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FettesgateThe English suffix -gate derives from the Watergate scandal of the United States in the early 1970s, which resulted in the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. The word "Watergate" is derived from the Watergate Complex, where the scandal started. Since the Watergate scandal, the media has on occasion referred to political scandals by adding the suffix "-gate" to one of the key words used to describe the scandal. This new label has sometimes stuck, but more often than not, the scandal is referred to by a different name. The 'Fettesgate scandal', as the incident was quickly baptised by the Scottish press, began in the early hours of 19 July 1992, when burglars spent three hours in the headquarters of the Lothian and Borders police in the Fettes area of Edinburgh. Several confidential documents were stolen and Animal Liberation Front slogans sprayed on the walls. Fettesgate remains relevant today as may be seen in the below article entitled ‘Gangster wrapping’. Fettesgate Phone TAPPING in Scotland ("Fettesgate") DUNCAN CAMPBELL, IPTV, AND CHANNEL 4 CASTIGATED House of Commons Hansard Debates for 14 Apr 1993 Gangster wrapping As it began, there were elements of farce to the tale. One of Scotland's most important police stations, Fettes, was burgled; documents were stolen and leaked to the press; embarrassed police officers rushed around arresting not the burglars but the journalists who had written about the burglary. Black comedy, perhaps. But among the material leaked were some less amusing documents: there was, for instance, a chart compiled from the records of calls made from an Edinburgh telephone in a two week period in January 1990. Over 150 calls were logged and the names, addresses and telephone numbers of 78 people and organisations called during that time, as well as the time and duration of the calls, were recorded. The telephone in question had not been tapped. Had it been, the police would first have had to justify the tapping to the Secretary of State for Scotland and obtained a warrant. The chart had been compiled from metering records. In Britain, to gain access to metering records, the police need do no more than establish a friendly relationship with British Telecom and pay a small fee. There is no warrant procedure, no public record and no safeguard against abuse or invasion of privacy that metering represents. The British government insists that police use of metering records is a harmless tool in the fight against crime. No invasion of privacy is involved, the government argues, so no legal safeguard is necessary. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and British civil liberties groups, as well as some individuals who have discovered, by chance, that they have entered police files through metering, strongly disagree. The 'Fettesgate scandal', as the incident was quickly baptised by the Scottish press, began in the early hours of 19 July 1992, when burglars spent three hours in the headquarters of the Lothian and Borders police in the Fettes area of Edinburgh. Several confidential documents were stolen and Animal Liberation Front slogans sprayed on the walls. Later that day, Alan Muir, reporter with the Sun, received a telephone tip-off about the burglary and duly reported it in the next day's paper. The story cost Mr Muir six hours in police custody the next day but no charges were brought against him. Six days after the burglary, Ron McKay, a journalist with Scotland on Sunday, found himself rummaging in a grit bin near his office, to which he had been directed by a telephone caller. Amongst the litter and debris in the bin he found a set of documents which he, too, used to write a story for the following day's paper. Two days later, Mr McKay was arrested in a dawn raid on his girlfriend's house in Chatham, Kent, held overnight, and charged with reset - the crime, under Scottish law, of receiving stolen property. The charges were dropped six months later. There were many rumours about who might have carried out the burglary. The IRA, the Animal Liberation Front, unspecified drug dealers and even MI5 were mentioned. There was also a persistent set of rumours about a gay network of semi-criminal elements who were alleged to have good police and legal contacts. Nobody has yet been charged with the crime, though some journalists who have covered the story in Scotland have come to believe that the identity of the burglar, said to be a police informer, is known to the police, but that the police fear he might embarrass the force in court. The burglary of one of their most important offices proved deeply embarrassing for the Lothian and Borders police. Edinburgh was scheduled to host the European Council in December 1992 and questions were asked, none too quietly, about the force's competence to deal with the security challenge it posed. There was further press outrage over police treatment of the journalists involved in reporting the story. And finally, the revelations about police use of metering records, revealed in stolen documents, have added fuel to a slow burning fire of concern over these methods. Metering is not telephone tapping. It involves no interception of the communication, simply access to the records