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The Murder of Daniel Morgan - tell me more.

Trio charged with axe murder win malicious prosecution claim

Three men who were charged with the murder of a private investigator have won their malicious prosecution claim against the Metropolitan Police.

Jonathan Rees, Glenn Vian and Garry Vian had appealed against the dismissal of their case by a High Court judge, Mr Justice Mitting, in February 2017.

They were prosecuted after Daniel Morgan was found murdered in a car park at the The Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south east London, in March 1987.

Mr Morgan 37, from Llanfrechfa, Torfaen, was struck four or five blows to the head with an axe, which was left embedded in his face.

The men were arrested and charged in April 2008 but in March 2011 proceedings were discontinued and not guilty verdicts entered....
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ViolentPanda said:
Morgan wasn't investigating police corruption for a client, he was investigating it off his own bat because he believed that his partner had dragged their business into the shit, buying info and "services" off a bunch on coppers at the Regional Crime Squad. Many of the same blokes have been "grassed" by each other as they've done deals to keep themselves out of nick. Sensible, if even a quarter of the stories about fit-ups by South East Regional Crime Squad officers were true.
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Spot on.
To amplify: Daniel Morgan and John Rees were partners in a private detective agency called Southern Investigations.
Morgan had unearthed a network of private detectives, informers, bent dibble and drug barons, and he also discovered that Rees was in it up to his neck, and about to drop their business right in it as a result
 
I watched episode 2 after, they're all available. I had to get up for work otherwise I might have watched all of them.

Yes, really good I thought. It surprises me how much talking Rees and Fillery are doing. I won't mention anything else in case people have only seen the first episode but there's some stuff that appears to have been left out, unless it's in the final one.
 
dunno - i thought it was a bit of a confusing mess and i was none the wiser by the end. and they didn't really go into details about the police corruption - i was very surprised they didnt cover the fact that one of the detectives on the original murder case was also implicated in corruption in the stephen lawrence murder (he was mates with the gangster dad of one if his killers) - New evidence links murders of Lawrence and investigator
 
It was interesting to have Rhys, Fillery and Glenn Vian talking on-screen, but I think it needed to be a longer series because as baldrick notes, there's just massive strands missing.

Many of the key points are definitely raised, but others are not. There isn't really any discussion of the problematic nature of the CIB3 involvement. Bob Quick is a talking head, but he is not really placed in context. The initial investigation is presented as permeated with bentness, and the Cook investigation as having been compromised through breaching the principle of ‘sterile corridors’, but ultimately the programme doesn't really attempt to place value of evidence.

Rhy, Fillery and Vian at various times make specific claims about police evidence; the programme makers show/play some of this evidence; but no attempt is made to test the evidence or the police narrative of the evidence against the claims of the trio.

For example, Vian says that the police transcripts did not match the covertly recorded audio - a straight forward matter the programme makers could have addressed.

The failure to accurately describe the atmosphere of ‘noble cause corruption’ (i.e. fit-ups, verballing etc) - as well as straight-ahead skimming, taxing and theft - prevalent in many bubbles within the Met at the time, not least at Catford nick, was a notable disappointment. After all, whilst only really nebulously articulated during the programme, the primary motivation presented as being behind the murder was an attempt to prevent Morgan blowing the gaff on police-criminal collusion. But this is not fully explored. It is not enough to focus on Rhys and Fillery as shady characters based on their behaviour immediately before or then after Morgan's murder, their dealings in the 90s with the NOTW and so on, because much of this hinges on evidence procured through the various Morgan murder inquiries, and is so by its nature limited.

Only by pulling the focus back from Rhys and Fillery (and the Vians), and surveying the wider environment around them, do things really start to make sense. So the section on the job done on Kim James becomes a he says, she says thing, with the police saying they had bugged Rhys and Simon James discussing the plot, and then Rhys saying no way did Jimmy Cook have time to plant anything because [even though he broke into Kim's car to steal keys] ‘he was only in the car for seconds’. No mention of corrupt police officer Austin Warnes or his associate Dave Courtney. No looking at where the coke came from. No comparison of audio tapes and transcripts with Rhys' claims.

Similarly there was no looking into the context of south London organised crime in the 1980s as a backdrop for Morgan's murder or any alleged police corruption and collusion, except in terms of a sloppy investigation into Morgan's murder itself. After all, to get to murder you must first march through motivation - and we are never given the nuts and bolts of specific collusive relationships, police corruption or major crimes which might provide reasonable motivation to engage in a conspiracy to commit a brutal murder in this way. (Such things are, however, covered at length in books such as Untouchables and Bent Coppers.) The Belmont car auction incident is the only prior act considered - and this is because it directly involves Southern and Rhys.

Elsewhere the programme makes some very sharp points - what was the role of Southern in relation to the NOTW? As Miskiw notes, it was a conduit, a means of credible deniability, an arms-length procurer of police intelligence. Southern performed not just a role as itself a provider of information, or as a supplier of technical skills, but as a cut-out between a newspaper seeking information from police officers, and police officers willing to sell information. A ‘clearinghouse’. But this comes after the Morgan murder.

It does, however provide a template for better understanding the possible significance and motivation behind Morgan's murder: Southern as a grey economy middle man.

Other areas I definitely would have liked to see more on: Marunchak; testing Rhys's claim that Fillery claimed to have ‘invented’ the Fake Sheik, as against the on-screen caption saying Mahmood disputed this and claimed he himself created the persona 8(?) years prior; exactly when and how the Rhys/Fillery set it up, Glenn was the axe man, Garry the look-out, Jimmy the driver theory came about; more on the setting up of Southern after leaving Madagan (and whilst Madagan is a talking head there's no mention he remained in contact with Rhys well into the 2000s); Taffy Holmes; Derek Haslam; a look into Southern's financials and client list/workload beyond Belmont, James and the Screws...

