Detective 'paid £2k a week by gangster'

Oct 7 2008 by Paul James, The Journal

A DETECTIVE was paid £2,000 a week to feed police intelligence to a gangster who later gunned down one of his henchmen in South Shields, a jury heard yesterday.

Drug dealer Allan Foster also took Detective Constable John Jones for a limousine-chauffered night out around London’s West End where they took cocaine and hired call girls, just weeks before Foster shot dead David ‘Noddy’ Rice in 2006, Newcastle Crown Court heard.

Foster and Jones met through Seaham gym owner Bruce McCall, a lifelong friend of Jones, as Foster attempted to reduce the jail sentence he was facing for drugs charges in 2003.

Foster told police where to find a stash of guns in London’s East End and was later jailed for just three years for conspiracy to supply 250kg of cannabis resin. His driver Steven Bevans was jailed for four and a half years.

But even before Foster began that jail term, he had Jones on his payroll, the court heard, initially giving him a plasma-screen television then giving him an Armani suit with £1,000 stuffed in each shoe at Foster’s pre-prison night out at the Tall Trees nightclub in Yarm.

After his sentence was over, he became an informant for the then National Crime Squad (NCS), but prosecutor Toby Hedworth told the jury it was Foster who was the beneficiary of any information flow.

Although Foster had been passed by Jones to the NCS, the Northumbria officer would check his police file on a regular basis and pass on what the force knew about him, the jury heard.

In return the court heard that Foster would pay “John the Copper” £2,000 a week so he could stay one step ahead of the authorities. In April 2006 Jones and Foster travelled to London’s West End, where they visited the Prada shop in Chelsea, then were picked up by a limousine driver who took them to bars and clubs, including Stringfellows.

Then the gangster took the married police officer to a house which Foster was renting in Kensington and call girls were brought.

Mr Hedworth said: “These sex workers will give evidence before you, I anticipate, including the fact that both men were snorting cocaine to the extent that DC Jones was unable to take advantage of the favours bought for him.”

He added: “You may think Allan Foster had a taste for the high life – the Crown submit Detective Constable Jones liked the flavour as well.”

Their arrangement came to a messy end that month when Foster was accused of stealing a £100,000 ring he had borrowed from a shop in the Gateshead MetroCentre. His house was raided on April 30 but Jones had been unable to tip him off because Foster’s name had not been entered into the police investigation, Mr Hedworth said.

Foster, who had a consignment of drugs on its way to the UK that weekend, then fled the country, returning just weeks later to shoot Mr Rice nine times at the Marsden Grotto in South Shields on May 24, before again escaping justice to Spain. He remains on the run for the murder.

Mr Hedworth said that Jones would also check the police computer for intelligence on McCall and his gym.

A police photograph of a man who had attacked McCall while he worked as a bouncer at Chase nightclub in Sunderland in 2004 was found by police inside a trophy at the gym, along with a list of street prices for drugs.

Mr Hedworth said bodybuilder and doorman McCall was supplying steroids imported from China to gym members.

Police investigating the pair unearthed a photograph of McCall, Jones and Foster together at a bodybuilding contest in Merseyside in 2005, when Foster was supposed to be at work in a haulage yard in Doncaster as part of his stay in an open prison.

Jones, 48, denies three charges of misconduct in public office between March 2003 and June 2007.

McCall, 42, of Cornelia Terrace, Seaham, denies aiding and abetting Jones’s alleged misconduct and further charges of importing, supplying, and possessing Class C steroids. The trial, scheduled to last for six weeks, continues today.