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Late 2014 there was a freedom of information request where somebody said they wanted access to all of Essex County Council's compensation payments over the last year long period. And then I come across this one and it says alleged abuse, 70 grand compensation. So I ring the switch, bought up and this lady answers the phone and say oh yeah just can you put me through to Dennis King and she said who's calling, I said Charles Thompson and she just went really silent. If nobody believes the newspapers then when the newspapers expose something bad that's going on at the heart of government or the justice system or something else you can't get any traction for that so people just dismiss it. So when you're talking about a paedophile ring it's not like there's somebody sitting at the top going oh I think I'll set up a paedophile ring. It's just that these paedophiles, that's how they operate it. So it was almost like a safe underground network so I won't go down the park and try and procure a kid in case he goes running to his mum. I'll get a kid that can be relied on to be quiet and that's all under lock and key. You can't get access to anything from those cases until about something like, you know, 2080. And we're on. And today's guest we've got multi-award winning investigative journalist Charles Thompson. How are you brother? Alright, thank you. It's good to see you. Yeah, really good thanks. First of all thanks for coming on the show. That's a pleasure. Thank you. It was phenomenal brother, fascinating. I listened to the podcast. You did on exposing the paedophile ring back in the 80s was it, South End? Yeah. What was that called? The Lost Boy? Yeah, it's called Unfinished. Unfinished. Subaru's Lost Boys. Yeah. Phenomenal. Thank you. Listen to it. For the work you've done you've been, like I say, you've been presented with numerous awards because of undercover, the bravery of what you do. We'll touch on a lot of things but always go back to the start of my guest. Find out a little bit about yourself and we can take it from there. So whereabouts did you grow up brother? I was born in North London but I only lived there until I was a toddler. So I've grown up in Essex, South Essex. Essex boy? Yeah. My family are all East End, you know, if you trace it back or West Country. But grew up in Essex. So we moved out to Essex in the beginning of the 90s. How was your schooling and stuff? Yeah, it was alright. Just normal school, you know, went to state school. Not much to report. I didn't have a fantastically deprived childhood or a very privileged childhood. Just had a regular working class childhood. My dad worked building sites and then in a factory my mum was a stay-at-home mum and then got a job in a school as a din lading. So it was just normal. A pretty normal kid. Yeah. No bullying, no fucking madness, no drugs. Nothing, just normal. Oh no, no drugs or anything like that. I mean I think most kids get picked on at some point in school but I can't claim to have a tremendous soul of story. I've read a lot of your stories as well. A couple of people you've interviewed like James Brown's Misses, Michael Jackson, the women who'd done the documentary and stuff. Some fascinating people, man, with some stories that nobody really wants to touch on. How did you get into journalism? Well, I always wanted to be a journalist when I was a kid but I don't know why. So it might be Clark Kent, you know, because I used to love Superman when I was a kid but for some reason I just always wanted to be a journalist. And then when I started in journalism, when I was about 18, went to university to study journalism and it was not what I expected at all. I was quite a shy person and journalism was all about talking to people so that was really difficult. My first ever journalism studies class, the lecturer gave us all a notepad and a pen and said, right, go out into the high street and interview someone and that was just so crushing for me because I was so shy, I hated it. But over time you get used to it and now it's, you know, I couldn't do anything else. It's just a fantastic job. I started out in showbiz journalism and that was mainly because well, I was interested in music and I contributed to fan sites. So back in the, you know, the 60s, 70s, if you wanted to be a music journalist, you'd contribute to like fan zines. You know, there was a prevalence of music magazines back then. By the time I was starting, that didn't really exist. It was all online. So I started contributing to like online music fan sites as a hobby and so I was getting to go and interview people or be around people that were heroes to me, you know, Motown musicians or James Brown. I was at James Brown's last ever London press conference and last ever show and got to speak to him and ask him a question. But it was all hobby stuff. I was doing hobby journalism sort of just to get bylined so that you've got a portfolio of work. So when you go starting to try and get proper work, you've got a catalog of stuff you can show them. And so eventually that turned into paid work. Started writing for an American music magazine called Wax Poetics, an American website called South News. I did stuff for Mojo here in the UK. So it sort of went through a process of starting as a hobby and developing into paid work. But showbiz for me is not very interesting as a subject. I loved it as a teenager because I was guessing to be around all these people that I loved, you know, that I grew up loving, like James Brown and, you know, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and George Clinton and Piefunk. But firstly, most of my heroes are now dead or retired. And secondly, showbiz journalism is just quite bullshitty. There's so much PR. The line has been blurred so terribly between PR and journalism. So the real story, as you say, never gets told. It's fake. It is fake. It's rubbish, really. I mean, showbiz journalism, even if you look in the biggest tabloid newspapers in the UK, their idea of showbiz journalism is having their picture taken with a celebrity and saying, I was backstage with whoever at their show the other day. And they revealed to me that they have developed an addiction dot, dot, dot to M&M's, you know, or just like, you know, it's just rubbish. It's just absolutely rubbish. So I just completely lost interest in showbiz journalism and just went into regular journalism. So what's the difference from showbiz to regular? Well, in showbiz, there's so much control. So everything gets watered down. You get told what to do, what to say, what's going out. Do you have any power? Not necessarily by the media companies, but it's all controlled by PR people. So in order to gain access to the person to speak to them, you have to agree to certain conditions or they put strict time limits on you or you ask a question they don't like and they interject. So it's all controlled by these PR people. And the media companies are dependent on the PR people because if you cheese off that PR person, then they'll cut you off of all their clients. So if they represent 20 celebrities and those celebrities are people that the media institution needs access to, you can't cheese off their agent because then you lose access to everyone. So that's why showbiz journalism is so useless. So you need to be a good little journalist and jump through their hopes and people please or else you'll not get any more clients. Yeah, to develop a career as a showbiz journalist, you have to essentially be a PR person that's masquerading as a journalist. So it's almost impossible. If you look at showbiz journalism in the old days, like the gossip columnist type showbiz journalists, they really did investigate what was going on in Hollywood and break big scandals. Whereas the only people that the media generally is willing to pick on now, not pick on but expose, is people who either have fallen out of favor already and then it just becomes a pile on. So they will turn against a particular celebrity and just absolutely crucify them endlessly. You know, just trying to think of an example. Well, Daniela Westbrook would be one, you know, who, you know, just once she fell out of favor, they all just piled on and it was just relentless, you know, every day, every week. I had that for laughs on. Last two weeks ago, and that's what he says, the media kill people, actually kill them by what they say in the press. From, if their careers are riding high, they'll promote them, do good, but as soon as they start coming down a bit, a peg or two and start losing the credibility or they can destroy careers as well as much as they build them. Did you see this? Did you think media kill people also? Well, I didn't stay in it for that long, but of course, you know, I've covered Michael Jackson extensively, for example, from more of an investigative angle. And you just look at what happened to him and that was like just, even before allegations or anything, if you just look at him in the 80s, where his only crime was to just be a really famous pop star, just the kicking that they gave him every day, you know, it was unbelievable when you look back at it and some of the stuff they did to him, they don't get away with now, you know, in terms of the mental health slurs and things like that. For example, you know, Frank Bruno, when Frank Bruno had his breakdown, the son called him Bonkers Bruno and said he belonged in a nut house. I don't know if you remember that. Huge outcry and they had to apologize and withdraw the newspaper. To this day, they called Michael Jackson Wacko Jacko. What's the difference between Bonkers Bruno and Wacko Jacko? And so, you know, and that he had that every day. So they pick targets and they just crucify them. But they only, see, they will not go over after somebody who they're dependent on. So if