Anyway, still interesting.
 
DaveCinzano said:
It was interesting to have Rhys, Fillery and Glenn Vian talking on-screen, but I think it needed to be a longer series because as baldrick notes, there's just massive strands missing.

Many of the key points are definitely raised, but others are not. There isn't really any discussion of the problematic nature of the CIB3 involvement. Bob Quick is a talking head, but he is not really placed in context. The initial investigation is presented as permeated with bentness, and the Cook investigation as having been compromised through breaching the principle of ‘sterile corridors’, but ultimately the programme doesn't really attempt to place value of evidence.
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Yes a number of the points you raised had occurred to me - I haven't read Untouchables but a lot of it was in the podcast from a few years ago. It definitely needed to be longer, and the connections between people weren't fully explored - like Bob Quick had some interesting things to say but why his views are of value instead of some other ex detective talking head wasn't explained and so on.

A reasonable attempt I thought but the boundaries between the murder case and all the other corruption stuff are quite blurred, one leads into the other quite easily and I don't know they got the balance right.
 
baldrick said:
A reasonable attempt I thought but the boundaries between the murder case and all the other corruption stuff are quite blurred, one leads into the other quite easily and I don't know they got the balance right.
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Pretty much sums it up for me - I think the choices made by the programme makers in part led to this (like not having an 'objective' narrative voice; or including multiple dramatisations of single sequences, or recontextualising single dramatisations in multiple sequences; and just not testing evidence).
 
teqniq said:
hackinginquiry.eaction.org.uk

Justice for Daniel Morgan: Finish the Leveson Inquiry

hackinginquiry.eaction.org.uk hackinginquiry.eaction.org.uk
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I started listening again to the second part of the podcast recently.

I honestly don't know how Alistair Morgan is still going. Three decades of crushing disappointment in officialdom. The higher it goes, the more corrupt everything appears - you know not even a veneer of pretending to do the right thing.
 
Panel is expected to report soon:


Short Times article:
www.thetimes.co.uk

Former suspect in collapsed 1987 Daniel Morgan murder case sues Metropolitan Police detective

A former suspect in one of the Metropolitan Police’s most notorious unsolved murder cases is suing the detective whose efforts to convict him were branded corru
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk

A former suspect in one of the Metropolitan Police’s most notorious unsolved murder cases is suing the detective whose efforts to convict him were branded corrupt by judges.

Jonathan Rees, who was charged with the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan before being cleared when the case collapsed, has already won a malicious prosecution payout from the Met.

In the latest twist in the case, which has been mired in claims of corruption and incompetence, Rees has taken the first step towards a private prosecution of Dave Cook, the now-retired detective who took charge of the inquiry.

The handling of the case was so troubled that in 2013 Theresa May, the home secretary, ordered an inquiry. The independent panel, which has cost £14 million, is due to report next month on the failure to convict anyone of the murder of Morgan, 37, a private detective who was found with an axe in his head in a pub car park in Sydenham, southeast London.

Cook, a former detective chief superintendent, became the public face of the Morgan inquiry in 2002 when he appeared on Crimewatch in an appeal for information. Shortly afterwards he was appointed senior investigating officer of a revived inquiry.

Four suspects were charged with murder, including Rees, Morgan’s business partner. Their trial at the Old Bailey collapsed in March 2011 after months of legal arguments and non-disclosure of police documents. Cook, who went on long-term sick leave that year, was criticised by the judge, who ruled that he had deliberately breached guidelines in relation to a key supergrass witness in the trial and probably prompted the same witness to implicate two suspects.
In February 2017 Mr Justice Mitting, who was overseeing a damages claim by the former suspects, ruled that Cook had risked contaminating the evidence and overstepped the mark “even to the point of committing the criminal offence of doing an act tending and intended to pervert the course of justice”.
The judge said of Cook, who has the full support of Morgan’s family, that his motive was to bring those he believed to have been complicit in the murder to justice. Rees won £155,000 in damages from the Met in 2019. His lawyers have now written asking to interview Cook.
Cook’s lawyers have asked for more information before agreeing to the interview and highlighted a serious complaint Cook has made against his former force for “deliberately” misleading Mitting.

Cook said that the Met tried to “silence” him from giving evidence about decisions made by more senior officers during the Morgan murder inquiry. The Met initially dismissed the complaint but has now appointed a detective superintendent to investigate.
Rees told The Times that Cook eventually would be summonsed to give his account but hoped the two of them could become allies against the Met.
Cook has denied acting corruptly but has said he was given no training in how to handle supergrasses. He declined to comment but a friend described the private prosecution as “a ruse to give Rees the upper hand” when the inquiry publishes its findings.
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Michael Gillard priming the pump:

Other stars of the Met [apart from ex-Commissioners Stevens and Blair] who could or should face criticism include John Grieve, Roy Clark, David Wood, Chris Jarratt, Andy Hayman, Bob Quick, Shaun Sawyer, John Yates and David Cook, the detective chief superintendent in charge of the botched last investigation.

Many were awarded the Queens Police Medal and have, through private sector roles or directly, a continued association with the Home Office, policing and the intelligence services.

Some are even emissaries of ethical policing taught to foreign police services with questionable human rights records.
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theupsetterstrikes.substack.com

PRITI VACANT

Home Secretary Snubs Morgan Family Over Corruption Report
theupsetterstrikes.substack.com theupsetterstrikes.substack.com
 
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