Cops, Criminals, Corruption: The Inside Story Panorama

These criminals are earning millions and millions of pounds.

You can buy policemen, politicians,

planning officers, judges,

CPS officials.

There's going to be a price for everyone.

This is the story of the battle against bent cops.

Revealed for the first time by those who were there.

We were a law unto ourselves.

If evidence is not forthcoming,

then we would give it a helping hand to get a conviction.

Customs didn't trust them,

MI6 didn't trust them, MI5 didn't trust them.

Nobody trusted them.

It's the story of how organised crime corrupted the police.

The lower-grade detectives were almost indistinguishable

at some stages from the criminals with whom they operated.

The truth of the matter?

There were organised criminals with police badges.

It's also the story of how the police fought back.

They wanted an undercover squad that could gather intelligence

that could be used to try and nail these bastards.

And we were set up to target them.

My gut feeling is that everything was being manipulated

by corrupt policemen working on the inside.

My gut feeling was we, at that point, um...

we'd been...we'd been set up. Completely set up.

The police was Dave McKelvey's life

ever since he joined the Met at 18.

I didn't go to work, um...for the money,

I went to work because I loved it.

If there was a job on,

I was the one who was the first one across the pavement.

I was the one who put the door in.

And that's what it was about for me. It was about catching bad people.

Catching people...rapists, murderers,

people involved in drugs crimes.

It was about catching them

and hopefully putting them in prison.

As head of the Newham crime squad, his team got results.

I know from the feedback, the intelligence we got fed back,

that it caused chaos amongst the criminal network

because they didn't know what was going on.

We were taking out major criminals all the time

and they couldn't work out who it was and why.

A routine raid in 2006

set off a chain of events that put Dave McKelvey

on a collision course with organised crime.

It began at a scrap yard in the Docklands area of East London.

It was a search warrant for stolen metal

at, um...a scrap yard, a metal yard.

INDISTINCT YELLING

In the course of the search, I think initially,

the individuals there were arrested

for handling £40-worth of stolen copper piping.

All right? Don't kid me off, mate, all right?

If you want to be serious, be serious!

I'm talking to you. He's asked me about receipts

-and I'm

-BLEEP

-showing him.

During the search, they found details of an address nearby.

We promptly trooped across the road

and starting searching these premises across the road

which consisted of 42 of the big containers.

And as soon as we started opening up the containers,

we realised very quickly

that it was an Aladdin's cave of stolen goods.

On the top shelf, there is a bundle of cash

in an elastic band on the right-hand side.

And on the left-hand side, there's another bundle of cash.

These are spoils of 18 different lorry thefts,

plus a burglary, a commercial burglary.

Plus there was a load of counterfeit goods in there, as well.

So I think it took us about five or six days to search the premises.

He arrested three men

and seized around £2 million-worth of stolen goods.

It was the remains of a much bigger haul.

Intelligence from a source in the criminal underworld

told him he was now locking horns with organised crime.

I suddenly realised that all of that work we'd been doing,

there was an organised crime group who were sitting above it all,

looking down at what we were doing.

We thought they were stand-alone pieces of work.

In reality, it was all being directed from above.

Dave McKelvey got his team together.

We put locks on the doors

and I sat them all down and I explained to them,

"Right, we are now investigating THE biggest crime family in the UK".

Police intelligence linked the three arrested men

to an organised-crime group called the Hunt Syndicate.

The man at the top, David Hunt.

Mr Big in a grey suit with a reputation for extreme violence.

Here he is captured on CCTV at a court case

about the ownership of the scrap yard where the raid started.

Dave McKelvey warned his team of young detectives.

You will get potentially followed.

They will undoubtedly make allegations against you.

There is nothing these people will not do, er...against you.

He was right to be worried about taking on organised crime.

He knew they were ruthless.

But he didn't know that they'd been corrupting police officers

for more than a decade.

I was running a particularly high-profile informant.

Who was giving top-class information

about serious organised crime.

Frank Matthews doesn't want to be identified.

He'd been running an informant at the heart of the Hunt Syndicate.

