Kevin O’Leary was the most senior undercover officer at Scotland Yard, running operations inside the most serious criminal networks
The first undercover case that Kevin O’Leary ever worked on is a hard one to forget: a wife was looking to hire a contract killer to get rid of her husband. O’Leary’s team were responsible for going undercover, posing as the potential killer-for-hire, to find out if she was really serious and had murderous intent, was just indulging a fantasy, or perhaps it was a cry for help. Either way, they were going into a murky underworld looking for evidence to build a case.
Later his name was thrown into the ring for the most senior undercover role . “There was someone else they had in mind, but they kept failing the exam. I knew they didn’t really want me – and I’ve never stayed at a party where I wasn’t welcome – but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I went for it,” he says.
Going into covert ops doesn’t require any specific qualifications, says O’Leary, but selection, including psychometric tests, is rigorous To be convincing, the staff were trained in the sort of music the shop was selling The staff began to ask around to buy guns – getting them off the street and into the hands of law enforcement.
Did it ever go wrong? Did officers get found out? “Sometimes they do get confronted and beaten up – that happened a few times. But we’ve got a well-worn protocol to sort it out.” Not exactly “secret squirrel”, but it involves using a cover officer – someone who isn’t visibly on the ground but is a handler that bridges the undercover person and the police – and a metaphorical emergency button to notify them that they’ve been compromised.
O’Leary is keen to draw a distinction between the work he did and that sort of undercover work. “Our objective was always to send cases to court for prosecution, so was always going to be looked at by a judge,” he says, whereas other units were “intelligence-gathering for internal consumption to build a picture” – for example, to understand what an activist group might be planning to do.
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