Thomas Joseph McLoughlin jailed
Some would argue that it isn’t fair to kick a man when he’s down. In the case of Thomas McLoughlin, jailed today for 14 months at Isleworth Crown Court, I’ll make a much deserved exception. (more…)
Tag: crook
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The truth's stranger than fiction
The “Devil’s Advocate” is jailed for 14 years
Bogus lawyer Giovanni di Stefano was jailed for 14 years yesterday after being found guilty of nine counts of obtaining a money transfer by deception, eight counts of fraud, three counts of acquiring criminal property, two counts of using a false instrument, one count of attempting to obtain a money transfer by deception, one count of obtaining property by deception and one count of using criminal property.
Giovanni di Stefano -
Video of the Week: Chris Huhne’s words come home to roost
The hypocrisy of the former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is exposed
In 2008, Chris Huhne made the following speech to the Liberal Democrat conference:
“For every 100 crimes committed in Britain today, just 1 criminal will end up with a conviction in a court of law. That’s a 99% chance of getting away with it. And if you don’t catch offenders, no amount of threatening punishment will work.”
Former minister Chris Huhne should have held his hands up ten years earlier With his resignation and change of plea yesterday, the shamed former minister’s previous comments now sound as shallow as the way in which he has treated his family.
Prior to the trial Huhne had called the police investigation into a matter that could have been solved so easily “gossamer thick”. If, instead, he’d simply taken responsibility for his own actions in the first place, none of this need ever have happened.
It is good to see that Huhne didn’t fall in to the 99% he chose to describe. Now it is time to speed him away to the cells.
Watch the video clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tBh5wJLCl5M
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Ronald Edwards (1931 – 1994), better known as Buster Edwards
Variously a boxer, nightclub owner, florist and criminal. Edwards became famous as one of the 1963 Great Train Robbery gang. He fled to Mexico but returned to Britain in 1966 when his £150,000 share ran out. After a 9-year stint in jail, he set up a flower stall in Waterloo where he was himself robbed by Dexter Fletcher, the then boyfriend of Absolutely Fabulous’ Julia Sawalha, in 1991. He was found dead hanging from a steel girder in a lock-up garage in 1994 whilst under investigation as part of an inquiry into a large-scale fraud. Phil Collins played him in the 1988 film of his life, Buster. -
Lance Armstrong
Cycling’s former golden boy being exposed as a cheat shocked the world. He summed himself perfectly in a comment to Oprah Winfrey in January 2013: “I look at this clip [of himself] and say ‘Look at this arrogant prick.’“ Many call for him to retire into obscurity but sadly that seems unlikely. Instead, the former boyfriend of Sheryl Crow seems to think he can build a media career. Most of us would rather he’d just cycle off. -
Greed ain't that good
Matthew Steeples reports on the sentencing of Maria Michaela
Today, Maria Michaela was sentenced to 9 years in jail at Harrow crown court for her role as the lynchpin in a fraud of epic proportions.
Maria Michaela attempts to look remorseful as sobs in her mugshot 
Convicted fraudster Mary-Jane Rathie Termed as “Britain’s biggest female fraudster” by the Evening Standard, Michaela is someone I came across in Lennox Gardens, London. In the building where I lived, she was often spotted with an associate collecting money from a tenant, Stephen Hunter-Scott, also known as Stephen Short, who was jailed alongside her.
In due course this Knightsbridge apartment was repossessed by an Irish bank but the aforementioned associate returned a year later and forcibly took possession. The apartment concerned was eventually taken back and sold on a short lease for just £200,000 recently.
Meanwhile Michaela disappeared but it was not until she appeared on the BBC’s Crimewatch wanted list that she again came to my attention. On the show, it was reported that this woman, who operated under countless aliases that numbered “Joanne Sarah Pier,” “Anjali Sharma,” “Mia Cul” and “Nadia Ali,” had, with the help of a corrupt chartered surveyor named Mary-Jane Rathie, obtained loans of £10.5 million from HBOS and £2.5 million from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007 and 2008.
