Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Night of the Mugger

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Winston Trew has just been arrested for mugging. It's 1972 and the crime has recently made its way to Britain from the United States. Dangerous thugs, replicating their American counterparts, have made the city of London their hunting ground - so Winston's eventual conviction is a win for the police, and for the press. The problem is, 22-year-old Winston is completely innocent. Do you have a question for Tim Harford and Rachel Botsman about trust? Please send it in to [e-mail]. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

PUSHKIN Derek Ridgewell moves through the London Underground with the easy swagger of a man who knows his star is on the rise. Confident and charismatic, the 27-year-old is a detective in the British Transport Police and he's well liked by his colleagues. He's even enjoyed some minor celebrity. A few years ago he gave a television interview about his decision to leave the Rhodesian police force in 1965.

Ridgewell had served for several years, but in his words, the force was a military organisation designed to suppress the Africans. And he quit on account of what he called its sickening racism. The young officer now leads a special squad of plain clothes police who patrol the Tube, London's subway system. It's accepted that mugging is on the rise in London, and the most dangerous thugs favour the shadowy network of tunnels beneath the city. Derek Ridgewell wants Londoners to feel safe again.

He plans to clear up the Tube arrest by arrest. Tonight, March 16th, 1972, he's on the Northern Line, a branch of the underground that snakes its way from the north to the south of the city. He set his sights on Oval Station, a stop in a quiet district just south of the River Thames and a known haunt of the most vicious thieves and a known haunt of the most vicious thieves and muggers.

Across town, 22-year-old Winston True is hurrying towards the Tube. It's gone 10pm and he's keen to return to his wife Marie and their two small children. They live in the south of the sprawling city, and the journey home will be a long one. Winston is happily chatting with three friends. They've just been to a meeting of their organisation, the Fasimbas, who are at the heart of the British Black Power movement. In recent decades, Britain has seen waves of immigration from the Caribbean islands that were formerly part of its empire. Some members are the children

of those immigrants, others, like Winston, moved to Britain as children. Winston's father was in the police force in Jamaica, where black officers couldn't rise above the rank of sergeant. Determined that his children would not face the same discrimination, he moved the family to Britain. He believed deeply in that core British value, meritocracy. Winston and two of his brothers, Clement and Chamberlain, were even named after prime ministers, but his bright hopes were dashed.

In Britain, the family encountered bitter racism. And after Winston's father died in an accident at work, they fell on hard times. In 1972, for Winston, the Facimbres are a bright spot on an otherwise bleak horizon. They offer a philosophy of self-help and self-development that appeals to him. They want black men and women to gain more skills and greater confidence, and they organise community initiatives and education programmes. Tonight, Winston is carrying a bundle of books he's collected for his children's Saturday school. As they excitedly discuss their plans, he has one eye on the time.

He's promised Marie he won't be late. If he can just get home by midnight. The fastest route, he thinks to himself, will be the Northern Line. And then a bus for the final leg of the journey. Where can he pick up a bus? Oh, yes, Oval Station, just south of the River Thames. As Winston descends into the subterranean gloom, he hears a train pull into the platform.

Come on! He urges his friends. They board just in time. pull into the platform. Come on! He urges his friends. They board just in time. The doors close shut behind them. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Winston and his friends, Stirling Christie, George Griffiths and Constantine Boucher, also known as Omar, left the train as planned at Oval Station, where Winston was going to catch a bus. A man was standing at the end of the tube platform, just by the exit.

A white man, looking in their direction. Was he waiting for them? Winston felt uneasy. But the man did nothing as they passed him, and the group hurried up the escalator, keen to reach the open air. On the escalator too, however, something unsettling. Two white men were blocking the way. They were just standing there.

We asked to pass, but they ignored us. The group shrugged it off and rode the escalator to the top. Here, Winston turned towards the exit. And then, quite suddenly... The two men in front turned around and one grabbed me, holding my arm and dragging and pushing me against a wall. The other man grabbed Sterling Christie. Then two more men appeared.