He was passing all the intelligence on to a squad

that was targeting organised crime.

When it reached the operational team, it was not being actioned.

They were saying they hadn't received the information,

that I hadn't passed the information on.

My suspicions then were that certain people were being protected.

It looked like serious criminals were being protected

by the very same detectives

who were supposed to be sending them to jail.

That team of officers, I believe, were corrupt

and were actually in league with the team

they were supposed to have been targeting.

He was right.

In 2002, a secret Met report called Tiberius

warned that some officers were in the pay of crime groups

like the Hunt Syndicate.

It revealed how the relationship between police handler

and criminal informant was vulnerable to corruption.

An informant will always try and push the boundaries

and will try to get you to do things

that are maybe not in the rulebook,

maybe even against the law.

Unfortunately, when they've overstepped the mark, as such,

there's no going back.

You cannot go back because now

the informant is running the police officer.

Tiberius concluded that organised crime

is currently able to infiltrate the Metropolitan Police Service at will.

Eight major crime syndicates between them

had corrupted 22 former

and 34 serving police officers.

It was so secret, only the Met's most senior officers got to see it.

Frontline detectives like Dave McKelvey were left in the dark.

This little...this little stretch here,

the criminality in this little stretch of road,

the other side and this side, incredible.

Back in East London, he was building the case

against the three men who were arrested after the scrap yard raid.

We thought we'd hit the jackpot.

We'd identified the principal handlers.

We'd got the people who were actually handling the stolen goods.

It looked like associates of the organised-crime group,

or OCG, had suffered an expensive setback.

When you look at what the Newham crime squad had achieved,

they were chipping away at the outside of this OCG.

And doing, from what I saw, a very good job.

So, we're being arrested for that little bit of tube...?

If the OCG are getting hot,

they want to do something about it.

In January 2007,

intelligence came in about what that something might be.

It said there had been a meeting on a boat in Spain.

The meeting had been between the head of the organised-crime group

and one of the UK's most prolific contract killers.

And a contract had been put together,

a substantial contract for £1 million,

to kill three individuals.

In total, five intelligence sources said the same thing.

But who was the target and when would it happen?

The police had no idea.

It was Dave McKelvey who discovered answers

from a petty criminal who knew the hit man.

He told Dave the hit was already in play.

A very well-known contract killer, um...

had been sitting outside Stratford police station

for a two-week period.

We were told what car he was sitting in

and we were told that there was a submachine gun

in a car parked down a road

and that that individual had identified a...

I think it was a 52-plate Mondeo,

which was one of the police cars on the team.

I remember literally going cold, literally, sitting there

and just...just...you know, a moment of...of...

I suppose, sheer terror.

And then...a controlled panic sets in

because it's clear that this isn't going to happen in a week's time.

He's saying there's a man sitting outside a police station now

and he's got a machinegun to shoot dead one of my policemen.

I immediately left and I put a phone call in to his supervisor,

who I knew was with him, and just said, "Get him out".

The intelligence suggested they had the details,

home addresses of two other policemen they wanted to take out.

It was clear one of them was me.

Intelligence named the hit man

as the leader of a London street gang.

I thought that the balloon would go up, I thought...

Bang! ..that there would be, you know, there would be firearms teams.

I thought there'd be all sorts of things going on.

He says the threat wasn't taken seriously by senior officers.

There are set policies to deal with threat-to-life situations.

They didn't do anything.

They did absolutely nothing.

The hit was never carried out,

but continued to hang over Dave McKelvey and his team.

David Hunt says the intelligence about the hit

was plainly not credible.

He says he's never been arrested or questioned

about any alleged contract to kill.

He says he was never suspected of involvement with the stolen goods.

He accepts offering support to one of the arrested men,

but says none of them are his associates.

The three men arrested during the scrap yard raid

were now awaiting trial.

The evidence against them was overwhelming.

We were heading towards, um...we thought would be a plea of guilty.

One of the suspects was on remand in prison.

He didn't seem to be worried.

I had intelligence sources in the prison

that I was being regularly fed intelligence

on what that individual was saying.

And, um...the individual in prison

was making arrangements for his wedding.

