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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
I remember there's, there was situations of dealing with, I worked on,
you know, various homicides, murders and other
situations and individual things will affect you and
you'll think about it and you come across death in different ways
and quite some horrendous death. I think dealing with especially
street buying and stuff, which I did quite a lot of at a
period you do, it does make you think, you know, you're
turning up there with a colleague, you're going to those. And one was in Ealing
Broadway, one was at, in 7 Kings and the other one
was actually up towards your area, North
London and they were three. All, all three were suicides.
All, all three. And all three were deaths.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast where we talk
to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller. I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century and I'm also the chairman of the IF
network of international investigative and asset recovery lawyers.
I am absolutely delighted to be joined by a good
friend who happens also to be a super talented investigator,
James Ellender from Futurum. To place
James in any one particular jurisdiction for longer
than a few days is not easy. He's currently in Malaysia.
Welcome James and thank you for joining me and taking time out
of your evening in Malaysia to share a few
things with us. Thanks Gary. Absolute pleasure. Looking forward
to having this chat with you after seeing all of these
various videos that you've recorded before. Yeah, it's.
Each one is, is as enjoyable as the last
and so far I haven't run out of people
to speak to but who knows, you've been kind enough to send me
lots of lovely information about you and
of course what. One of the things that you would expect jumped out at me
is that before joining the police you were actually
an estate agent. And I really want to
know what is it that happened to you? Did you get mugged as an
estate agent and you decided you needed to be a
defender of the law? What was it that made you
change your mind from being a property dude to, to becoming a
policeman an estate agent in Suffolk? I actually really
enjoyed it, enjoyed the old, the whole property market.
But I had a daughter when I was quite a young age and I didn't
know what the longevity was going to be and I thought, well, working for
the government or, you know, becoming a police officer might be,
might actually give me a bit of stability and some career
progression and you know, earn a decent income. So that was really the reason why
I joined and I was actually quite interested in it. So. So good
for you. So it wasn't as if also that you had
or did you have an investigative or
police service background in the family
anywhere. It wasn't something that you knew about or was it? My
father is, was an accountant and worked for
AstraZeneca but started off working for ICI. And, and, and
my grandfather, who I didn't know his father was in the raf
but never really come, come into contact with the
police, good or bad at that point, you know, it was, I was quite vanilla
in the whole, in the whole subject of law enforcement.
Right. And you, you joined when you were quite
young because you became an inspector at the age of 26, you
said. Yeah, so I joined in
2000 and you always remember your date of enter service
was the 5th, 5th of November. So Guy Fawkes Day.
I did my sergeant's exams within two
and a half years or, or was studying for those. I then
became a detective and I then did my inspectors after that. So
I was qualified as a, an inspector from, from
26 years old or 25, 26 years old. I was
an acting DI on many occasions but never actually
went up to the substantive rank. And the reason was because
you actually lost overtime and you know, so if you're a
sergeant or an acting inspector, you still got the overtime
but you go to it, you just on salary. And the roles I
was in was always long hours. You could do 12, 14 hour shifts.
So you could, you know,
plainly I wanted to earn the money and you could earn more than what your
inspectors or your chief inspectors were earning. And I think that's still the system
to this day. It's a total illogicality, isn't it, to
talk about a disincentive to people, to progress.
So give us an example of one of the eye opening
experiences when you first joined the police. I mean, we all have
a perception of the police forces as a member of the public.
But when you actually join and you train, was there one particular
prosecution or investigation or collar as they call
it, that stands out as to. I had no idea or
I was gobsmacked as to how this actually happens in
practice. Tracking back from that. When I joined the police and I went
to police training school, I was, I didn't like it initially.
It was a, it was a big learning curve for me and actually when I
left, I was very sad to leave the training, the police
training college, you know, because I'd come to love it and it
teaches you a huge degree of discipline you know, of
polishing your boots and making sure that you don't have tram lines in your shirt
or your trousers. You know, I went to go and work in, in
Baker Street. I worked for the British Transport Police and I went to go and
work at Baker street and I worked on the London Underground. And that first day
of, when you've got your uniform on and you've got your big hat and you
go out and you feel that everybody's looking at you and you're just so nervous
and you're going out there with your tutor and you make your first arrest and
you're shaking, you know, because you just don't want to get it wrong because
you're giving them the, you know, you're giving them the caution, right? And then you
got to get this person into custody and then you take this person to
custody and, and you're shaking again because you're in front of the old
custody sergeant who doesn't care that this is your first arrest and that
you're actually really excited. Do you remember the first arrest?
Is it sticking your mind like the first day on the job or not? Yeah,
yeah, well, it does. And I think, you know, it was always a
cliche in the British Transport Police. All we did was, you know, we, we
collected tickets and, you know, and, and fair evaders.