They started shoving George and Omar and shouting at them. What was going on? Muggers were known to lurk on the Tube. So were they being robbed? I could hear them saying, Muggers were known to lurk on the Tube. So were they being robbed? I could hear them saying, "'Get over there! Move! Get the fuck over there!' They shouted at us, and we shouted at them. One of the men, the leader, looked young.

He had a kind of cocky swagger, and he reminded Winston of the white boys he'd been at school with, the ones who always stood too close, invading his space in an implicit threat of violence. They weren't being robbed. We're the police, declared Detective Sergeant Ridgewell. The police? They weren't dressed like the police. Winston asked to see some ID. He knew his rights. Never you bloody mind about ID. Some of you blokes have been nicking handbags. We're

going to search you lot. Winston was baffled, stealing women's purses. They didn't have any purses on them, just the colouring books he'd collected for the children. The men faced each other in a tense standoff. How do we know you're the police? Just show us some ID. It all seemed ridiculous, Winston would later recall. Surely these men were drunkards, they just left the pub and they were having a laugh at the group's expense. Stop fucking pushing me! Winston heard Omar shout.

The standoff was broken. Omar had punched the man who'd been pushing him. The group had been learning karate, and their instinct was to defend themselves. Another man rushed at Winston, who'd pushed him back. He fell to the ground, where he grabbed at Winston's feet, pulling him down to the floor. A second attacker seized Winston in a headlock. The man holding me was angry, and he began applying pressure to my neck. I could hardly

breathe. He was trying to strangle me, then he whispered in my ear, Let's see how fucking clever you are now. And then it was all over. Clothes torn, covered in cuts and bruises, Winston and his friends were loaded into a police van and taken to the station. Here, his request for a phone call was denied. It's my right! Ridgewell drew close. You blacks have got no bloody rights. He snarled into his face.

Not in here anyway. Another voice chimed in. Winston couldn't understand how he'd ended up here. Alone in a prison cell, a mix of dread and heart-thumping shock coursed through his body. The following morning, Winston, Omar, George and Sterling were charged with 17 counts of robbing persons undetermined. They would face trial later that year, but for now they were released on bail. As Winston awaited trial, he noticed that media coverage of muggings was growing fevered and frantic.

The Daily Mirror newspaper led the charge, announcing the night of the mugger. In the darkness outside a London railway station on Tuesday night, a stiletto flashed and an old man fell dead, stabbed in the heart. Mugging, explained the article, is a crime fairly new to Britain. It has its origins in America. The word itself is derived from attacking a mug, an easy victim. The murdered man, a widower named Graham Hills, had been exactly what the cunning three-man gang had been waiting for.

Easy prey for a quick steal. The police already knew that the crime of mugging was on the rise in gritty urban districts. Now it was time for the general public to become acquainted with the term and alert to the danger. According to the American police, mugging usually involved crushing the victim's head or throat in an armlock, and robbery by any degree of force, with or without weapons. It was said that in the United States, this crime had more than trebled in ten years. One hundred and fifty such muggings had been reported on the London Underground in the last three years.

The implication was clear. Mugging had made its way across the Atlantic, and now it was reproducing itself on British soil, spreading unchecked. It was terrifying. And it was totally unprecedented. Or was it? Cautionary Tales will return. London, July 18th, 1862. It's gone midnight. Member of Parliament, James Pilkington, is walking along Palmal, a grand thoroughfare in Westminster, the seat of power in Britain.

