“Even now, I still can’t believe it all happened, that the man I was married
to did all those things.” Kim James is a hard-working, non-drinking, non-smoking
29-year-old mother. A former model who now works as an aerobics instructor, she
is bringing up her two-year-old son, Daniel, on her own. She shakes her head in
disbelief as she ponders the events of the past year. “It is a complete mystery
to me how my husband changed. I just can’t work it out at all . . .”
Her shock and bewilderment is understandable. Last Thursday, Simon James, Kim’s
34-year-old estranged husband, was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course
of justice. In the summer of 1999, he had plotted, with Jonathan Rees, a private
investigator, to have his wife arrested as a drug dealer. Rees had persuaded a
corrupt police officer to fabricate an ‘intelligence report’ claiming that one
of his informants had told him that Kim James was a cocaine dealer. He had her
car broken into, and cocaine planted in it.
In response to the intelligence report, police officers duly searched Kim
James’s flat and car on the night of June 15, 1999. They found several sachets
of white powder in her car. She was arrested for ‘possession of cocaine with
intent to supply’ - an offence that carries a mandatory sentence of seven years’
imprisonment. Kim, innocent, was faced not just with the horror of jail, but
permanent separation from her son.
“It was,” she remembers, “the most awful thing imaginable - a terrifying
nightmare in which I was trapped. I knew my husband must have been behind it,
but I had no idea of how I could prove it and demonstrate that I was innocent. I
was absolutely petrified of what would happen.”
What is most shocking about the case is how astonishingly easy it was for Simon
James to engineer his wife’s arrest. He was angry about her decision to reduce
his weekly contact with Daniel from three days to one. His response was to try
to ensure that she was sent to prison for seven years and denied all contact
with their child. He came appallingly close to succeeding.
On May 6, 1999, he walked into the offices of Law and Commercial, a private
investigative agency in south London. Jonathan Rees was one of the firm’s two
directors. James explained to Rees that he wanted custody of his son, but his
lawyer had advised him that the courts would not award it to him - they would
uphold his wife’s right to be the primary carer. He was sure, he said, that his
wife was not fit to be a mother and could not be trusted to look after his son
properly. How could he get the courts to agree with him?
Rees would eventually suggest a simple way to solve that apparently intractable
problem: they could frame Kim as a cocaine dealer. He could arrange for the drug
to be planted in her car and, through his police contacts, he could ensure that
she would be searched and the drug found. She would go to prison - and, even if
she did not, no judge in the country would allow his son to be looked after by a
drug dealer. The cost of destroying his wife’s life would be £8,500.
Austin Warnes, a 37-year-old detective constable from the CID based at Bexleyheath
Police Station, was offered £1,500 to plant a false report in the
police crime computer. He readily accepted. The sum seems absurd: for a paltry
£1,500, Warnes was willing not only to corrupt and pervert justice by
implicating a young mother in a crime of which he knew she was innocent, but
also to jeopardise his own career and risk a lengthy spell in prison - a
particularly uncomfortable place for a police officer.
Despite the fact that the Met is determined to root out corruption and the
Commissioner insists that there will be “no hiding place” for corrupt officers,
Warnes was willing to run so great a risk for so small a reward. It is evidence
of how confident he was that he would not be caught. A career police officer
with two commendations from the Metropolitan Police for his “excellent”
work, it is difficult to believe that it was the first time Austin Warnes had
been involved in planting false intelligence into the crime computer.
Certainly the smoothness with which the operation proceeded suggests that Rees
was experienced in having innocent people framed. And, indeed, that he was not
ultimately successful was purely down to chance. For reasons unconnected to this
case, officers from CIB3, the Met’s specialist anti-corruption squad, had
planted a microphone inside Jonathan Rees’s offices at Law and Commercial.
They believed that Met officers were corruptly selling him information from the
Police National Computer. They had, therefore, started surveillance of his
office to see if it revealed who those officers were.
For a month, the tapes of Rees’s conversations revealed nothing of interest.
Then Simon James walked into his office. “We were faced with a very serious
dilemma,” remembers Detective Chief Inspector Barry Nicholson, who was in charge
of the CIB3 inquiry. “Should we intervene, tell Kim James and ensure that Rees’s
and James’s conspiracy ended before they had actually done anything? Or should
we let the operation continue until we had enough evidence to be sure that we
could prosecute James, Rees and their criminal associates?
“After thinking long and hard, we decided that we could not simply let them get
away with it. We had to let them proceed far enough to ensure that we got the
evidence we needed to convict them. Of course, that meant we couldn’t tell Kim
that we knew she was innocent. We couldn’t tell anyone. None of the police who
arrested her knew anything about CIB3’s operation. We felt that we couldn’t risk
the possibility that it all be fed back to Rees by a corrupt officer.”
CIB3’s decision to keep her in the dark is not one that Kim James feels wholly
comfortable with: “I can see why they let it all go on. Of course I can. Yes, I
know that they had to do what they did, and I can see why they couldn’t tell me.
But, well, thanks guys! My life was a nightmare for several weeks.”
As far as Kim was concerned, there was nothing with which to prove her innocence.
There was only a police report that she was a drug dealer and cocaine had been
found in her car. As even her own lawyer pointed out, it looked very bad indeed.
Several weeks later, on July 19, officers from CIB3 would tell her that they
knew she was innocent, that she would not be charged and that they knew who was
behind the drugs being planted in her car. “We had to wait as long as we did
because we wanted to flush out as many of the corrupt officers who were dealing
with Rees as we could,” DCI Nicholson insists. “In the end, the only officer we
had sufficient evidence to proceed against was Austin Warnes.”
When Warnes saw the evidence against him, he pleaded guilty. James and Rees both
elected for trial, as did James Cook, the man who officers from CIB3 filmed
breaking into Kim’s car and planting a package. Rees and James were both
convicted. Cook was acquitted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice: it
appears that the jury was convinced by his claim that he did not know what the
package contained.
Judge Paul Collins described the crimes as “particularly grave”. He called
Austin Warnes “a disgrace to the Metropolitan Police Service”, said Simon James
was “egocentric and gullible” and noted that even Jonathan Rees's lawyer was
“unable to disguise” the unattractiveness of his client’s evidence.
Judge Collins then handed down astonishingly light sentences for a conspiracy
that would - had it succeeded in the way that its perpetrators intended
“permanently and perhaps tragically have damaged two innocent lives”, to use the
judge’s own words. Warnes received only four years for planting fictitious
evidence. He will, as the judge stressed, be eligible for parole in two. Rees
and James were given only six years each. They will be eligible for parole after
three years.
“Given the severity of the crimes, we are surprised at the lightness of the
sentences,” DCI Nicholson said. “The CPS will consider what grounds there are
for appealing against them.”
Kim James, too, was shocked at the lenient treatment of the men who came so
close to wrecking her and her son’s life. “If CIB3 hadn't happened to be
listening in Rees’s office,”; she says with a sigh, “I would probably be in
prison now, and my son would be with the man who had put me there. I still can’t
quite get my head round that thought. It’s horrific, but it could have happened
to me. What scares me is that it was so damn easy for them to frame me. All it
takes is one corrupt policeman. Just one.”
