Doing Time - A Gypsy Deception

Most of us have had a job in our past, usually in the early days, that stands out in our working lives for all of the wrong reasons. I’ve actually had four such jobs so far, but the one in which the next series of events took place stood out again. Shirley Kelly was a sole practitioner in criminal law working out of a flat above a shop in Levenshulme. The woman was a lunatic, a loose cannon on the verge of being completely out of control, I would be amazed if she wasn't struck off years ago. It takes a certain type of person to be a criminal solicitor, most seem to glamorise their profession and their clients, they thrive off working for well known criminals, as though such people have celebratory status, and as such, so do they. Because criminals have their pick of criminal solicitors, there has to be a level of friendship and respect between solicitor and client in order to ensure repeat business, more often than not this involves a solicitor kissing the arse of some criminal fuckwit. Of course, criminals don’t work normal hours, and when they require the help of a solicitor, it’s more often than not initially in the middle of the night and nearly always because they have done something criminal and therefore quite rightly are heavily outnumbered by the authorities and in custody in some police station somewhere. Now, in order to represent any such criminal effectively, you either don’t have to give a shit what a particular criminal has done and therefore ethically blasé; be anti-establishment/rebellious; be money and respect orientated; be all of these things and more, or like I did initially and very naively; either believe the bullshit you were being spun in defence, and/or, blame the criminal’s unfortunate circumstances for their actions and want to help them put this mistake behind them with minimal damage so they can get back on track. Anyway, this breed of people in my experience worsens still as they become partners of law firms and thus bosses. They have no business skills and are therefore ill equipped to be running a business, further; they are feisty souls whose management techniques involve lying, manipulation, reactive blind rage and bullying. This particular megalomaniac boss around whom this story pivots had no other solicitors working for her when she poached a very junior me, she had only a small team of staff, all woman, mostly younger, some a lot younger, all of whom took her with a pinch salt, drank with her, kissed her arse, and who I believe she secretly fancied. I had been warned only days before I was due to start working with SK that the record time for a solicitor to stick it with her was 3 months, and that they would always be starting out in their careers, which allowed her to promise them big things whilst paying them very little and taking full advantage. SK was a true whirlwind, disguising her lack of legal knowledge with an energy sapping high speed dominance; I wouldn’t have thought she had ever listened to anybody or anything in her life. Just seeing her black spec’ed up 330i BMW parked up outside would fill me with dread and reduce me to a shadow of what I was capable of, all my energy and spirit sapped just on the off chance I might see her. Deep down, like most alcoholics in her position I am sure that she was a deeply unhappy person, no doubt very insecure, probably on the back of something traumatic in childhood. Whatever it was, there was simply no excuse for her method of keeping young solicitors in check once in her employ, i.e. by way of a psychological cosh. She promised me a higher salary than the Salford based criminal firm I was in, which incidentally is one of the four jobs that stands out for all the wrong reasons, with fast track opportunities and a VW Golf. The fast track opportunities were to start with her outlaying an expense to get me qualified to do police station work, this never happened. The Golf turned out to be unsafe, breaking down after two weeks and remaining under the trees outside my small flat just off Burton Road until long after myself and its owner parted company, at which point I sold it in order to recoup a fraction of the monies she owed be by then. No matter, the Golf was replaced by a knackered old automatic diesel Corsa, a banger which she made me buy and then never paid me back for. The job description never existed, but in summary the job involved waking the woman up on numerous occasions from a drunken stupor on her office floor whilst surrounded by over spilling ash trays, just so I could offer her a cup of tea so she wouldn’t be late for court, only to be told to, ‘fuck off you useless shit.’ To have my salary significantly reduced, stopped and then have to request and justify why I should be paid by way of a measly cheque each Friday, if she happened to be in, otherwise not get paid. Spend a week night going through the personal files of a senior officer with the Greater Manchester Police together with his estranged and very jaded wife, Hell bent on revenge, and who was sure contained evidence of his corruption, then going through this with SK before starting a day of court hearings. Having to not only kiss the arses of her drug dealing clients, but also ferry them around in my works car that I had paid for in order that they could drug deal whilst their cars were under surveillance. Being on call for police station work every night, despite not being qualified, and then doing all the Magistrates court work by day. Not being entitled to be paid for the police station work on account of me not being qualified to do it, all good experience you see, and despite having been told I would get a 45% cut of any such work. Having all of my work torn to shreds on a daily basis because nothing was ever right, despite doing everything to a very high standard and exactly as she had told me to. Being a verbal punch bag and target practice for launched lever arch files, one of which caught be unawares in the mouth at very close range. Taking a very damaged woman’s wrath on behalf of all men for being a man. Despite all this, and a lot more, I did manage to set a record; for no less than 6 months I continued to work for this nutter, such was the fear of not having career related employment. However, it was in the lead up and then including the day of my 25th birthday that was the final straw, I think my spirit just knew, and thus subconsciously I knew that I was on the verge of being broken, I jumped ship a few