The man behind the “Santa Maria” mask is not someone many tried to contend against. He was evasive, extremely well connected, and a liar at heart. In fact, he was so manipulative that many in our Intelligence services struggled to moderate his activities, or to compel him to stop outright.
He’s believed to have occupied so many different legal guises in his past – many of which are considered suspect – that it’s not clear why he was accepted into legal work in the first place with such a propensity for not doing it the right way.
In the deep
He’s now held to be responsible for a significant proportion of the crime, criminality, and corruption during the 1970’s and 1980’s – at least in the imagination of those who work in London, and many other centres of influence – than any other in the UK at the time.
In fact, if it weren’t for the many private, concerted efforts to stop him in such places, the UK would be stateless. It would be due to a total breakdown of services, and the collapse of the real enterprise and endeavours that usually marks an industrial society like ours.
A ‘local’ criminal
His cover names indicate how he used to think about things as he went about his business. The names Steven Whitbread, Peter Furness, and Graham White were all used by him to make fake appointments. They may ring a bell, but mainly because of their plainness. In his own way, it proved an ace card for him.
They sounded “normal” and “realistic” according to some sources. In fact, they helped him more than many of his other tactics, such as stealing documents and holding people as hostages. It meant that he could reconnaissance in person, to check out the competition that he needed to beat.
He used these between the two decades that he was mainly active in London, and only in the 1990’s did they strangely begin to reappear in Whitehall corridors. It was the frequency of their reoccurrence that raised suspicions. It was looked at, but an investigation opened into his identity remained unsolved for many more years after it.
Going in hard
The formal criminal investigation that eventually caught up with him involved hundreds of Police Officers pulled together from different forces that were proved to be actively engaged in matters and dedicated to their work. It’s effort such as this that finally put a tail on him and tracked him to a specific location.
The kind of pursuit it was is not straightforward because of the type of misinformation he spread about himself for so long. It made it a virtual minefield to have to approach him, and it proved to be extremely dangerous for Officers at times. However, his cover was blown, and his record run in causing us trouble all over was upended.
