Martin Buckley Backfire
I’ve always thought the MKX was the moodiest of all Jaguars. Looking back at the ‘interesting’ period owners tends to the back up this theory: east end sporting personality Reggie Kray needs no introduction, while the likes of T Dan Smith (the Poulson scandal) and landlord Nicholas Van Hoogstraten tie in nicely with the big Jag’s image in its 60th year. One didn’t know about until recently is Angus Sibbet. This burly, bearded, 33-year-old Geordie bon vivant, while evidently no saint, did not deserve to be shot point-blank in his green MKX 4.2 auto one snowy evening in 1967.
His supposed murderers, Dennis Stafford and Michael Luvaglio, would almost certainly have walked free today on the flimsy evidence as presented in ’67. Instead they did 12 years each of a life sentence before being let out on licence in 1979. In the meantime, Ted Lewis penned a thriller called Jack’s Return Home; when director Mike Hodges turned it into Get Carter in 1971, it was no secret that the storyline was influenced by the real-life goings on in Newcastle in 1967.
This being the 50th anniversary of what is probably my favourite film ever, I thought it was worth a look at the real-life case – if only on the basis that if a sad fan like me didn’t know about it (until Youtube threw it up as ‘recommended’ viewing last year), then you might not either.
The slaying was dubbed the ‘one-armed bandit murder’ by the press because Sibbet’s demise was linked to his job collecting money from the clubland fruit machines owned by his boss, Vince Landa. A cockney who had moved to Newcastle to avoid the wrath of the Kray twins, Vince was not born Landa – in fact, he was the older brother of Luvaglio, who drove a white Rolls-royce and lived in a Victorian pile called Dryderdale Hall, the self-same one Hodges cast as Cyril Kinnear’s rural gaff in Get Carter.
It was put about in period that Sibbet’s death was ordered because he was skimming £1000 a week off the takings… How else could he afford a new MKX? I have never seen it confirmed that he had his hand in the till: the MKX, registered MUP 11D, was a gift from his ‘best friend’ Luvaglio. Stafford, a conman with a colourful past, managed a club for Landa and had a Fiat 2300S that was off the road for repairs at the time, which is why he was using Landa’s red ’66 E-type while Vince was at his villa on Majorca.
The two Jaguars were the mute witnesses to the events of that night – or just the MKX was, depending on which story you believe. What is certain is that at 5:15am, MUP 11D and its grim contents were discovered by a miner returning from the night shift. It was parked (badly) under Pesspool Bridge with its lights fading, a rear window smashed and its nose stoved in.
Stafford and Luvaglio, who were due to meet Sibbet at a club at the time of the murder, were arrested the following evening after a tip-off that the E-type was having rear-end repairs – the police had convinced themselves that the front end of the saloon was consistent with it running into the back of the sports car. Stafford claimed the first he knew of the damage was when he went to grab a packet of fags from the E-type at 2am.
According to film-maker Neil Jackson, who continues to champion Luvaglio’s innocence and is planning a film about the affair, 3D modelling has proved the coming-together of the rear of an E-type and the front of a MKX to be inconsistent with the damage to the cars. Given that the case rested heavily on this, it’s easy to see how unsafe the conviction was: the police couldn’t come up with any forensics or a weapon, and the two men had alibis for all but 45 mins of that evening.
But if they didn’t do for Sibbet, who did? I won’t go into the various theories here: better to read David Lewis and Peter Hughman’s Most Unnatural: an Inquiry into the Stafford Case or watch the BBC documentary. Viewer discretion advised: they stuff a perfectly good MKX into the back of an E-type for the sake of authenticity.