He's just passing the famous monument to the Crimean War, a statue of three guardsmen who somberly survey the gaslit street. Should he head to his private club? No, he thinks it's late. Time to go home. He turns towards Waterloo Place. I remember crossing Palau Maule and then all consciousness left me. An attacker, or perhaps a group of attackers, have hit James Pilkington on the back of his head. When he comes to, his clothes are soaked with blood

and his watch and chain are missing. Once the public learns what has befallen James Pilkington, a member of parliament no less, there is uproar. Pilkington, it is said, wasn't just attacked and robbed. He was a victim of the sinister new crime of garroting. According to the newspapers, gangs are now professionalising the art of street robbery. One attacker crushes the throat of the target, leaving him writhing in agony, with tongue

protruding and eyes starting from their sockets, unable to give the alarm. The attackers' colleagues, meanwhile, rob the poor victim. There's something distinctly foreign about karate. The word comes from a Spanish weapon, a gruesome handheld ligature used to torture and strangle unfortunate victims. One editorial declares that London's Bayswater Road is now as unsafe as Naples. Spain, Italy, whatever, this crime wave is uncongenial to the soil and manners of Englishmen. It reeks of Mediterranean villainy. And if an MP can be attacked in genteel Westminster,

then even the more respectable pockets of the city are now the dominion of thugs. No one is immune to garroting. No one is safe to walk alone at night. As summer turns to autumn, the papers fixate on the threat. Reports proliferate about garrotters hauled up before the magistrants to face justice. Gherotting is the talk of the town, declares the Illustrated London News. Penal jurors' prudence a favourite after-dinner topic. Everyone has an opinion about where this crime wave has come from,

and everyone has their pet solution. For one reader of the Times, the police are at fault, for they've grown lax. Laxity, he explains, is the nurse of crime. For others, the trouble started when Britain stopped shipping its criminals to Australia. What's more, those criminals are now being granted their freedom early, with a kind of parole document called a ticket of leave. As a result, there's a surplus of delinquents on the streets, and they are undoubtedly waiting to pounce. The good newspaper-reading people of London begin taking matters into their own hands? After

all, if the authorities stop transporting convicts to Australia, they cannot depend on the authorities to protect them. The discerning gentleman might purchase home-made weapons, or hire a uniformed escort to ward off potential attackers. A range of defensive gadgets goes on sale. One Walter Thornhill, a cutler, patents a design for an anti-garotting device, a spiked steel collar to be worn about the all-too-vulnerable neck. The panic about garroting soon spreads to Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire. Britain is on a knife edge. In the 1970s, the psychologists Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovich began studying how well people estimate the likelihood

of certain lethal events. In a series of experiments, they asked 660 adult participants to judge how frequently they thought death occurred from various different causes. They found that we tend to exaggerate the likelihood of very dramatic and sensational happenings. Death by tornado, for example, was generally overestimated, while death from diseases such as diabetes and asthma were vastly underestimated. We're also particularly bad at judging the likelihood of violent crimes, as Tom Gash has noted in his book Criminal – The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things. That includes crimes such as murder, but it seems likely that it also extends to being

attacked at random in the street and garroted, or ambushed on the London Underground and mugged. Media coverage influences this too. In another experiment, Paul Slovich and Barbara Combs found that the more coverage a dramatic event receives in the local press, the more likely people were to overestimate its chance of happening again. We simply don't have a very good understanding of the risk of shocking and sensational dangers in everyday life. Distorted media coverage can make that worse. When it comes to the stories we tell about crime, big, scary numbers, like the idea that muggings have more than trebled,

can play into this. They grab our attention. We're all too ready to anticipate such danger anyway. By November 1862, panic about garroting had reached fever pitch. There was also increasing confusion about who was, and who wasn't, a garrotter. The satirical magazine Punch gleefully printed cartoons of men spooked by their own shadows, or attacking trees in the dense London fog. Newspapers reported on instances of confusion too.

The Times described, A timid gentleman who lived in the London suburbs and constantly on the lookout for danger had taken to carrying a cudgel with a heavy lead filling. One night as he neared his home, another fellow pushed rudely against him. Naturally the timid man swung at the rude fellow with his cudgel and with great presence of mind struck him a severe blow. The rude fellow fled, but he left his hat behind him. And the timid man was shocked to read in its lining

the name of a dear friend, Edward. He hastened at once to his house to explain himself. Edward's distraught wife opened the door. I'm glad to see you. Poor Edward. He's been garrotted. Another paper, the Shoreditch Advertiser, systematically investigated a number of reported garrottings. They all turned out to be utterly fictitious or mere drunken squabbles. And what of James Pilkington's pal mal attackers? Two men, both ex-convicts and former ticket