And, and genuinely my first arrest was a fair evader
and it's because he wouldn't give his name. And therefore you
can't serve a summons on a person. You can't give them a, you can't,
you, you can't do a process, as it's called, and send them to court
if you can't verify who their name was. And the guy didn't have a, have,
have, have a wallet or an ID card. So there you go, he get, he
gets nicked and you take him into custody. So how did he, how did he
get nicked, James? Was somebody screaming, catch that man or
something. How did you get him? It was a ticket, a
ticket check at the gate and I think it was at Piccadilly Circus, if
I recall correctly, coming up from the Bakerloo line. And he tried to
double shuffle through, which is going in behind someone at the gate, and
the ticket inspector stopped and then he starts having an argument and we're going
through the station at that point. So then obviously the ticket inspectors go,
there you go, it's yours. And then, and then you end up
arresting this person. But you then
unfortunately get the name as ticket inspectors and you're collecting, you're
collecting tickets and arresting people. But the British Transport Police
is. It was a very unique police force because
it's got national jurisdiction of England, Wales and Scotland.
And it actually made it very interesting in a lot of ways because of the
Met Police is obviously in the confines of Greater London. And then
you've got all these other police forces of Hertfordshire and stuff where
we didn't really have a jurisdiction. And, you know, the largest
landowner in London, or I think in the UK is the London Underground. I think
that's still the case. And the railway covers so much. So
jurisdictionally, you're going from one railway station to
another and you don't go by train, you go by car. And the public
don't differentiate between you being a British Transport Police
officer and the Met Police. So you get involved in everything. So actually
it's a very, a very, very fulfilling
job as a police officer. Do you think it's still as both
interesting? Do you have buddies that are still in the
Transport Police or people that tell you about what the,
what world the world is like there now? Is it still as interesting, do
you think? I still think the job's interesting, but I think
unfortunately the politics and the public
perception of policing and the way it's portrayed
is challenged. And I think there's still some very, very good police officers
in there. I think they've got a harder job now, definitely a harder job
because of the bad press that's happened and some of the rotten apples that exist.
But that happens in any organization. I think there's some funding
constraints. It's not something I would join now because I,
you know, you talk about the good old days, you know, but they were the
good old days. Yeah, but for some people it's very rewarding. I
had some of the best jobs, some amazing jobs that I worked in, in covert
policing was just amazing to work in. But the problem
is then you get promoted and you become an inspector, a chief
inspector. Superintendent. You get involved in much more politics and
bureaucracy and it takes you away from really what, what you enjoy doing.
Now, I know you mentioned the, the magic two words
that everybody certainly manic TV and Netflix
watchers like me love to look to watch things and
listen to experiences about COVID
investigations. It's always tricky when
I've had ex policemen, ex intelligence
officers. But what can you tell me about
some of the, the most maybe
exciting and also the most frightening experiences you
had doing covert investigations? There's a number I
remember on my very first day when I went out to as a.
What would be called a Level two Test Purchase Officer, which is a Level
two undercover. And you do, you do. You're going out
to test the commodity or service of a product,
buy a product or service to understand if it exists. And
I was going out to buy heroin and crack, crack cocaine
on the streets of London. It was my first ever deployment. It was about 3
o' clock in the morning and going out into Tottenham
Court Road near Gooch street, and the buy was on. I'd
identified a dealer to buy off and went down his back
alley and he went to go to get something from the back of his
trousers and there was something poking out. And I thought it was a
knife, but it was actually an Afro comb that he'd poked down the back
of his trousers. And he was just going to reach to his behind
to retrieve some heroin for me, where
he'd hidden it down in an
orifice. And so the panic's going. As we're in
this back street, I think he's gonna pull a knife on me. But no, he's
just moving the Afro comb and getting the heroin from his rear. That sounds.
That sounds horribly painful to me, the way you've explained the
extraction process, James. And it was a funny. It was a
funny, you know, occasion, really, for that, you know. Cause the adrenaline's
going. It's the first drug buy that you're looking to make. And then
the relief that when he gives you that and he serves it into Rizzler, right,
and he pulls it over with a coin and serves the heroin into a
Rizzler, a cigarette paper. And then you wrap it up and you walk away
and you bought your first 10 pound, you know, bag of. Bag of
brown, you know, of heroin. And,
you know, there was another occasion which was similar drug buying in. In.
