THE USUAL SUSPECTS #10
A Round Up of Crime & Corruption
In this round up of The Usual Suspects from December to March we stay mostly where The Upsetter’s heart lies - Scotland Yard.
There’s shenanigans aplenty around an area that’s seen many a trial and career come a tumble - the use of informants.
Talk to any serious detective involved in investigating organised crime and they’ll tell you at some point in the life of a top echelon gangster information has gone over to the police.
“They all grass,” as one ex-detective put it, even the ones regarded as the most staunch.
But then, giving up bodies, rivals, loads, stash houses, wife beaters, kiddy fiddlers, greedy bent cops, suspected terrorists are all trades with law enforcement that in the villain’s mind don’t necessarily add up to grassing.
They think, with some reason, it’s different from giving up others to save your own skin or for a lighter sentence. It’s not grassing, it’s a way of staying ahead of the game, seeking strategic advantage over competitors and keeping the police off your back while the real business of making money is done.
This tenth edition of The Usual Suspects revisits claims that a major league London armed robber may have been a grass for the very unit set up to catch his kind of villain - The Flying Squad.
It’s followed by an exclusive story from The Upsetter archives of how champion boxer Chris Eubank got mixed up with a notorious MI6 informant down in Brighton.
Then there’s a tale of two controversial one million pound loans that the billionaire porn baron David Sullivan has made to a crime lord and to his fiancé.
Speaking of that crime lord, news arrives that a retired senior detective is looking to sue the Met over its now discredited Tiberius report on police corruption, which claimed he was in David Hunt’s pocket.
It’s been four years since a Met cop kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard heralding much noise from the police establishment that it was going to tackle the culture that had previously ignored sex pestery and other red flags.
Red flags such as trying to date a 17-year-old victim of crime you’ve just dropped at her parents or using the cover of being in an undercover unit protecting women on nights out to hit on them in front of your colleagues.
The Upsetter brings news that the internal investigation into a creepy Met and City of London cop has reached a new low of unprofessional standards by the Line of Duty squad.
On with the show, and tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of The Upsetter on Substack. So a big thank you to all subscribers and sources who’ve kept this newsletter alive and an unrivalled antidote to the drive-by journalism of most crime reporting.
It’s natural therefore that we start today’s offering where it all began in April 2021 with an update on the story of the autistic detective. It’s got the usual staple fare of this newsletter: prostitutes, pegging and police corruption.
So give your eyes a treat.