It was bizarre.

Because he knows that he's going to get off.

And he's not going to get off. How can he possibly get off?

Did the criminals know something Dave McKelvey didn't?

That Dave McKelvey was now under investigation himself.

David's style of policing, perhaps, didn't, er...warm to everybody.

And he, er...could be described and was described

as being Gene Hunt on speed.

Albert Patrick later reviewed the allegations against McKelvey.

So, what was he being accused of?

I found that difficult to actually work out, personally.

But, er...they believed that he had an unhealthy relationship

with the people he was actually looking at and arresting.

SIRENS WAIL

The trial of the men arrested at the scrap yard was about to begin.

An anti-corruption detective sent an eight-page dossier

to Crown prosecutors.

It raised concerns about Dave McKelvey and his team.

There was an unease for me that a report was allowed to go

all the way to the CPS without anybody sanctioning it,

without anybody at a higher level.

And I never saw anything to say,

"OK, I'm the head of the anti-corruption squad,

"I've approved this".

I never saw that.

The report so alarmed prosecutors, they dropped the charges.

The trial collapsed.

I remember at the time just thinking, "I'm being fitted up".

You just had nowhere to go.

You just...you didn't know who to trust,

you didn't know who to believe.

Everything. The world...your world is turned upside-down.

One way or another, organised crime had prevailed.

It would be several years before Dave McKelvey discovered more

about how things had gone so badly wrong.

There are now approximately 6,000 organised-crime groups in the UK.

They cost the economy over £24 billion a year.

To understand the root of today's corruption,

you have to rewind the clock to the backhanders of the past.

SIRENS WAIL

South London, the 1980s.

A different world.

The police had no morals.

Because they was working both sides of the fence.

Paul Goodridge grew up in the borough of Croydon.

He witnessed police corruption first-hand.

SIRENS WAIL

Croydon was run by the Old Bill then.

It was run by the Old Bill.

That's why I went with villains

because at least I knew what they was.

Down in Croydon, they was all trying to hide what they was.

And you didn't know the good guys from the bad guys.

I was talking to this officer once in a club,

I was having an argument with him.

His exact words, he turned around and said,

"You think that you've got a firm?"

He said, "My firm's the biggest, right?"

And he said, "They're all dressed in blue".

-In short, you can't

-BLEEP

-with these people.

Paul Goodridge ran a private security company.

His best client was the actor, Richard Harris.

He also counted some of London's most notorious criminals as friends.

I've been with colourful people, right?

And I've not done no business with them, right? But I knew them.

I knew them to drink with, I knew them to associate with.

He says corrupt police were making money out of gangsters.

Some did, yeah, yeah.

It was rumoured, and I believe the rumours,

they used to hire out their warrant cards.

For a few hundred pounds,

criminals could rob each other while posing as policemen.

Yeah. Not once or twice.

It was a world of almost routine corruption.

Then an extraordinary event.

A murder unsolved to this day.

Daniel Morgan and Jonathan Rees were private detectives.

One would die, the other would become the prime suspect.

I had no reason to hate Daniel at all.

He was good at what he did.

We were salt and pepper type characters.

We worked well.

And we earned lots and lots of money.

And I lost lots of money, um...when he died.

I mean, but I'm not...worried about that now, um...

but I'm just saying that he was... he was...

more use to me alive than dead.

Um...and he was a friend.

In 1987, Daniel Morgan was found dead in a car park.

He'd been killed with an axe.

Did you kill Daniel Morgan or arrange for his murder?

You're too clever for me.

-You want an answer?

-I would like an answer, yeah.

No.

The murder remains mired

in allegations of corruption and incompetence

which, to this day, have never been resolved.

The original enquiry team drafted in officers from the crime squad

based here, at Catford police station.

We were a law unto ourselves, that Catford Crime Squad.

The villains didn't want to commit any crimes on Catford

because they know, you go to Catford, you'll get fitted up.

If evidence is not forthcoming, but you know the person is guilty,

it's just that it's just not there,

then we would give it a helping hand to get a conviction.

We got the results, the crime rate fell, everyone was happy.