kept by British Telecom. The usefulness of metering to the police is obvious: using metering records they can build up a picture of an individual's friends, acquaintances and contacts. If several individuals' calls are monitored, telephone trees can be extrapolated, connections made, cases built, all without the individual being aware of police surveillance. But because the content of the calls is not recorded, the British government argues that metering falls outside the scope of civil liberties concerns and requires no oversight. British government has argued the same case for many years. In fact, we owe the existence of the Interception of Telecommunications Act 1985, in part, to the last time the British government lost the argument in the ECHR, to which, in the early eighties, a Mr James Malone took a complaint. Mr Malone was an antique dealer from Dorking who was charged in 1977 with dishonestly handling stolen goods. He was tried twice, in 1978 and in 1979, but the jury could not agree a verdict. He was formally arraigned once more, but the prosecution offered no evidence and he was acquitted. It was police practice not to reveal in court that telephone tapping had been used in the pursuit of an investigation, even when a tap had yielded conclusive evidence of guilt. But in the course of Mr Malone's first trial, a police officer under cross examination had read out extracts of conversations recorded during an authorised intercept of Mr Malone's telephone. The policeman's mistake allowed Mr Malone to challenge in the high court the lawfulness of the Home Secretary's warrant procedure for phone tapping. The High Court judge observed that there were no legal safeguards against abuse under English law. It was a subject, he said, "that was crying out for legislation". Mr Malone proceeded to the final remedy, a complaint about the tapping and metering of his telephone before the European Court of Human Rights. Mr Malone's case was twofold. Under Article 8 of the ECHR he argued that his right to private life and correspondence had been breached and, under Article 13, that there was no legal remedy in Britain for this abuse. In response, the British government, while declining to confirm the interception in any particular case, admitted that Mr Malone was a "member of a class of persons against whom measures of postal and telephone interception were liable to be used". On metering, the Government argued that even if metering had taken place, which they denied, it did not entail interference with Mr Malone's Article 8 rights. In 1984 the ECHR ruled in Mr Malone's favour. British law, the court ruled, lacked sufficient clarity on the issue and, even where surveillance can be justified to prevent disorder or crime, "the system of secret surveillance adopted must contain adequate guarantees against abuse." Turning to the question of metering, the court ruled: "The Court does not accept... that the use of data obtained from metering, whatever the circumstances and purposes, cannot give rise to an issue under Article 8. The records of metering contain information, in particular the numbers dialled, which is an integral element in the communications made by telephone. Consequently the release of information to the police without the consent of the subscriber also amounts, in the opinion of the court, to an interference with a right guaranteed by Article 8." The police, the court observed, had no power to compel the Post Office, as it then was, to supply metering records. But nor was it illegal for the post office voluntarily to comply with a police request. But since there were no legal rules concerning the scope and manner in which the authorities used this device, their actions, while not "unlawful", were not "in accordance with the law". In response to the Malone judgement, the government passed the Interception of Telecommunications Act 1985. This essentially did three things: it made it a criminal offence to tap, though not to bug, a telephone without a warrant; it set up a tribunal to which complaint could be made if an illegal tap was suspected; and it made it illegal to give evidence of a telephone tap in court; thus neatly ensuring that such slips as made by the young constable in the Malone case could not recur. Since the Act, parliament is informed in an annual report how many phones have been tapped each year. Metering, however, does not fall under this procedure. In a letter to the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties in September 1992, Lord Fraser of Marmyllie, the Minister for Health and Home Affairs at the Scottish Office said that the question of metering was very carefully considered when the legislation was being prepared and was very fully debated in Parliament during the passage of the Act. In fact, Hansard records only one exchange on the subject of metering, a one page entry from a late night session on 3 April 1985 when the Home Office minister, David Waddington, responded to a proposed amendment to the bill put forward by the Liberal Democrat MP Robert Maclennan. Mr Waddington repeated the Government's line that metering was fundamentally different from interception and was dealt with differently in the bill. Whilst information gathered from interception was not normally available to the