I was. I was down in. Down on the south coast
and we're buying gear and
it's snowing. We had mountain bikes and one got
puncture and my socks were wet and it was
freezing cold. And we were dragging this bike around and there's these
hills and then there's these. These Mancunians
down there that didn't like us and thought we were police and we were
making out we're not police. And then they pull a knife on us and. And,
you know, they don't want us on the patch and we're trying to make
out we're users. And then the police get called
because we're drinking on the street and then we don't give a real name and
then they're looking to Arrest us like the, similar to the ticket offense because we
haven't given a real name and you know you've got all these different dynamics going
on and you know, as a, As a level 2
test purchase undercover, you want to go up to the big jobs but you've got
to cut your teeth, you know, with some of the lower level
stuff. But actually in a lot of ways the low level stuff
really teaches you the basics of how to deal with stuff, you know and you
learn a lot about your, your inner stress levels and stuff. And
I think one job that really I saw changed drastically. I was
going to buy a lighting generator that had been stolen by
travelers on, on a site up in middle England and
got onto the site and we're looking to buy
this thing. I was with a, with, with a, a colleague of
mine and we'd done some research of this lighting generator and they're,
they're worth about 25 grand. They what they use on the
railway to light up the tracks at night. Oh I see. And the travelers were
selling them at 3,000. So you knew, you knew you were buying something
moody. And when they're there the traveler's like look, do you want
to buy some guns? And we're like what. They had a,
they had a, like a shipping container that was like their armory
and and we were waiting for the uniformed police to come in and do. It
was a by bust what we call and the police to come in and, and
do the arrests and we had to cancel them coming in because there was all
these firearms on, on, on the traveler's site. So
and it shows you how, how drastically things will change. You know,
a situation will change very quickly. And
in preparation for those kind of test
purchases or undercover purchases, do you have
at least a patrol car or somebody accessible?
What's the kind of planning and the protection that goes into
something like that? You know, not divulging any
tactics but there is levels of protection teams that sit around.
You know, sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more and it's really
quite risk based. But sometimes
as you can imagine if people are too close to what you're doing can
actually disturb the environment. So. Yes, but you know, I
think technology helps a lot more nowadays, you know, with the UK a lot
CCTVs everywhere. So you know there's a higher level of
protection around that and technology that, that can
assist with this sort of stuff and without obviously
even giving circumstantial information.
Were you ever, did you ever need to have a
different identity or
Pretend to be somebody else in a
relationship that lasted, you know, a few months or a few weeks rather than
just a going up and pretending to be ex. Did you have anything that
was more. Maybe not long term, but short to medium
termish. There's levels of pseudonyms that people work under and
dependent upon the, the job. You know, you
will have different covers that sit around that. It certainly
exists and it's certainly stuff I've been involved in and been around.
Right. And one of the things that always.
I'm always curious about and I'm sure people feel the same way is
when you're maintaining an alter ego, as it were.
How do you do that without letting
that alter ego bleed into the way you
behave normally and your normal
ID as it were. And I don't know whether that kind of
pressure being or that kind of experience undercover
ever happened to you, whether you. Where you felt, you know what,
I'm mixing with people that are so
negative and it's such a dark environment. It's
impacting me and the way I think and the way I behave. I do think
that's a very valid point. And I think perhaps your risk appetite
changes. I think your behaviors change. I think the way
your outlook on life can change. It can be quite common for you
to. Biases develop. You can
look at the bad in people you know, around that. A
comment that was made to me was because you're spending so many time
around, you know, especially when you're doing.
You're doing very street level drug buying. It can
devalue you or change your intelligence levels because you're just
around different people. You know, it's that saying, isn't it? You know, you're the product
of those five people you spend your life around. And you
know, if you are constantly around people who
are in challenging situations through drug use and stuff like that,
or you're following people a lot. You know, because I worked on a surveillance team
for many years. You see life in a different way and it can make you.
It can, it can change your opinion of certain things. Yeah. Good and
bad. But it never for you. You seem like quite
a. A balanced human being. It never
got you to the stage where you felt that, you know,
the world is a. Is not a good place for you to be in
and affected you mentally. It didn't have that kind of impact on you. You
were able to, you were able to cope with it
in the normal course of events, I guess. Yeah. I think, I
think obviously every situation does change you and I think you Know, I
remember there's that there, there was situations of dealing with, you
know, because I, I worked on, you know, various
homicides, murders and other situations and, and
individual things will, will, will affect you and you, you'll think
about it and you, you come across death in different ways and quite some
horrendous death and I think dealing with, with especially street
buying and stuff which I did quite a lot of at a period
you do, it does make you think and
I'm quite good at boxing emotions which is I, I could,
I, I could go out there and switch off and get on and do that,
do that job and then leave those emotions. But the problem
comes with that is, is how do you then unbox them sometimes and
then get back into normal life? And you do, you do have to be
careful. I think there's colleagues that I've known that has worked very deep
undercover in long term infiltrations and
that's a very, you know, there's a lot of people that would
not be able to handle that. I didn't have that level of
exposure. But I do know it does happen to people and I do
know some people have struggled but I've got some of my really good friends who
have worked on very long term stuff and they weren't affected by it. They've just
got very resilient personalities. Oh, that makes sense.