weeks later feeling a very ill young man, that is until I walked out of the door for the last time and down the street, at which point the horrifying prospect of unemployment with no pay in my pocket and no referee was like a gift from the Gods in comparsion to what I had been through, and a price worth paying for freedom. SK always wore jangly jewellery, expensive looking, but jangling nonetheless. She would also have giant expensive handbags, always with tassels and bits hanging off, her long painted nails clutched like talons around her Mont Blanc, and although she was always heavily made up, I was certain she had a touch of the Romany behind that foundation. It would have made sense, because, although most of her client base consisted of local Asian drug dealers and gang members, there were also a number of gypsy’s that used her services. Unfortunately for me, that meant I wouldn’t just get police call outs at any old time in the Greater Manchester area, they could be anywhere in the bloody country. The worst such call out came in on the eve of my 25th Birthday; it was a sunny Friday afternoon, I was in high spirits on my way back to the office having just finished a long hard slog at the Magistrates Court, the hope being, even if it meant not getting paid, that SK had sloped off boozing somewhere with her stick thin, forty something, chain smoking peroxide blonde minion who always reminded me of something nasty out of a fairy story. It was not to be, my mobile rang, SK had a police station call out for me when I got back, she was prepared to give it to me despite it being highly complex, she was civil in her manner, even offering to pay me for this one; she obviously had plans. I continued back with dread in the pit of my stomach as I always had before I was due to see SK. It turned out that the call out was for three young traveller lads who had been arrested and caged up in a police station somewhere in Greater Birmingham for the deception burglaries of a large number of elderly people up and down the country over several days. Their crimes were appalling; they targeted elderly people, no less than seventeen in total, one of whom was a war veteran well into his nineties, many of whom were woman. It was unknown how they knew of their selected targets, but it seemed a big coincidence that they were able to hit so many specific targets within such a large radius within such a relatively short time. Their technique had been to wait outside their targeted homes in a black Vectra, the car had been spotted and thus had eventually been their downfall. Upon establishing the neighbourhood was clear, one of the gang would approach the home, knock on the door, explain that a ball had gone into the back garden and ask to have a look. Upon gaining access, said decoy would attempt to distract the victim whilst the other gang members gained entry and riffled through the gaff. It’s a fair bet that as well as being an easy target, the elderly often kept cash and valuables in home having had the foresight no to trust banks, which at the time made no sense, but at the time of writing makes complete sense. Unfortunately, more often than not, things didn’t always go to plan and the poor old victim would end up having the most terrifying experience of their twilight years, two of whom had to be hospitalised. One poor man became suspicious, went upstairs to find a traveller riffling through his bedroom, the brave old dude went to chase him out and was knocked to the ground, his mattress was then flipped on top of him whilst the whole gang then jumped up and down on it. As you can imagine, the police had a deep hatred for the defendants, they’d brought out their big guns and there was no way they’d be letting these lads go anywhere, they knew only too well that if they did, they would never see them again, securing police bail for those who have many aliases and no fixed abode is always going to be a real battle, especially if they were bang to rights, and this lot had been arrested in the car that had been reported, together with a boot full of belongings that weren’t theirs. I was to be heavily outgunned. I drove down to Birmingham straight after work, it was the best part of the job, although the printed AA route planner did get me lost towards the end. I’d actually pulled into the police station once on my way in, parking up in its empty car park to study my route, I had decided that it could not possibly have been the cop shop, despite it appearing to be so on my planner, it had no signs, no real entrance and looked bleak, grey and totally lifeless sat on a main road in the middle of a rundown suburban shit hole. The investigating officers were CID and fresh enough to their shift, they were very experienced, but young enough to be street wise, energised and brutal, they were taking no prisoners and knew every trick in the book, I, on the other hand knew very few. Although I was treated professionally, they ran rings around me, they didn’t care I was new and inexperienced - the kid’s gloves were off, as were the boxing gloves. It was relentless as each of my criminals and me were bamboozled with a gradual dripping of technical evidence over the hours, it was like Chinese water torture. To make things worse when I did get a little breathing time between interviews I was giving myself a hard enough time trying desperately not to screw up whilst having SK, clearly drunk, battering my head and confusing issues on the telephone. The client’s had not taken well to being caged up, each time I went in to see each of them, all three begged me to get them out, weeping to see their mummies and daddies. It was very difficult to take instructions, even when they wanted me, as a 'country lad' to understand them, deciphering a jumble of chaotic and frightened high speed Irish was not easy. It was a tough night alright and getting tougher, I was due to be spending my birthday with my brother and folks at Devil’s Bridge the next day, I wondered if I’d make it. After three hours or so of hardnosed fine tooth comb interviewing of each defendant in turn, the sheer number of offences, dates, victims, previous related offences and convictions, the tiniest details, outstanding warrants and the vastness of the geographical area over which we were talking, involving multiple constabularies, agencies and evidence, the filth started to trip us up and wear us down. At 12:00am I was 25 and it was VIPER time, we were all to be taken to another police