person intercepting, he elaborated, metering information was routinely and properly held by the telecommunications operator. The Government apparently continued to believe, despite the ECHR judgement, that metering was not a grave invasion of privacy and did not require even the flawed safeguards that the act introduced to cover tapping. The only provision made for metering was in Schedule 2 of the Act, under which it became an offence for information about a person's use of the telecommunications system to be disclosed to third parties, other than for the telecommunications operator's purposes, for billing, for instance. Exception was made, of course, for the police and security services. They may ask for information "for the prevention or detection of crime or for the purposes of any criminal proceedings". There is no obligation on British Telecom, Mr Waddington disclosed, to disclose such information, but nor are the police obliged, as they are with tapping, to obtain a warrant, or to disclose to Parliament how often they ask for metering records. British Telecom (BT), with whom the customer has a contractual agreement which most customers assume is confidential, have not been very forthcoming about their habit of supplying metering records to the police. In August 1992, in the wake of the Fettesgate scandal, Carole Ewart of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties (SCCL), wrote to the chairman of BT in her capacity as a customer to inquire whether BT had given any police force or security agency a printout of the numbers dialled from their Glasgow office. In another letter, written in her capacity of director of the SCCL, she asked for information about the operation of this procedure. Four months later, BT replied to her customer inquiry with an assurance that records from SCCL's telephone and fax lines had not been supplied to the police. In a reply delivered by hand on Christmas Eve, BT also said that it was not BT's practice to ask for a warrant. Whilst it is true that, under the Telecommunications Act and the Data Protection Act, as BT point out, they are not obliged to ask for a police warrant, it is also true, as Ms Ewart argues, that they are entitled to do so, if they felt that such a procedure would offer greater protection to their customers. In reply to SCCL's request for details about the procedure covering metering records, Christine Ingram, assistant to BT's chairman, wrote a letter that was a masterpiece of obfuscation. Ms Ingram said that the Telecommunications Act (1984) allowed for disclosure and that for BT to request a court order in such cases would be "wholly inappropriate". BT's procedures, she said, require requests for information to originate from "senior police officers", rank unspecified, and, she claimed, "authority is carefully controlled by our senior management teams". "I am unable," she concluded, "to provide a breakdown of the volume of requests as this information is not available..." Ms Ingram does not explain why the information is not available despite her earlier assurance that such requests are "carefully controlled by our senior management teams". As a result of the Fettesgate burglary, one Edinburgh citizen found that his telephone number did figure on the police charts. It was George More, one of Edinburgh's leading criminal lawyers, whose office had been telephoned a number of times from the number under surveillance. Whilst he admitted that to be metered was less unpleasant than to be tapped, Mr More was nevertheless indignant. "It is an unpleasant intrusion into my private affairs. One has to assume that conversations with a client, which covers when I talk to a client, are confidential, as they are meant to be. If we are meant to have a confidential relationship, and if you agree with the idea that the client and his lawyer have rights, then we should not allow them to be whittled away." As a result of the public row over metering in Scotland in the summer of 1992, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Lang, announced a review of the arrangements over metering. In October, few were surprised when Mr Lang announced in Parliament that he was satisfied that the statutory arrangements were being met and saw no need for the law to be changed. He did, however, issue operating guidelines to the Scottish police in December 1992 covering the rank of the police officers entitled to ask for metering records and the kind of crime that justified it. He also said that his office would receive an annual return on the number of occasions on which such information was requested, though it has yet to be tested whether this will be made public. The new guidelines, according to Kenny Farquharson of Scotland on Sunday, who has covered the metering controversy for six months, actually relax the rules. Previously, says Mr Farquharson, a request needed to pass through a chief constable or his deputy. Under the new rules, any officer of the rank of Detective Superintendent or above may ask for metering records. The new guidelines do not cover requests made by customs officers or the security services. In December, at the EC summit in Edinburgh, a chance to regulate this practice was lost when a draft EC directive on regulating the telecommunications industries was "withdrawn for revision" in the name of the principle of subsidiarity. Article 7 of the draft directive, had it been adopted, would have obliged the police to get "specific authorisation by law" before requesting metering information. The British Government, of course, is a great champion of the principle of subsidiarity. It also seems determined to protect its right to go on knowing who we call, when we call them, and for how long. August 1992