of leave holders, were arrested. The police magistrate had no firm evidence that they were the guilty parties, so he sentenced them to three months in prison for being suspicious characters. Better safe than sorry. In October 1972, Winston True, Sterling Christie, Omar Boucher and George Griffiths went on trial at the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales. There was grassroots support for the accused men, but for Simbers and various other organisations had started an Oval Four defence campaign. A picture of the men outside the magistrate's court, their faces grossly swollen from their beating by police,

had been printed on posters and circulated in community papers. At the same time, the mainstream press continued to warn people about muggings. According to the Times, the police were going to petition the Home Office to increase their powers. So alarmed were they by the mugging trend among young people. One figure, which featured in newspapers up and down the country, suggested that muggings were up 129% in four years. But what was that figure based on?

As author Tom Gash has noted, violent crime was on the rise in the second half of the 20th century, so it seems there was some basis for concern about mugging. But mugging wasn't formally a crime. So were all robberies up by 129% in four years? Or perhaps assault with intent to rob? Or was something else being measured altogether? As murky statistics and sensational headlines proliferated, the panic about mugging appears to have outstripped the concrete facts. And that panic had very real consequences. Decent citizens are afraid to use the underground late at night, said the Daily Mirror forebodingly.

The solution? Harsh deterrent sentences. At the same time, community leaders expressed concern that black youth were being explicitly targeted in police clean-up operations. It was even said that, if you listened closely while walking past the pubs in South London, you might hear a sinister Calypso song drifting through the air. If the muggers don't get you, Ridgewell will. At trial, Winston explained how, on the night of his arrest, Derek Ridgewell's squad hadn't properly identified themselves as police officers.

A woman named Diana O'Connor had seen the fight at Oval Station. She told the court that on that terrible night in March, she'd thought she was witnessing a group of white men attacking some black kids, not police officers subduing criminals. And she'd even tried to help. The boy's eyes seemed to be coming out of his head, Not police officers subduing criminals. And she'd even tried to help. The boy's eyes seemed to be coming out of his head and his mouth was open as if he was choking to death.

It frightened me when I saw his face. That's when I intervened to stop it. Winston also described how he'd been forced to sign a false confession. In custody, he'd been punched by one officer and had his head slammed into a cell wall by another. I was on edge, expecting to be hit at any moment by anyone from any direction, he said later.

He'd been interrogated and threatened repeatedly throughout the night. Eventually, worn down, he'd signed the confession. Even though there were no victims named in any of the 17 charges of robbing persons undetermined, and no witnesses for the prosecution, aside from the arresting officers themselves, the Oval Four were found guilty. Winston was sentenced to two years in prison. I was in a state of shock. I couldn't believe what was happening to me.

I was actually going to prison for something I didn't do. He felt hopeless. All was lost. Detective Sergeant Ridgewell, meanwhile, had already struck again. Portionary Tales will be back. It's late 1972. Alphonse Ciccuri and Laurence Sweiler are deep underground in Tottenham Court Road station on London's Northern Line. They're lost.

The trainee Jesuit priests are visiting Britain from Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe. They want to get back to Oxford, where they're studying social work, but they can't find the right platform. Alphonse is standing with his hands in his pockets when, quite suddenly, two men appear in front of him and grab him by the arms. They drag him wordlessly upstairs. Alphonse is terrified. Then more men appear.

They're aggressive. They're going to rob me, he thinks. Alphonse fights the men off as best he can. It's only after they've managed to restrain him that they reveal they're police officers. Alphonse and Lawrence are taken to police headquarters, where they're both charged with trying to steal from two women, as well as with assaulting officers.

They deny the accusations fervently, but a trial date is set. Winston True was still in prison at this point, and for a while, it seemed that Alphonse and Lawrence were bound for the same fate. Only this time the presiding judge took a different view. When Ridgewell gave evidence, the defence asked him if he was particularly on the lookout for coloured young men. On the Northern line, I would agree with that, admitted Ridgewell.

