Stephen Lawrence - justice denied by criminal corruption?

[Jan Klimkowski]

In 1996, Noye stabbed 21-year-old Stephen Cameron to death on the M25 motorway. He fled to Spain's Costa del Crime, knowing there was no extradition treaty with the UK.

This was regarded as Britain's most notorious road rage murder, but there are allegations that the murder was over a drugs deal.

Eventually, Daniella Cable, Cameron's girlfriend, 17 at the time of the murder and an eyewitness as she had been in his car, was flown secretly to Spain, and identified Noye. He was eventually arrested, and convicted of Cameron's murder.

Daniella Cable will remain in a Witness Protection programme for the rest of her life.

If she has any sense.

For the other eyewitness to Cameron's murder, Alan Decabral, refused to enter Witness Protection and was shot dead in his car, in October 2000.

Additional details here:

Arrogant killer who made crime pay
By John Steele
http://www.telegraph.co.uk - 17th April 2000

Noye given life for road rage murder on M25
BRASH and bullish, Kenneth Noye liked to give the impression that he was smarter and tougher than anyone else. He was arrogant, too, entertaining fellow prisoners while on remand at Belmarsh jail by boasting of the guests he would invite to a party on his acquittal.

Police believe he was just the man to fight, from anger or pride, someone who complained about his driving. He was the kind of man who, when losing a fair fight, would use any means, including a knife, to save face. Noye was notorious for driving his high-powered cars at near suicidal speeds. To pursue him was "virtually impossible", said one officer who investigated a suspected plan for cocaine importation by Noye in the early Nineties. "He would drive at 100mph or more. At times you just couldn't stay with him. It was too dangerous."

Spanish officers sent to arrest him on behalf of Kent police in August 1998 faced the same difficulty. On his way to one assignation with a young woman Noye drove a Jeep at 100mph along a treacherous road towards Barbate, near Cadiz in southern Spain. One police car was left behind, another skidded and a third failed to negotiate the slip road Noye suddenly took.

He was just the kind of driver to decide, in an instant, to take the M20 slip road off the M25 and swerve his powerful Land Rover Discovery towards it at breakneck speed, cutting up the slower Bedford Rascal van driven by Danielle Cable. Noye typified a new breed of entrepreneurial and international British criminal. It had evolved from the local gangs - such as that led by the Kray twins - whose interests lay in clubs and protection rackets.

In the Seventies and early Eighties, Noye was a working-class man on the make. The son of a Post Office manager and a greyhound track manageress, he grew up in Bexleyheath, a suburb in Kent where many had moved from the rundown dockland areas along the Thames. Short, stocky and with a broken nose acquired when he fell from a tree as a child, he left school at 15 and studied commercial art at printing college.

As an apprentice printer in Fleet Street, he spent his cash on smart clothes and the many women he chased. But he was ambitious. Working night shifts allowed him to take a daytime job driving a tipper truck. And when he married his loyal wife Brenda, he decided to set up his own haulage business. He branched out into property. One deal secured him £300,000 which he invested in mobile homes in America. He began cultivating criminal contacts.

Noye was eager to embark on money-making deals. He began trading in jewellery, particularly watches. He tried his hand at building. He even renovated a sunken boat raised from the Mediterranean, an enterprise that earned him £40,000. By his late twenties, he was a millionaire. He moved with Brenda into Hollywood Cottage, a mock-Tudor building in acres of woodland, with orchard and swimming pool, at West Kingsdown, Kent. Here Brenda raised their two sons. A cottage that had occupied the site had burnt down in mysterious circumstances.

By now the distinction between legal and illegal business was becoming blurred as Noye diversified into illicit gold dealing and VAT evasion. He was mixing with financiers, and it was not long before his eyes were opened to the potential of offshore banking and money laundering. He had a cluster of convictions. Most were for shoplifting or receiving stolen cars and property in his youth. But he had also assaulted a police officer and been caught smuggling a pistol from Miami. Beneath the veneer of the successful entrepreneur lay a thug. Neighbours, wary of his notorious temper, tried not to cross him. Once he emptied a shotgun into a pub ceiling just to settle a bar room argument, it was whispered.

However, anxious that his standing as a successful businessman should impress, Noye began befriending local politicians, county dignitaries and magistrates. He joined the Freemasons. He also began to cultivate police, informing on his rivals. During his trial in 1985 for the murder of Det Con John Fordham - of which he was acquitted - evidence emerged that Noye had told the officer in charge of the Brink's-Mat robbery investigation, Brian Boyce, to ring a fellow officer named Ray Adams.

Adams, Noye had suggested, would say he was "not a violent man or a killer". Mr Adams, who later became a commander of Scotland Yard's intelligence branch, is understood to have been one of Noye's police handlers. There is no evidence of impropriety on the part of his official police handlers but Noye has long been suspected of forging corrupt relationships with other officers he met, particularly through his Masonic links.

An illustration of his attitude to detectives came when he offered Det Chief Supt Boyce a £1 million bribe if he ensured Noye escaped prison. Mr Boyce rejected the offer. By January 1985, a Scotland Yard team hunting the three tons of gold taken in the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery - Britain's biggest proved raid - knew the bullion was being sold back on to the legitimate market. It traced the chain back to Noye and hoped he would lead to the gold.

It was known that Noye kept shotguns but this was not considered a danger. Police thought they were part of the haulier-turned-country squire image he cultivated. His rottweiler dogs presented a greater threat to Det Con Fordham, the experienced undercover officer who, with a colleague, Neil Murphy, was sent into the grounds of Hollywood Cottage to monitor activity. Only Noye knows truly what happened when first his dogs and then he, armed with a kitchen knife, confronted the balaclava-clad Fordham.

