THE ΩMEGA MAN
Police Corruption, the BBC and the Murder of Stephen Lawrence
A clue to the aura of police corruption that hangs over the murder of Stephen Lawrence was buried in a garden just ten miles from where the black teenager was fatally stabbed in 1993.
A corrupt cop has claimed he hid two stolen Omega watches in his garden before selling them and splitting the proceeds with a bent detective who had protected one of the Lawrence murder suspects.
Rather than investigate this claim, the National Crime Agency spent years trying to prosecute the whistleblower for perjury.
The Crown Prosecution Service has been sitting on a file from the NCA for the last two years.
The Upsetter meanwhile has been on a treasure hunt to unearth a timely story about how the police, its so-called watchdog and the BBC did their best to bury any hint of corruption in the infamous racist murder.
It’s time for the Omega Man.
The Groovy Gang
The house at the heart of this tale belonged to a detective constable nicknamed Porky.
He served on the drug wing of the South East Regional Crime Squad (Sercs) based at East Dulwich, which targeted career villains operating around south London and into Kent.
Porky was bent. And he later confessed to being part of an inner circle of detectives dubbed ‘the groovy gang’ because the drugs seized from dealers were resold through their informants in the puff and cocaine game.
Porky pissed up his share of the cash from these corrupt recycling operations or spent it on family holidays and renovations.
His house in Croydon had a raised back garden with three levels backing on to a small woodland.
It was perfect for Easter egg hunts with the kids; and for burying evidence that could get him sacked and sent to prison.
In 1994 Porky buried two Omega Seamaster watches in the back garden. They were part of a haul worth tens of thousands of pounds which Sercs detectives had recovered in August.
Last week Porky told The Upsetter what he remembered about the operation:
“We did a job over in Essex way and we seized a lot of different types of watches and they were just there and I thought, I took two. And when I got them home I thought, ‘God this is stupid. I can’t wear them and I can’t do anything with them.
It was a daft thing to do. I thought I’d put them away somewhere. I didn’t want [my wife] to find them for a start. It just so happened, we’d just got rid of the pond and filled it in because [my son] was two. Basically I laid some crazy paving on it. It wasn’t fixed and all I did, I lifted one of the slabs up, dug underneath it, dug a hole, wrapped the things in a carrier bag. I just stashed them under the ground.”
Porky sat next to an experienced detective sergeant known as OJ - short for Obnoxious Jock - who had recently joined the East Dulwich office of Sercs.
OJ arrived in April 1994 straight from working the first year of the Stephen Lawrence murder, which occurred not far away in Eltham on 22 April 1993.
The Glasgow-born detective had played a key role handling witnesses who within days of the stabbing at a bus stop were naming the white gang of youths responsible.
OJ and Porky became friends and bonded over football. One weekend on duty in August 1994 they got into a wide ranging discussion about crime.
“I’m sure it was a bank holiday. It was Sunday and we were waiting to see an informant because we were going to give him a car that was wired for sound and vision,” recalled Porky.
Porky felt comfortable bringing up the Omega watches he had buried in his garden. OJ, he said, came up with a plan to fence the watches through an old informant.
The informant was a career criminal plugged into the local underworld where Stephen Lawrence’s killers came from and could move stolen goods and drugs. He was also someone providing ‘work’ (tip offs) through OJ to the groovy gang.
Porky liked the plan. Later that day he said the discussion turned to the Lawrence murder.
“We were talking and I turned round and said I felt it was obvious the boys were guilty, so obvious something’s wrong. And then [OJ] suddenly came out with the fact that he’d been dealing with, his exact words were, ‘Old man Norris.’
I knew one of the boys was [David] Norris and old man Norris is the dad [Clifford]. [OJ] said that he’d given them information. [OJ] wasn’t precise to what the information was and said ‘they’d looked after him’, and then, that there’d been ‘a real little earner’ out if it and I knew exactly what he meant by ‘a real little earner’, it meant they’d received cash.
I didn’t pursue it. You know, act in horror or anything like that, because of my own bit of corruption at the time as well … I knew from my police experience they’d lost evidence or they’d hidden evidence or done something and [Norris] paid for it in order to protect the Norris boy by helping the dad.
[It was] one small part of one large conversation, but it was quite clear what [OJ] said and it’s something that sort of stuck with me, made me think, I may be doing some bad things but I’m not hiding away murders.”