"Fettesgate"
has revealed a police phone-monitoring network,
as Kenny Farquharson reports from Scotland New Statesman and Society 7.8.92. Splashed across the front page of the Scottish edition of the Sun on 30 July was one of those tabloid headlines you cannot help but admire. Next to a picture of a sheepish-looking Sir William Sutherland, chief constable of Lothian and Borders police, in very large letters it asked: "HAVE THE PLODS GONE MAD?" It was one of the first shots in a Scottish media blitzkrieg against the police, following the heavy-handed treatment of two journalists who had written stories about an embarrassing break-in at the Lothian and Borders force headquarters in the Fettes area of Edinburgh. Intruders had spent an estimated three hours in the offices of the Scottish crime squad in the early hours of Sunday 19 July, and had stolen dozens of confidential files detailing police investigations and surveillance operations. Animal liberal Front slogans were spray-painted on the office walls. What has predictably become known as "The Fettesgate Affair" continues to dominate the news in Scotland, and has thrown up a number of prickly issues: the use of criminal law against journalists who have been given sensitive information; the safety of the European Community summit in Edinburgh in December; the ability of the police to protect their own offices and the identities of their informers; and the use by police of a type of TELEPHONE surveillance that does not require a warrant. Nine days after the break-in, Ron McKay, 43, a reporter with the quality broadsheet Scotland on Sunday, became the first person arrested by the special team of detectives put together to investigate the raid. While on holiday in Kent with his girlfriend and baby son, he was woken by Scottish detectives at 7am. Detectives searched the house, broke into his car, searched a basement flat he owns in Maida Vale in London, and then flew him back to Edinburgh where he spent a night in police cells. He was handcuffed, fingerprinted, denied a change of clothes and eventually charged with reset, an offence in Scots Law similar to handling stolen goods. McKay had written a story about the break-in for SoS, based on a detailed account provided by someone claiming to have taken part in the raid. The operation, the source said, was organised by a new alliance between the Animal Liberation Front and influential figures in Edinburgh's criminal underworld. The source also said files relating to police anti-terrorist operations were being passed to the IRA and UVF, and that two people revealed in other files as ALF informers had been given 24 hours to leave Scotland. Copies of some files were made available to the paper. The circumstances surrounding McKay's SoS story are now subjudice. The day McKay appeared in court, detectives also paid a 7am call at the Ayrshire home of Sun reporter Alan Muir, 28. He was not arrested, but under a clause in the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980, he was held for six hours-the first five of which were spent waiting alone in a police cell. He was eventually questioned by detectives, who showed him a list of calls made to and from the Sun's Glasgow offices and a transcript of a conversation Muir had with a contact. The increasingly beleaguered chief constable has since agreed to an inquiry into his handling of the matter, to be conducted by a senior officer from Strathclyde. The chief has been visited by Labour MP Alistair Darling, an advocate by trade, and the editors of Scotland's two quality daily newspapers, the Scotsman and the Herald. Herald editor Arnold Kemp has expressed concern that any move to extend the law of reset to cover "information" would be a threat to the freedom of the press. But the affair is more than a furore about journalists' rights. The real legacy of Fettes gate could be the opportunity it gives to scrutinise some less than savoury policing methods. On Sunday 2 August, SoS published a front-page news story, based on information from the stolen files, describing the way Lothian and Borders police force was using a form of TELEPHONE surveillance that does not require a warrant. SoS has seen copies of a full record of a police TELEPHONE-monitoring operation. It details more than 150 calls made from an Edinburgh phone in a two-week period in January 1990. It gives names, addresses and TELEPHONE numbers of 78 people and organisations called during that time, as well as the date, time and duration of each call. Because the conversations themselves were not recorded, this form of surveillance-known as "metering"-is not covered by the Interception of Communications Act and therefore does not require a warrant signed by the Secretary of State for Scotland or the Home Secretary. All it takes is a police request to British Telecom, which says it