Noteworthy success against an “entirely different league”

A group of British forgers responsible for putting UK£30 million of counterfeit currency into circulation in four years has been jailed for a total of more than 26 years. Dubbed the “Lavender Hill Mob” by police after the classic Ealing Street comedy, they were so successful that in the period 1994 to 1998 their near-perfect copies of UK£20 and UK£50 notes accounted for two thirds of all the counterfeit paper money in circulation in the UK. The copies were of such high quality that they could not be detected by ultraviolet test equipment used in shops and garages. The Bank of England became involved in the investigation and a new UK£20 note was issued partly in response to the fraud. Kenneth Mainstone, the brains behind the operation and a man without any previous convictions was ostensibly a respectable printer who ran his own business. However, he was also producing forged notes on a UK£20,000 press at his home in Essex. With the assistance of Anthony Wilkie, a toolmaker, he also printed fake gas, postage and television stamps and they planned to manufacture copies of UK£1 coins. Other members of the gang who pleaded guilty to producing or handling the forgeries were Bernard Farrier, a retired engineer who was found with UK£1.5 million in sheets of uncut notes in his shed on the Isle of Wight, and two convicted criminals, Stephen Jory and Martin Watmough. The last two provided the underground contacts who filtered the notes into the economy having paid the forgers five per cent of their face value. Mainstone, who met Jory during his attempts to publish a crime novel he had written, was jailed for 12 years. Jory was sentenced to eight years; Wilkie received a sentence of three years and nine months and Watmough was sent down for three years. Farrier died last December. Judge Michael Brodrick described the case as “in an entirely different league, perhaps several leagues removed from anything that has previously come before the courts.”