A group that provided phoney passports to criminals so they could evade the law has been sentenced to prison.
The scheme’s architect, Anthony Beard, paid gullible individuals for their expiring passports so he could apply for renewals using their information but criminals’ photographs, including murders and drug dealers.
The so-called “golden ticket” of fraudulently acquired real (FOG) passports, which allowed the criminals to flee and begin a new life overseas, cost up to £20,000.
Beard, 61, put his own burner phone numbers on official forms and countersigned some of them himself. He was responsible for more than 100 fraudulent applications.
Evidence of his offending dated back to 2007, but Beard, from Sydenham in south east London, was heard bragging that he had been running the scam for 20 years.
He would find people with similar facial features to his criminal clients and pay them for their expired passports, with other contacts pretending to be professionals to vouch that the photos were genuine.
In 2019 he started working with two other men: Christopher Zietek, a broker who represented a Glaswegian crime gang, and Zietek’s ‘trusted lieutenant’ and ‘dogsbody’ Alan Thompson.
In Thompson’s defence his lawyer, Craig Rush, said he had been forced to retire on medical grounds in 1999 so he became a gofer for Zietek ‘not for money but because it gave him something to do’.
Once the passport scam was uncovered, the fake identities of around 50 fugitives were discovered and they were arrested.
Their trial focused on 12 passports that were obtained for customers including Glasgow murderers Jordan Owen and Christopher Hughes, Liverpool drug trafficker Michael Moogan, Manchester fugitive David Walley and suspected Scottish drug traffickers Barrie Gillespie, Jamie Stevenson and James White.
Beard also obtained fake passports for Stephen Lawrence murder suspect Jamie Acourt, Irish drug kingpin Christy Kinahan Snr and firearms trafficker Richard Burdett, although these were not part of the trial.
Beard admitted conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and conspiracy to make a false instrument with intent, and on Tuesday he was jailed for six years and eight months.
Zietek, 67, who had homes in Sydenham, Ireland and Spain, was jailed for eight years for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, conspiracy to make a false instrument with intent and converting criminal property.
Thompson, 72 and from Sutton in Surrey, was sentenced to three years for the same offences. Both men were found guilty following a trial in March.
Passing sentence on Tuesday, Deputy Circuit Judge Nicholas Ainley said of the scheme: ‘It was to enable very wicked, sophisticated, violent criminals to escape justice by providing them with documents that because they were genuine would deceive the authorities to enable them to escape.’
He said that Zietek was ‘clearly the organiser’, providing a link to serious criminals, while Beard was ‘the leg man’ and Thompson had a lesser role.
Craig Turner from the National Crime Agency (NCA) added: ‘This was the golden ticket for the organised crime networks in order that they could evade arrest, evade identification by local law enforcement either internationally or at home in the UK.’
The NCA now plans to make an application to recover proceeds of crime from the gang.