The man in charge of the Catford Crime Squad

was Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.

Jonathan Rees' close friend.

Sid was like a king holding court.

Everything was done through Sid.

And Sid could then sort it out with the senior officers.

The day after the murder, Fillery was told

to take a witness statement from Jonathan Rees.

Fillery left the enquiry shortly afterwards.

Senior officers later became suspicious of Rees.

They believed he was the only person

who knew where Daniel Morgan would be on the night he was murdered.

They made a dreadful mistake on the day that they arrested me.

And from then on,

it...it...it wasn't an investigation to find the murderer of Daniel,

it was an investigation to find anyone or anything

to implicate me, and just me,

in the murder of Daniel.

It'd become blinkered.

Sid Fillery was also arrested,

but without real evidence, the cases against both were dropped.

Sid Fillery says his friendship with Rees

didn't compromise the murder inquiry.

He also says he took his responsibilities

on Catford Crime Squad seriously

and his team were busy enough dealing with people they'd arrested

without falsely creating evidence.

The Morgan murder ought to have been a wake-up call for the Met.

But it was another organisation altogether

that raised the alarm about police corruption.

A top-secret team within Customs and Excise.

They were targeting big-time drug smugglers

and they were called, Alpha.

Alpha was the... Was? Probably still is,

the telephone intercept section.

Until now, no customs officer has spoken publicly about its existence.

When you came into the organisation,

you'd be given a paper to read which was about interception.

So you'd read it...

and you'd be told, um...

"You might...you need to know about this,

"but you need now to forget it".

It was very secret.

Within our organisation, very few officers ever worked there.

Very few officers ever knew where it was done, the physical premises.

Very few officers ever knew how it was done.

Alpha began as a small team and grew rapidly.

It was hugely successful.

I mean, it was absolutely critical to our success.

-Yeah, yeah...

-Officers worked in shifts.

Whenever the criminals were talking, they had to be listening.

You're getting into the heart and soul

of the individual and their colleagues.

You're getting to understand them.

You're getting to understand their movements, what time they get up.

You're getting to understand who's important in their lives.

Yeah.

And, of course, people don't say,

"I'm going to smuggle 50 kilos of cocaine next week".

That's not how it works.

50 grand's worth of shirts. That's it.

They'll say to a pal, "Have you got the shirts?"

And the pal will say, "Well, I think...

"I think, er...I'm getting them next week".

That was intensive. My hearing suffered as a result of it.

-All those hours with headphones on?

-Absolutely.

By the end of the 1990s, cocaine busts had risen fivefold.

Heroin seizures more than doubled.

Millions and millions of pounds were at stake.

And it wasn't just drug dealers that Alpha could hear.

The most significant source of information

about bent police officers was from telephone intercepts.

And the range of criminality which police officers were involved in

was everything from just having a drink with a so-called informant,

or, I mean, in one or two cases,

police officers being right at the heart of smuggling episodes.

At its peak, they were listening in

to up to a dozen bent cops at any one time.

Alpha briefed senior officers at Scotland Yard.

The lower-grade detectives were almost indistinguishable

at some stages from the criminals with whom they operated.

And they were socially mixed up together

in a way that's quite difficult to conceive.

I mean, we had intelligence at one stage

of two criminals who were targets of ours

playing football for a Metropolitan Police football team.

Very hard to believe.

For the time I was there, at least six police officers were arrested.

But convicting them was extremely difficult.

Extremely difficult.

It wasn't just Customs and Excise

who were warning the Met about the scale of corruption.

So, too, was the Met's own internal auditor.

The Met employed 55,000 people when I was there.

If you employ 55,000 people,

you won't have 55,000 totally honest people.

You'll have some people who join because they're criminals.

Some become criminals when something happens in their personal life.

You're going to have some people who've been suborned by criminals.

It's the nature of the job.

SIRENS WAIL

Peter Tickner was brought in

after the Met's assistant director of finance

had stolen £5 million.

The end result of that was I got the job of head of audit at the Met

and given the power to look at everything.

He found out that contractors working for the Met

were a Trojan horse for corruption.