station in central Birmingham so that my clients could be videoed and I could then choose each of them 11 other mug videos from thousands to put alongside each of them on their video. The one’s that looked most like them have to put immediately before and after your client’s mug video so as to confuse the witness who is then shown the films with a view to identifying the culprit, or not. It was up to me as the solicitor to ensure that upon completion, each video went into a sealed bag with a code over the seal so as to ensure that it could not be tampered with. It transpired that the seal numbers I wrote down that night did not later correspond with the bags, despite the police arguing that I had not written them down correctly on the night, I knew for a fact that out of sheer terror for SK I had done, they’d been tampered with. SK later threw a file in my face over this in her haste to be angry with me, and yet I'm sure she will have used it to great effect in defence of what positive identifications the confused old biddies were able to make. At 3:00am, having made our way back up to the original police station for a series of further ball crushing interviews, the lads were charged with God knows how many counts each and refused police bail, they would be in Court on the Monday morning. I finally walked out of the door in tatters, it was dark, my hair was all over the place from running my hand through it in stress, my tie was loose and my suit badly crumpled. I lit a cigarette as I approached the car park, as I lifted my head I could see that my car was no longer the only car in the car park, it was now full, of transit vans in every shape and size you could imagine, no sooner had I taken this in when I was mobbed. I don’t wish to offend, but when certain traveller folk want something from you and you aren’t one of them, they have a tendancy to get right into your personal space in an attempt to dominate and intimidate a little. This is bad enough with just one or two of them talking about a planning application appeal, but when there are tens of them of all ages, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, concerned for their close family, panicking and not knowing what’s going on, it can feel like things are getting very dangerous. Despite having very little left to give, the nicotine and the adrenalin found me the words to bide me the time to hold them off and get me to my car. Once into my car, the door was being held opened whilst I furiously tried to fob off three or four questions at once with the most optimistic of advice I could muster in the circumstances, I hoped that I would never have to meet these people again based on all the BS I was spinning. It was getting relentless, they wanted a full and detailed conference each, and I had a three hour drive home, I managed to force the door shut, lock it and started the car, as I sped off their were hands on my bonnet, roof and boot, I really hoped to God now that I wouldn’t have to meet these people again, they’d want to tie me up in the sun like a site dog and creosote me. I breathed a sigh of relief as I hit the main road, the tiredness had gone and I was completely wired, it was still dark and the roads were clear, but my goodness there were a lot of traffic lights I had to get through to get the Hell out of Birmingham. I seemed to be getting caught by every red light, after about the third or fourth I noticed that there were the headlights of traffic building up behind me by now. At the fifth I noticed that the headlights immidiately behind me were on full beam, not only that, but my entire rear window was taken up by the bonnet of a long wheel based transit van bearing down upon my pathetic old automatic Corsa. I must have been more tired than I realised, it wasn’t until I pulled away and noticed another transit van in convoy that I cottoned on to the fact I was being followed. The van immediately on my tail began to rev up behind me, swerving from side to side and flashing its lights. The roads were absolutely dead otherwise, I thought that I was too, I had visions of me being dangled off a motorway bridge or bundled into the back of a van never to be seen again, I knew that SK would certainly not say anything, her client’s came long before me, I even wondered if she’d put them up to it. The car was registered to SK, if I made it home I vowed to hand over the keys with my resignation, she could deal with any speeding or light jumping fines, I just hoped the old thing would hold out as I put my foot down. I jumped half a dozen lights and just kept going until I hit motorway, I was looking in my mirrors all the way home, suspicious of any vans or anything tailing me, my heart never once left my mouth until I pulled up at home. With reflection, I think this had all been an act of intimidation, a demonstration of what I was dealing with if I didn’t get what they wanted. I didn’t sleep much before my brother picked me up in a convertible 3 series he’d borrowed from his work, we drove the scenic route to Devil’s Bridge in Kirby Lonsdale with The Best of Café Del Mar on full blast and met my folks on the bridge for a bacon butty and a cup of tea. They understood that I was no quitter; they understood that the criminal law was not for me, and they left it there. I went back down to Birmingham on the Monday morning and applied for bail on behalf of each defendant, not because I felt threatened, but because it was my job, I lost. A couple of weeks later, having had my work ripped to shreds for the last time, with a large amount of wages and expenses outstanding, SK lied that on the basis that some boxes had not been ticked on a form, she could not claim the £500 owed to the firm in legal aid for my Birmingham trip, I would not therefore be paid for the most harrowing nights work of my life that I had undertaken in opposition to every grain of my being. She would not then show me the boxes to which she referred. I left the office that evening as usual, my diary nice and full for the coming weeks, a pile of work to be done on my desk, and never went back, later selling her Golf to recoup a small amount of what I was owed. I bumped into one of SK’s part time secretaries several months later in a pub in Chorlton, she told me a lot of horror stories about the solicitors who had gone before me and, about SK, many of which made me feel a lot better about myself and my abilities, especially the one about the bill from Birmingham being submitted and paid.