KING OF THE CORRUPT COPS
On the left, the head of the Flying Squad. His holiday chum? The villain who ran Soho’s vice empire — and paid him a fortune in bribes in an age when bent coppers were untouchable... and who make Line Of Duty look like a tea party
At a swish restaurant in Piccadilly Circus, a gemstone’s throw from sleazy soho, Jimmy humphreys, a nattily dressed, hardnosed, convicted villain, was tucking in with his glamour-girl wife, Rusty, by his side.
they were the golden couple of the capital’s vice scene, she a stripper, he the Cockney owner of a chain of sex shops and strip joints.
that evening, they were dining with the most powerful man in soho, gangster Bernie silver, a shady character making a fortune from prostitution and strip clubs.
there was one other guest in this criminal gathering — and not the sort you would expect. he was Commander wally Virgo, a wily senior police officer, the overall boss of nine of London’s CiD elite squads, to whom humphreys was having a moan.
the criminal was planning to broaden his business by expanding into pornography, but, apparently, his attempt to start up a new dirty bookshop was being hampered by the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications squad.
Could Virgo possibly help out by having a quiet word in the right ear? Of course he could.
it turned out the obstructive head of the Obscene Publications squad (aka the Dirty squad), Detective Chief superintendent Bill Moody, was simply holding out for more money — £10,000 for starters and £2,000 a month for protection. (in today’s money, that’s a downpayment of around £250,000 and £600,000 a year thereafter.)
a deal was struck. Bundles of fivers changed hand. Virgo presumably got his cut. Everybody was happy.
this was police corruption, seventies-style — involving huge sums of money and officers in the top echelons of the law enforcement system, on the take in return for ignoring the very crimes they were supposed to be solving and the criminals they were meant to bang up.
LOOKING back, what is extraordinary is not just the scale of corruption, but how brazen it was, how obvious to anyone who cared, or dared, to look closely.
if you wanted to spot a bent copper, look for the one driving a brand-new Lancia, holidaying in spain, splashing the cash well above his pay grade and openly socialising with known villains.
Contrast that with the BBC series Line Of Duty, the police corruption drama whose season five finale aired a couple of weeks ago.
the bent officer in the show communicated with the criminals anonymously and voicelessly via written instructions on a laptop — not over chateaubriand steaks and Beaujolais in a public restaurant, as they did back in the seventies.
this very different M.O. ( modus
operandi) emerges in a new book, Crossing the Line Of Duty, by true crime specialist neil Root, detailing the corruption, greed and sleaze that debased scotland Yard 50 years ago. Coppers and criminals colluded in a culture of kickbacks, bribes, gifts, ‘drinks’, nods and winks that was all the worse for being an open secret.
it is hard to understand, Root writes tellingly, how the likes of Virgo and Moody ‘ could have been so corrupt for so long, without their superiors reprimanding or punishing them and honest fellow officers exposing them’.
a culture of closing rank prevailed. no one said a dicky bird about the greasing of palms so blatantly going on or the miscarriages of justice that occurred as a result.
neil Root identifies the burly, obese kenneth Drury, commander of the Flying squad, the elite group of detectives charged with tackling serious crime, as chief among the conspirators: the most rotten apple in the barrel. he was a star of the police force, with a dozen major commendations to his name, a terrier who secured convictions, whatever the cost. But he had a dark side. in hauling himself up the greasy pole, he had no compunction in framing three men for a highprofile murder it later turned out they hadn’t committed. he was prone to doing favours for his friends and mixed in very dodgy company, too. shortly after he took over at the Flying squad in 1971, he ran into humphreys, by then firmly established as soho’s ‘Porn king’, at a party. humphreys quickly sealed their association with a ‘drink’ of £50 (more than £1,000 today).
Drury’s police salary was £4,600 (approximately £115,000 today), but this was more than doubled by the £ 100 a week he now got from humphreys in return for keeping the Flying squad out of his business.
humphreys had no trouble paying up. On his own calculation, he was coining £ 2,000 a week from pornography — an annual £2.5 million in today’s prices. what he paid to keep the police off his back was a drop in the ocean.
From that moment, policeman and pornographer not only socialised and did business together, but watched each other’s backs.
when humphreys had a serious falling- out with Bernie silver (the randy humphreys foolishly had a fling with silver’s girlfriend), it was to Drury he turned to sort out the potentially murderous situation and save him ending up in an unmarked grave in Epping Forest. For this service, he was slipped a massive £1,000 bonus (£25,000 today).
the two even holidayed together with their wives, humphreys picking up the tab for a lavish two-week spree in a luxury hotel in Cyprus.
But it was this that proved their undoing.
Back in those days, the police had no anti-corruption unit keeping an eye on wayward conduct among their fellow officers. in the absence of what would now be considered an essential safeguard, that duty fell to the Press, and, in February 1972, the sunday People exposed that Cyprus holiday under the headline: ‘the police chief and the Porn king.’
while the paper didn’t allege corruption as such (though the implication was clear), it posed a pertinent question: ‘was it wise for Commander Drury of the Yard to go on holiday with this old lag?’