you have a celebrity who complies with you, who cooperates, gives you interviews all the time or that kind of thing, they will never go after that person because they're too lucrative. So they only go after the people who are dead, falling out of favor or refuse to cooperate. And, you know, so there's a sort of an element of corruption there on the side of the media. There's also an element of corruption just in the way that show business operates as well. And that's the other thing is that the more time you spend around celebrity, the more you understand, I'll be careful what I say, the more you understand the power of games that are going on behind the scenes and the powerlessness of the celebrities and the often very difficult circumstances that they're in where they're not really in control of their own destiny. And so the real stories are often not told. Yeah, it's scary to think that people have the power over your life, your career, but again, that's how you react to it. Now you see people slip them over the edge. Here's a girl, Caroline Flack, who was crucified while speaking about court cases before she'd even been in court and the pressure just got too much and the girl took her own life. I mean, it is sad that it can happen to so many people when your career's riding high, certain stories can. But again, I feel as if the press, it's not to the high standard it was. It's not to the publicity it had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. The numbers are coming down. Everything seems to be going online, podcasts. More people are starting to turn to podcasts because it's the truth. Things aren't edited. Things aren't watered down. There's no bullshit. There's no big corporations behind it pulling the strings, telling you what to say, telling you what to wear, telling you what to think. I think the game is changing. I think people are starting to understand that it's not always the truth, ain't always what you see in black and white. Some people do believe, though, what they read from the press is all true, but I think more people are starting to waking up to realise, wait a minute, it's only bullshit. It's clickbait. It's just, yeah, they're in control of what they put out there. And you read it that much though you all believe it, mud sticks. Well, I don't subscribe to the idea that everything you read in the media is bullshit. So most of what you read in the newspaper is true, but there's levels of truth. There's something maybe true, but only part of the story, for example. So it might be true that this thing has happened, but if you rob that thing of context, then actually there's something bigger going on. But it's a very difficult situation because I am a journalist. I love journalism and I love newspapers, and I do think that without them we will be in really, really catastrophic trouble, democratically speaking, because the internet has created a platform for a lot of people, but the downside of that, there are upsides to that certainly, but the downside is that it's not regulated. And for example, if I am somebody that believes that the Illuminati are running the world and that the Queen is a lizard, then I can amass a gigantic following. And meanwhile a newspaper, which is employing professional investigators to scrutinize and fact-check things before they go in the paper, is getting a fraction of the readers that Captain Illuminati is getting. That is a problem. So we do need proper professional media, but the problem comes when you have people that have that media platform and they abuse it and then they discredit the whole industry. So if you have media who are caught lying about something, it just gives people ammunition against journalists in all walks of life. You know, I don't know any journalists personally who make up stories, but when somebody does get caught making up a story, that reflects badly on all of us. And I think that as an industry we're having to deal with that now. We're having to face up to the fact that there have been rogue elements within the journalism industry for a lot of years who have inflicted bad damage on our reputation. Yeah, thanks to the bugging the phones and bugging people's apartments to get information. That stuff is always going to stick. Do you know what I mean? So it's difficult. If a journalist phones me, there's always that weirdness that what they try to fuck me over for because it's hard to get... You know the way they spin things? It can be difficult because it's always collect bait as well, where, well, that's not true. But they're more to it in such a way where you say the context is took out but it looks as bad as what it is. So it can be difficult for anybody to trust journalists as well because, again, it's about sales as well. I don't think so. But big stories, collect bait, okay, people buy that. Clickbait certainly is a problem and I don't like clickbait because, again, it damages all of our reputation. When I have fallen victim to that, just as anyone has, where you're scrolling down Twitter and some news organization puts some misleading headline and you click on the story and then you go, even like the story that I'm reading doesn't even bear any relation to the headline that I've clicked on. It's just clickbait. It's the dictionary definition. So they say, you won't believe what this person has revealed about themselves and then you click on and you're scrolling down and down and down. You're going, there's nothing here. There's nothing revelatory. It's just nonsense. So that, it turns people off of the media and it is a problem because then without a properly functioning media you can't have a properly functioning democracy because if nobody believes the newspapers, then when the newspapers expose something bad that's going on at the heart of government or the justice system or something else, you can't get any traction for that. So people just dismiss it. So if you have, you know, Donald Trump just as an example has weaponized this phrase, fake news. Now, the overwhelming majority of the things that Donald Trump describes as fake news are not fake news. They're completely true. But on the rare occasion where something does go out that is fake news and he says it's fake news and then it turns out it is that discredits journalism as a whole. So then his followers now every time something negative is published about Donald Trump they say, oh, fake news. It's not fake news, but those rogue elements who have been caught publishing fake news they have now damaged us all. And when that problem becomes widespread you just lose a properly functioning democracy because there is no watchdog that can be trusted to hold people in power to account. And so, you know, I will always defend journalism and professional journalism but at the same time it is disheartening when you sort of have people letting their own side down. Yeah. How is it when you're doing the journalism a lot of majority newspaper as well it is all negative press. Can that be tiring as well because there's so much goodness in the world there's so much goodness that happens everywhere but we don't seem to see it as much in the press or in the radio it's all quite doom and gloom is that a tactic to create more sales? I think if something is functioning the way it's supposed to be functioning is not news. So, news is when you have discovered typically when you've discovered something that's not working properly. So, for example, if we had a fantastic test and trace system at the moment in the middle of this pandemic then it would not be newsworthy to put on the front page today hooray 100th day in a row of good test and trace that's not news because if the government sets that up it should work. That's what it's been set up to do. So, you know, if I switch on a light and it switches on that's not news because it's supposed to switch on when I push the switch right if I press the light switch and the house blows up that's news. So, you know, if so I think that necessarily if your job as an industry is to hold power to account then most of what you produce as news will be negative because you'll be saying this arm of government has done something wrong this is what needs to be done to fix it what our job is as an industry is to shine a light on things that have gone wrong to try to steer them right. Now there's a public interest argument with celebrity as to whether you know when you're talking about bad press like negative press for celebrities I think it is often debatable how much public interest there is in those stories. You know, if a celebrity is walking down the street and you know they've got their trousers on backwards and they look a bit of a mess is that in the public interest does the public have a right to know it's a difficult one again because if they've been walking down a public street then if you create a law that says you can't run that story then effectively what you're telling people is that it's now illegal for them to know what's happening in a public street. That is difficult to sustain because that means if somebody gets murdered outside your house tomorrow you no longer have a right to know about it. So there are arguments either way but a lot of just because you can do something it doesn't mean that you should and I think there is a debate to be had about a lot of celebrity journalism and the public interest value in it. So when did you start getting an investigative stuff? So I was at university and while I was there I was working as a showbiz journalist and I ended up freelancing for the tabloids I did that until 2011 because I graduated into the recession so the 2008 banking collapse happened and as a result of that there was a dearth of jobs in local media which is where I wanted to go I wanted to move into the regional press PAYE eventually and so I just freelanced and I did court