Rigged by Andy Verity

Author:Andy Verity
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flint

12

THE RINGMASTER

Overlooking the River Thames at the east end of the City of London is a royal castle that’s long been a symbol of the way the British state of the past would mete out ‘justice’ to its enemies. Visitors to the Tower of London learn about the two heirs to the throne aged 12 and 9 who died after being imprisoned there in the late fifteenth century before Richard III became king; the jailing and beheading of Henry VIII’s wives Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard; and the excruciating torture and execution, approved by King James I, of the man who in 1605 tried to blow up Parliament, Guy Fawkes. In the history of British justice, in addition to cruelty and torture, there’s also another recurring motif: the hanging judge. The most notorious in history is Judge Jeffreys, who occupied the top judicial office of Lord Chancellor and sentenced at least 160 people to death after a West Country rebellion against James II, including one woman he sentenced to be burned at the stake just for sheltering some of the rebels. After James was overthrown by William of Orange, Jeffreys begged to be held in the Tower to protect him from a mob who were threatening to show him ‘the same mercy he had ever shown to others’. He was never to leave his voluntary captivity and died within its walls. When the yeomen who guide tourists around the Tower recount that horrible history, it is always with a tacit understanding that that confusion between justice and a cruel kind of vengeance, that state-sanctioned indulgence of some of our least civilised impulses, is safely consigned to the past. Of course, in modern-day Britain, we no longer do things like that. These days, we don’t use the justice system to crush people. Or do we?

Just across the river on the south bank, a short walk from Tower Bridge, is an ugly six-storey 1970s building with a red-brick exterior and only a few brown-tinted windows where the modern, apparently more civilised, version of justice is carried out. With an interior that was notable, after years of ‘austerity’, for its threadbare carpets, foam-upholstered seating and peeling paint, Southwark Crown Court is nevertheless the hub of the UK’s efforts to prosecute white-collar crime in the City of London and Canary Wharf – a concrete reminder of how little successive governments have been prepared to invest in bringing genuine fraudsters to justice. It’s not that there’s a shortage of genuine white-collar criminals. It’s just that the capacity of the police to investigate fraud has been so chronically underfunded that very few of them end up in court.

On Tuesday, 26 May 2015, a bright but cloudy spring morning, I was assigned to Southwark Crown Court to help cover the opening day of the trial of Tom Hayes. Because he was the first banker to be prosecuted since the 2008 financial crash, it was the lead story on the news throughout the day, as my colleague Emma

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