For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Read online

  For Queen and Currency

  Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

  Michael Gillard

  For Sparkle and Cool Hand. Shine on.

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue: A crash foretold

  Part One: Boom (1993–2004)

  Chapter 1 Essex princess

  Chapter 2 The ‘mobile classroom’

  Chapter 3 Road to royalty

  Chapter 4 Gripper meets Purple One

  Chapter 5 Bubble bath

  Chapter 6 The Currency Club

  Chapter 7 Throne games

  Chapter 8 ULPD: a firm within The Firm

  Chapter 9 Jimmy’s

  Chapter 10 Gripper Airways

  Chapter 11 The corgi that didn’t bark

  Part Two: Bust (2005–2014)

  Chapter 12 Grand designs

  Chapter 13 Winter of discontent

  Chapter 14 The Bristol connection

  Chapter 15 Death threats, guns and gangsters

  Chapter 16 Royal Protection: the Osmans

  Chapter 17 Royal hunt of the Sun

  Chapter 18 Annus horribilis

  Chapter 19 God save the Prince

  Chapter 20 God save the Queen

  Afterword: At Her Majesty’s pleasure

  Photographs

  Note on sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Preface

  No Old Bill ’ave ever admitted to what we’ve done … The Queen is going to be mightily pissed off.

  This book began with a phone call out of the blue one afternoon in the summer of 2008. The caller was offering an amazing tale that, on the face of it, had everything my news desk at the Sunday Times could want: royal indiscretions, high-risk gambling, brown envelopes and greedy, out-of-control Buckingham Palace cops striking gangsta poses on the Throne of England. All of which had seemingly taken place on the watch of Scotland Yard officers paid to protect the Queen and her family during the war on terrorism.

  The man at the end of my Nokia identified himself as Paul Page, a 37-year-old recently sacked police officer. It quickly became apparent that the Yard’s anti-corruption squad, the Complaints Investigation Bureau (CIB), was investigating Page and he didn’t like it. He spoke lucidly but with machine-gun delivery about how, as a Royal Protection officer for ten years, he was now facing charges of threats to kill and fraud. A big fraud, I would soon discover.

  Page spat his version of events down the phone: ‘I operated a spread betting syndicate from Buckingham Palace. Over 130 officers were involved. CIB stitched me up big time and I can prove it.’

  I’d heard it all before, many times: another dirty cop trying to pin his corruption on the undoubtedly venal internal politics of Scotland Yard and the cover-ups that will continue to occur as long as we allow the police to investigate their own.

  But Page was different. Through his verbal assault of fact, theory and fuck-peppered anger he made one thing crystal clear. ‘You are not a shoulder to cry on,’ he said. ‘I am not pretending to be innocent.’

  It turned out that Page had read a book I co-authored four years earlier about Scotland Yard’s phoney attempt at a ‘no hiding place’ clean-up of corruption in its ranks. That book, Untouchables, exposed two decades of double standards and institutional cover-ups by the same anti-corruption squad that was now on Page’s case.

  As journalists we never know, when we slink, cajole and elbow our way into someone’s life, whether we will fathom them. Deadlines, impatience, cynicism and a lack of trust can all work against that aspiration. But I was lucky. When Page found me I found him to be in a confessional state of mind. He had an almost suicidal need to recount and recant for his past actions. And not just what had happened at Buckingham Palace.

  Page was ready to blow the whistle on another hidden part of policing: a culture of violence, cover-ups and fit-ups so rarely exposed, let alone publicly justified, by those on the inside. In my experience, when an officer feels scapegoated by his own organisation he loses the will to maintain the siege mentality and conspiracy of silence around modern policing. Page was no exception. He explained:

  At the end of the day, they are trying to airbrush out most of what’s gone on and say I am guilty on my own. There are loads of people who should be standing in the dock with me. This is their problem: I’m Royal Protection. When these Royal Protection officers are giving evidence you can imagine what it is going to look like. The Queen is going to be mightily pissed off. That’s the bottom line. Basically I’ve threatened them and now I’ve got it back … I’m happy to go to court. I want to go to court. I’m not trying to say I’m not guilty. I’m guilty of something, I’m sure I am. If it’s misconduct in a public office, so are others.

  Page had run a gambling syndicate known to its members as the Currency Club. Essentially, it was a hedge fund for cops betting on foreign exchange rates and commodities such as oil and gold in the six boom years leading up to the 2008 crash. Initially, Page operated from the police locker room under the stairs at Buckingham Palace. But later, as civilian investors piled in on promises of returns beyond the dreams of avarice or financial reason, he would drop off cash in brown envelopes from a Range Rover with blacked-out windows that he drove from palace to palace and pub to pub.

  ‘I regret the day I ever expanded it further than just Buckingham Palace. It was the biggest mistake of my life because greed took over everyone,’ Page claimed.

  The more I looked into the mechanics of the Currency Club, the more it looked like a Ponzi fraud of the kind, but not the size, perpetrated by Wall Street’s kingpin, Bernie Madoff, on far more financially savvy and well-heeled punters.