I was contacted by a head of audit of another government department.

They had a problem with a dodgy works contractor

who was paying bribes to a member of their staff.

When he started asking questions,

he was told the dodgy contractor was also being employed by the Met.

So I went and saw my mate and he said,

"I've been warning them they're using dodgy contractors,

"but nobody will listen to me on the support side".

A check was done on the home address of the company director

with Met intelligence.

We got the reply, "I wouldn't touch him if I were you.

"That's Frank. That's the well-known armed robber." What?!

You know? Totally stunned.

The Met had signed a £1 million three-year contract

with a maintenance company owned by a known criminal.

His workmen had access

to police stations all across South East London.

And it turned out they changed the DCI's notice board

at Tower Bridge.

They'd also changed the locks on the cells at Tower Bridge.

And they'd done other minor works and maintenance in the office

where detectives were doing armed-robbery investigations

in Tower Bridge. And this was an armed robber who'd been in there.

So God knows who they sent,

or who went around all these police properties. I hate to think.

Peter Tickner says he tried to raise his concerns with a senior officer.

It didn't go down well.

All the paperwork he had in front of him, he threw at me, like that.

And words to the effect of, quite loudly shouted, you know,

"You're not a detective, you're not a police officer,

"you're not trained in investigation.

"You have no right to investigate anything in the Met.

"That's a police officer's job! What the blank, blank, blank

"do you think you're doing a police officer's job?!"

Later, he discovered the armed robber was passing information

to an organised-crime gang that was itself under police surveillance.

Of course, nobody talked to anybody inside the Met.

This is classic, you know, divide.

The operational side were running an operation,

they were trying to nail the big villains in the South East.

They weren't interested that one of the villains

had a works and maintenance contract with the Met.

Organised crime was getting a toehold.

And the Met was getting a bad reputation.

Customs didn't trust them,

MI6 didn't trust them, MI5 didn't trust them.

Nobody trusted them.

That corruption problem

wasn't confined to an individual officer here or there.

It impacted upon offices, squads, teams, et cetera.

So, if you like, this suggestion of corrupt networks.

It was obvious the Met had a problem it could no longer ignore,

but it didn't know how big the problem was.

In 1994, the Met Commissioner ordered a top secret operation

to get better intelligence.

If you're going to tackle corruption,

particularly allegations of police corruption,

you need to understand the nature of it,

so you need to undertake a scoping and intelligence-gathering operation

to ascertain what the problem is.

If you don't get that,

you're not going to know how best to investigate it.

So they wanted an undercover squad that could gather intelligence

that could be used to try and nail these bastards.

The squad that would nail them was called CIB 3.

It was based in this now-empty office block.

The detectives were hand-picked, and became known as the Untouchables.

It was very confidential.

Even within the squads we worked in silence.

We didn't discuss jobs that we were involved in.

The scoping exercise identified a number of officers

that were clearly involved, or believed at the time to be involved.

The truth of the matter,

they were serious and organised criminals with police badges,

if you want a description of them, and we were set up to target them.

Two of its biggest targets

were Kevin Garner and Terry McGuinness

of the Met's elite Flying Squad.

McGuinness was one of my DCs on the Flying Squad.

He got caught in a sting operation

where they went into a house

and stole lots of drugs that had been put there.

A great investigation - all on camera.

They were caught bangs to rights.

Garner and McGuinness were arrested in 1996

trying to steal £400,000 worth of cannabis.

They confessed, and became the first ever police supergrasses.

They named 80 officers they said were bent.

McGuinness made an allegation

that the whole of the Flying Squad was corrupt.

Using supergrasses was controversial,

and it snared some very senior officers...

including Albert Patrick,

one of the Met's most respected murder detectives.

He was accused of stealing £8,000 recovered from a Post Office robbery

and using it to pay for a Christmas party.

31 years' service, and I'm getting accused of corruption.

Think about it. Are you with me?

It just didn't stack up.

At the time, Albert Patrick

was in charge of Scotland Yard's most explosive case -

the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

-REPORTER:

-Senior officers at Scotland Yard

confirmed that Mr Patrick was being investigated

in relation to a corruption inquiry

at the Flying Squad's East London offices where he worked before.