Michaela, who may well in reality be called Bruna Louise, had posed as a wealthy South African heiress to secure the funds she supposedly required to fund the purchase of properties in Chelsea, Belgravia, Pimlico, Greenwich, Clapham, Stoke Newington and the Docklands. In reality, Rathie, who was bribed with £910,000 in cash, a £49,000 Range Rover Sport and a £143,000 Bentley Continental, vastly overvalued each allowing Michaela to pocket, for example, £6 million for a Cheyne Walk house that was in reality worth just £3.5 million.
Whilst Rathie, a former employee of Ashdown Lyons, was jailed for 6 years in July 2011, the fraudster Michaela managed to evade capture for three years. She was eventually caught this January in Bexleyheath working as a mortgage broker. In various preliminary hearings, her pleas of insanity did not help her cause and nor did her unwillingness to provide evidence of her true identity. This morning, she got just what she deserved.
Of her conviction, Detective Inspector Andy Fife of City of London Police commented:
“Maria Michaela created a web of deception that duped banks into handing over vast sums of money and then perpetuated her crimes by assuming a new alias to try and secure more loans. False identities and a corrupt property surveyor were the tools she used to make millions, turning herself into one of the, if not the, most prolific female fraudster the UK has ever seen.”
The lesson of Michaela and her cohorts, I’d argue, is simple. Greed may well be good in the eyes of Gordon Gekko, but the greedy generally get caught in the end and generally it is down to their own vanity. As she rots in her cell, perhaps she ought to consider this folly.
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First Among (Not So) Equals
The latest sale of 32a Ovington Square
I first visited 32a Ovington Square in September 2009. At the time, this “hidden house” was the home of Lord Carrington and it had just come on the market at a price, if I recall correctly, of circa £3,000,000.
The newly redeveloped Carrington House, 32a Ovington Square, London, SW3 1LR 
The Rt. Hon. The Lord Carrington KG, GCMG, CH, MC, PC, DL (born 6th June 1919) with his wife Lady Carrington (1920 – 2009) and their dog Edward A friend was looking for somewhere to buy in London and I’d somehow come across the aforementioned property in a magazine. A detached house in Knightsbridge at this price seemed like a bargain and as he was keen to take a look and I lived round the corner, we arranged to see it together.
During this period, I had unfortunately made the mistake of making the acquaintance of a former ambassador’s wife who thought herself rather grand. Said woman somehow found out about my friend going to what Americans might term an “open house” at 32a Ovington Square and somehow muscled in. This individual happened to be selling her own home nearby and I reckon she, like my friend, thought she’d be onto a bargain. She’d previously unsuccessfully tried to persuade my friend to buy her individually styled, Ralph Lauren wallpapered home but as it actually rattled every time an underground train went underneath and as it was far from a bargain, he’d sensibly declined.
We arrived at the 2,240 square foot 32a Ovington Square to be told by a rather unhelpful estate agent that we’d have to just wander round by ourselves and that there was no brochure or floor plan. As a merry throng trailed through the house, Lord Carrington stood in the garden looking bemused and his secretary fussed around him. The pair plainly weren’t comfortable with all the interlopers and all in all, who could blame them.
The ex-ambassador’s wife, whose carelessness Rupert Everett most amusingly made reference to in his recent memoirs, spent the entire visit whingeing about the house being dark and stinking of damp. I had to agree with her as the neighbouring buildings towered over it and there was mould on the walls. My friend simply said: “It needs a fortune spending on it.” We left and later I heard that it sold for well above the asking price. The wife of the ex-ambassador thankfully departed from our lives soon after.