reporting and showbiz reporting music features that kind of thing and then 2011 I got a full-time job in the regional press and that was when I really started working on proper investigative stuff. How did you get into it? Is it showbiz, showbiz, lost boys how did that somebody walk in who was being abused and confronted you to tell you they had a big story? Not quite but it was along those lines so what happened was I had looked at a freedom of information request so freedom of information is a law which exists to allow the public and the press to access information which is not publicly available so for example with your local council any meeting that your local council has all of the agendas in the minute for those meetings are public and you have a right to access those so if you want to know what the councillors are talking about behind the scenes outside of those meetings freedom of information gives you the right to demand those emails and as long as they're not covered by certain exemptions you can then see them. So freedom of information was used in 2014 late 2014 there was a freedom of information request where somebody said they wanted access to all of the Essex County council's compensation payments over the last year long period and I downloaded this spreadsheet and I was looking at it and most of it was people that personal injury that sort of thing people that cut themselves on council prophecy and then I come across this one and it says alleged abuse 70 grand compensation and this was right in the middle of the Jimmy Savile fallout and Dixaro was publishing all of it's stories about the so-called Westminster Peter Farbrough and so on and so forth and so historic abuse was a massive topic in the news at the time and I run across a local authority paying 70 grand for alleged abuse and I think oh my god like this is a big story so then I keep scrolling and then there's another one scrolling further and eventually there were 10 or 11 payments for historic alleged abuse at Essex Council so I went to Essex Council and said here's a list of questions for each of these complaints I want to know the gender of the complainant the age that they say they were at the time of the alleged abuse the link to the council for example was it a children's home was it a foster home was it at school you know what's the council link and a few other questions and they came back and said that's going to be another freedom of information request so you're going to have to wait a month for the information that came back on Christmas Eve 2014 and they refused to answer every single question every single one saying to answer these questions would identify the victims which is the phrase they use they didn't say complainants they said victims which I disagreed with thoroughly so one of the questions I had asked for example was in each of these cases have you alerted the police to the alleged abuse that's a yes or no question answering yes or no to that question does not identify the victim so that was a ludicrous defence that they had given so I rang up the press office and had quite a severe argument with the press office and hung up the phone I was really angry about the way I'd just been spoken to and about the their attitude towards the story which I felt was inappropriate and I spoke to the the news editor whose name is Steve Neil and we decided to go front page with it first paper of 2015 Essex Council has been paying all this money for alleged abuse and they're not answering any questions so we did that we put it on the front page the next week as well with an update and we just thought right if you want to screw us around right we're going to put it on the front page again so about three weeks later something like that I'm just sat on my desk and the phone rings and the receptionist says there's somebody in reception who wants to talk to whoever it was that wrote the Essex Council child abuse stories I see that was you I said yeah I'll be down in a minute so I went down it was like an older man in his 70s white hair and I took him into the boardroom and he introduced himself his name was Robin Jameson and he had been head of the psychology department in south end on C in the 80s and 90s he was an NHS manager at the time retired now and he said I've seen your stories about Essex Council I don't necessarily think what I'm going to tell you is connected to these payments but if you want a story about Essex Council and child abuse just let me tell you this story and so I sat there for an hour just listening to him and he's telling me this whole story about Peter Falring that wasn't investigated properly and the police knew all about it and didn't do anything and on and on and I'm thinking is he nuts? you know am I listening to a nutter or am I listening to somebody who's telling me the most important story anybody's ever told me as a journalist and it was the latter you know because as I said about trying to fact check what he was telling me it was all stacking up you know these two men did appear in court they were charged with running a Peter Falring they admitted to running the Peter Falring etc so the more you looked into it the more you realized that they were substance to what he was saying and this is Dennis King and Brian Tanner and these two were supposed to get life was it in the 80s or 90s but they made deals secret handshakes they only ended up getting like 3-4 years yeah so what happened was they were charged with offences including buggery which was now it will be charged as rape and conspiracy and those offences meant that they were eligible for life sentences for what they'd done and this was not just you know one off this was for a couple of years they were running this ring whereby it was wholesale it was like industrial scale they were grooming the kids abusing the kids and then driving them around for other people to abuse them as well in different locations around Essex and beyond and this was all freely admitted you know this was the bizarre thing about this story was that the case came to court this was all freely admitted and yet there clearly was a dissonance between what had been acknowledged in court and what had the outcome had been so they charged with these offences which carry a maximum sentence of life and then on the day of the trial the boys are there ready to testify there were six boys ready to testify to specimen charges which were considered to have of wider abuse they all show up at court they're waiting to be called into court and then somebody comes in and says we don't need you they have changed their pleas to guilty what the boys were not told at that point was they've changed their pleas to guilty on much much lesser charges they'd done a deal so the deal was that the buggery charges were reduced to attempted buggery and the conspiracy charge was dropped it was allowed to lie on file so they plead the most serious offense they pleaded to was attempted buggery so their sentences were reduced from potential life they were expected to get 15 years to life and they ended up with four and three years so there was a drastic reduction in the sentences of these two men and the question obviously that leaps off when you're reading this is why why would they do that particularly because both of them had prior offenses similar offenses King in particular had decades of compulsive abuse of children so his criminal record demonstrated that every single time they let him out of prison he immediately sets about abusing kids again he was compulsive so if you have the opportunity to put him away for 15 years to life why would you seek to do a deal they said we did it to protect the boys because it saved them having to testify but none of these boys were consulted nobody came to them and said would you prefer if we do a deal so you don't have to testify they knew nothing about it so there's a dissonance there between the official version of events and what's really happening and that was what we set out to investigate was why did these two men get this extremely lenient deal and what happened to the rest of the ring they appear in court and plead guilty to running a pedophile ring where's the ring nothing ever happened to any of the other abusers so those were the questions that we set out to try to answer what so this guy King as well had photos of kids he was abusing up in his wall like trophies that was subsequent yeah so what happened as a result of that plea bargain he was out very quickly in ruby a couple years later he's now back under investigation for running another ring this time involving girls instead of boys and then disappears goes to the midlands or the east of england and he just spends the rest of his life abusing kids and continuing to receive extremely lenient sentences you know there's a story that we tell in the podcast where he was eligible for 10 years he'd just been to prison for abusing kids came out and immediately was caught abusing kids again comes back before the court is eligible for 10 years they give him 12 months and he's out in five so you're just looking at this pattern and going what is going on and that was one occasion when they went and raided his house based on some intelligence they found that he had been photographing himself abusing children developing the photographs and framing them and using them to decorate the walls of his house yeah sick bastard so why is he from getting four year sentence doing the same but getting a lesser sentence was he connected were they scared that the names that he were putting into the mix at the court case that they didn't want it to go any further so they'd made a deal was there more behind the story well that was the question we set out to answer we think we answered the question because after years of investigating I tracked down this source so there was a source who