Eric Allison, the Guardian and Observer prison correspondent, was scathing about the evidence I gave from the witness box against him and others at the Old Bailey. “If I knew you were going to be that bad, I wouldn’t have pleaded guilty,” he told me more than a decade later, when, implausibly, he was a reporter and I was news editor of the Observer.
At our first meeting in the early 1990s, he was holding a fistful of stolen blank British passports and offering thousands more and I was a reporter playing the part of an upmarket crook who had driven to the meet at a Manchester airport hotel in a two-seater Porsche.
Unfortunately for Eric, the passenger seat was occupied by an undercover Scotland Yard detective and the hotel foyer was full of armed police in plain clothes.
Eric, who died last weekend aged 79, was one of seven men arrested across the country for their part in a conspiracy that involved prison corruption, forged US dollars, blank passports and the alleged involvement of the IRA. The IRA link proved to be untrue, a story weaved by my informant in an attempt to make it more vivid at a time when terrorists were bombing London, but the passports and the dollars were very real.
When he was arrested, Eric was surprised to find that the police were armed, as he was a small, slight man whose CV covered burglary, bank robbing and white-collar crime, none of it violent, or successful, as his prison record showed.
I had involved the police at an earlier stage in the investigation than normal after the offer of passports turned from a few to thousands. Scotland Yard was initially sceptical but, after pulling a dozen brand new blank passports out of my pocket, I was linked up with a “buyer”, a detective whose expertise was in infiltrating criminal gangs. He was introduced as my partner and gradually burrowed his way into the conspiracy, resulting in Eric’s downfall.
I had completely forgotten about him until I joined the Observer when he offered up a story. We met and reminisced about our past lives, him as a crook and me as a hack, and he trotted out his well-versed line about journalism not being as lucrative as crime but a lot safer. He was still a minx of a man and reminded me of an ex-smoker who yearned for his former life but knew better.
I remember discussing him with the Guardian’s former managing editor, who asked what I thought about employing a jailbird as prison correspondent. “No problems,” I replied. “But I would double check his expense claims.”
Eric Allison, 1942-2022
Chris Boffey is a former news editor of the Observer