tries to respond positively to all police requests. BT also says it has the right to charge for such services, but declines to say HOW MUCH money it makes from passing on this information. Duncan Campbell, surveillance expert and former NSS investigative journalist, has been shown the metering information and describes it as "the best, and, indeed, the only complete evidence of a breach by police of the principles of the law," on this matter. Civil liberties campaigners say it is unacceptable to have such surveillance going on free of parliamentary scrutiny, and the new shadow secretary of state for Scotland, Tom Clarke, has written to Scottish Secretary Ian Lang requesting an inquiry into its use. The value of metering information is obvious. It can give police a detailed picture of a person's friends, contacts, business dealings and movements. It can show when a client has called a lawyer and when a source has called a journalist. TELEPHONE "trees" can be set up showing who knows who knows who. And worryingly, despite the fact that the number of phone taps are published each year by the government, there are no Scottish or Home Office figures on HOW often the police use metering. Fettesgate continues to make the news. Whitehall sources have been quoted as saying security for the EC summit must be completely reviewed in the light of the break-in. And there have been reports that the raid was carried out by criminals on the fringes of Edinburgh's gay scene, looking for evidence said to link a convicted gay fraudster with a Scottish sheriff. In the meantime, journalists reporting the story wonder who will be next for the 7am call. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, IPTV and Ch 4 are the subject of a scathing report by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. All three have been heavily criticised following a complaint over the C4 programme, 'A Tale of Two Cities' investigating the so called 'Fettesgate/Magic Circle Affairs', produced by Mr Campbell's production company, IPTV. This is not the first time that Mr Campbell's journalistic methods have been called into question. In May of last year, Mr Derek William Donaldson was found guilty of assaulting Mr Campbell, after both he and his mother were subjected to unrelenting pressure from Mr Campbell trying to secure an interview, despite being told by Mr Donaldson that 'an interview was not on'. At the High Court of Criminal Appeal where Mr Donaldson appealed unsuccessfully against sentence, the appeal judges referred to Mr Campbells conduct in the weeks preceding the assault as 'Appalling'. Mr Donaldson complained about the programme to the BCC. The BCC, after an exhaustive year long investigation, said in their adjudication that issued their findings. In the document the Commission states that 'They had been seriously handicapped in their adjudication by the lack of supporting evidence from Ch 4 for assertions in the programme which Mr Donaldson had contested'. The commissions report further states We have no hesitation in upholding Mr Donaldsons complaint that there was an unwarranted infringement of his privacy during a visit to his home by IPTV and Mr Campbell in January of 1993 when IPTV used a zoom lens to film him indoors, and placed a hand microphone through the letterbox to record a telephone conversation. Mr Donaldson claims that 'the Campbell documentary was nothing more than a concoction of lies and I am glad he has been found out, he has only been able to drag up my criminal record as a weapon against me but now the boot is on the other foot. In an English civil court, with a jury we shall see what his so called witnesses say under oath. Every one of his programmes contributors will be called to give evidence, and then we shall see who has been lying'. Mr Donaldson has had meetings with London based solicitors who are prepared to raise an action against Channel 4 and Mr Campbell on a speculative basis. Mr Donaldson revealed that he has also met with a senior Edinburgh Advocate with a view to raising similar actions in Scotland against the Glasgow Herald and Gay Scotland as both publications had published damning articles by Mr Campbell. Channel 4 are standing by the story. Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow) : After the Home Secretary courteously gave way to me when I asked him about South America and in particular about Colombia and Peru, he gave a very convincing answer about his work and that of his Home Office officials in Colombia. I thoroughly support that. May I perhaps have a letter from him about Peru? I do not blame him for not answering that, but it is a very important subject. I wish to refer simply to clause 17 and the issues that arise from it. It is one of the Scottish clauses. In particular, I refer to a letter to the Leader of the House from David Johnston on 5 February 1993 in which he states : "I understand you are considering problems associated with the Parliamentary device of introducing a report which to all intents and purposes can't be challenged ( Hansard 28 January 1993 : column 1160)." A criminal inquiry is one thing ; what purports to be a criminal inquiry in substance is another. I was one of two people who declined to go before the Nimmo-Smith/Friel committee because I did not understand