The Association of British Investigators appears desperate to be seen as the ethical new face of snooping.
It follows long running scandals of private detectives and corporate spies practising dark arts for clients of varying virtue and public interest.
The ABI says it is on the side of the angels and claims support from the family of Daniel Morgan, the private investigator notoriously murdered with an axe in south London almost forty years ago.
Although Morgan was never an ABI member, the scandal around his violent death certainly has served to highlight the corruption crossroads where private sleuths, cops, crooks, lawyers, journalists, the big rich and politicians meet.
More recently, the ABI has been trumpeting an alliance with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The privacy watchdog is helping the ABI develop a legally-binding code of conduct for its 400 members who handle the personal data of those they snoop on.
This could be anything from snatched pictures of an over-the-side spouse to information obtained from expertly scrapping the internet for someone’s digital trace that could predict the contents of their next trip to the toilet.
The code of conduct was close to being announced this summer when The Upsetter contacted the ICO to ask what it was doing about a dossier of allegations about its new bedfellow - the ABI.
The ICO had been warned in March that the ABI was “riddled with malpractice” and using the privacy watchdog as “corporate window dressing”.
The warnings came from private detectives, some still inside the ABI, who were concerned about governance at the lobby group and the vetting of its members.
Many former police officers join the ABI seeking membership as a way of promoting their detective agency.
However, some are now concerned that the ABI is putting women at risk by admitting retired colleagues who were sacked from their force for sexual misconduct.
Others are concerned about the continued use of dark arts, particularly hacking and blagging.
The ABI says of its mission:
“Since the 1950s, we’ve lobbied successive governments for regulation. While we wait, the industry remains a ‘free-for-all’, where untrained and unscrupulous operators are free to practice. This tarnishes the reputation of our industry as a whole, so we’ve imposed our own voluntary self-regulatory regime by enforcing a robust code of ethics and standards. Members adhere to this, so ABI membership is worn as a badge of quality.”
Let’s see.
Torrid Tories
The dossier given to the ICO this March refers to a case that rocked the ABI and led to the resignation of three members from its general council.
Matters escalated in 2017 after a whistleblowing private detective reported the ABI’s then chairman, Stuart Price, to the general council for trying to engage him in a hacking operation.
Let’s call the whistleblower ‘Gittes’ after the fictional private detective played by Jack Nicholson in the seminal noir film Chinatown.
The ‘Gittes’ in The Upsetter’s story was a former undercover cop who had worked for the Metropolitan police’s anti-corruption squad. On leaving the force, he became a private detective and sat on the ABI’s general council.
His evidence against Price included documents, emails, WhatsApp messages and taped phone calls with the ABI chairman.
Price was working for aristocrat clients embroiled in a rather nasty dispute with their estranged daughter and her therapist.
He wanted Gittes to assess some documents he said had been obtained by a Hong Kong hacker and purported to show the daughter had been brainwashed.
Victoria Cayzer had cut off all contact with her parents by 2012. The following year she turned her back on a £1.5m trust fund and ended up squatting in an old dye factory in south-east London.
By 2017, the 27-year-old was living in an eco-squat called Grow Heathrow near the airport with a dog on a string named after a female war photographer and not a copy of Tatler in sight.
Tori, as she preferred to be known, described her new home as “vibrant, creative chaos that strives to better itself morally and ethically with environmentalism and sustainability at its heart.”
She alone was of Tory donor blood. The wealth of her investment banker father, Charles Cayzer, can be traced back to the East India Company. Her mother, Amanda, had remarried the Earl of Caledon, the Queen’s lord lieutenant of Armagh, Northern Ireland, where he has a castle.
Tori, a reluctant socialite, had struggled since her mid-teens with self-loathing which presented as an eating disorder and depression.
She had sought help from various professional and alternative quarters, before finding a former air stewardess turned life coach who used dreams and her own experience of sexual abuse to address the trauma of others.
Tori’s parents paid the relatively inexpensive therapy bills but were suspicious of the life coach. This soon turned to outrage when their daughter alleged she had been sexually abused as a child.
Her parents were disgusted by the claim, which Tori made to the police, and believed it had been planted as a false memory to defraud their daughter of her inheritance.