A site plan shows how hidden away 32a Ovington Square truly is – ideal for a government minister or indeed a wayward celebrity About a year and a half later, I saw 32a Ovington Square for sale with planning permission to construct a far larger residence with a basement and sub-basement pool complex. The price was in the order of £14,000,000. I thought that somewhat ludicrous but now that the very same property is on the market at a price of £23,00,000, it seems that the world has just gone mad.
The brochure for the new residence, which has been renamed, Carrington House, reveals a three-storey low-built freehold building with 5,300 square foot of accommodation. Though 32a Ovington Square has been more than doubled in size by a developer named London City Developments, the sub-basement leisure complex has not been constructed. Could this have been because of planning problems or simply because such construction wasn’t deemed to add value?
In August 2002, Lord Carrington, whom The Mirror described as being “doddery” in a Scurra diary piece, was said to have objected to a bar named Townhouse behind his former home being given a 1am licence. That bar has since closed but as seven of the residents of Ovington Square and Beauchamp Place also took a dislike to the prospect of subterranean developments at his former home, only proposals for a single basement level were included in the January 2010 plans submitted by a Mr & Mrs R. Garner.
Jeffrey Archer’s 1984 novel “First Among Equals” (published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0-340-35266-3) Aside from controversy with residents and planning officials, this “heavily overlooked,” “dark” house gets a brief credit in Jeffrey Archer’s 1984 novel, First Among Equals:
“Charles would not have normally accepted the invitation. Lately he found cocktail parties to consist of nothing but silly little bits of food, never being able to get the right drink and rarely enjoying the trivial conversation. But when he glanced on his mantelpiece and saw an ‘At Home’ from Lady Carrington he felt it might be an amusing break from the routine he had fallen into since Fiona left. He was keen to discover more about the rumoured squabbles in Cabinet over expenditure cuts. He checked his tie in the mirror, removed an umbrella from the hat stand and left Eaton Square for Ovington Square… He arrived at Lord Carrington’s front door a little after six forty-five. A maid answered his knock, and he walked straight through to a drawing room that could have held fifty guests and very nearly did. He even managed to be served with the right blend of whiskey before joining his colleagues from both the Upper and Lower Houses.”
Turning to the real Lord Carrington, here is a man who has led a remarkable life. He served as Foreign Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet between 1979 and 1982 and as Secretary General of NATO from 1984 to 1988. The last surviving member of the Cabinets of both Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home was British High Commissioner in Australia between 1956 and 1959 and also chaired the 1979 Lancaster House conference that brought Zimbabwe’s revolutionary war to an end. In 1991, Carrington presided over diplomatic talks in the former Yugoslavia and commented:
“When I first talked to Presidents Milošević and Tudjman, it was quite clear that both of them had a solution which was mutually satisfactory – which was that they were going to carve up Bosnia between them.”
Lord Carrington at his desk in 32a Ovington Square, Knightsbridge 
The Manor House, Bledlow, Buckinghamshire, HP27 9PB is the country home of Lord Carrington Milošević was found dead in his cell in 2006 but it is quite possible that Lord Carrington’s name will be mentioned in the trial of Goran Hadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that has just commenced at The Hague. It is amazing to think that matters involving this 93-year old politician are still current but Carrington’s stamina is shown in his roles as the longest serving member of the House of Lords and the second longest serving member of the Privy Council after HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.
Aside from politics, there is much on the internet, a considerable amount of it written by wildcards and fantasists whose number includes David Icke, about Carrington’s involvement with Henry Kissinger, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group and the Committee of 300. The consensus of these conspiracy theorists generally borders on the ludicrous, but it is without doubt that Lord Carrington had and continues to have influence in many high places. He was chairman of Christie’s International PLC from 1988 to 1993 and has held directorships on the boards of companies that have included Barclays Banks PLC, Hambros PLC, Cadbury Schweppes PLC, Amalgamated Metal Corporation PLC, British Metal Corpoation PLC, Rio Tinto PLC, Kissinger Associates Inc. and Hollinger Inc.
