It so happened that Cliff, who had a more modest taste in houses but whose flamboyance came out in his choice of cars, lived in the nearby suburb of Peacehaven, next door to a printer, Barry Cheriton. Unlike the rest of the team, Barry had never once had so much as a parking ticket. His credentials were simply the skills of his trade, and that he got on well with his felonious neighbour.
Cliff went to great, but subtle, lengths to dazzle him by flaunting his glamorous lifestyle. He reassured him of the rewards, should he take up his offer to ‘just do a bit of printing for us’ and minimized the risks by maintaining that Barry would be only a bit player in whom no-one would be interested. It worked a treat; Barry could not resist.
Barry was like a gangly love-struck teenager in this new underworld. He would do anything to impress Cliff and David. They treated him like the liability he was. His blundering ways together with his habitual tendency to lie his way out of any corner meant that he needed watching closely.
To produce 3,000 fake passports Barry could hardly use his employer’s presses, so they had to find a safe place for him to work that had all the right machinery and where no-one would ask questions.
Wilson Press, in nearby Uckfield, was well known as the place where many extreme right-wing publications were printed. Owned by Holocaust denier Anthony Hancock, it was no stranger to clandestine printing runs, nor to police surveillance. The day staff had long since learned to ask no questions. It was the ideal place to rent overnight for Barry to print a few passports. None of the team particularly liked Hancock, but this was business and they knew they needed him. A few thousand pounds would be enough to buy his silence, an essential guarantee when working a scam on this scale.
The irony was lost on no-one that a place so accustomed to promoting racism and intolerance was to be used to enable 3,000 people to enter and reside illegally in the UK.
When they needed to, David and Cliff claimed that their materials were to help them manufacture personal organizers. It was enough to satisfy even the most curious.
While this lucrative new project was taking shape, they were starting yet another scam. Music cassettes, even then, could cost up to £6 a throw. They worked out that if they could find a way of producing counterfeit versions for a fraction of that, they could put on a decent mark-up, yet still retail them for far less than the High Street.
Having procured a copying machine that could create duplicates to industry standards and hundreds of thousands of blank tapes, all they needed, once more, was a printer and a press for the labels and inserts. The timing was perfect. It transpired that Barry could churn out very passable artwork. He and Hancock’s machines had never worked harder in their lives, all under Cliff’s unrelenting supervision.
Soon box-loads of crystal-clear chart-topping cassettes were on the streets, changing hands for £1 each or £3 for five. Given that they only cost 50p to make, the profit margins were impressive.
Henty and Wake could not believe the demand. They had staff employed on shifts each running off hundreds of copies a day. It was netting them £1,500 per week.
However, selling such huge quantities of counterfeit goods at markets and car-boot sales is not the best way of staying below the police radar. It was this that flagged up that Henty and Wake had engineered this new racket. We knew nothing yet of the passports.
Police surveillance showed them dashing around the city stashing boxes at various garages and houses. What did not seem to fit were the trips to London to faux-leather factories and the purchase of yards of gold foil. No-one had seen a tape decorated with either of these. Clearly there was some multitasking going on.
By researching possible uses for those materials, supported by intelligence coming in, we became aware of their passport project. At first we thought that they were just trying their hand at making a few to see what they turned out like. Never in a million years did we think that they stood to make nearly £300k each, nor did we realize the connection to Lenny.
As we were trying to fathom out exactly what was going on, 1 Wykeham Terrace was playing host to a thriving cottage industry in counterfeiting. The kitchen had been taken over for the shaping and cutting of rexine, the bath was filled deep with dye to achieve just the right hue for the covers. Other rooms were used for the drying, stitching, quality control and packing operations. They were certainly working hard for their money.
Their business brains ensured they adopted a creative approach to any problem that threatened to derail their production. Old-style passports had two elongated ovals cut into the front cover. One would reveal the holder’s name, the other the document number. They wrestled with how to recreate these shapes in a way that would look like the real deal.
When they were forging car tax discs, they faced the same quandary in replicating the perforated circular circumference. In that case, they found that a metal pastry cutter hammered onto the paper did the trick perfectly. Applying the same principle, they carefully manufactured a razor-sharp steel die to strike down on the cover. They were delighted with the results.
When the pages arrived from the printers, David spotted a problem. The background on any official document is always, deliberately, incredibly busy. On a passport, however, it is overlaid with the multicoloured image of a complex crest. Barry had not spotted this. Its omission was an error that could fatally scupper the whole project.
David and Cliff were furious. How could Barry have been so stupid? They needed a solution and needed it quickly. It would ruin all the pages to run them through the printer again. This could set them back weeks.
Barry had a suggestion. ‘I could design a template to match the genuine one and build up the colours using screen-printing.’
‘What, on every page of every passport?’ asked an incredulous David.
‘It’s the only way. We’ve come too far and I’ll work night and day. It’ll take some time but it’s do-able.’
‘OK. It had bloody better be. We’ve got one and half million quid and a reputation to protect,’ threatened Cliff.
The date was soon set for David and Cliff to travel to London and show Lenny the samples of their handiwork. Barry had to sweat blood to rectify his schoolboy error in time. The others took deliveries of the freshly corrected pages on a daily basis and with care and precision stitched them together into more than acceptable imitations of UK passports.
As the day loomed, the counterfeiters were exhausted. They had known that to earn a prize of this size they would have to graft, but this had taken even Cliff’s industrious nature to new levels.
A sense of achievement and impending prosperity prompted David to treat his wife to an intimate dinner at the world-famous English’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in Brighton’s Lanes. Generally acknowledged as the city’s oldest and finest seafood restaurant, over the years it has hosted the rich and famous, such as Charlie Chaplin, Dame Judi Dench and, of course, Peter James.
There, they excitedly planned their future with riches that just months ago would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Castles, holidays, fast cars; nothing was beyond their reach.
The following day, Cliff had to pop out to sort out some problems with the tape production leaving David, Barry and one of their helpers putting the finishing touches to the samples before the trip to London later in the day.
As with several large-scale police operations in those days, the investigative arm of CID knew little of the hundreds of hours of surveillance or the huge intelligence case being built by those in covert roles. We only found out about what had been happening on the day itself. This was all to do with operational security — the need-to-know principle that ensured the risk of leaks was kept to an absolute minimum. The downside was that we had to play catch-up. To keep an operation secret the painstaking evidence-gathering often had to wait until after the arrests had been made. This meant taking statements and securing exhibits relating to events that had long since passed.