Guthrie/Charlery Saints and Scroungers

Saints And Scroungers puts the spotlight on benefit thieves,

those who ruthlessly steal millions of pounds from the British taxpayer.

But we also search out the saints, the people who help

put unclaimed cash into the hands of those that really deserve it.

Saints And Scroungers is all about busting benefit thieves

who steal millions every year.

And the crack team of investigators determined to

scupper their devious scams.

And we also shine a light on those who genuinely need the money

and the people who help them get it. They are our saints.

The saints get help and the fraudsters get their comeuppance.

Coming up on today's show.

How a family stole over £100,000 of benefit money

to fund their property empire.

-How many are we talking about?

-Five properties.

-They're robbing the system blind?

-Yeah.

And the man whose disability threatened to stop him

living the life he dreamed of.

I spent years looking for work.

I felt like I was wasting my time.

Damien suffered a lot of knock-backs, he got depressed,

he got to the point where he didn't want to get up no more.

It's like he withdrew.

Families are there to support each other through good times and bad.

Now, to me, that means going out and earning an honest living.

Picking the kids up from school, helping with the elderly parents.

NOT helping your child to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds

of benefit money and get rich at the taxpayers' expense.

Meet the Guthries.

34-year-old Riccardo and his sisters, Bianca and Cosima.

On the surface a close-knit, loving family

from Chingford in East London.

But they are suspected of stealing nearly £112,000

from local London councils to fund

a property empire worth £1.5 million.

North London council Barnet were making checks into all benefit

claims across the borough and were alerted to some dodgy dealings.

Barnet's head of counter-fraud, Clair Green,

-has been hot on their trail.

-Alarm bells rang

when we started looking at the benefit claims in more detail.

The same name cropped up at

different addresses across our borough

and when we looked there was the same names

that were cropping up at addresses in other London boroughs as well.

Those names were all those of the Guthrie family

and although there was no evidence of wrongdoing,

it was enough to spark an investigation into the family.

I've come to meet Clair,

to try and get to the bottom of this family of fraudsters.

You've established benefit's been paid at different addresses,

across different boroughs.

Nothing wrong with that though, is there?

No, but what we'd started to do is look more closely at the claims.

We kept coming across the same names at different addresses,

three addresses in the Borough of Barnet and two addresses outside.

So we held a meeting with the local authorities' investigators.

We started looking more closely at the claims

and we decided we would take the lead on the investigation

because we had the same names, same landlords,

same owners of the property and it wouldn't be possible to be claiming

benefit concurrently in different boroughs at the same time.

-Was it at that point that alarm bells started to ring?

-Yeah.

There were at least three other London boroughs

that were also potentially caught up in this suspected family fraud,

including Kensington and Chelsea, Waltham Forest and Ealing.

The main investigator on this complex case

was Tony Nash.

It was his first job to discover who owned the properties

where housing benefit was being claimed.

He began with a property in Barnet.

Paul Barratt purchased Willow House in December 2003

for £170,000.

Further checks showed

that Paul Barratt was an alias name

used by Riccardo Guthrie.

But how did they know it was an alias?

The police have a national database whereby people

who have been convicted of crimes will appear on that register.

In addition, if somebody is using alias names

they will also appear on this record.

So their family fraud business began.

Not satisfied with just buying the house through shady means,

the Guthries hatched a plot to get benefits through the house as well.

A claim for housing benefit and council tax benefit

was made at Willow House by somebody called

Courtney Campbell on the 10th of July 2003.

And who was Courtney Campbell?

Courtney Campbell was an ex-partner of Bianca Guthrie

who is a sister of Riccardo.

So they've now have Bianca Guthrie's ex-boyfriend involved

and this was no flash in the pan.

These housing benefit claims on Willow House went on for four years

and amounted to over £30,000.

Not to be left out, Cosima Guthrie -

Bianca and Riccardo's younger sister -

was paid £17,000 of housing benefit for the same address -

to which, as a relative, she was not entitled.

It was quite obvious this was a family job.

Riccardo Guthrie was the owner of the property.

Courtney Campbell was claiming housing benefit.

His ex-partner, Bianca Guthrie, and also Cosima Guthrie

were getting the benefit payments into their bank accounts.

2003 was a busy year for the Guthries.

In September of that year, Riccardo Guthrie

sold a further property he owned in North London to another member

of the Guthrie clan.

Keeping true to the family business,

it wasn't long before Riccardo's sister Bianca,

held her hand out

for some benefit help using this same address.

A benefit claim form was received by Waltham Forest

in July 2005 from a Bianca Guthrie.

She was claiming housing benefit and council tax benefit

in respect of Connington Crescent.

