Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number of ‘True Crime’ B movies which were an integral part of a visit to the cinema, or ‘flicks’, when we were young. Some of us also remember his catchphrase when describing the downfall of a murderer, if only because it was a favourite of The Spectator’s one-time political columnist Alan Watkins: ‘It was then that he made his first big mistake.’ As it happens The Spectator features in Lustgarten’s own story, one of many to be told in Duncan Campbell’s very entertaining new book about crime reporting past and present. For it was when walking down the street in December 1978 while reading The Spectator that Lustgarten suffered a heart attack and died.
It was news to me that, prior to his sad demise, Lustgarten, who had many years before chronicled the career of the famous ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer George Joseph Smith, was himself implicated in a bathroom corpse mystery. A girlfriend of his called Gabrielle was discovered dead in his bath after Lustgarten had several times confided that he wanted to end their relationship. Had the great man likewise made his first and last big mistake?
Crime reporting involves three groups of citizens: crooks, policemen and hacks. The last two groups have always had a symbiotic relationship, the police relying on journalists to assist them with publicity, the journalists needing the police to give them tip-offs.
This was never a very satisfactory state of affairs. Journalists formed themselves into a lobby, the Crime Reporters Association — ‘an elite body who can be trusted with confidential information to mutual advantage’, in the words of the CRA’s president, Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express. As all too often with other such lobbies, the hacks would simply report what they were told by the police. Thus, in the case of the famous 1992 Wimbledon Common murder of Rachel Nickell, papers like the Daily Mail and the News of the World went on reporting that local ‘weirdo’ Colin Stagg was the murderer even after the case against him had been thrown out of court. The police had repeated their familiar formula ‘we are not looking for anyone else’ and that was sufficient proof of Stagg’s guilt.
‘Lessons have been learned’ no doubt was repeated as it always is on these occasions. But only a few years later exactly the same thing was happening when following the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol, her landlord Christopher Jeffries was given the Stagg treatment and dubbed an ‘ageing weirdo’ and a ‘nutty professor’ by lazy journalists acting on tip-offs from the police. Jeffries later won £500,000 in libel damages from seven newspapers.
It may seem strange that the press’s regrettable tendency to believe what policemen tell them has survived so long despite all the continuing revelations of police incompetence and corruption. As Campbell reminds us, as long ago as the 1970s the situation was so bad that Sir Robert Mark was appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to purge the force of corrupt officers, 478 of whom were dismissed and 50 prosecuted. Yet today the situation is probably even more serious, with no sign of a new Sir Robert being brought in to do something about it.
But if the police have become the criminals, then so have the journalists. Against a backdrop of falling circulations, the press has resorted to ever more desperate measures to lure in the punters, even creating crime with the use of stings, fake sheiks and other devices to incriminate vulnerable celebrities. Rather than risk their lives in pursuit of stories, they discovered they could sit safely in their offices and employ agents to hack into mobile phones in the hope of uncovering sensational information.
In this state of unedifying confusion it is no wonder that journalists like Duncan Campbell tend to hark back to a golden age of cops and robbers when ‘legendary’ Scotland Yard detectives — Fabian of the Yard, Nipper Read, or Bert Wickstead (the Old Grey Fox) — would sip champagne in El Vino’s with the likes of Percy Hoskins and Peter Earle from the News of the World, the man who claimed that gang leader Charlie Richardson had put a £1,000 bounty on his head.
Only occasionally nowadays do we get a glimpse of past times, as with last year’s Hatton Garden diamond heist, when £14 million-worth of gold and jewellery was stolen by a group of oldies from a safe deposit company over the Easter weekend. Unlike the Great Train Robbery, there was no physical injury; and when some headline-writing wag christened them ‘Diamond Wheezers’ it seemed as if for a moment the good old days had returned.
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