The corruption allegations forced his removal.

I went on television that afternoon and said I'd clear my name.

I did, six months later.

I cleared my name, but it hurt my wife.

It hurt my family. It hurt my friends.

80 officers had been accused of corruption

on the word of two bent cops.

Only five, including the supergrasses,

ever went to jail.

It was innovation, it was new techniques,

and we made mistakes and we were criticised.

Do I think debriefing people

and using them as witnesses is a good thing?

In hindsight it probably wasn't, actually,

it wasn't the best technique -

but it gave an awful lot of information

which later went on to be corroborated.

At the height of the supergrass investigation,

175 detectives were fighting corruption.

To me, it was proportionate resources.

175 detectives aren't that many

when you think how many major investigations we undertook.

One of those investigations was the decade-old murder of Daniel Morgan.

His former business partner, Jonathan Rees, was still a suspect.

Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery had left the police

and was by now working with him.

CIB 3 began a spying operation on the pair of them.

They uncovered a bent cop and a plot against an innocent woman.

I remember sitting in the van

with all these policemen all laughing and joking,

um...before they took me to the police station.

And, you know, I was under arrest, basically.

Kim James didn't know what was happening, or why,

but the Untouchables did.

They'd recruited a former detective to go undercover.

His job was to get close to Jonathan Rees,

someone he used to know.

So, I said, "Well, I suppose if I was going to go about it,

"it would be along the lines of,

"I was a disgruntled pissed off ex-policeman

"who had been treated badly."

He hates the police because he got locked up for his partner's murder,

so I said that would be a good starting thing.

Rees fell for Haslam's approach,

so his CIB 3 handlers asked him...

Could I steal the office keys?

I said, "What would be the point of that?"

He said, "Well, then we've got access."

I said, "Yeah, but if they lose a bunch of keys,

"what would you do if you lost your house keys?"

I said, "You'd change all the locks."

So, he said, "Oh, that's a point."

So, I said, "Have you not heard of taking impressions of keys?

"I might be able to help you there."

"Why?"

So I said, "Well, that way they don't lose them,

"they're not going to replace the locks."

"Oh, yeah. Meet me at Gatwick Airport."

He said, "I'll arrange to get you some key boxes."

They wanted the access to bug it up.

So then they could put the equipment in -

and, really, that's what they did.

The Untouchables were listening 24/7.

Jonathan Rees had a client involved in a custody battle.

Simon James paid Jonathan Rees

to put his wife Kim under surveillance.

The job was simple enough, but he suspected,

and had been told by friends of hers

she was mixing with the wrong people...

..and that she was earning some extra income by...

..dealing.

Jonathan Rees couldn't find any evidence

Kim James was dealing drugs -

because there wasn't any.

That didn't stop him.

He hatched another plan -

steal her keys and put a camera in her flat.

It was all perfectly legal.

The... At worst, a trespass.

We got the keys removed from her vehicle,

but when we tried to use them, the keys,

we didn't have a key for the communal door,

so that was, basically, the job was dead in the water.

Simon James wanted sole custody of their son Daniel.

He wanted his wife's home raided, so he and Jonathan Rees

paid a policeman £1,500 to make it happen.

The reason for going through him

was that if we'd gone to the local police station

and said, "Oh, we think this has happened, we think that's happened,

"and we've got these suspicious things happening,"

they'd have told us to go away.

Rightly so, they've got better things to do.

So we would have got a second class service,

whereas by using this contact, we got a first class service -

and he passed over that information to the other side.

Were you breaking the law paying the police officer to do that?

I wasn't, no.

All this time, the Untouchables were listening in.

Their tape recordings revealed what was really going on.

Namely, plant cocaine in her car.

And this was being monitored.

The police officer Jonathan Rees paid

was Detective Constable Austin Warns.

He told another detective

that Kim James would have drugs in her house that night.

Information from an informant - an informant that never existed.

He then fed these lies into the Met's criminal intelligence system.

Kim James was arrested.