  Ponzi schemes, I learned, are quite simple in that early investors are paid from later investors’ money. Both Madoff and Page were facing trial at the same time. Their self-delusionary worlds had come a cropper as investor confidence sapped and the world’s financial system collapsed.

  At his peak, European royals and British lords were among the investors in the illegal hedge fund Madoff had run below the regulator’s faint radar. His business grew not just because people liked and trusted Bernie but because he offered investors incredible returns, in return for no questions asked about how he made their money. Healthy commissions were paid to brokers and feeder funds for sending salivating investors his way; and the more they salivated, the more commission the brokers mopped up.

  Page operated a similar system of ‘lieutenants’. Some were in the police, others were the friends of these uniformed investors. They worked their family and circle of friends for investment in his scheme and received secret commission payments for their enthusiastic advocacy. The whole greedy money-go-round carried on as long as Page regularly paid out the incredible returns he offered well above bank rates.

  Before the prosecution could hang, draw and quarter him at the royal courts, I was able to cross-examine Page and his wife Laura about all aspects of their life and the insane way the Currency Club was run. Often this questioning was done amid the family chaos of trying to keep four young boys happy. To his credit, Page never dissembled or feigned memory loss.

  I’d like to think my questioning had left him little room to manoeuvre. But the truth is, it was Laura’s presence during these sessions and her often withering interjections that stopped any real spin being put on the last eight years of life married to a gambler of other people’s money, who’d gone into a free fall of bad decisions
and excessive drinking.

  Laura had held the family together. She too was facing trial, accused by the Crown Prosecution Service of facilitating the multi-million pound fraud.

  Scotland Yard and the Palace never wanted this story to come out, which is why, well before the trial, they made Page an offer it was thought he’d never refuse: resign and save himself, the Queen and Scotland Yard a lot of embarrassment.

  His refusal to resign made Page neither madman nor whistle-blower. He was, though, a deeply flawed man, a deluded police officer who thought he was a big swinging dick in the City, where making money appeared as easy as taking sweets from a child.

  Rogue cop or scapegoat for a monarchy and police force too big to fail? Good cop gone bad trying to cover up some reckless financial decisions or degenerate gambler who’d set out to rip people off? Either way, I was all in.

  By the time their trial started in April 2009, an international cabal of multi-millionaire bankers had inflicted incredible pain on tens of millions of the much less well-off through another type of Ponzi scheme, a global one, involving the trade in toxic mortgage debt. Savings were wiped out, homes and jobs lost and hope gone. Yet this reckless gambling, deception and trickery hasn’t resulted in one City suit standing trial.

  Whilst I knew by the opening of his trial that Page was guilty, it strongly looked like other Royal Protection officers with dirty hands were being ‘looked after’, to use a police expression.

  As I said, some of the things Page admitted to me were suicidal to his own legal interests. But I believe the public interest would not have been served by his guilty plea in return for a lighter sentence, and no exposition of the management failures that allowed this scandal to develop inside the Royal Protection Squad and at Buckingham Palace.

  The intoxicating ability to make money in the commodity, credit and housing booms meant Page’s investors didn’t carry out simple due diligence. Why would they? He was a police officer, they said. More credibly, Page operated his financial scheme in an era of popular delusion, the delusion being that cheap money and the housing bubble would never end. Free credit allowed Page to binge on gambling and alcohol just as it enabled the British people to embark on a crazy consumer binge.

  There was nothing new here. Charles Mackay saw and said it all 160 years ago when capitalism was in its infancy but greed and fraud were not. ‘Money has often been a cause of the delusions of multitudes,’ he wrote in his seminal work Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. ‘Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper… Men it has been well said think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’

  The decade covered by For Queen and Currency was another period of popular delusion and madness of crowds. It started with the death of Princess Diana and ended with the financial meltdown. From 1997 to 2008 was a time of free money; borrow now worry later, buy-to-let mortgages and TV schedules stuffed with property porn for a nation of amateur landlords. The banks were literally throwing money at people on the government-fostered popular delusion that house prices were only going one way: up.

  So it was that Page’s investors took out cheap loans, gambled their savings or borrowed against their homes to invest in his get-rich-quick-scheme. None engaged professional advice to verify the probity or financial sense of his claims. He offered them returns that were too good to be true, yet they willingly conspired in believing him.

  As a business pal of Bernie Madoff once commented on the victims of his multi-billion Ponzi fraud, ‘C’mon! They had to know something wasn’t right.’ Or as a university professor investor who lost his savings bravely admitted to Time magazine, ‘We knew deep down it was too good to be true … We deluded ourselves into thinking we were all smarter than the others.’

  To be fair to Page’s victims, where were their role models? It was a period of incredible corruption and greed by politicians and public servants. The MPs and Lords’ expenses scandals, many exposed by my newspaper, showed the ease with which politicians felt they could cash in on the housing boom using public funds for mortgages on second homes or improvements to existing ones – moats and duck ponds, anyone?

