Convicted killer’s ‘jury tampering’ plot to derail £45m drug smuggling trial from prison cell

A convicted murderer, who once escaped from prison using a grappling hook, orchestrated a plot to collapse a £45m international drug smuggling trial by claiming the jury had been bribed.

William Todd, 61, has been sentenced to seven years in prison after he was found guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

He directed the scheme from his cell using a secret mobile phone under the alias Ari Gold – the Hollywood agent played by Jeremy Piven in TV series Entourage.

Todd was given two life sentences in 2001 for the attempted murder of his former business partner Arthur de Sousa and shooting dead Mr de Sousa’s bodyguard in the Berkshire village of Pangbourne.

He escaped from Winchester prison after sawing through the bars of his cell window before scaling the 30ft wall using a homemade grappling hook and rope ladder – but was caught five days later.

Todd was nearing the end of his sentence at Coldingley prison when he staged an elaborate plan to help the gang who smuggled 448kg of MDMA to Australia in the arm of an industrial digger walk free.

The organised crime group was caught after Danny Brown, 58, sent a picture of his pet French Bulldog Bob to Stefan Baldauf, 66, showing his partner’s phone number on the dog tag over encrypted communications platform EncroChat.

Southwark Crown Court heard Todd brokered the plot on behalf of others, using a 46-year-old man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, as his man on the outside to record the names of the jurors when they were sworn in for their trial.

When the jury retired to consider verdicts in June 2022, false claims were sent to Kingston Crown Court and police that named jurors had been bribed up to £20,000 to acquit the men on trial.

The jury, court staff, solicitors and barristers all initially fell under suspicion, but some of the jurors had already been discharged and names had been misspelled, so the trial continued after it was found to be a “dishonest attempt to derail the trial,” said prosecutor Charlotte Hole.

After Brown and Baldauf were found guilty of drug trafficking days later, along with four other men, Sheree Avard, 41, from Woking, Surrey, was recruited in a bid to get the convictions quashed.

The court heard she called Brown’s lawyer posing as the girlfriend of one of the men on the jury, who she claimed had confessed he was pressured by corrupt National Crime Agency officials to convict the men.

An image of a fake passport was also created in the name of Ioana Andrei and a woman in Romania was paid 2,000 euros to sign an official deposition, along with a corrupt solicitor in Bucharest, which was sent to the lawyer.

The statements were leaked online, claiming police and NCA were corrupt and influencing jurors.

The prosecutor said “there was a real risk of serious consequences for innocent parties”, adding: “Had this been believed, jurors could have been in contempt of court or worse.”

Avard and the man who cannot be named admitted conspiracy to pervert the course of justice between March and November 2022, and were jailed for 12 months, and three years and four months respectively.

Sentencing the three involved, Judge Gregory Perrins said the plot “struck at the very heart of justice”.

“This was a professional, persistent and sophisticated attempt to undermine the trial and then the convictions of people involved in serious organised crime,” he said.

“The intention of the conspiracy was to undermine the entire process of justice.”

He said Todd had “close links” with the organised crime group and told “directed every part of the conspiracy” from his prison cell.

Steve Ahmet, senior investigating officer at the NCA’s Anti-Corruption Unit, said: “This case shows the remarkable lengths that high-harm criminals will go to in order to cheat justice and why they pose the greatest corruption threat to crucial pillars of our society.

“The offenders were determined to help their criminal associates walk free but our team built a rock-solid case against them.”

Brown, from Bromley, Kent, and Baldauf, from Ealing, west London, were jailed for 26 years and 28 years respectively in December 2022.