worked on the original investigation in safeguarding the kids and a lot of people were saying to me you need to find this person and I couldn't find I just couldn't find them they weren't in the phone book they were not on facebook or anything eventually it turned out they were on facebook but they were under a fake name but I was able to follow a sort of a trail of clues on the internet which led me to believe that this profile was in fact the person I was looking for so I messaged them got no response because we weren't friends on facebook so it goes into the hidden inbox right so months and months later I get a message but I've almost forgotten I've messaged this profile and a message comes up from this person saying you know who are you watch your phone number let's talk I get them on the phone it is the person I'm looking for so I meet them thank you I meet them in a pub and they were so scared how do I know you're really a journalist how do I know you're not a spy trying to find out what I know this case is so dangerous you know so I said look I'll do all the talking I don't want you to tell me anything I'll just show you what I've been doing for the last couple of years I'm telling them a story Robin shows up at the office here's the first story we published here's what we found out there and here's who I've spoken to so far anybody that had allowed me to share their name I shared their name and by the end of that meeting they kind of went I'm still not sure you know I believe you're a journalist now but I still don't know if I'm safe to talk about this case so I left it a while then we met up a game and for much longer this time we were together in a different pub this is how paranoid they were it was counter surveillance techniques they were using so I was on my way to the meeting and they rang me and said yeah I'm not where I said I was going to be somewhere else so that's a re-route and go somewhere else so after that meeting the very end of that meeting they said I've got to tell you something and they told me this whole story so they at the time that they were working on this case they were in the middle of a degree social work degree and they were writing their dissertation and their dissertation was all about cases that they were working on at work they were using them as case studies then the organisation that they were working for got closed down and this was like catastrophic for this person because they were right in the middle of their dissertation if this organisation closes down they lose access to all of their source materials they can't finish their dissertation so what they did was they nicked all the documents so all of the cases that they were using as their case studies when this organisation closed they just took all the files home with them so this was 2018 I met this source so that year some new data protection laws had come in which basically said that anybody who was mishandling data private data was eligible for an unlimited fine and prosecution and they just you know had a massive panic and started burning all their files and then the week that they found my message on Facebook they had one pile of files that was left to burn and after they spoke to me on the phone they went and checked them and in there was a load of paperwork about the Shubri pedophile ring case and they said look I'll let you on the condition that you never ever named me I'll let you look through all this paperwork so I agreed and then we got that paperwork transferred to a legal person who's now holding it and so I'm going through all this paperwork and in there we find a document which lists Dennis King as a police informant and this is a couple of years after the Shubri case after the one that we're writing about but nonetheless he's listed in this document as a registered informant so if you're looking for a reason why a compulsive pedophile might get a severely reduced sentence being a police informant might be a good reason so that appears to be the answer to the question now what we still don't know is who was informed we have no idea it doesn't say anywhere in the paperwork who was informing on so because the question that you know that overwhelms this case is if you've got somebody who is raping children on an industrial scale normally a police informant the way the system works is that the lower down person informs on the higher up person so when you're watching a rap drama and you're looking at a police informant typically you're looking at a fence or you're looking at a small time drug dealer who gets pulled in on some chicken shit charge and then goes alright if you let me go I'll tell you who the big boys are but that system makes no sense this case makes no sense within that system because what could he be informing on that is more serious than him raping children on an industrial scale and then trafficking them to other people to be raped by them as well what could he possibly be informing on that would be more severe than that that's the unanswered question and some people think that maybe he knew of important people who were abusing kids certainly when he was arrested there was a story that appeared in a national newspaper that said that police believed that there were businessmen and civil servants involved in the ring another theory is that in fact he was not an informant and effectively he was being paid as an informant but his job was not to inform because he knew too much about police officers because a number of the boys we also found out from these documents had named the same police officer as being a regular visitor to Dennis King's flat so we still have not got to the bottom of what was really going on we know he was a police informant or certainly registered as a police informant which is that we're in a lot better position than we were when Robin walked into the office in 2015 but there are unanswered questions certainly if you've got a gangster or if you've got a drug dealer that's been caught by other drug dealers looking from the outside I personally think because in the court it says you're not getting done for rape because boys as young as 10 were prostitutes so he was obviously renting these boys out to high profile names police officers, judges whoever it is so now it's like Jimmy Savile as well why was he never outed, why was he never why did the people wait till he's kind of dead he worked with the royal family he must have been vetted do you know what I mean so the guys obviously had a lot of protection that there should be no green light for you abuse kids while you're putting other pedophile rings or other organisations in prison do you know what I mean you shouldn't be making deals you shouldn't be a high profile snitch to then for you to get a green light to abuse kids it just doesn't make sense but if he's renting kids out and it's a pedophile ring it would have been all connected there have been high profile names they've been probably too scared to send them to prison for a long time because the names he could have uncovered look at the Epstein kind of stuff as well where he says he killed himself but again people say he was going to expose people big high profile names that is a connection if you investigate you'll know that it's connected it's so much more than those six boys who were abused in the connection it has up down the country worldwide that this pedophile ring is around the whole fucking world it's so bad and it's so polluted and so full of poison that it's not just a case of one thing when you were digging into this case did anybody ever try and pull you aside to say look stop did anybody ever tell you was your life ever in danger because it's stuff that for me but this is what I call a journey of somebody who doesn't quit five years later you're still working on it you're still trying to find answers you're not doing it for a quick fix for me that's what a journalist is all about that's what I see as a journalist not somebody who's just doing a quick story for clickbait you have went deep spoke to the people spoke to the kids put old files so I take my heart off to you and I respect that so when you were doing the podcast how can people watch this podcast first of all so it's called unfinished so if you just go on to whatever podcast platform you use whether it's iTunes or Spotify or wherever if you just search unfinished it should come up it will say it's made by Easton Daily Press or you can go to podfollow.com forward slash unfinished dash one how was it for the six boys going to co-op well men now and getting told they weren't going to take the stand they weren't going to face their abusers this made a deal that must have a fate that must have another slap in the face yeah so in terms of those six well firstly those six were representative of dozens so those six were there for the specimen charges so they charge these six guys they charge over the abuse of these six guys but the jury would have been told you're hearing from six but this is indicative you know we can't call 80 people here to testify so this is just an example of what went on that was made clear by the sentencing hearing that this was the dozens was the word that was used at the sentencing hearing so the problem that we encountered with tracking down the victims which we did track some of them down but a number of them were dead through very unfortunate circumstances hearing overdoses one shot himself so some of them are dead a lot of them are badly badly damaged really catastrophically badly damaged so homeless drug addicted in prison one of them detained indefinitely in a psychiatric facility so we tracked some of them down I tracked down one of the six who was due to I said I tracked down and spoke to one I tracked down some of the others but they didn't want to cooperate I tracked down one of the six and interviewed