And I've probably met one or two of those people that you're talking
about. So you mentioned murder and of course again
the run of the mill member of the public loves a good old
murder mystery. Do you recall the first time you ever
espied or came across a dead body and your reaction? And
most of us we come across death thankfully quite
rarely and it's usually an elderly member of the family and it's in hospital
and it's benign. In your
job there at that time, of course it's totally different.
Do you remember that first occasion where you turn up and
you find somebody and you realize they are
dead? I don't recall the first one. I certainly recall
a lot of situations and if, you know
I work for the British Transport Police and when I was in
uniform you would deal with a lot of persons hit by trains and
oh wow, you know, which are quite, quite horrendous to
work within. And again you have to show quite a lot of resilience around it.
And it was one day I dealt with three in a day when I
worked within on our immediate
response vehicle out, out of Baker street
and you know, you're turning up There with a colleague. You're going to those.
And one was in Ealing Broadway, one was at. In 7
Kings and the other one was actually up towards your area,
North London. And they were three. All. All three were
suicides. All for all three. And all three were deaths.
Oh, my God. But the outcome, and not being graphic about it,
but the outcome to those three deceased were quite very different
situations and different injuries. But
unfortunately, it's very, very common on the railway and, you know,
on the London Underground. I don't know what the stats are, but I think there's
one every day, or at least not deaths,
but, you know, it's very common. So you become very accustomed to
being around death, you know, And I had had the
misfortune, should I say, of being at old gate
40 minutes after the. The. The bombs had gone off.
Oh, wow. Were you still. You were obviously still in the service at
that stage, were you? Yeah, it was in 2005. I was.
I was in a different role. I wasn't in uniform at that time, but I
was in. It was in 2005, but it was, you know, it was all hands
to the. All hands to the pumpkin. And my old
relief, which was B relief, that ran out of Tottenham Court Road at the
time they were on. They were on early term duty
on the morning of the 7th of July. And the most of those
that team that I'd worked with, who were good friends of
mine, went down into Russell Square where. Which was one of
the most challenging, challenging bomb sites to deal with
because it was so underground, because Edgware Road was
much more open, Old Gate was much more open. Russell
Square was deep and Tavistock, the bus
was. Was outside. So the challenges, there was different
challenges, but I went to Old Gate and, you know, I
remember it very vividly now that. That scene and what was going on
just, Just remind me and people on the scene what
actually happened on that day. There was. There were two or three
locations. Do you remember what they were? And, and what was.
So there was Old Gate, there was Old Gate Station where one of the bombs
went off. There was Edgware Road where one of the bombs went off
between King's Cross and Russell Square. And that was why it was
challenging, because it was in a tunnel and that went off and getting the
responses down there into. Into the tunnels. And
then the bomb went off on the bus at Tavistock and Tavistock Square
close to use and not far from Russell Square. And they all went
off within, Forgive me, maybe 20, 20,
20 minutes of one another. I Believe. But I was
based over in Docklands and immediately went
to Old Gate. That's why I went to Old Gate and then I worked in
a support role after that with, with some strategic
command as a driver to support to
incidents afterwards of working around that because I was in a
specialized role at the time. Can you talk about any of the
follow up intelligence and investigation work that you did
or that you were involved in after those bomb attacks? Or was
it all exclusively held, managed by,
I don't know, MI5 or whoever the appropriate
investigative body is. It's controlled by the security service.
But obviously the police have, have a critical role in
policing London or policing the UK and the Met Police is the counterterrorism
lead. You know I ended up going, moving on to a surveillance
team, a level one mobile surveillance team. Said we
followed the, you know, the people around serious organized crime and we worked
on counterterrorism operations, you know in support of
other surveillance teams and, and especially the years
after, you know, you have a lot of great exposure
to working on counterterrorism following
suspects who have been identified by the security Service who.
Warrant, warrant 24 hour surveillance. At times I can't
remember now maybe you can what the outcome was. Were
a number of, or all of the, well you never know. All but a
number of people arrested and prosecuted for those bombings.
I just, my memory is not good enough. Do you recall? Well, you had the
four that obviously were deceased, you know, after the day,
you know, and there was the failed attempts afterwards and then you had the
Stockwell incident of Domendez, the poor gentleman
that, that ended up getting mistaken for a
terrorist. That's right. Were you involved in that investigation?