Now, it seems, the Guthries felt like they were on a bit of a roll

and Riccardo quickly added another property

to their growing portfolio,

using another alias.

This time, Paul Simpson.

And he wasted no time in putting the house to use.

Two days after Riccardo Guthrie

purchased Perry Mead Road,

an application form for housing benefit and council tax benefit

was received from Cosima Guthrie, who is the sister of Riccardo.

She stated that her landlord was a Paul Simpson

and she was not related to her landlord.

It wasn't true, as Riccardo Guthrie was the owner of Perry Mead Road.

These multiple identities seem to be catching!

This family have had more IDs than I have had hot dinners!

Time for some clarification.

The kingpin is Riccardo Guthrie. He is the main player in this fraud.

He has purchased all of the different properties.

-How many are we talking about?

-Five different properties.

-All under his name?

-Either under his name,

or various alias names that he uses.

-And what was he doing with the properties?

-Once he got the properties,

he created a fake tenancy agreements either with a member of his family, normally his sisters,

and in one case an associate.

Whenever he put them in there, were they under their own names, or aliases?

-No, they were all under aliases as well.

-This must have been a nightmare to investigate.

Yes, really complicated.

Just how many aliases were involved?

They had a number of different aliases.

Riccardo, the main person, he had five different aliases.

His sister had four different aliases. Another sister had one.

And how they created those identities, was they used DVLA records

and they obtained driving licences in their alias names.

From that driving licence, they used that as an identity document

to build on and create a completely false identity.

So they applied for a driving licence in their real name,

then wrote to DVLA saying, "I've changed my name,"

get another licence,

then getting bank accounts and credit cards and things like that,

-building up a credit profile at various addresses. Some of them have four or five?

-Yes.

-And then, obviously, they are robbing the system blind.

-Yes.

And the reason they needed

so many fake identities was to disguise the fact

that they were claiming housing benefit for so many addresses and from a relative,

which is illegal unless you have a valid tenancy agreement in place.

Then, just when you might have thought the Guthries

couldn't get any greedier,

it seems Bianca Guthrie, using another name, Angel Smith-Walker,

was after a further fraudulent housing and council tax benefit handout,

using yet another property in the family's portfolio...

..Mays Lane in North London.

The payments for housing benefit in respect of the property behind

were paid to Riccardo Morgan,

who's a known alias of Riccardo Guthrie.

So, that was over £11,000 going into the family pot

from April 2004 to July 2005.

But did she even live at this property she was claiming for?

We're of the opinion that Bianca Guthrie

never resided at the property behind, and even if she had,

she would NOT have been entitled to housing benefit

as she was related to the landlord,

and there was not a commercial agreement in place.

But there was still another twist to this tale.

Bianca Guthrie actually owned another property

which she did not declare on the application form.

If she had declared that,

she would NOT have been entitled to housing benefit anyway.

But which house did she actually live in?

We'll never know.

The Guthries had clearly been using these properties

to fund their criminal lifestyle but no-one who owns or lives

in any of the houses now, has any connection with them.

Housing benefit is obviously there to help those in genuine need,

to make sure they've a roof over their head.

But in the last year alone, housing benefit thieves

stole £290 million from you and me, the taxpayer,

making it the largest single area of loss within the benefits system.

And it seems to me that these Guthries

had been playing fast and loose with our money for long enough.

For now, it's farewell to the fraudsters

and hello to the people we call our saints,

those who are in genuine need of help

but are too proud or don't know how to claim what's rightfully theirs.

And the people who point them in the right direction.

Imagine, you've always known what you wanted to do for a job.

You've studied hard, you've got the right qualifications,

but no matter what you do,

you just can't find that elusive job.

29-year-old Damien Charlery has fought hard all his life

to overcome the learning difficulties and speech impediment

he's suffered as a result of being born prematurely.

Damien has a speech and language delayed reaction.

It can be delayed from anything from five to ten minutes,

depending on how comfortable he is.

Encouraged by his mother, Damien achieved the qualifications

he needed to pursue his dream of standing on his own feet

and carving out a career, but it was tough going.

I was looking for work for quite a long time.

I spent years looking for work. I felt I was wasting my time.

I knew he was going to come up against some barriers.

The barriers he came up against was awful.

-How were you surviving?

-I was still living with my mum.

What were you doing for money?

Well, like, I had incapacity benefit.

-Income support and DLA.

-Disability living allowance?

-Yeah.

Damien's entitlement to benefit help has never stopped him

wanting to pay his own way and to build a career to be proud of,

but the odds seemed stacked against him.

Damien suffered a lot of knock-backs.

He got depressed, he got to the point where he didn't want to get up no more.

