THE SCUM OF WEST YORKSHIRE

Nicholas O'Dwyer investigates the basest

of all criminals, those who prey on the old and infirm

THEIR FACES glower down from the dingy office walls: broad noses, a lick of cruelty to the mouths and contempt in their eyes for the police camera. Meet the `bogus callers' of West Yorkshire.

They have posed as social workers, police officers, gas and water board offi- cials. Remorselessly and repeatedly, they target the elderly, whom they call 'rattlers'. Their mugshots — 144 of them — look down on some of the most depressed detectives in Britain.

Six officers working from a disused police station in Leeds make up one of the very few squads dredging one of the nasti- est little backwaters of modern crime. Last year, bogus callers notched up 722 offences in West Yorkshire. This year the total is expected to rise by a quarter.

The callers' expertise is in spotting the overgrown garden, the lace curtains, the peeling paint which signal for them a 'boat' — an old person's house. Sometimes they will follow a rattler home from the post office, or trawl behind the day-centre bus, jotting down the drop-off addresses of promising targets. They say they can smell the laid-up money in the boat. It is, they say, 'foist'. After the targeting comes the knock. A cap pulled down over the eyes, a spurious ID card flashed quickly at the short-sight- ed, quick-fire conversation designed to confuse. The trick is to get the rattler away from the boat, while the accomplice often a youngster learning the tricks of the trade — sneaks into the house and smash- es open likely hiding places for cash.

While making a BBC Modern Times film, we met wheelchair-bound stroke vic- tims who could only watch while young men rifled through their possessions, a frail and vulnerable schizophrenic pension- er victimised in his home by men who had driven down from Scotland, and we met Alzheimer's sufferers who had been repeatedly targeted. It was a world without mercy where infirmity provided only a cash opportunity.

`You could have no legs, no arms, be blind and deaf, and if you've got money in your house it'll be taken. It's not a ques- tion of remorse. They have no feelings whatsoever for their victims,' said DC Graham Twohey, a tough and grizzled vet- eran of the West Yorkshire police team.

His colleague, DC Ian Thistlewood, agreed: 'Pity isn't in it. Pity is something that policemen feel when they go to these old people's houses, absolutely nothing to do with the villains when they go. They want money and they'll get money. They'll go out and have some beer, have a right good night out on this lady's life savings. They'll piss it up against some pub wall, they'll put it in their arms, stick it up their noses: where's the pity gone?'

Both officers say the crime statistics understate the scale of the problem — they don't include cases in which the vic- tims simply haven't realised they have been conned or, fearful of their relatives' scorn, have not reported the crime.

`Bogus' crime takes different forms. The distraction burglar will try to get the pen- sioner out of the house to examine, say, a broken-down wall at the end of the garden. The bogus official purports to be from one or other utility or, surprisingly frequently, from the police force.

The reasons for calling can be imagina- tive. One offender worked by buying a brace of cheap budgies from a pet shop and then pushing one in through an open window: `Missus, our bird's escaped and flown into your house. Can we come in and get it?' Another would carry a pocketful of maggots from a bait shop. These he would claim to have found in a neighbour's roof rafters. Could he just come in and inspect upstairs?

A high proportion of the calls featured the words, `I've been sent by . . . ' followed by some department of local government. The claim seems to possess a talismanic quality on the doorsteps of the elderly, def- erential to what they still see as authority. Many of the calls unerringly exploit the innate kindness of people raised in an age of trust. The victims will always fetch a glass of water for the thirsty. They will look after the young child while the adult 'just goes round the corner'.

When the doorstep patter doesn't work, violence does. Several 'bogus' men have trussed up their victims before terrorising them into revealing hiding places for money. The head of the Leeds unit, DCI Michael Grubb, believes three West Yorkshire unsolved murders are the work of the bogus men — cases where their efforts have been over- enthusiastic.

The casebook spans social class. The most pathetic stories were those like Fred- erick Steele, aged 82. Mr Steele lives a threadbare life. He is vulnerable, easily confused and physically frail. He has endured seven years of bogus callers tak- ing his pension from him. Twelve men have, so far, been convicted of theft, and the callers keep coming. His neighbour says he hands over cash because he can see the anger in the callers' eyes.

At the other extreme are victims who police believe have lost up to £150,000. One bogus caller proudly told us how he had hoodwinked a former Leeds Universi- ty professor living in genteel senility in Headingley. He had won the man's trust to the extent that the professor sent away the policeman a worried neighbour had called to the house.

`Stanley' had his first bogus caller visit in July. Stanley, now 73, was a former RAF flight engineer living out his days in the house where he had lived with his parents. He was immensely proud of his wartime memorabilia and the sunset view of a Lan- caster bomber he had painted above the fireplace.

A man had called purporting to have been sent to paint the house by the coun- cil. Stanley was confused about the details of the visit and what had gone missing but, back in July, wanted only to get his hands on the culprit. He brandished a short cere- monial sword — a trophy from wartime service in the Far East.