Partly, but not in the run up to it. More,
more into some of the dealings after it, you know. And as
you've got to imagine it, you know, the country was on very
high alert at that time. You know, the UK was at a
critical time. There's a lot of unknowns, you know, things have been
pieced together and you know, I definitely worked on
much more staff stuff post 7
7, you know, and then this stuff ran on and there was some quite
big jobs that changed the way airlines treated terrorism,
how, how liquids and stuff were
transported. You know, if, if you recall
the. I think there's been some number of documentaries on it of
the liquid bombers who were up in, in, in North
London and up in I think
Hertfordshire, how that changed. And you know,
and these really do test the security services and they test the
police covert surveillance teams that are running around trying to,
you know, to observe and manage, manage, manage
the subjects, you know, and to keep them under control. And if you
lose those people, and that's the problem if you lose people when they're
in the act of committing an offense, commission of crime or anything,
you know, it can be very worrying for the surveillance teams. It could be very
worrying for the senior management because you're trying to protect life and limb.
That's what police officers there to do, protect life and live, uphold the law fairly
and firmly. But you want to get the evidence. And it's always a bit
like working with, you know, armed robberies, you
know, like I'm sure at some point you will interview or you
have interviewed someone from the flying squad, you know, and you
know, they're a very unique team within, within the Met Police. And they always want
to get someone going across the pavement, okay, what they call going across the pavement,
going towards the bank to get them in the act, because you get them in
the acts, you then it's not a conspiracy to commit
a robbery, it's actually a robbery and then they can go to prison.
But this is the challenge that you face when working within
surveillance teams. And I've worked on some
armed robbery suspects and I've been behind armed robbers in Essex
for a job of where they were planning to do a cash in transit
robbery and was the operational commander on running that
job, which was very exciting but very, very stressful.
Tell, tell us a bit more about that if you can, about the planning and
how you identify. It's a, it was a gang that had
previous form or you got intelligence. Tell us a little bit
if you don't mind. It was a group of, of older
armed robbers. Okay. They were old school, they had committed a
crime, someone had been injured and shot. And then I
worked on one of the surveillance teams that was
following one of the subjects around. And at the time,
it was quite a long while after the initial offense that had
happened and we were following one of the subjects and there was a number of
other subjects being followed as well. And there was different surveillance teams working
on that. And what would happen
is the surveillance teams, the three subjects or four
subjects would meet and the primary sea would go. So the ops
commander is whose car they got into. So on
one wonderful day, my
subject was the driver and it was his car. And the other subjects came together
and they were following cash in, cash in transit vehicles around,
around on the routes. And they were, they were, they were planning, they were
doing their reconnaissance. We had 30 odd surveillance vehicles running
around behind them, which was mayhem because we had three surveillance
teams running because at any time they could split and we had to go with
our individual subjects and we had
tactical armed support that was running
with us who would deal with, with an intervention.
And it's very stressful running that because you've got a lot of radio traffic
moving. You're covert, you're all in, you're
a surveillance team. You're following these, these baddies as they
were and their proper old school
banks. Did you eventually capture them
or catch them as it were, in the act of trying
to hijack a security van or something, or did
you nab them before they did the crime? If my memory's
correct, we had them on a lot of dummy runs and the
decision was made that the evidence was strong enough
at that point, point that controlled arrests were
going to be made. So they put more tactical uniform units through their
front doors early one morning to arrest them and
they, they were taken out. But that was quite a long term operation
that we were involved in. And you learn a lot from that. You learn a
huge amount from that. You learn, you know, being in surveillance, you
know, we always only ever tell the good jobs and we only ever told the
jobs that went right, you know, you know, you never get, you never going to
talk about the 12 hours that you're on a plot, you know, with your seat
back in the car waiting for movement from the subject because that's 12
hours of a day that's gone. But that's a surveillance
officer's life. How do you keep yourself alert and awake? I mean,
I mean in this day and age you've got telephones, so people play on their
phones or whatever. But that's not great because you're supposed to be keeping an eye
out. So is there a trick of the trade in keeping yourself from falling
asleep? Because that must be a bit embarrassing. You have a lot of McDonald's
coffees and you know the Wild Bean Cafe from the
BP station. You know, when I was doing it, you
know, iPhones had only just come out really, the smartphones. We had
blackberries and Nokias and you'd spend a
lot of the time on the phone to, you know, one of the other teams
chatting to one of the other cars, chatting to them. You're just talking a lot
of the time, you're chatting about stuff or you know,
you're trying to do that or you didn't really have the games. I think we
had Snake on the phones and do you remember that Snake on your Nokia
Phone. Yeah. Or Tetris, I think, was probably the
best you could get. So you're trying to keep yourself awake.