  Without the reckless culture of government-sponsored casino capitalism and irresponsible bank lending, all crowned by light-touch regulation in the City and, as it turned out, at Buckingham Palace and Scotland Yard too, this Royal Protection Squad scandal could never have happened.

  Evidence would emerge from the vaults of the Met’s anti-corruption squad that Page’s dive into financial insanity was spotted well before he hit the water, but shoulders were shrugged and his file gathered dust at Buckingham Palace.

  For Queen and Currency is more than a bad-cop story of a big fraud at a great palace. It is also a cautionary tale of the madness of crowds; of how, like Paul Page and his salivating investors, the British people also lost the plot, beguiled as they were by the patter of bankers and politicians who secretly gambled away their future.

  Prologue

  A crash foretold

  21 November 2006.

  Paul Page had hardly slept in a week, except when the booze briefly took hold. Awake, he was buzzing with fear and adrenalin.

  Days earlier, anti-corruption detectives had come to the house and warned his family they were in danger. Investors in Page’s betting syndicate had lost £3 million. One of them had approached a hit man.

  Pacing around his living room like a cage fighter, Page’s attention was drawn to someone parked oddly across the street. Before he could check it out, the man sped off. Page rushed to his car and gave chase. It ended ten minutes later when he deliberately crashed into his target at a big roundabout.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? Is this a fucking brown envelope job to come sort me out?’ Page screamed as he dragged the man out of his wrecked car, a gun pressed to his head.

  ‘Don’t kill me!’ the man pleaded.

  With the sound of police sirens approaching, Page calmly put his weapon down on the grass of the island in the roundabout, raised his hands and watched drivers run for cover.

  His eight-year free fall from trusted, Royal Protection officer at Buckingham Palace to half-cut, gun-toting crazy was at last coming to an end.

  Part One: Boom (1993–2004)

  Chapter 1

  Essex princess

  July 1993. Police Constable Paul Page was bored. It was a slow summer night shift at Grays police station in Essex.

  ‘Get over to a flat in Lodge Lane,’ said the sergeant walking into the office where Page was doodling. ‘There’s a woman complaining about nuisance calls. Apparently someone’s been ringing and putting the phone down. She’s only been in the flat a few months. Check it out, will you?’

  Page duly drove off, hopeful he was coming to the rescue of a hot girl. But when he arrived at Lodge Lane, an old woman answered the door. The young constable gave an inaudible sigh, introduced himself and quickly established he was at the wrong address.

  Minutes later, at about 7.30 pm, the right door was knocked. This time, a dyed blonde in her mid-twenties with a small gap between her front teeth answered. Page was instantly struck. He introduced himself again, this time enthusiastically.

  ‘Hello. I’m PC Page.’

  Laura Keenan decided to play with her fresh-faced knight. Page was well-built and pushing six foot. His ears stuck out because his hair was so short, and his flat nose gave him maturity beyond his years.

  ‘How old are you then?’ Laura asked in a deliberately ambiguous tone. Page didn’t know whether she was complaining or flirting. Just in case, he added a year to his age. ‘Twenty-three,’ he replied.

  ‘Ahhh!’ she said mockingly. ‘Come in.’

  Laura’s two-year-old son was asleep with the bedroom door open. ‘Is the father here?’ Page enquired, noticing she wore no wedding ring.

  ‘We split up when
my son was born,’ Laura explained guardedly, but in a casual tone. ‘I’ve only been here three months. I was living with my mum and dad when Thomas was born.’

  Several tea bags later and Page was being hassled by his sergeant wanting to know why the routine inquiry was taking so long.

  ‘Yeah skipper, it’s a bit more complicated than I originally thought,’ he told his boss, winking at the victim of crime. ‘There may be other offences to consider,’ he added, for effect.

  Page was a natural blagger; one of life’s chancers. The self-assured, self-styled cockney wide boy respected the idea of a rule of law and those who enforced it. It appealed to his personality type – what some might call a rescuer, although one with a vigilante edge not afraid to break the rules to dispense his version of street justice.

  But he was not a natural policeman of the kind that likes to take orders. He didn’t fit easily into a disciplined service of blind obedience. In Page’s world, just because a person wearing more elaborate braiding on their arm or a law book under it said something was so, didn’t make it so.

  That said, to those who knew Page as a boy, it came as little surprise when fifteen months earlier in March 1992 he had announced he was joining Essex Police. At the time he felt he lacked sufficient qualifications for an army officer cadetship and his second choice, the London Fire Brigade, wasn’t recruiting. So joining the police seemed a good fall-back.

  Around midnight, Laura finally closed the door on PC Page. He had the cheek to claim overtime for his groundwork flirting and the next day was back for more. This time the constable came calling while Laura was in the bath. She thought it was her sister otherwise she never would have come to the communal door in just her towel.

  When Laura saw it was Page she blushed. But he persuaded her to let him in on the slim pretext that he had an update on the nuisance caller. Laura was happy to go along with it and, as Page followed her up the stairs, he eyed up her all over salon tan wishing the towel would fall.