him at length and he had no idea that this had happened he went to court with his mum to give evidence his mum got called out the room she came back in and said they don't need you anymore he's pleaded guilty so he just went home he had no idea about the plea bargain about the lenient sentence certainly had no idea that this lenient sentence had freed King in particular to go off and just do it again and again and again and he was just disgusted because he found this all out from me he was just infuriated because the other thing is that Dennis King in the middle of our investigation Dennis King died which is a whole other story about a police cock up which maybe we'll come to later so King dies I get his death certificate and he's died of AIDS and he was last in court for abusing kids a few months before he died so this is a guy with AIDS that's abusing children so that in particular infuriated this this person that I tracked down so I can only give you that one person's perspective they appear in the podcast albeit their words are read by an actor because of the legal entitlement to anonymity so you hear from them whenever I think episode 8 is when they react to King's death so he died when all this was getting uncovered yeah I tried to track him down that was one of the one of the weirdest moments in the investigation was I found out where he was living which was in a sort of a sheltered accommodation complex for OAPs and I couldn't get a direct phone number for him I could only get through to a sort of a switchboard so I ring the switchboard up this lady answers the phone and say oh yeah just can you put me through to Dennis King and she said who's calling? I said Charles Thompson and she just went really silent and then she went I know your name it's in my file somewhere and she wouldn't put me through so that was kind of creepy how does she know how does she know my name that was creepy you asked me earlier about whether I'd have been threatened oh not threatened I did get a telephone call from a friendly person Essex police who informed me that I should that day going forward that all my calls were being listened to but I think that was it I think that was the only sort of threatening slightly threatening moment Did that make you want to stop? No I found it almost found it amusing because the only reason it alarmed me was because of the sources I was dealing with that I was worried about them being identified but we were specifically every time we found something out about this case we just dumped it in the public domain immediately because the only reason why anybody would want to shut you down is if you're sitting on top of something and they don't want it coming out so if we just found something out and just splurged it straight away into the paper we were sort of protecting ourselves so that's just what we did so what was that King's job then what did he do so when he started offending in the 1950s he was a merchant Navy seaman he at one time worked in a sweet shop which he used to groom children another time worked in a toy factory at the time of the Shubhury prosecution he was his occupation was given in court as a cafe worker we know that he was dealing in stolen goods because we spoke to numerous boys who were in his flat and just said you know the flat was just full of stolen goods all the time and part of the grooming process was that he was grooming these kids to go out stealing for him because that compromised them so he now had something on these kids you're involved in criminality you've been breaking into people's houses people's cars so you dob me in I'll dob you in sort of thing part of the grooming process that he would involve them in his criminal activities what about Brian Tanner the other one who was involved he was a businessman so he he ran a scrap metal business now by the time he by the time of the Shubhury case he had been prosecuted a couple of times already and he was working as a lorry driver but prior to that he was running what had previously been his business it was quite an established and well known business in South End as a scrap metal company and when he was prosecuted that was actually quite big news the first time because he was such a well known local businessman but his earlier prosecutions were less serious it was more sort of meeting a rent boy in a toilet and getting caught sort of thing rather than running a violent pedophile ring he also ran a skip hire business now what happened to him after Shubhury we have no idea he died so long ago that all of the records on him have been destroyed so his prison records are gone his police records are gone so what happened to him afterwards is a bit of a mystery unfortunately in the UK our retention of public records is appalling if you go to America for example and you wanted to investigate a case like this the amount of information that you would be able to access dwarfs what you can access I mean in the UK in terms of official paperwork access through public bodies we've got nothing why is that does that have to take pedophiles as well it's well they say it's in line with their retention policies so they say well we can't be expected to hold all data indefinitely so once a case reaches a certain age we destroy everything now I'm slightly skeptical of that system firstly in America they seem to manage it perfectly well and secondly if I want to go and research a Victorian court case that exists I can go and get it right now there was a book that came out a few years ago called Fanny and Stella which was all about a court case that took place at the Old Bailey during the reign of Queen Victoria how was that book written because they went into the archive and got all the files so how come you can go and get all the files from a Victorian court case but if I want to research something that happened in 1990 you tell me it's too old and it's been destroyed it's slightly farcical the system in my opinion we need to retain this stuff indefinitely what's the thing where they can hold it for 75 years before you can look at it that's certainly because we found we found a connection between Dennis King and the Shubri ring and the dirty dozen gang that murdered not murdered that killed at least three young boys Mark Tillard's Lee Barry Lewis and Jason Swift and so we tried to get hold of the records from those cases to see whether King and Tanner had ever appeared in that case whether they've been interviewed or whatever and that's all under lock and key and we can't get access to anything from those cases until about something like you know 2080 or something like that that's why they can do that but again that shows that they're hiding something whoever's in power, whoever's in charge doesn't make any sense because they're abusers the people who are abused are still here they're still living so it's not that we'll get closure of somebody's dead but they can, do you know what I mean it'll still be good to see the files and understand that this is what they've done to their relations, other people that are abused because the majority of people who get abused don't come forward because they're too scared he says you watched the Daniela Westbrook thing as well who was abused at seven, eight years old and it's scary for people to mention names because they're so drilled with fear and hurt and trauma and pain that they know the effects that these people can but these people deserve to be named in shame they deserve to be put out there and try and protect the other kids who are coming through I don't know if it's because more people are potentially speaking out or more platforms where people can feel safer to talk that all this stuff's coming to light but it's scary to think that how much this shit actually goes on were you working on it and think did you know anything about any of this stuff beforehand? No, I mean I had covered court cases involving abuse but I had never had investigated in any level of detail I think the thing that we discovered was that in a sense the notion of a pedophile ring is slightly it's almost like a myth so what happened back then was there was no internet so if you were a pedophile you couldn't go looking for other pedophiles on the internet and download in decent images and all that sort of stuff so generally they would making behavior was higher and you would get caught and you would go to prison and when you went to prison as a result of what you had done there would be like a price on your head in the prison, you know like it's the worst thing you can do abusing kids so once you're in prison there's like a target on your back so all of the people that were in prison for abusing kids would be put together on a different wing now what was enabled was networking so now when you get out of prison you've got all these pedophile contacts that you've made in prison and if you get caught again and again your web of contacts gets bigger and bigger and then they hook you up to their contacts and their contacts so what you ended up with was sort of an underground network all across the UK where pedophiles were in touch with each other through connections they've made in prison with so when you're talking about a pedophile ring it's not like there's somebody sitting at the top going oh I think I'll set up a pedophile ring it's just that these pedophiles that's how they operated so it was almost like a safe underground network so I won't go down the park and try and procure a kid in case he goes running to his mum I'll get a kid that can be relied on to be quiet and be groomed by one of my mates so the whole notion of a ring in a way that's what it was called at the time and that's what we've referred to it as in the story because it was actually called the sex ring that was what the authorities called it the chubri sex ring but it's not really a ring it's just