Yeah. What was the most dangerous bunch
of people, without naming them, gang that you came across? That
sounds like it wasn't a party. People that are
knocking over and maybe I'm wrong. Were they people that
were using firearms or proposing to use firearms in that
process as well? Yeah, I think the, you know, the
armed. The armed incident. I talked about the old school bank robbers.
You knew that they were prepared to use firearms. Yeah, because they'd
already shot someone and that was what the job was about. And
they were prepared to shoot innocent bystander.
There was some guys and they were going to do a post office and they
were using a crossbow and they would carry crossbows quite a lot.
Traveler sites, obviously, access to firearms. I
did a lot of work in the earlier days before I went onto the covert
team where did a lot of stuff in knife crime, you know, on the London
Underground. A lawyer had been stabbed
and this was a response to. Was prior to
7. 7. And was the lawyer stabbed for a mugging,
for a robbery or was it something else? I see, yeah, it was a
mugging. And we. We did an. We did a thing called
Operation Shield, which was a knife arch, knife
arches, like metal detectors at stations and with drug stocks and stuff. And I
ran the. The. The COVID deployments on those.
And one that I remember, and it was in the Daily Mail. We did
Luton Carnival and we went into the crowds when they were coming
off the train. 96 weapons we recovered on one
day of 96. Stun guns,
knives, swords. And they were just being dropped in the.
Dropped in the queues because the people were queuing to go through these
knife arches, to go through these metal detector arches and people were going
there to commit violence. And, you know, and we did it at night and Hill
Carnival, but Luton Carnival was. And it got onto the front page of the
Daily Mail and it was a bit like lawless, lawless loot. And it was
cool also, I think. And it was a picture of all these weapons that had
been recovered from the day. And I worked on the covert teams going
into the crowds with that and you could see people dropping, dropping the knives
and we were grabbing them, we were trying to take them out, you know, and
that, that. That's obviously, it's quite scary doing that
because you're, you're very close to. To weapons
and knives can, you know, as we know, can kill and injure people very,
very quickly. You know, all it Takes is, you know, a dig and. And then
it's done. So I'm assuming, which sounds
logical, that you had to have quite a bit of training in self
defense and how to disarm people. And is that a. I
imagine a regular thing? And you had to keep yourself in
the, in the know, as it were. As to how to do that you do,
I think it's every six months you have to do your baton training and your
unarmed defense tax refresher. And
so you have to go through, through that training where you'll go, go
and dress up in your, in your tracksuits and go to some
gym hall and the instructor and then you, you gotta.
Who'll throw you about a bit. Yeah. Punch a dummy and
you know, with your baton and stuff. So you, you have to
do it and you learn how to gooseneck someone and how to
handcuff someone. But you know, when you do it every year or
every six months, I think is, is how. Is how often I think
you have to do it. So a lot of it becomes muscle memory.
So let's move on now to if anyone
listening at the moment, they would think you spent your entire life in
the police force. But that's not the case. You left
the police in, I think
2013, if I'm not mistaken. So
for the last 13 years you've been in
the private sector. And one of the things I know
that you have been particularly focused on
is behavioral analytics.
And of course that is fascinating for most people.
Most people have heard about the CIA, Quantico,
Behavioral Analysis Department, etc.
What is it about behavior, behavioral analytics? How
did you first get interested in it? Or is it just part and parcel of
everything that you've been doing, you had been doing in the police and you just
wanted to take it into the private sector? Yeah. It's an
interesting question. You know, Operation Shield, when we were, when
we were doing the knife crime, you know, arches and stuff like that, you're observing
people's behavior. Yeah. And the actual people that go through
the metal detectors aren't the ones that interest you, it's the ones that don't
go through. And what behaviors do they display that
you might suspect they're up to something. And you'll see it with
pickpockets and you'll do it with surveillance. You know, if you're used
to following someone on foot or in a vehicle, before a vehicle
or someone on foot turns left or right or does something
or stops, they will display a series of
behaviors. And those behaviors, if it's you on
foot is your trajectory, is how you're engaging with the
environment that you're working through. Yeah, your gait, all
of these different things that someone's shaping up for a left hand turn or a
right hand turn. And if you can see that before they turn, you can position
yourself to then get into a wider position of COVID for
surveillance, for example. Or you can preempt.
Now you can, you can put this into
interviewing techniques as well. So when you interview
suspects, witness or victims, people will
display certain behaviors when they're under elevations of stress.
So when cortisol near peripherine and adrenaline is
released within the body, which are our stress hormones, our behaviors change
and that's life. Yeah. If you ask someone
a difficult question or you catch them, they'll blush. Yeah,
they'll blush or they'll perspire. Their heartbeat, heart rate might increase.
They might become awkward. They might manipulate with their hands or
fingers to soothe themselves. They might anchor their feet on the ground.
