Rtn Graham Furnival: Coppering in the 70s

Since President Francis is still on holiday, it fell to 1st Vice President Graham to chair this meeting. He joked that he had to introduce the speaker - himself.

Graham retired from the Essex Police as a Detective Chief Superintendent. For this talk he told us about two cases he was involved in during the 1970s.

One was an investigation into a business he thought had probably been set up with the best of intentions. Two men had rented a large warehouse in Essex with a view to buying goods for resale to the general public from the warehouse. The warehouse was fitted out appropriately and local staff hired. The two owners and their manager then acquired goods on credit from suppliers all round the country.

One aspect of the business they had overlooked was publicity. They had hardly any customers but continued to buy from their own suppliers on credit. The operation came to the attention of Essex Police when they started receiving complaints about the business’s failure to pay its bills.

Three plain clothes officers were sent in. One, a male, purported to be a salesman interested in selling to them. He turned up in a business suit carrying a briefcase under his arm. Accepting his cover story, the two owners took him up to the offices not generally seen by the public. The briefcase contained a hidden camera, so the officer was able to take photographs of the proprietors. He also reported that there were piles of paperwork with no order to them.

The other two officers were female. They turned up individually purporting to be potential customers, going round the warehouse with shopping lists in their hands. Their real job was to note the brands on sale so that the police could approach their credit departments for more background information. Graham was one of the officers who went round the country interviewing the suppliers’ credit controllers.

The police had seen that loaded lorries were leaving the warehouse and decided to follow one of them to see where it went. These days such an operation would be carried out using four unmarked cars, and possibly a helicopter and a GPS tracker. In the 1970s Graham was in one of the two unmarked cars following one of the lorries.

The lorry drove down the A12 towards London. From time to time it would slow down to 30 mph. Graham commented that it was difficult to follow a vehicle successfully when it was going so slowly on a major road. Eventually the driver would turn into a lay-by and stop. The surveillance car immediately behind it would then drive past and the second car would keep a watch on the lorry. When it arrived in London it stopped overnight and arrests were made.

The two owners and their manager were prosecuted, the rest of the staff being completely innocent and unaware that they were working in anything other than a legitimate business.

The second case Graham mentioned was another fraud. The police discovered that the culprit had emigrated to New Zealand with his family.

Graham and another officer travelled to New Zealand with an extradition order. He said they had a very pleasant few days there interviewing people. Having flown eastwards from the UK to New Zealand, the two of them decided to continue flying eastwards with their prisoner so they could claim to have completed a round-the-world trip.

The problem came when they had to stop in America overnight. Their prisoner had an American visa but neither of the police officers did. Furthermore, Graham set off the airport alarms when he walked through with a set of handcuffs on his belt. He produce his warrant card but the local police weren’t convinced; so far as they were concerned, he couldn’t be a police officer because he wasn’t carrying a firearm,

Graham didn’t actually tell us how he got out of that one. The two officers did make it back to the UK, complete with their prisoner, who was put into prison on remand.

When it came to trial, the fraudster was sentenced to eleven months. If he had been sentenced to twelve months he would not have been allowed back into New Zealand.

A couple of months later Graham was surprised to bump into the fraudster in Chelmsford. It turned out that, because of the shortness of the sentence and the time he had already served on remand, he was already out on licence.