The main entrance to Carrington House 
The main reception room of the house is decorated in a contemporary style and a far cry from the traditional decoration favoured by Lord and Lady Carrington 
An essential feature in any house priced over £10 million is a media room 
Carrington House now boasts a bar that any dignitary would envy 
The newly added basement level features an entertaining hall, dining room, bar, gym, media room and two bedroom suites 
The staircase is now lit by a glazed cupola 
The master bedroom 
The master bathroom 
Another bedroom, located at basement level, is decorated with a Scottish theme and has access to a shared courtyard 
The other suite that shares the courtyard is decorated with an “Out of Africa” theme complete with an image of a zebra and matching linen and upholstery 
Would the purchaser of a £23,000,000 home truly want an AstroTurf lawn? Following on from this rather over the top redevelopment, a new chapter has certainly begun at 32a Ovington Square. Whether it is bought by a popstar or a Russian oligarch, they’ll definitely not be anywhere nearly as equal to Lord Carrington in terms of their league of influence.
Carrington House, 32a Ovington Square, London, SW3 1LR is for sale through Knight Frank. For further information contact Nick Vestey on +44 (0) 20 7591 8600. Full details of the house can be viewed at: http://search.knightfrank.com/sla100211
For more details about the Carrington family’s Carrington Estates Ltd., go to: http://www.carington.co.uk/
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Why pay less?
Living life to the full Donald G. Abbey style
“Why pay less when you can pay more?” is a mantra that some strangely choose to live by. In my time, I have encountered a couple with a different Ferrari for each day of the week, someone who proudly declared their home had a window for each day of the year and an heiress who insists upon the local baker feeding her dog daily with a freshly baked caviar pie.
When I discovered a house in California priced at $78,000,000, I didn’t expect to subsequently find out that the same vendor is also selling another of his homes in Montana at the very same price. Having done a little research into Donald G. Abbey, the commercial real estate tycoon who owns both The Bradbury Estate and Shelter Island, I discovered that here indeed is another personality whose excess knows no bounds.
I suppose when people sell homes of this worth, the asking price they set is quite irrelevant. “What,” I’m sure they ask, “is $5 million between friends?” Equally, when it comes to developing such properties, characters of this nature do not show any reserve. Bling is most definitely the order of the day and the larger and flashier one can build, I guess, the better.
An aerial shot of The Bradbury Estate, 172 Bliss Canyon Road, Bradbury, California, CA 91008, USA 
The front elevation of the main house 
The owner and his guests need not get wet on arrival in their limousines Abbey’s Bradbury Estate is a case in point. This vast property consists of a 33,000 square foot main house with 7 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. It is almost entirely made of French limestone and includes a chef’s kitchen with a pizza oven, a 2,000 bottle wine cellar, an oak paneled elevator and a leather paneled poker room. Bedrooms include domes with hand painted frescos and in addition there is a detached 6,700 square foot guest house above a 10 car garage and a 5,700 square foot pool house with a catering kitchen, gym, massage room and a subterranean EPA certified 25 yard rifle shooting range complete with a gun storage room and 2 large safes.
The hall of the main residence comes complete with a gallery and bar 
A vast library provides the perfect space to enjoy a good book 
The library’s glazed ceiling 
Another palatial reception room 
The house features a rather impressive kitchen 
Mr Abbey’s copper bath tub comes complete with a mat displaying his initials in front of it Within the 8 acre grounds there is a cross shaped infinity-edged pool – perhaps Mr Abbey is religious – that is “just a few feet short of Olympic length.” It requires 350,000 gallons of water if it is to be filled to capacity. Adjoining this is something even more ludicrous: a 1,000,000 gallon, temperature-controlled rainbow trout pond that cost some $8,000,000 to construct. The pond is said to be “adorned with perennials,” is heated by a custom gravity separator with UV filters and is “chilled for the trout by a 300-tonne central cooling plant.” At Bradbury, thoughts of water crisis in Sudan and Ethiopia come way behind the needs of Abbey’s rainbows.