And behavioral detection is utilized a lot within
airports by the TSA in America and is
widely done now for, for to identify suspicious
behavior. And you can do it in interviewing. During my
masters I studied it a lot and I did a lot of interviews around
behavioral science and looking at soft target locations for
counterterrorism. And I've written quite a lot of papers on
it around, around the behavioral science. Since
then I've worked with, I worked with FIFA in
Qatar World cup developing a program in behavioral detection.
I've worked with the Aviation Council International
developing programs for airports for
terrorism, for check in staff and for
security staff. And I delivered a course last year to
Sofia airport in Bulgaria on that. So just pause, pause
there. You've got mentioned Qatar, you've mentioned Bulgaria.
I guess that you need to spend a certain
amount of time in each country to understand the cultural
behavior, behavior of the people there. Or are there
some telltale signs that every human being,
whatever culture, exhibits in certain
situations? How does it, how does that work? Yeah, you definitely
gotta be more culturally aware and you've gotta understand your
environment. There's something called a baseline. The baseline environment
is the norm, the natural environment. The baseline environment here,
for example, is you and you and myself talking. If someone
shouted in the background, we'd be startled and the
baseline changes. So it's very much. If you
looked at the Manchester arena
bombings at the Mel arena back in 2017,
there was a number of behavioral indicators displayed by
the BOMBER before the 21 victims died. And
it was actually reported by a father of
one of the arena goers that there was suspicious
behavior there and that those suspicious behavior is actually.
It's quite in your face when you look at it. He was avoiding the cameras.
He was sat in an area. There was a lot of clothing. He had a
very, very heavy bag that he would lean forward on to counter
the weight of that bag. He was in the location
for many hours where. Where it just wasn't
natural and there was missed opportunities. I believe from. From the review
that that came out into that rapport. And we can look
at things called macro cues or micro cues. Macro cues are
more of. About the engagement with the environment
and the dress, the attire, the
gate, the trajectory, all of those things. They're macro.
The micro is more of how someone would react if you ask them a
question. So if I asked you a question and then you.
You were evasive, you provided distancing language
around that, you provided fillers that you were
using past to present tense, confusing that. There's a lot
of this. You maybe don't want to stick with eye contact. We're not
saying someone's lying at this point. What we're saying is there's probably something there, there's
a topic to probe which could be of interest to us. It's
not lie detection. So in. In the. For example, the
Manchester bombing, did anyone, to your recollection, did
anyone individually pick up certain
things and they never sewed it? Nobody sewed it all together, or
is this all exposed facto when they picked up the cctv?
No, it was picked up by a father of one of the
concert goers who reported it to
the security that was there and the security
did not challenge the person that is contained
within the publicing the public report that was done.
I can't pass any comment on that. All I've done is I've read
it a lot and have studied it and what would be assumed
is there was some failings that occurred and there was a missed
opportunity. And, you know, you and I know it's
a sad indictment of life that wherever you go
to a place where there's tons of people, you have a bag
check and things like that. Did that not happen? Was it not. Was it
not normal or was it not normal practice to
check everyone's bags before they went into a concert or a
conference to a concert like that? He was in a public area
that joined and I don't know the men arena
very well, but I believe there's a concourse area from the
railway going to the arena and it was in a public
Congregation area that wasn't within the confines of the
secure. He was in the exiting area waiting
for the crowds to leave. And they say he's not in
a secure, secure environment. I see.
Okay. So, of course, as happens with all of
my wonderful guests, time is running out. What I want to do is
ask you about again, without
compromising names, etc. In your
role as an international risk advisor investigator,
can you give us a taste of one of the most
challenging investigations that you've been
involved in? And also maybe a
quick example of an investigation or something that
didn't go quite the way you planned it to go? And whether
it's previously in the police or in your private sector
so that people can learn from what didn't happen as
well as it should have done, there's still a case ongoing. And I won't go
into the detail around it, but it's a. Is
a boiler room fraud. The victims, I.
They're really nice people and you always want to help them.
They've been defrauded of, you know, a serious amount of
money, which is life changing to a lot of people. And I think the challenges
exist around this. My, my team have done a fantastic job.
We've been in Southeast Asia. We've confronted
the subject, and I actually did that myself after we
performed surveillance on him. But we can't get
the link to the bank accounts.
Yeah. And we know it's him by the way
he reacted when I spoke to him. He told me to go away. That
would just not be normal for an expat who saw another
expat, you know, in a Southeast Asian country. And I
use the first name. You wouldn't go, who the F are you?
Yeah, you would be like, I don't know you. Sorry, who are
you? Like that. You'd be a bit more friendly. And the guys are wrong. And,
and I think for the last couple of years. And funny enough, I'm rev.