The judge was horrified. Citing inconsistencies in police evidence, he said, I find it terrifying that here in London, people using public transport should be pounced upon without a word by anyone that they are police officers. The case was thrown out, and the judge told the two young men that they left the court with no stain on their characters. This case was brought without justification.

As for Derek Ridgewell, the British Transport Police quietly transferred him to another post. For Winston True, prison was a place of limbo, where the passage of time seemed not to exist. His prison reality was one of permanent uncertainty. While in prison, Winston appealed. His conviction was upheld, but his sentence was reduced to eight months. Back in civilian life, that dread and sense of limbo remained. He was in turmoil.

I was a very angry man. I had nightmares. I had a stomach ulcer. I hated the world and felt helpless. Winston told a local paper that he would not give up the fight for justice. The wounds are too painful to leave it at that. But he was also depressed. His marriage was over. He was a single parent and his sense of self had been destroyed by the lies that had been told about him. For now, he also faced the task of rebuilding. Eventually, Winston got a job as a mailroom clerk and messenger at an office,

and in 1982 he went on to attain his bachelor's degree in social science. A master's in policy studies followed in the early 1990s, and he became a lecturer. He also remarried. The stigma of a criminal conviction followed Winston, but he was gradually able to put the pieces of his life back together. his life back together. In 2003, Winston was conducting research on teenage fathers. I was part way through a literature review when I collapsed from a brain hemorrhage. He was left partially paralysed, walking with a limp, and he lost some of his memory.

But the stroke also shook other memories loose. My wife told me that during my time in hospital, I kept referring to it as a prison, and kept telling her I didn't want to stay there. I wanted to go home. The pain of his wrongful conviction had embedded itself within him. When he returned home from hospital, he decided he'd write a book about his case, and hopefully expel the bitterness and anger he felt.

It was an act of defiance. He began to make freedom of information requests about Derek Ridgewell's career. What he found out amazed him. In Victorian England, the garroting panic vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. The press moved on. There were other matters to worry about now, like the revolution in Greece, depression in Britain's textiles industry, and the war in America. But the panic had lasting consequences. It left in its wake a raft of hasty and punitive legislation designed to crush garrotas. Minimum terms were made longer. Prisons in Britain had previously been undergoing reform, but now there was a crackdown on conditions.

Prisoners were locked in separate cells and prevented from speaking with each other. Hard labour on the tread wheel was also permitted. Inmates would spend hours climbing stairs attached to a giant wheel, a useless, exhausting task designed to break the spirit. And whipping was also brought back for people convicted of robbery with violence. Prison guards could issue a convict with up to 50 flesh-splitting lashes at a time.

In Parliament, the Home Secretary recognised that this was... ..panic legislation after the panic had subsided. All the same, it remained in place for decades. Roughly 100 years later, the press would once again, in Winston True's words, whip up a mirage. This time, it was about young black men involved in crime. As the fear escalated, figures of authority, like Derrick Ridgewell, gained more power.

Innocent people were punished and lives forever altered. Perhaps if we'd learned more from the garroting panic, Winston True's story would have been different. In 2010, Winston published his book, Black for a Cause. Determined to right the wrongs he'd suffered, he'd set about collecting all the information he could on Detective Sergeant Ridgewell, and he'd learned that the Oval Four case wasn't the first time that the police officer had lied. Ridgewell hadn't served in Rhodesia for several years. He'd been in the military police force there for

just three weeks when the country declared unilateral independence from Britain, and in the chaos he'd deserted. When he first returned home there'd been a warrant out for his arrest. Eventually though it was dropped and he'd been able to take up a post with the British Transport Police. There was more. He'd fitted up another group of young black men for mugging on the Northern Line just weeks before framing the Oval Four. They had become known as the Stockwell Six. Ridgewell claimed that the men had attempted to rob him and that he'd fought back. The Stockwell Six testified that the robbery was a fabrication, and that the officers had

been violent, beating them, kicking them and stamping on their bare toes. One of the group believed that Ridgewell had planted a knife on him. Was he well-practiced then at fabricating evidence? After his failed attempt to frame Alphonse Chikouri and Lawrence Swaler for mugging, Ridgewell was asked to head up another special squad. Vast quantities of goods had been going missing from a London railway depot.

