to make a buck even if sometimes they paid the price with their liberty. That was the life they had chosen and custody provided a time of reflection to brainstorm the next scam to help them up the social ladder.

Henty proudly explained to Peter James and me on another visit that he now produces paintings openly branded as fakes and makes a pretty penny bringing masterpieces to the masses. His new wife is insistent that his life must now be on the straight and narrow and, so far, he has not let her down.

Wake, when we spoke with him, was looking forward to his release from prison. When I asked him what he planned to do he was quick to remind me, ‘Graham, you know me, I’m never going to be poor now, am I?’

I chose not to ask any more. Nowadays, ignorance can be bliss.