It's like he withdrew.

Although Damien was struggling in his professional life,

his personal life had never looked brighter.

He had met Michelle on a training course soon after leaving college.

Michelle knew just how much having a job meant to Damien.

He found it quite hard looking for jobs

cos there was nothing really there

and he wasn't like some other people that just wanted to stay at home.

He really wanted to work, so it was quite stressful, I think, at times.

Finally, just when it seemed his years of struggle

would count for nothing, in stepped Damien's very own saint.

Meet Ameeta Pathak from Ellingham Employment Services

whose mission in life is to help people with disabilities find work

and then continue to support them throughout their career.

We offer a variety of accredited courses. For example, catering

or horticulture.

Really, the aim is to tailor-make the courses to suit our clients' needs

and their skills.

It was first clear when Damien came here,

though very motivated and very positive and keen to find work,

he lacked some of the skills needed to find paid employment.

Although Damien had worked hard

to gain qualifications at college in animal care and horticulture,

his voluntary work experience so far hadn't fully equipped him

for a full-time job. But that was about to change as there was

a training course just starting that was right up Damien's street.

At the time, we were running an accredited programme

which offered Damien an NVQ in horticulture.

Damien was determined to make the most of this new opportunity.

Damien completed the course which ran for a year.

He did extremely well.

And he shone because he was so enthusiastic and very motivated.

And, consequently,

he was offered a place on a social enterprise that we were setting up.

This social enterprise was a gardening service

called Weedbusters,

employing people with learning disabilities

to carry out a variety of gardening jobs

for corporate and private clients.

What was your job? What sort of things were you doing there?

We were doing other people's gardens,

but as well as that, we were also doing contracts, jobs like,

for example, schools, parks.

-How much did you enjoy it?

-I enjoyed it, it was nice hard work.

Finally, Damien was able to combine the horticultural knowledge he had gained at college

with the new practical gardening skills he'd learnt on the training course.

Everything from landscaping jobs, to planting borders,

to pruning hedges, and, most importantly, get paid for it.

While you worked at Weedbusters, what happened to your benefits?

I finally came off income support and incapacity benefit.

How did that feel?

It felt great, because I don't like having to rely on anything.

You didn't actually like being on benefits, is that what you are saying?

Yes, I would have liked something to do, it has been so difficult until now.

Damien's life was finally on track. And to add the icing on the cake,

he moved in with Michelle.

However, Michelle lived on the other side of London

and although he loved his hard-won job,

travelling up to three hours a day eventually took its toll.

Damien hung onto his newfound confidence and came to a decision.

I decided to look for a job closer to home which would suit me better.

Once again, his saint was there to help.

When Damien spotted the job, we contacted the employer

and explained although he had a disability,

he had all the relevant skills to do this job, which was a gardening assistant.

We explained that we offered support in employment,

should he be successful.

-What happened?

-I got a first interview to begin with,

and I did well in that interview.

Then-then-then again, I had a second interview in which I did well,

then I heard that I had got the job.

-You did?

-Yeah.

-Congratulations.

-Thank you.

-Are you still there?

-Yeah.

-How long have you been there in total?

-I have been there

since November 2008 - I have been there for two years.

He's excelled.

He's done things that I never thought he could do.

He's stuck when I thought he was going to give up,

when I thought there was no other way for him to turn,

and I saw him come back from that.

I know he's got great ability.

And he's a lovely person. A beautiful person.

It's clear things are on the up for Damien.

His work ethic and persistence are finally paying off

and his dreams are coming true.

Now, back to the Guthries and the world of scroungers.

The fraud team at North London council Barnet are taking the lead

on an investigation into one of the largest family frauds the council has ever seen.

They are closing in on the Guthrie clan.

Kingpin Riccardo, his two sisters, Cosima and Bianca

and Bianca's ex-boyfriend, Courtney Campbell.

It seems they have been building up

a property empire across London,

claiming housing and council tax benefits

by renting houses to tenants who turned out to be family members

using made-up names or who didn't exist at all.

But benefit thieves by any other names would still be known as cheats.

When they were registered to that house,

were they actually living there?

We found no evidence of them living at the properties in most cases.

These fraudsters were clearly up to their eyes in crooked deals.

The Guthries created a minefield of misinformation

and multiple identities

to try and put investigators off the scent.

But the evidence is piling up.

It's overwhelming.

It is over 5,000 pieces of evidence that all had to be logged

and analysed by our investigators. At times we had the entire team working on this case.

We have never dealt with anything this big before at Barnet.

The investigators had their work cut out

keeping track of the tangled web of properties and names

that this family gang of fraudsters was using to steal

thousands of pounds a month in benefits.