pedophiles who know each other and form connections and help each other out effectively that's what it is it's not a top down conspiracy it's just something that's born out of necessity for them it's born out of their attempts to stay underground not get caught so what's your outlook on the whole thing then with King what do you think the bigger picture is why do you think he was getting less sentences why do you think he was connected to bigger people or do you just think the law the system is fucked well we like to form conclusions without evidence so what I'll give you is the information we have and what it could mean so number one we have the information that he was a police informant it could mean that he informed on something even more serious we have the information that he was involved with a police officer it could be that he was given lenient treatment so he didn't blow the whistle and hang up on that police officer we know that there was a link between him and the dirty dozen gang we know that the Shubri case was ongoing at the same time as the dirty dozen investigation we know that he was a police informant it is therefore possible that he informed on the dirty dozen which would fit into the pattern of informing on something more severe the only thing more severe than raping kids is raping and killing kids so if there were a narrative in which it would make sense that he had information which was valuable and which would have merited in some people's opinion giving him a lenient sentence that would maybe fit the bill so those are possibilities but the truth is we don't know and the official paperwork has all been destroyed I'm still involved in a freedom of information battle with Essex police I'm still involved in a freedom of information battle with the CPS and I'm still involved in a freedom of information battle with the probation service and someone else who I can't even remember who that is now I'm battle buff everyone basically because they won't give you anything and the excuses that they give you are ludicrous and we go into some of them appear in the podcast in the final episode so for example a number now of public bodies have said we can't release files on Dennis King because it might cause his loved ones to become mentally ill so if it might upset his niece we can't release it and you're just going what are you talking about you've got thousands of people over the years if he's abused hundreds of kids which he has we know that each of those kids has parents siblings grandparents friends who have been affected by what has happened particularly those who have taken their own lives died of drug overdoses etc the web of damage that emanates from one kid being abused is just extraordinary so when you replicate that hundreds of times over you've got thousands of people whose lives have been marred by what this man has done and to say we can't release the files on this guy because it might upset his niece it might upset his sister it's just disgusting it's just despicable it's such a cop out that shouldn't even exist as an exemption anyway I mean if you were to take that exemption and apply it to any other form of information gathering I mean it would render almost all journalism illegal because if you know somebody down the road gets prosecuted for murder and you put it in the paper it might upset his mum I mean it's this ludicrous reason not to release information pathetic so I've got multiple public bodies which are using that as an excuse another one which is fantastic which I keep getting from the police from different police forces is if we release information which concerns how we investigate a crime criminals could access that information and use it to avoid detection so we can't give you any files on this guy I mean again ludicrous we're talking about 30 year old files the idea that the police investigating a pedophile ring 30 years ago if you release those files it will somehow give criminals today a magic key to get out of trouble any time they get I mean it's ludicrous but these are the pathetic excuses that they keep giving meanwhile in America if you were investigating this case you just ring up and go hello can I look at the file on Dennis King and they say yeah come down tomorrow it's pathetic the UK system compared to America so I'm still technically Southland is not even my patch anymore I was working on that story on another newspaper which has since closed down and been reopened but I don't work there anymore I've made the podcast which is finished but I kind of just don't want to let it drop because I just think it's a disgrace that they're able to keep getting out of releasing this information it shouldn't these exemptions shouldn't exist you shouldn't be able to withhold information on a pedophile police informant because it might upset his sister that's pathetic it shouldn't exist so I am determined to challenge that as far as I can afford to challenge that it comes to a point where it would start costing me a lot of money to challenge it legally at that point it might become unsustainable but I am sort of wedded to the principle of challenging that as far as I can. To keep moving forward and keep pushing forward 100% you should be allowed to look at some of these files dead, alive, no matter what it's to understand that there's more victims out there there's more people who's been abused, kids have been killed do you know what I mean? How did other journalists treat you when you were doing this case? Well we've won a lot of awards a lot of industry awards for it it's gone down very well within the industry interestingly the the national media has basically ignored it I mean the podcast got reviewed by the mail and Private Eye has supported us but and the BBC when because one of the things we achieved back in 2016 was we got the case reopened through our digging and through some of the badness that we had uncovered we worked with the police commissioner at the time who was able to force them to review the case and reopen it now when that happened we got covered by BBC I was interviewed on BBC ITV covered it and a few national papers but since then it's just been like radio you know just nothing the national media and that is a consequence I think of what happened was this story broke just as the Westminster paedophile ring story was falling to pieces this whole Carl Beach Nick thing was absolutely crumbling because BBC panorama had gone away and investigated the Carl Beach story and found numerous major discrepancies in it they'd found witnesses who had been compromised by the way they've been interviewed they found that he was reporting a murder that had never happened, provably never happened etc so the air was kind of coming out of the souffle of the Westminster paedophile ring it was all collapsing in on itself and that discredited in a way historic allegations in a way that made it difficult for another case to then break through because a lot of the national media were going well no we don't want to get our fingers burned on another historic abuse case because what if it all turns out to be bollocks so that damaged this I think in a way so the national media never and then we had two big broadcasters in the UK last year who expressed an interest in turning this into a documentary series for TV and again once again emerges Carl Beach because he ends up on trial for perverting the cause of justice and gets convicted and justice all the publicity around Carl Beach explodes these broadcasters just lose interest again in the Shubri I think every time there is a major scandal which turns out not to be true I think that damages legitimate cases badly which is why I'm kind of I have a parallel interest in false allegations I'm very interested in the psychology of that and the often shambolic way in which they're investigated by the authorities and the way that that discredits legitimate complainants who has the final decision whether a story should be put in the mainstream media or not is it I mean it would be the ultimate decision would rest with the editor of the individual title but there are so many layers I mean if you take just as an example say today's mirror newspaper the stories that will have been submitted for today's mirror newspaper will have been at least three times what they can fit in the paper and so every day stories are submitted to national newspapers and don't get used it's just a fact of life you know because somebody buys an advert and you lose a page or whatever and that even happens on regional titles you know stories get spiked because there's no space for them there's news judgments now sometimes you might pick up that newspaper and your story has not gone in but a story about you know Gemma Collins looking glum in a high street has been given half a page and you do think well I'm not sure what rationale there is for that you know if you've submitted a killer story which you've worked on hard and then it gets spiked and you pick the paper up and it's just full of photos of celebrities and stuff you do kind of go like what is going on but that made you question your job then that what is it I'm doing at all for when you know you should be getting exposure from some hard titan stories the stories that should be out there in the public domain instead of somebody walking along the street and eating an ice cream well there is always a trade-off right so it happens in every industry so for example there will be a lot of very worthy films that never get made because all the money has been spent on a new X-Men film or something or in publishing you've got to balance the books if you're paying for non-fiction books which don't sell very well might sell 2,000 copies for example then maybe you need a Zoella from YouTube guide to how to pick an outfit that's going to sell 20,000 copies to balance the