The British Transport Police must have hoped that the disappearances would decrease under Ridgewell's watchful eye, but strangely they multiplied. He continued in the role until 1978, when he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to steal from British Rail. It turned out that over 11 or so months, Ridgewell and his colleagues had stolen 60 vanloads of goods. Those goods were worth more than £1 million in 1980.

Relative to the wages at the time, they'd be worth more than £7 million today, about $10 million. He'd fenced them via a notorious London crime family and squirrelled the proceeds away in properties, businesses and a Swiss bank account. In 1982, Ridgewell, still in prison, died of a heart attack. But rumours persist that he was murdered because he knew too much about corruption in the police force. Another Ridgewell victim, a man Ridgewell had framed

for stealing from British Rail, read Winston's book. It helped him piece together the truth about the police officer who'd sent him to prison. And in 2018, he managed to get his conviction heard and overturned by the Court of Appeal. One year later, armed with this precedent, Winston True finally won the same victory. His conviction was quashed, along with those of Stirling Christie and George Griffith. Eventually Omar Boucher's conviction was overturned too.

The Lord Chief Justice was remorseful. Our regret is that it has taken so long for this injustice to be remedied. Winston no longer felt he was suspended in limbo. He was in charge of his own destiny. Outside the Court of Appeal, he urged others whose lives had been blighted by Ridgewell to come forward. If you are innocent, don't give up. Derek Ridgewell had lied from the earliest days of his career. There had long been reason to mistrust him. A climate of fear about mugging, heightened by media reports, gave him power, and the people around him reinforced that power. By the end of 2024, the Court of Appeal had quashed 11 convictions based on evidence from

Derek Ridgewell. But there may be more out there. As for Winston, life is good. He still lives in South London, where he's celebrated by his local community for his activism. He's often recognised his local community for his activism. He's often recognised as he walks down the street. He's also working with a production company to develop a documentary and a drama series about his story. But while that story has a happy ending, the scars remain.

Ridgewell was convicted and imprisoned for stealing mail bags, but in my case he willfully and maliciously stole nearly 50 years of my life. And I'll never get them back. Key sources for this episode include Winston True himself, who spoke to cautionary tales in 2024, and Rot at the Core, the serious crimes of a detective sergeant by Winston True and Graham Satchwell. This episode was inspired by policing the crisis Crisis, Mugging the State and Law and Order by Stuart Hall and others. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Alice Fiennes and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos Sanjuan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaph Haferi edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembra, Sarah Jupp, Maseya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios Kevin, Kiera Posey and Owen Miller. Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Trust is at the centre of so many cautionary tales. I've told you about the people who trusted a man in uniform and allowed him to steal from the city coffers, and the woman who drove into the desert because she trusted the satnav ahead of her instincts. Then there was the celebrity author who trusted photographs of fairies as proof of their existence. We've had people who trusted in technology when they shouldn't, and those who didn't trust it when they should.

And that's before we get to the doctors, business leaders and scammers who abused the trust put in them. I'm fascinated by questions of trust and given that you're a loyal listener to cautionary tales I'm guessing you're quite interested in them too. And that's why I've invited Rachel Botsman to join me for a special edition of Cautionary Questions. Rachel is the author of the new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted. So who better to answer your trust questions? Maybe you'd like to know why we naturally trust some people but recoil from others.

Maybe you're curious about why so many people are taken in by particular historical figures. There might be an episode of cautionary tales that makes you tear your hair out at the gullibility of those involved. Are we right to be suspicious whenever a politician says, trust me? Can being too distrustful be as dangerous as being too trusting? Whatever your query, you can trust Rachel to have the answers. So send them to tails at pushkin.fm. That's T-A-L-E-S at pushkin.fm.