Then the Guthries came up with a new scheme to maximise the money

they could make from their property empire.

The Guthrie family purchased properties on the ends of terraces,

so they could build on the side of these properties.

Riccardo Guthrie purchased the property behind,

and then obtained planning permission to build on the side of it, which you can see here.

Two houses were clearly better than one

when it came to squeezing double the money out of the taxpayer.

Over in another family property in North London,

a new-build had been created on the side of the house.

And Bianca Guthrie was carrying out her own little scam

to contribute to the family's ill-gotten gains.

She was claiming housing benefit and council tax benefit in respect of Connington Crescent.

Bianca Guthrie claimed nearly £15,000 from the new address at Connington Crescent.

And guess what?

Not only did it seem that she never lived there,

but all the money she received to pay her rent

went into an account that she used under a different name.

Now, we know that the Guthries had been using these properties to fund their criminal empire.

But none of the current owners or occupiers of these properties has any connection with them.

It was time to knock on the Guthries' many front doors.

In February 2007, we organised raids

with Metropolitan Police

and investigators from other local authorities as well.

We simultaneously visited eight properties early in the morning.

None of the family members were there on the morning of the searches at the properties.

We searched the houses and we found a large number of documentary evidence

that assisted us in our investigation.

We found benefit application forms, bank statements,

driving licences, all in the alias names.

We seized over 5,000 pieces of evidence that day.

Although there wasn't a Guthrie in sight,

in another twist to this tale, the houses were far from empty.

-Who was living there?

-At some of the addresses, we found that there was genuine tenants in there,

paying rent to him as well as the housing benefit that he was receiving.

So, presumably he rented those out to people who were working

-and paying rent privately.

-Yes.

OK, which is fairly shrewd, because he is keeping under the radar then.

-He has tenancy agreements set up and gets benefit too.

-Yes.

-A lot of money involved?

Yeah, a lot of money involved.

Was there no end to the Guthries' greed? Apparently not.

So the family have

four grand a month in benefits that is totally fraudulent.

They have also got private rents coming in on the various houses as well.

-Were they living a lavish lifestyle?

-Yeah, very lavish lifestyle.

When we visited them on the day of the arrest,

it was established that they were driving Porsches, Land Rovers,

they had flashy watches, designer clothes,

a really good lifestyle, they was living.

-OK. And we are paying for it!

-We are paying for it, yes.

That does hurt, doesn't it?

Finally, armed with a stack of evidence,

it was time to bring in the Guthries to interview under caution.

First up was the kingpin himself, Riccardo Guthrie.

Who, wouldn't you know it,

when confronted with his crimes by the interviewing officer,

suddenly seemed lost for words.

And if Riccardo thought he had any secrets,

he was in for a big surprise.

Time to name names.

Have you ever used that name?

Have you ever used that name?

But it didn't matter how many names Guthrie tried to hide behind.

There was just no escaping his trail of lies and deceit.

Then it was his sister's turn, Bianca, to be in the hot seat.

Would fraud investigator Tony Nash have any more success

in getting her to open up about the family business?

NASH: ..certainly since that date. Is that correct?

The Guthries might have had nothing to say,

but the facts spoke loud and clear.

Finally, it was time for this fraudster family to go to court.

And if you thought that would be the end of their conniving,

you'd be wrong.

Once the jury went out to deliberate on their verdict,

evidence came forward that there potentially had been some jury tampering

and the judge at the time had to consider this evidence.

There was an investigation

and she decided that there was sufficient evidence

that there had been some jury tampering,

and she discharged the jury.

She decided at that point to deliver the verdict herself

and this has made legal history.

At last, after five long years of hard investigation,

the Guthries were about to get a taste

of a different kind of tenancy.

All four benefits cheats were found guilty of conspiring with others to defraud.

Riccardo Guthrie was sentenced to three years in prison.

Bianca Guthrie was sentenced to two years.

Cosima Guthrie was given a sentence of 18 months in jail.

And Courtney Campbell, Bianca's ex-boyfriend,

was given a 12 month suspended sentence

and made to serve 160 hours of unpaid work.

As for the properties, the London Borough of Barnet,

working with the Metropolitan Police payback unit,

have started confiscation proceedings

which hopefully will result in as much money as possible going back into the public purse...

where it belongs.

At times, it was completely overwhelming,

due to the scale and the complexity of the case.

It is very satisfying to know they all got guilty verdicts

and are behind bars now.

It has taken five long years for investigators to dismantle

the Guthrie property empire.

An empire that was built with taxpayers' money.

But brick by brick, this family fraud has been exposed

and now Riccardo, Cosima and Bianca are behind bars...

where they belong.

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