Noye was to admit stabbing the officer to death but claimed that he acted in self-defence as he feared for his life. Later that year an Old Bailey jury accepted this defence. In 1986 Noye was convicted of handling the bullion and jailed for 14 years. He contained his arrogance in the murder trial, but in the second case reverted to type. He told a convoluted tale of dealing in smuggled gold and appeared contemptuous of the Crown's attempts to prove that he had handled the stolen bullion. His arrogance backfired and the jury did not believe him.

In a moment to be contrasted with his tears in the M25 trial - as a disabled witness told the court of his kindness and generosity - Noye snarled at the jurors who convicted him: "I hope you all die of cancer." Of the three tons of virtually pure Brink's-Mat bullion - worth £26 million - police recovered only scraps. About half went through Noye's hands, creating a flood of cash which was invested in London's burgeoning Docklands developments.

The Brink's-Mat inquiry took Yard officers to America and around the world, providing conclusive proof for the first time that a new generation of British criminals such as Noye had forged international liaisons. As a police killer and the handler of the Brink's-Mat gold, Noye enjoyed considerable status among the inmates of high-security wings in jails around the country.

Noye had no drugs convictions before the Brink's-Mat case. But he appears to have developed a taste for trafficking while in prison. Between 1992 and 1993 he was drawing towards his release and was allowed out on day release from Latchmere House, an open jail in Surrey. The aim was to allow him to rehabilitate himself in the community. Noye, ostensibly, found a job with a skip hire firm in Kent. In reality, he spent his time with a long-time associate, planning, it was suspected, to import cocaine from Colombia via Florida to Britain.

His activities attracted the attention of the United States authorities and the regional crime squad in south-east England. But their six-month operation was destroyed by a corrupt police officer, John Donald, who offered through another criminal to supply Noye and his associate with details of the investigation. The approach was sufficient to alert Noye, who abandoned the suspected cocaine plot. Donald was jailed for 11 years.

Noye was released in 1994 and, despite being forced to pay £3 million following civil action by the loss adjusters for Brink's-Mat's insurers, never seemed to be short of cash. In the civil agreement, Kenneth and Brenda Noye were allowed to buy a new house in Sevenoaks, Kent, close to the police station.

He owned vehicles in false names and is believed to have lavished money on at least one mistress and, according to police sources, call girls. At least one holiday was spent in Northern Cyprus at the Jasmine Court hotel where Asil Nadir, the fugitive Polly Peck chief, was based. An indication of Noye's activities in this period came in 1996 when several men involved in an audacious plot to steal up to £800 million from high street cash machines were convicted.

One of the ringleaders was John Lloyd. Lloyd, 62, and nicknamed "Little Legs", was long suspected of involvement in the Brink's-Mat gang and had paid £5 million to the loss adjusters. His girlfriend, Jean Savage, was jailed for laundering cash from Noye's handling operation. Lloyd and Savage had lived in a cottage in West Kingsdown they bought from Noye. The case, centring on an attempt to create counterfeit cards, relied on the evidence of an informer, Martin Grant. Grant maintained that Noye had been involved in the preparation of the plot but he was never prosecuted.

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Road rage fiancée fears Noye revenge
New identity for witness with £1m price on her head

http://www.guardian.co.uk

Jamie Wilson

Monday April 17, 2000

The former fiancée of the man murdered by Kenneth Noye in the M25 road rage attack has spoken of her fear of an assassination attempt ordered by the gangster, after police warned her of a £1m price on her head.

Danielle Cable, who was with Stephen Cameron when Noye stabbed him to death at an interchange near Swanley, Kent, in May 1996, has been living under a new identity under the witness protection scheme since she helped police to identify Noye in 1998.

Speaking publicly for the first time since Noye was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey last week, Ms Cable, 23, said she lived in constant fear of her life. "I have to live from day to day wondering if I'm being watched or followed. I will always live in fear of Kenny Noye and what he could do to me if he ever found out where I lived."

Two years after Mr Cameron's murder, detectives flew Ms Cable to southern Spain to identify the man suspected of killing her fiancé. She told the Mail on Sunday of spotting Noye in a restaurant: "There were lots of people, and I was shaking. I saw him straight away. I just looked at him. I felt hatred. My stomach was churning and my heart was pounding. I felt I wanted to say something, but no words would have come out anyway."

Two weeks after she returned, police told her to go on holiday for her safety. "I never went back home. I haven't been back since."

In her new life she often wears a wig to disguise herself and will be photographed only in silhouette. "I have lost twice - Stephen and my old life," she said. "I haven't seen two of my brothers since I was relocated, and I didn't see my mother for four months."

Ms Cable is planning to marry a soldier who has helped her to recover from witnessing the stabbing. "I always said I would never love anybody again. But I met someone, and although I love him in a different way he is brilliant."

Scotland Yard yesterday refused to comment on reports that Noye, 52, is being investigated in connection with a string of gangland murders.

According to the reports, detectives believe that the south London car dealer John Marshall, found shot dead in his Range Rover a few days after Noye fled to Spain, may have been killed on his orders.

Marshall is believed to have supplied Noye with false number plates and papers for the Land Rover he was driving when he killed Mr Cameron. Noye is said to have ordered Marshall's murder before he could be questioned by police.

Noye has also been linked to the shooting of Daniel Roff, found dead in his car outside his house in Bromley, Kent, in March 1997. Roff was suspected of being involved in the murder of Noye's close friend, the great train robber Charlie Wilson.