what a criminal inquiry in substance was. Either a proceeding is a criminal inquiry, or it is not. If it is not, there are different rules. My instinct was thoroughly justified, as things turned out, in not submitting myself and necessarily confidential information to Mr. Nimmo- Smith and Mr. Friel in the light of subsequent events and the fiasco which surrounded an interview that purported to be from The Daily Telegraph. How people conducting what are supposed to Column 909 be, in substance, criminal inquiries can as a regular habit talk to journalists while they are undertaking those inquiries is absolutely mind boggling. The letter says : "As Leader of the House, I think you ought to know I have challenged a particular aspect of the Report of the Lord Advocate's Inquiry into allegations of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Doubtless others may wish to challenge areas where they have first hand knowledge." In areas of the Nimmo-Smith inquiry where I have first-hand knowledge, it is very wide of the mark. I must report that there are police in my area who are seething with indignation that they are in the position of not being able to answer something which was put to the House by the unopposed return procedure in circumstances which were an abuse of that procedure. For the sake of time, I refer to a letter dated 4 February from David Johnston to the Lord Advocate : "At 17.12 of last week's report of the Lord Advocate's Inquiry it is claimed that I misheard John Simpson in Snatchers Bar. The implication was my professional incompetence led to a Member of Parliament being misled and, in turn, causing him to mislead the Lord President. I told Mr. Nimmo-Smith and Mr. Friel that I was so surprised by what Simpson told me in Snatchers that I suggested to Alan Muir at The Sun that it would be worth his while phoning Simpson in the bar and speaking to him." To cut a long story short, that happened. It also happened that--as I understand is its custom-- The Sun tape recorded a conversation. That tape recording absolutely destroys paragraphs 17.12 and 17.13 of the Nimmo-Smith report : "Simpson :
Well maybe. I don't
think he will be nowbut Muir : No?"--
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes) : Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but he seems to be going wide of the Bill which is under consideration. He may make a passing reference to that matter, but he seems to be dwelling on it in some detail. Mr. Dalyell : Other hon. Members have gone very wide : I have sat through the whole debate. I shall simply limit my comments to one matter : "Muir : No? Right. Well, thank you very much Mr. Simpson. Simpson : Well, remember that if you mention my name, I'll sue you. Muir : there is no problem Simpson : But there's you know you're on the right track Muir : Yeh. Simpson : There's a lot of things about this one that stink to high heaven. Muir : Mmm. Simpson : I mean, I am a totally, utterly straightforward person Muir : Mm Simpson : and always have been and there's a lot of things about this case that stink to high heaven." Of course, I am obedient to the Chair. I put down a formal question to the effect that this whole correspondence should be put in the Library of the House of Commons. That was refused by the Scottish Office Minister who was operating for the Lord Advocate. I wish to register the fact that that is a profoundly unsatisfactory procedure. Column 910 On 10 February, a letter came from the Crown Office. As the House will be aware, in carrying out their inquiry and making their report, Mr. Nimmo-Smith and Mr. Friel Sir Ivan Lawrence : On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. There are hon. Members who wish to participate in this debate on the Bill. Time is short, and the hon. Gentleman must know that he can raise this matter on the Adjournment. Mr. Dalyell : The hon. and learned Gentleman has had his turn ; he has already spoken for 20 minutes. Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. I have told the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) that he is going wide of this Second Reading. I now ask him to deal with the Bill as it stands rather than dwell on specific points which he has made in some detail. pparently, as QCs become more senior, they think that they can become more verbose. He took up time. Sir Ivan Lawrence : I kept to the subject. Mr. Dalyell : This is the lawyers getting at it. Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. It is not a matter of what another hon. Member thinks. I am saying from the Chair that I have given the hon. Member for Linlithgow sufficient scope. He has made his point and I cannot allow him to dwell on it. He must return to the main factors that are set out in the Bill. Mr. Dalyell : Against the background of clause 17, I believe that what happened in Scotland--what is generally called Fettesgate--is a shame- making event in our legal history. I speak on behalf of police officers who have been unable to defend themselves given what the Scottish Crown Office has done. As I know that other hon. Members wish to speak, I shall, of course, obey you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall leave it at that at 9.10 pm. The
godfathers might have gone, but crime is still paying big time