Out of the blue, everything began to unravel for ken Drury.
the Met launched its own inquiry, while the rest of Fleet street piled into the commander, who pleaded
his innocence in interviews, claiming that he paid his share of the cost of the holiday.
But the media could smell blood and it didn ’t help his case when further stories appeared of Humphreys being a guest at the Flying Squad’s annual dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane.
The links between the ‘Heavy Mob’, as the Flying Squad was often known, and the criminal mob were proving too close for anyone’s comfort. In mid-March, Drury was suspended from duty.
Brazen as ever , he spoke out loudly and passionately in his own defence. There was no question of improper conduct, he blustered. He announced he had issued a writ for libel against the People, though it never actually appeared.
He argued that, yes, he had consorted with criminals, because that was the only way to catch
them. ‘It’s no good going to the vicar’s tea party and trying to get any informa - tion about organised teams of robbers,’ he told the BBC in an interview.
Coincidentally, it ’ s the same case made by Super - intendent Ted Hastings in TV’s Line Of Duty — that getting close to the villains was the only way of exposing ‘H’.
But how close is too close? When has a line been crossed?
In Drury’s case — and those of Virgo, Moody and scores of other officers in the Seventies enjoying ill-gotten gains trickling down through the ranks — the line didn’t even exist. There was no excuse, no question of accidentally over - stepping the mark.
He knowingly sold himself, and the police service as a whole, down the river.
A defiant Drury tried to lie his way out of trouble, telling the police inquiry into his activities that he had ‘no knowledge whatever of Humphreys being engaged in pornography’. He maintained he kept contact with Humphreys as a source of information — ‘He tells me anything he considers will be of interest to me’ — and cited a gang of armed robbers he had caught as a result.
But his superiors were not taken in. His association with Humphreys was deemed ‘improper’. It had discredited the reputation of the police. Drury resigned from the force, taking early retirement.
In public, though, he maintained a bold front, telling any media outlet that would give him space that all he’d ever done was get close to villains ‘to keep myself informed. I regarded it as part of my duty as a copper’. He as good as fingered Humphreys as his underworld nark. Humphreys was appalled and angry at being labelled a ‘ grass’ — the worst thing that could be said of any crook. It might even put his life in danger. So he now went on the offensive and, in an interview with the News of The W orld, laid out in damning detail all his dealings with Drury. Not only had he alone stumped up for that fortnight in Cyprus, he also logged 58 occasions when he wined and dined the police commander and ‘I always paid the bills’. Drury was being shopped by the very man who’d bought him. He was done for. everywhere, the corruption seemingly endemic in the force was unravelling. There were more newspaper revelations, this time taking the lid off the Drugs Squad — all of it encouraged by the new broom sweeping through the Met, Commissioner Robert Mark . He was an outsider , untainted by London ways and brought in to clean up the place. ‘A good police force is one that catches more than criminals than it employs,’ he said as he set up the first dedicated anticorruption unit at Scotland Yard, A10. Until then, the usual practice had been for the Flying Squad to investigate any allegations about the Dirty Squad, and vice versa. One by one, the villains who thought they had bought themselves immunity were banged up. Humphreys was in prison. So, too, was the vice king Bernie Silver , along with four of his thugs, for living off immoral earnings. Silver is said to have offered a massive bribe of £35,000 — close to £1 million today — to the Serious Crime Squad to get him off the hook , but times had changed. And then it was the turn of the bent coppers themselves to face justice. In dawn raids, Drury and two other Flying Squad officers were arrested, the once all-powerful commander now photographed cowering under a blanket as he was taken into custody.
SO, TOO , was V irgo, followed by Moody and seven others from the Dirty Squad. The bulk of the evidence against them came from the pornographers and pimps who, it now turned out, had been paying them off with massive bribes since the early Fifties.
A series of sensational trials left the public aghast at what London’s senior law enforcement officers had been up to.
The biggest single bung was £14,000 (equivalent to £350,000 today), paid to Moody to have a charge dropped against the manager of a shop.
Virgo’s total take over the years was estimated to be £60,000 (£1.5 million today).
They used every trick in the book to line their pockets. Police would raid the premises of those who didn’t play ball and confiscate their hoards of dirty magazines.
But they didn ’t destroy them, as they should have. Instead, the ‘approved’ pornographers bought them back to sell in their own grubby shops.
The judge summed it all up as corruption ‘on a scale which beggars description ’ as he jailed Moody and V irgo for 12 years apiece ( though V irgo’s conviction was later quashed on a legal technicality).
Drury got eight years, reduced to five on appeal.
Not every case came to court. Under Mark’s reign as Met Commissioner, 50 officers were prosecuted, but 478 were allowed to retire early as the systematic corruption that had developed within Scotland Y ard was weeded out.
But it was not eradicated. Bad apples still exist. If they didn ’t, then Line Of Duty would not have had half the nation watching.