books so there's always a trade-off and there is a problem generally there's a conflict in many cases between what is in the public interest and what is the public interested in is the public more interested in a famine in the Darfur or are they more interested in a picture of a celebrity looking ridiculous in many cases they're more interested in the celebrity that looks ridiculous and so if you fill your newspaper with famine in the Darfur then you're going to sell about 3 copies so there is a trade-off always to it's almost like what's that phrase you catch more flies with honey than vinegar right so if you put enough of what people want to read in the paper then you will draw their eye to the important stuff but yeah sometimes you it's just disheartening it can be but again you've just got to press on if you're doing what you love then you've interviewed some great people like James Brown's Weave how did that end up coming about so I was a huge fan of James Brown massive fan went to see him live a number of times as I said his last UK concert I managed to get into the press conference and speak to him he clearly was not well at that concert and died about six weeks later something like that so his wife I was working freelance at the time for an American news website so it was showbiz news website called South News and I can't remember how that came about to be perfectly honest I mean it's about ten years ago now but I knew it was a story that I wanted to tell because when he died she was locked out of the property the money men behind his estate locked her out she was not there when he died she was in rehab for a painkiller dependency gets a phone call to say her husband is dead flies back to the house that they lived in and there's all these padlocks on the door and she can't get in basically told her you're not his wife we dispute the marriage you're not coming in so she lost access to all of her possessions that was the home that she lived in with her son which was James Brown's son and they basically were turfed out onto the street and I just was very interested in it you know it was about around the time I was becoming disenchanted it was showbiz journalism because these kind of stories about control money men the way the industry operates etc I just generally don't get told and I had an outlet that was prepared to let me tell the story and so I did a quite a long interview with her and we published it about a year ago maybe two years ago a national newspaper in the UK published an interview with her where she basically told all the exact same stories that she told in my interview eight years earlier and they put speaking for the first time in this exclusive interview I was just like really this has been out in the public domain what was that 2010 something like that that I did that but yeah it was a shocking story really shocking and it's kind of a window on celebrity and the way that celebrities are often not the masters of their own destiny and I think that's the most interesting thing about celebrity what about Clive Stafford the guy who overturned 300 different cases from people wrongly convicted who was that character Clive Stafford Smith I interviewed him for the yellow advertiser which was the newspaper that I worked at when I was doing the Shoeberry case but it really was just a very quick turnaround you know when you're working at a newspaper things stories come in and go out again you turn them around very quickly so again to be honest I don't recall how that came about I do recall speaking to him I remember asking him what's your number one if somebody has not committed a crime and has been arrested what's your number one piece of advice and he just said never ever ever talk to the police never because a lot of people think I've got nothing to hide so I'll just blab away right now I wasn't there I was somewhere else but he said what they do is so in most cases in something like in America DNA is only recovered in between 5 and 10 percent of serious cases so between 90 and 95 percent of cases there is no DNA from the perpetrator in 25 percent of cases where DNA is found it excludes the police's prime suspect so if you are in that 90 to 95 percent of cases where there's no DNA there is a one in four chance that the police will pursue the wrong person and so what they will do is if you start talking they will just build a case around what you're saying so if you say oh no I couldn't have done it because I was at the cinema they'll go when did you get to the cinema you go three o'clock when did you leave seven o'clock what did you do after that well I was at home on my own so all of a sudden you'll find now the time of death they'll go back to the pathologist is there a chance that the murder could have happened after seven o'clock well you know there's no fast rules with this stuff so it probably could have happened after seven o'clock now you've got no alibi right so you never ever ever talk to the police because they will just they will build a case if they think that you did it every word you say will be used against you so that was his number one piece of advice no comment all the way no comment people do talk to themselves in a conviction even if they are innocent just saying that you are there at a certain time has enough to charge you and that's when people start sticking people in start fighting, start arguing it can get messy who was the woman who did the Michael Jackson conspiracies at Aphrodite Jones Aphrodite Jones she was an interesting lady so she covered the Michael Jackson trial she was in court every day and of course at the end of that trial he was acquitted everybody knows he was acquitted if you read the trial transcript it's quite obvious why he was acquitted and yet what she observed from the inside was a case which from day one was literally falling to pieces just absolutely didn't hold water and yet a media that every day was trying to make him look really really guilty and so she wrote a book after the trial called Michael Jackson Conspiracy and she was talking about the way the media covered the case as sort of an agreement like the media were all in cahoots you've got a case which objectively speaking was a catastrophe literally from day one fell apart and yet a media that was making it sound like he was definitely going to be convicted and so when the acquittal came in when the verdicts came in there was this dissonance there between what the public were all expecting and what actually happened because they had not been really told what was actually going on in the courtroom so she was a very interesting person to speak to what was her whole opinion on the Michael Jackson case she came away convinced that that was the right verdict she was sat in court watching these witnesses completely fall apart I mean the whole case didn't I mean I could talk about that for two hours but the whole case did not make any sense at all the prosecution case they had charges on the indictment which contradicted other charges on the indictment so they couldn't both be true I think the two boys I watched one of the documentaries the two boys that were in it but they actually gave they were actually a character witness I think for Michael Jackson the case prior and they were saying he was a good guy he was this and then when they died they came out and says I think that's the boy was a dancer I think he'd been like Britney Spears I think it was I think when Michael Jackson died I don't know what happened but it just did it make sense to me but when Michael Jackson was like eight years old his dad took him to get him chemically castrated to keep his voice his voice never changed I don't think that is true now yeah you're probably talking about leaving Neverland that documentary so there again I mean I could literally deliver a sermon on leaving Neverland but there are a number of problems with those guys and you would never know it from watching that documentary in terms of differing versions of the stories that they've told, financial motives parts of because when you accuse somebody of something in which necessarily happens behind closed doors so what you're not talking about with Michael Jackson is a kind of a chubri allegation where there's this big gang of people and they're sharing boys around whatever what you're talking about with the Michael Jackson allegations is boys saying we went behind a closed door and something happened so it's impossible to verify whether that did or did not happen because it necessarily happened in private so the only way to verify or to try to establish the veracity of what they're saying is to take the parts that you can check and check them and the problem with those guys and it could be faulty memory there's any number of explanations but the problem is that when you do that the bits you can check don't add up so for example one of them is suing and has been suing for a number of years and says he was abused between 1988 and 1992 in the documentary he says that he was abused repeatedly in the Neverland train station and the documentary the way it's edited certainly makes it look like he's saying that happened in the late 1980s that train station did not exist and was not built until the mid 1990s which is not only long after it's placed in the documentary but also long after he says in his lawsuit that he was never abused again so when you start looking at these inconsistencies the way that that documentary presented these guys as if there was nothing wrong with their stories was not really honest there are a number of discrepancies yeah I think he's the most he was the king of pop weren't he he was the most famous person on the planet again people say there's no smoke without fire I just don't know the answers to that but when I watched the documentary I thought the boys that were talking were full