The caller must have marked Stanley down as a good prospect for his col- leagues. In the course of the next five weeks, eight further bogus men called. Stanley was broken. His neighbour told us he was frightened to open the door even for his home help. He had unexplained bruising to his ribs and arm.

Stanley told us he was leaving his home for his own protection and moving to shel- tered housing. He had hoped to die in his own house, but the callers had destroyed his peace of mind and driven him out. At three in the afternoon, he was still wearing his pyjamas and, at the end of the short television interview, his face collapsed in on itself with grief.

Nellie was 73 but had a gentle girlish charm. She had been togused', as the police call it, at least three times and wasn't sure how much money she had lost because she had never counted the money she kept hidden upstairs. The calls had reduced her to hiding at the back of her house. She left her dead husband's cap on the front dresser in the hope that the bogus men would think there was a man in the house.

`I've always trusted people,' she said. `The policeman said I'd have to be less trusting in future. They'll not be seeing me at the front door again. I'm going to stay back.'

DC Twohey explains: 'They trust because they are honest and good and decent. They're brought up in a system where the neighbours in the street talked to each other, where they could leave their house doors open. If you do that now, well . .

The bogus callers live a life apart. Many are travellers who flit between police force boundaries to thwart investigation. Some use their own 'slaves' — booze- or drug- addicted vassals used to make the prospecting knock on a new door. One such slave lived in a dog kennel beside his master's caravan and was beaten when he tried to flee.

The bogus men are nothing if not indus- trious. William White clocked more than 200 offences and bought a Spanish villa' before he was arrested. White, who has now returned to his native Rochdale after completing a prison sentence, would fly in to Manchester airport, cross the Pennines for a bogus spree and then return to the sun. Another bogeyman managed a total of 839 offences.

`What we have in the West Yorkshire area is travelling bands of criminals,' said DC Twohey. 'The villains can go out one day and recce the likely targets, then come back three months later. They know exact- ly which targets they're going to hit. You have people from Manchester, Liverpool, London, Scotland coming to our area, doing two or three jobs, then moving on.'

They pick the elderly for two reasons. First, the old hoard cash. One bogus man we met had walked away from one pen- sioner's house with £37,000, another with £12,000. Most will be content with a rota of pension money victims, preferably those sufficiently vulnerable and isolated to allow repeat visits and a regular cash flow.

Second, from the criminal perspective, the victims are ideal. They have poor short-term memories, bad eyesight and are physically frail, should they need to be brushed aside. Not only are the proceeds in cash — 'old money' as Graham Twohey calls it — there are no incriminating tools required should the criminals be arrested between jobs. Even if they are caught red- It was formerly known as BBC English.' handed, there is a chance the victim will die before the case reaches court.

This is the root of the detectives' gloom. In most of the crimes, the victim is the only witness. Detectives do not enjoy putting such witnesses through the rigours of ID parades and Crown Court cross-examina- tion. One experienced bogus man who had stood his time on ID parades said, 'They are terrified. I have seen them physically shaking on the parade. It's the thought that that nice man was a criminal who could have killed them.'

The only real hope is when there is a good secondary witness and the criminal has left a fingerprint at the house. Even then there is a problem. When I asked the team's patient and diligent scenes of crime sergeant, Dave Hunter, where he would send a print he had found on a back door in Batley, he told me it went to Seattle in the United States, there to take its place below prints found at the scenes of mur- ders and rapes in a processing list which can take years.

For local CID offices, bogus crime is a disaster: high input in terms of getting a cogent statement and searching for possi- ble witnesses, low result in terms of arrests. Even the Leeds team has a clear-up rate of only 30 per cent. The criminals know this and disperse their efforts between police boundaries to ensure it does not become a force priority in any one area. Criminals operating in Yorkshire can easily flit between five counties.

Only when a squad like that in Leeds takes an overview do the patterns emerge. Most of the criminals have a tell-tale sign. Paul Darracott — a Scouse bogus man who clocked up 50 non-violent offences in West Yorkshire — would invariably ask for a glass of water or lemonade to slake the rag- ing thirst induced by his heavy consumption of amphetamines. William White would claim to be catching rats or mice. In both cases the team was able to track the bogus men beyond their force boundaries so that the scale of their offending became clear.

Despite this, there are currently only two such units in England. Even these are under pressure to reassign officers to murder inquiries and armed robberies. Bogus bur- glary remains a dirty little crime offering no kudos, few arrests and little overtime.

`Depressing, isn't it?' said Ian Thistle- wood. 'We try our best with each case and we know we're on a hiding to nothing more often than not. And no matter how good our evidence may appear to be at the time of an offence, somebody's going to cut it to shreds, some little shit's going to walk out of court and we know for a fact he'll be back at it within weeks. It's the way of the world.' Or, in other words, crime really does pay.

Nicholas O'Dwyer is a producer with BBC Documentaries. His Modern Times film, Bogus Callers, is screened at 9 p.m. on 1 November.