They even looked in Daniel's bedroom.

They looked in his cot.

They strip searched me.

And then they didn't find anything.

So then they said, "Oh, we're going to have to go and look in your car,"

and somebody shouted something.

They had found a lot of drugs in my car.

They said that it was cocaine, lots of it -

enough for me to have been given a lengthy prison sentence.

Detective Constable Austin Warns pleaded guilty

and was jailed for four years.

Simon James had paid Jonathan Rees £8,000 to set up his wife.

They were both sentenced to seven years

for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

I really still to this day feel sorry for her.

She is raided by the police.

Of course it was never going to go anywhere,

because it wasn't cocaine, and it was all corruption.

Despite his conviction,

Jonathan Rees still denies he plotted to put cocaine

in Kim James' car, and that he corrupted a police officer.

Corruption is if you get someone to do something

that they shouldn't do,

or get someone not to do something that they should do.

He was asked and tasked to do something that he should do.

We are asking him to take time off from his normal work

or put himself out to spend time and pass on this information

to get us that first class service.

Daniel, the son Kim James came close to losing, is now 18.

She says if the plot to jail her had succeeded,

she wouldn't be here today.

I probably would have ended my life,

because there's no way that I would have been able to stay in prison

knowing that my son was with somebody who could do that to them

and knowing that when I got out,

there was no way I'd be able to see him.

The surveillance lasted nearly a year.

It rescued Kim James from a plot to frame her,

and found evidence of police corruption -

but the probes hadn't captured any new evidence

about the murder of Daniel Morgan.

In 2011, after yet another investigation,

Jonathan Rees was formally acquitted of murder.

He and Sid Fillery are now suing the Met.

If you tried to write that story in a novel,

people would say it was so far fetched

it couldn't conceivably be true.

And yet it was.

CIB 3 had disrupted networks of bent cops

and sent the message that corruption wouldn't be tolerated...

but it was costing millions.

There was definitely an issue in that money had to be saved,

money was tight.

The heroic days, if you like, of professional standards were over.

The people who'd really trailblazed the new techniques

and a real concerted push against corruption,

that was finished,

and we needed a more sustainable model.

Stephen Roberts was the first senior officer

to calculate how much it cost to send a bent cop to prison.

Certainly in the hundreds of thousands -

and it was in the high hundreds of thousands -

and that clearly wasn't sustainable.

Not simply because we couldn't afford that sort of money any more,

but because it was very obvious that there were more targets,

more potential targets,

and there would simply be no question of tackling that number

at that sort of price per head.

Prosecutions could drag on for years -

officers suspended on full pay.

We might be paying them

out of the public purse for two years.

And we said, "Well, isn't there anything we can do

"to short circuit this?"

We came up with what, at first, I have to say,

seemed like a rather silly idea -

which was, "Why don't we just call them in,

"tell them off and tell them that we don't love them any more?"

They decided to write to corrupt officers suggesting they resign.

Officers were told that when their case came to court,

their contrition might be taken into account by the judge.

It became known as the 23p initiative -

the cost of a second class stamp.

To our surprise, I have to say, everybody that we tried it on -

and there were well over a dozen in the first year -

there and then signed the letter of resignation

that was offered to them.

It was so successful

that we started to work out how much it was saving us -

and it came to millions!

You know, that comparison between the Rolls-Royce of the good old days

and the Mini now.

Rolls-Royces are great,

but if you can't afford the petrol they don't get you very far.

Mini - you can go a long way in a Mini.

Might not be quite as comfortable, might not accelerate quite as well,

but it gets you a long way.

The glory days of the Untouchables were over...

..but the threat from the corrupting influence

of organised crime was not.

Dave McKelvey's Newham crime squad had been neutralised,

he believes, by organised crime.

Do you miss it?

Yeah.

If I had the choice, I'd be doing it still.

I would never have given it up.

He and his team had been threatened with a £1 million hit,

put under investigation for corruption,

and Dave McKelvey himself had been suspended.

I'd gone from being a very successful, well-respected

detective chief inspector, quite a senior policeman,

you know, who was out working at the coalface,

nicking villains and putting them behind bars,

to suddenly - my house is being searched.