of shit but again there's been I don't know in America you can buy your way out of cases and stuff as well so it's but there's always going to be speculation there especially when there's so high profile in effect you can buy yourself out of a case anywhere there's a misconception with the Michael Jackson case that he bought his way out of a criminal case which is not true he's settled a civil case but the criminal case continued anyway and they just couldn't find any evidence so the criminal case just died on its ass basically because they the case was rubbish it's it's a very complicated story but it's one that I've worked on since since I think I interviewed Aphrodite in 2008 and I'm still in a sense working on that story now occasionally this morning I got an interview request by email for somebody making a documentary about Michael Jackson but I need to find out what they're doing before I decide whether to talk to them do you do that to background Shakespeare who they are first? I try to yeah I got asked to do one last year I'm trying to remember what it was called it was on Amazon Prime but basically I found out who else was involved with that I'm not getting involved because the problem with the Michael Jackson case as with a lot of cases where celebrities are involved is that they attract sort of hangers on who represent themselves as being in the know about a particular case and they're really not and when I looked at the people that they were interviewing for this documentary I was asked to do last year it was just people that I knew that the other people they were talking to had no credibility so I thought I don't want to be part of it so I do try to find out especially with the Michael Jackson thing because I get these requests all the time and I almost always say no yeah what about Michael Barrymore who's the other person I did you did your research investigative journalist who I'm taking over yeah it was a really weird one with Michael Barrymore it was one of my first assignments when I joined the yellow advertiser was that he was doing it wasn't even on my patch he was he was appearing on the community radio station on one of our patches and for whatever reason the reporter couldn't go so they said do you want to go and interview him the station director had said that he had agreed to be interviewed so I went over there to interview him and he's going I haven't agreed to any interview I don't know anything about this so so he agreed to let me just sit in on the show and then what he did was live on the air he started sort of dragging me into the show and involving me in the show and he sort of started interviewing me so in a sense it was a story that went wrong I was supposed to interview him but he ended up sort of playing with me like a cat with a ball of string but I wrote it from a first person perspective like a piece of Gonzo journalism and ended up winning an award for it at the regional press awards East of England awards so yeah that was an interesting encounter but again it was like it was like maybe an hour that I was with him would you ever investigate that case well it's not on my patch so no there's got to be things in your area well at the moment I'm employed by the Archant Investigations Unit which is a team of investigative journalists that work for the Archant media group which runs about 50 newspapers and I have quite clearly defined patches in London half a year so at the moment I would not be able to investigate anything that didn't happen on those patches yeah do you ever go undercover, do you have to wear disguises or that nah, you just go straight in and ask questions and I mean in a sense sometimes over the phone I'll just give you an example just of the way public bodies try to frustrate journalists so if you ask for a document which you are absolutely entitled to see and they know you're a journalist quite often they will find any number of reasons not to give it to you so they will tell you they've lost it they'll say oh the person who's in charge is on leave or just excuse after excuse after excuse so at one time at the Yellow Advertiser an excuse that came through was oh we've locked it in a cupboard and we can't find the key ludicrous excuses now if you are a member of the public and you ring up and ask for that document they don't give it to you that's really really serious so quite often you'll find yourself ringing up a public body and saying oh hello can I have that document if they say who are you you just say oh my name's this and I live at this address you don't tell them you're a journalist so in a sense you could argue that's sort of undercover very very light touch undercover what case would you like to have worked on or been investigating in that you think maybe I could really do that but that's wrong I can find out more information is there any case that ever sticks out over the years where you'd have liked to have worked on no I think I think anything that I would like to have worked on I have worked on a number of cases which I feel are not satisfactorily resolved Shuvery being one of them so I would like to continue working on those but if something's gone and been done it's not worth worrying about I mean there's investigations that I certainly admire you know like Nick Davies phone hacking or Woodward and Bernstein Watergate or whatever but do I think I could contribute anything by picking them back up no so I'll investigate a journalist then for you for the Shuvery stuff are you just looking to get some closure and get convictions and then you move on to something else in a sense it's a story that never ends and it's hard to define what would be the point at which I would feel comfortable letting go because the web of damage is so gigantic you know there are dozens of victims who are in terrible circumstances you could say I won't rest until all of those people have been given the after care that they deserve or whatever but realistically that's not something I could ever achieve I think what I would like what for me would be closure a form of closure is to find out what Dennis King's role really was was he an informant if so what was he informing on if you could make sense of that if you could rationalize that in some way if you could say okay he did really really really terrible stuff but here's the reason they let him off you might not agree with it but there's a rationalization to it I think that would provide a degree of closure to a number of people there are victims who still are looking for closure but with King gone is very difficult to see how you could identify the other abusers because when you're being driven to be abused by somebody they don't say to you alright we're going over Bob Smith's house you know here's his date of birth you don't know who these people are you don't know what their real names are they're often referred to by nicknames so even in order to identify those people you need the police to do the groundwork you need the police to go off and investigate and maybe bring you a selection of pictures and say can you pick out the person that you were taken to but the police have shown no interest in doing that kind of work the way the podcast ends is with the uncovering of of raft of problems with the most recent police investigation where they had a complainant who came forward and was willing to cooperate and there was just a disaster after another they didn't investigate anything that he told them they didn't do even the most basic legwork massive delays in his case so he came forward and agreed to cooperate in late 2017 they took over a year to complete his interviews and a couple of days after he finished his interviews Dennis King died so if they had dealt with his case properly and quickly they might have been able to go and interview King who might have been willing to give names might have been willing to fess up to stuff but because of the chronic delays in the case that opportunity was lost can that become frustrating with the police today is there a a hate between police and investigative journalists because if you get information that they can't actually find but you have got it does that annoy them I think they certainly were annoyed by the Shuber investigation because anybody is annoyed if they are already busy and under resourced and then you dump a load of extra work on their doorstep and the police have been badly defunded for the last you know 10 years and in addition to that after the Jimmy Savile revelations they were swamped with historic cases with people that felt bold and to come forward and so they are now dealing with all of their contemporaneous cases and all of their historic cases that are now coming out and they've got less officers than they had a few years ago when they didn't have all this work so it's obviously very annoying when a journalist then shows up on your doorstep and says oh he is another massive pile of work for you I think obviously it must be annoying also for the police to for me to be constantly digging up problems with the original investigation in 1990 albeit that was probably there's nobody there now that was working there in 1990 but nonetheless it's not good for the reputation of the force what's your social media and stuff Charles in case people want to contact you I'm on Twitter at CE Thompson which is spelled T-H-O-M-S-O-N yeah and that's it yeah I'm not on Instagram or anything like that so brother thanks for coming on today telling your story I think it's great what you're doing it's a tough job especially obviously trying to get some closure and working with so many different kinds of people but fair play to you check out the podcast as well iTunes Unfinished, Shubri's Lost Boys Shubri Lost Boys yeah so thank you brother and take care to like share and comment your thoughts on this week's podcast thank you