The rear of the house viewed from above The Bradbury Estate’s $8,000,000 trout pond 
The estate’s 350,000 gallon near Olympic length cross shaped infinity edged swimming pool 
The property’s EPA certified 25 yard rifle range For those wanting to avoid California’s UV rays, Bradbury also boasts an acre of porches, decks, loggia and walkways. A 600ft blue stone driveway completes this “once in a lifetime trophy property” that “belongs in the portfolio of the most astute collector” and it has space for “60 foot truck access or multiple limousines.”
When Mr Abbey has tired of California, he is able to retreat to his own island in Montana. The 24 acre Shelter Island on Flathead Lake includes 7,000 feet of frontage to the water, a world class sporting clay course and 3 computer controlled tracks and docking systems that allow boats to be landed in the dry dock without riders ever leaving the craft or handling a line. The island is powered via an underground armoured utility cable that carry 12,000 amps to it along with CAT-5 computer cable and phonelines and the main entertaining space features a mammoth television of some 120-inches in size.
An aerial view of Donald G. Abbey’s Shelter Island 
Mr Abbey’s passion for copper continues with a conservatory made out of the metal on the lakeside elevation of the main residence on Shelter Island 
The Great Room of the main residence on Shelter Island 
Mr Abbey’s passion for fine wines is displayed in a bar and tasting room in the property 
The owner and his guests can access their boats without having to go anywhere near the water Abbey has built over 44,000 square foot of accommodation on his island. The main house has 5 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. His “Great Room” features ceilings of some 45 foot in height and in addition to yet another indoor shooting range, there is a kitchen that woudn’t look out of place in The Savoy hotel.
In the UK, the property most similar to anything Abbey has built has to be Updown Court at Windlesham in Surrey. Developed by a former bricklayer named Leslie Allen-Vercoe, the house was described by him as being: “The most important residence to be built in England since the 19th century.” Architectural critics did not agree and some went as far as to say that it looked like: “A cross between a Tesco superstore and Center Parcs.”
Allen-Vercoe’s behemoth of a house is gargantuan in size. With 103 rooms it includes 24 bedrooms, 5 swimming pools, a 2-lane bowling alley, a squash court, a floodlit tennis court, a 50-seat cinema and a panic room. The heated driveway that led to the house is entirely made of marble and cost some £2.5 million to construct but plainly none of this appealed to the market as it languished for sale at a price of £70,000,000 from 2006 to 2011 before being repossessed by the Irish National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). Updown Court was sold for half the original asking price to a foreign buyer in October 2011 and is, I believe, due to undergo extensive remodeling.
Updown Court, Chertsey Road, Windlesham, Surrey, GU20 6HY, UK Allen Vercoe once stated: “If Elton John were a house, he’d be Updown Court.” Equally, I imagine if Mr Abbey’s residences were to be compared to any celebrities they’d be the vulgar car crash that is Donatella Versace and the ludicrous money obsessed singer with a dollar sign in her name, Ke$ha.
Updown Court, Shelter Island and The Bradbury Estate all illustrate that money cannot buy you good taste. I suppose, though, that those who ultimately come to live in them will have plenty of space to choose how and where to enjoy their own form of misery.
For more information about Donald G. Abbey, go to: http://www.theabbeyco.com
For information on both The Bradbury Estate and Shelter Island, contact Bob Hurwitz of the Hurwitz James Company on +1 310-477-8865. Website: http://www.hurwitzjamesco.com
A website devoted to The Bradbury Estate can be viewed at: http://www.bradburyestate.com
A video of Shelter Island can be watched at: http://vimeo.com/11404637
For more details on Updown Court, go to: http://www.updowncourt.com/
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Ferrari's 'F'lipping 'F'ool
The case of a Ferrari FF driver with more money than sense
Last November, on my way to a lunch at The Stafford Hotel with The Steeple Times restaurant critic, Anthony Brown, I took a photograph of one of my favourite vehicles, a Ferrari FF, in Curzon Street, W1.
