One Head Many Hats by Robert D. Brewer

Author:Robert D. Brewer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brown Dog Books

CHAPTER 8

I was involved in a complicated fraud during my time on shift. I had arrested a very clever individual who was conning a well-known high street store out of hundreds of pounds. At the time, this particular store allowed a customer to buy goods up to the value of £500 using a cheque without the need to produce a cheque guarantee card. Amazing.

So this individual would go into the store and buy anything, and I mean anything, up to that value by using just a cheque and without any other form of a cheque guarantee card. He would then walk out of the store for a few minutes then go back into the same store. He would say he wanted a refund for the goods that he had just purchased, and ask for a cash refund for the entire amount. His scam was that he acquired five bank chequebooks, that’s 25 cheques in each book, but he had no money in his account. After about ten days the bank started to get two or three cheques per day to the value of around £500, which obviously all bounced.

I spent weeks on that job trying to gather the evidence against a very cunning person. I always had a slight admiration for criminals who used their brain to commit fraud, as opposed to those who used a shotgun or violence to scare someone senseless for a few lousy pounds. Also, in those days I was given the time to investigate a crime of this complexity. Nowadays, it wouldn’t happen, and the store would either investigate the crime themselves or just write off the loss and pass it on to the consumer.

Christmas time on shift was always a lottery. In effect, you normally had Christmas Day or New Year’s Day off. As an unwritten rule, though, if you had a family in those days, the job would try and give you some time at home, if you were unfortunate enough to have to work on Christmas Day. It was around 1995, and I was on a shift on Christmas Day, when we got a call that there was a mass brawl on one of the estates. We were running a skeleton crew because even the villains normally took Christmas Day off (normally, but not always). As my crewmate and I arrived at the location of the incident, we were confronted with a mass fight outside a house. After wading in and trying to separate the main protagonists, it emerged that it was a family argument revolving around the Christmas dinner table as they all sat down to Christmas dinner. It ended up with all offenders being arrested and charged with affray, which is slightly less serious than violent disorder. I recall the main offenders were the father and his three grown-up sons. The next day, all four visited the police station. But instead of being taken there under arrest, like the previous day, they all attended voluntarily and with great shame. All

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