Albert Patrick, former of the head of the Lawrence inquiry

was asked by the Met to look at what had happened

to Dave McKelvey and his team.

The first and most important recommendation,

I think you'd find, was that the investigation

against Dave McKelvey and two of his colleagues was flawed.

Mistakes were made, and it should never have happened.

One of those mistakes involved suspicions

about an officer called Corrupt Dave.

These suspicions had already been checked out.

It wasn't Dave McKelvey.

They'd been investigated covertly,

and they knew, as a result of another operation,

that we were completely exonerated.

They knew categorically we were clean.

Corrupt Dave was a completely different officer,

based at a completely different police station -

yet suspicion was raised again about Dave McKelvey

in the corruption investigation that was found to be fatally flawed.

I think the original intention was to take us out,

and I think what happened, the events that then followed...

..they didn't have to kill us.

Effectively they used the system against us.

He believes his investigation into organised crime

had been deliberately derailed - but can't prove it.

The end result of that is two major trials get dropped

that cost the public millions and millions of pounds,

and criminals, organised crime,

are able to carry on their corrupt relationships,

you know, people walk free that should never have walked free.

Albert Patrick is certain the investigation into Dave McKelvey

was incompetent -

whether or not it was corrupt, he's more cautious.

When you put it all together,

for me, there was clearly a view that...

that OCG had actually achieved what their aim was -

not by killing the cop, if it was McKelvey,

but by having the prisoners discontinued at trial.

Did that happen because of corruption,

or because of a bit of luck on their behalf,

and you had a poor investigation?

I won't give an answer to that.

I don't have enough accurate information

or seen enough documentation to give a view either way.

The Met says organised crime

remains its single biggest corruption threat.

We are an organisation that probably deals with

more organised crime group investigations than any other

that you are likely to find, certainly in this country.

We are absolutely alive to the threat

that organised crime groups pose, and absolutely alive to the fact

that any decent, sensible organised crime group

will be trying to corrupt police officers.

The Met also says it's changed the way it works

to make it harder for organised crime to corrupt police officers.

What we have now, the levels of control

and the levels of oversight,

it's a very difficult environment, I think,

for somebody to knock a job off track.

Dave McKelvey's career was finished.

The detective who'd been awarded 60 commendations

left the Met suffering a break down.

I just literally fell to pieces.

I was unwell, very unwell. And...

It was, you know, it was over. My career was over.

Dave McKelvey sued the Met.

They settled, apologised - but won't comment on his case.

Since leaving the police, Dave McKelvey's seen more evidence

that organised crime could have compromised his investigations.

From the Met's secret report, Tiberius.

Named police officers involved in corruption,

and particularly involved in corrupt relationships

with this particular, same organised criminal network,

and yet nothing was done about them.

One name jumped out.

An officer in his squad

who'd seen sensitive intelligence about the Hunt crime syndicate.

When we started our operation off, we should have been told.

We should have been made aware of all that.

They've got to the point where they know all the tactics

that are used by police.

David Hunt says he can't comment on the Tiberius report,

as he's not seen it.

He says he doesn't have an organised crime group,

he's not a corrupter of police officers,

and as far as he's aware, he doesn't know anyone who is.

Organised crime makes billions.

The cost of protecting empires - a few bent cops.

People think that corruption in the Police Service is cyclical.

It's not - it's the response to corruption that's cyclical.

If you can protect your group, your syndicate,

your organisation and you can use a bent cop to do it, they will do it.

That's in their nature - and you'll probably never stop it.

Simple as that, you will never stop it.

For Dave McKelvey,

the threat from organised crime isn't going away either.

I've got two choices -

I could go away and crawl under a rock and hide...

and live scared.

Or, I can hope and pray that someone out there

is going to do something about the corruption that we uncovered

and they do something about organised crime.

Dave McKelvey fought a battle against organised criminals,

and he lost.

No-one pretends that the war between the police

and crime gangs over corruption will ever end.

The question is the same as it's always been -

who's most determined to win it?