Emblazoned with a Westminster City Council parking ticket, this particular FF, baring an Arabic registration “66 C,” was especially noticeable as it was “wrapped” in orange and black and I took a photograph of it.
My photograph of the orange-black “wrapped” Ferrari FF in Curzon Street, Mayfair, London, W1 in November 2011 After sharing the image on Facebook, I received, in Margaret Thatcher style fashion, the following reply from the renowned designer, Bruce Oldfield: “No, no, no!” Another friend, Anne Marie Legault added: “It doesn’t fit with the neighborhood.” Karen Ashworth, a Mercedes SL 500 driver and friend from my school days, summed up the thoughts of the majority though when she stated of the car: “I’m not a fan to be honest!”
I subsequently saw the car a few times in the months that followed but never imagined that I’d see it on the Mail Online website and would certainly never have predicted that it would have ended up as an advert against uninsured drivers outside New Scotland Yard.
The very same Ferrari FF outside New Scotland Yard today 
Instead of a parking ticket, this Ferrari FF now has a police notice glued to it’s windscreen 
28-year old His Highness Sheikh Rashid Bin Humaid Al Nuaimi. His nickname is “RRR,” which supposedly stands for “rich in real estate resources.” The Steeple Times picture of the week, following on from this morning’s coverage of it, therefore, has to be of this particular FF. It turns out that it is owned by His Highness Sheikh Rashid Bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, the 28-year old son of His Highness Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, the ruler of Ajman, and was recently impounded in South Kensington, London after he hadn’t bothered to insure it. Having paid £227,000 for such a magnificent vehicle, one would have thought he’d have the brains and finances to have done such. Plainly the age of excess and stupidity is still with us.
Read the Mail Online’s coverage of the story at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2209551/Going-fast–Ferrari-proudly-display-outside-police-headquarters-deter-uninsured-drivers.html
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Video of the Week: Sorry is the hardest word to say
The spoof of Nick Clegg apologising hits the iTunes charts
“I’d like to take this opportunity to put things straight,” began the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, this week when he attempted to say sorry for breaking his party’s election pledge on tuition fees.
Such a stunt was inevitably going to be controversial and equally opened Clegg to taunts from his opponents and the public in general. I am sure, however, the Liberal Democrat leader did not expect that an adapted version of his speech would enter the Top 40 hits of the week in the iTunes charts or that he’d find himself challenging the likes of Kanye West, The Killers and Carly Rae Jepsen for the top spot.
Nick Clegg: Britain’s next popstar? “The Nick Clegg Apology Song: I’m Sorry (The Autotune Remix)” hits the iTunes charts Turned into a ditty little song named: “The Nick Clegg Apology Song: I’m Sorry (The Autotune Remix)” by parody site The Poke, Clegg cleverly realized the political capital in embracing the two-and-a-half minute video and gave permission for it to be released. He did so on the basis that all profits go to the Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, of which his wife Miriam is a patron, and now appears to be benefitting from the publicity during the key time of his party’s annual conference.
A spokesman for The Poke commented:
“Nick Clegg has been very good-humoured about this. He has become the first politician in history to achieve a position in the pop charts for making an apology. The Poke is staggered by its success.”
A spokesman for Mr Clegg added: ’It’s good news that the Sheffield Children’s Hospital will be the ones to benefit from the song getting into the charts.”
Whilst Clegg’s days at Number 10 may hopefully be numbered, perhaps a career in the pop business beckons. For that reason, we make it The Steeple Times Video of the Week.
Watch the full video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDjRZ30SNo&feature=player_embedded
Read The Poke, whose motto is “Time well wasted,” at: http://www.thepoke.co.uk