We're doing a review of it, like a cold case review. And I was joking
with one of my investigators this morning, and I think I've
spoken to you about this case maybe about 18 months ago
about, you know, what can the IfG do to help, you know,
within the network. And we're still stumped. We need the evidence. We need
to, we need to get the evidence of, of connecting these guys to the bank
accounts. And we can't get that, you know, because he's a clever guy. And
I joked with one of my investigators this morning, like, you know, I need you
to get your Colombo jacket on and stand in the rain and
actually think about what we could do with this and a different set of eyes
on it. Have we missed something? Is there something else
there? And the problem is, as you know, with these fraud jobs,
Gary, people run out of money. And, you know, I'm not going
to take any more money from my client, but I do want to solve the
job and it's probably one of those jobs that you really, really want
to solve because we're so close and this guy's living his
lifestyle and his family, you know, the kids are going to
these nice schools and stuff and this is the suspects. And I think you're doing
it with dirty money and we can't get you. So we haven't
done anything wrong. We've done a lot of things right. And we couldn't get into
the gated community and it was a real challenge to how to get into this
gated community. And the security guards wouldn't let us in. And in
the end we found a person at home made food
for delivery. It wasn't a shop or a restaurant, but you could
pre order food. And what we did was we just pre ordered food from them
every day to get into the gated community. And then we could be in this
gated community to look at the subject's house and you
have to use these tricks to do stuff, but nothing ever went
wrong. But we need something to go right, put it that way, to
solve this case. And before
I let you go and, and
serve your wonderful clients in the way that you do,
is there anything that you have sat back and
thought about, either in the old days or now that you
would have loved to have done had you not become a
policeman or an investigator? Is there something that you thought,
ah, you know, I'd love to have been a, a forex
trader with whatever. Is there something, or something
really outlandish like a professional footballer?
You know, I've always had actually an interest in finance and I've, I've always thought
about that. I always thought about wanting to become a lawyer when I, when I
left the police and, and I didn't do that. And obviously I know a lot
of lawyers. I know I work with them mostly day in, day out
and I enjoy it. But there was a hard decision and I remember
my, my stepdad that passed the
year I, I actually left the police and I considered becoming a
pilot, an airline pilot, and I went to go and do the exams up in
Manchester and I was the oldest one, sat there in the room,
you know, And I was only in my mid-30s and everybody else was there with
their parents, you know, coming along to do the exams and
I, I, I walked through a lot of the interviews
and the, the maths tests and all of that. It was
easy. You know, I'm good with, good with numbers. Yeah. But I wasn't
so good with the joystick and, and the pedal thing
because I'm not used to playing computer games. But I was good enough to pass.
But I, my coordination probably was lacking compared to,
you know, an 18 year old and, you know, and I had a
bit of money, I'd saved up and to become a pilot at the time was
about £80,000, you know, to do all the training.
And I spoke to my stepdad about it and he said, look, the decision is,
do you go into business or do you become a pilot? You've really got to
make that choice because if you become a pilot, this is, this is going to
be your second career and probably your last career, as it were.
And I took the decision not to and I didn't become a pilot and I
went and set up my own business and, and then went and worked out in
Brunei and took it from their training governments and, and, and now,
and now 13 years on, I live in different places and
travel, travel around the world trying to solve some of the, some of
these problems. Indeed. And very quickly, why
pilot is that from? You mentioned the raf, your granddad, or
why a pilot? What was it that said that rang in your mind?
I'd always been fascinated with planes. I enjoyed
in the police, I enjoyed doing the, the
response driving. I was a, you know, police advanced driver, had done
all the training. I enjoyed vehicles, I enjoyed the
adrenaline and speed of that. I like dealing with complex problems.
I'm very mathematical, I'm very scientific.
I found it very interesting. I think it's, it's, you
know, how an A380 takes off and lands, you know,
with up to 500 people on board is fascinating.
But I think now, you know, as much as I would have loved
to have done it, I get to travel on planes and stuff and be around
aviation and I probably have the better side of it. And
I'm not saying I would have probably still loved to be in a pilot, but
perhaps you fall out of love with it as life goes on. I don't know.
Yeah, not necessarily a safe, a
vocation as it used to be with everything going on, but anyway, that's another
conversation. James, it's been lovely chatting with you
and I want to thank you for taking time out and
for joining me. I wish you a lovely evening in
Malaysia. Happy Eid, I'm supposed to say Eid
Mubarak or something like that. And you're supposed to send me
lots of money and gifts for the finishing of the
festival as well. So I'll see you soon, whether it's in
England or in Asia. Lovely, thanks. Thanks,
Gary. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening. And if you
enjoyed this podcast, please click and subscribe to the
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