Taken from The Observer October 2, 2005 I once interviewed a Brooklyn cop about a murder and he showed me a Polaroid of the victim. 'So the guy knocks on the door, the door opens and the guy's looking down the mouth of this shotgun. BANG! He takes a shell full of buckshot in the face.' The cop looked at me sympathetically: 'You all right, pal?' Scotland was never quite so Chandleresque, but it has had its moments. In the old days, the job required a little chutzpah; the drinks were short, the raincoats long, the stories tall, and the gangsters terrifying, but not truly terrifying. I was reminded of this last week when a judge agreed to extradite Antonio la Torre to Italy. Now there's a blast from the past. The Italian authorities say that la Torre is 'the undisputed head of a criminal organisation, directing its activities and programming numerous acts of extortion'. Which was why, apart from love, he moved to Aberdeen. Back in the early 1990s, la Torre ran a restaurant, Sorrento, in Bridge Street. He had been ensconced there since 1986 and would have remained nothing more than the archetypal smiling Italian proprietor had the carabinieri not leaked documents to the Italian press with his name in them. They were attempting to show they were doing something about organised crime by revealing a map showing the various countries mobsters had fled to, one flag firmly planted in Scotland's north east. Two journalists from Scotland on Sunday travelled up to have dinner at the restaurant. 'The squid in ink was really very good,' said Jeremy Watson, who was one of them. They then questioned the Italian about his connections. He wasn't very pleased and when the story was published he sued for £150,000. From then on, la Torre would greet journalists by asking them whether they were sure they wanted to run the story, in a splendidly traditional, if still unsettling, tone of voice. La Torre's wife was Gillian Fraser. Perhaps they connected by both coming from seaside towns, she from Aberdeen, he from the Camorra heartland of Mondragone, north of Naples. At around the same time, Euan Ferguson was asked by the then editor of Scotland on Sunday to write about Arthur Thompson Snr, the infamous godfather of Glasgow's East End. It was to have 'a touch of Mario Puzo'. Following the killing of two youths, Ferguson reported, two words were on the lips of the bad boys in the leather jackets: 'Arthur's back.' He then mentioned Thompson was 'father to mayhem and murder'. The writ arrived shortly thereafter. Despite the truth in every word, the paper realised it had to settle. A week after the cheque was sent, Thompson's heart ruptured and he keeled over. Ferguson arrived at the funeral in a long coat and found himself jostled to the graveside. His pretence of being a gangster mourner went well until a photographer asked if he wanted a lift back to the office. According to Bob Wylie, the BBC's investigations editor and another veteran of Scotland on Sunday's buccaneering days, the great change in gangland crime has been the ever increasing amount of money involved. 'I recently did a story on a drugs gang in Possil,' he said. 'This gang had taken over just half of Possil, yet when the police raided the grandfather's house, they found £138,000 under the floorboards.' A shift has occurred in the relationship between the police, the press, the public and the criminals. In the days of Thompson, there were ugly rumours of policemen receiving kickbacks, but Wylie said a very different attitude now pervades. 'The police are far more co-operative [with the press] now,' he said. 'They seem to understand the need to convey to the public that things are being done.' Nothing showed the breakdown of trust between the police and the press so much as Fettesgate, the break-in at the headquarters of Lothian and Borders police in 1992. Secret and highly embarrassing documents were stolen, some of which were left in a bin near Scotland on Sunday's office. Ron McKay, now George Galloway's right-hand man, received a call and was told where to find them. The police charged him with 'reset', receiving stolen goods, and McKay spent a night in the cells. With the United Nations naming Scotland as the most violent country in the developed world, none of this should be taken to mean the country has become safer. Instead, it means a young newspaper has matured to a less litigious middle age, the criminals have become more sophisticated and measurably more brutal and the police have grown more effective. As Wylie pointed out, ultimately there's nothing very funny about the actual crime. La Torre is still in a Scottish jail. His libel case fell apart when he was arrested in Amsterdam in 1996, but after 15 months inside, he was allowed back to Scotland. Now, with new evidence, an Italian court has sentenced him to a further 13 years. Last week, the judge gave him his marching orders. Meanwhile, and perhaps poignantly, the new owners of his restaurant have renamed it Sopranos. See also articles: The Magic Circle Reflections by Martin Frost on his life, beliefs, commerce ... from our senior judges not to publicly release the police’s damming reports such as ‘Blackmail and our ‘Gay Judges’’ and the ‘Fettesgate affair’. ... |
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