Belmarsh prison officer guilty of being paid mole for reporter
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Version 0 of 1. A prison officer at Belmarsh high-security prison has been found guilty of being the paid mole of a reporter working at the Daily Mirror and News of the World over five years. After an Old Bailey trial, Robert Norman, 54, was convicted of committing misconduct in a public office while working at HMP Belmarsh, south London, home to a number of high-profile prisoners. The court heard he was paid more than £10,000 for 40 tipoffs to the reporter, Stephen Moyes, between 30 April 2006 and 1 May 2011. In his defence, Norman, from Swanscombe, Kent, denied wrongdoing and told jurors that he wanted to highlight problems at the prison in the public interest. He claimed the case of a Catholic chaplain having affairs with inmates was being “swept under the carpet” by authorities before he told Moyes about it. The jury was not told that charges against the journalist had been dropped after a review of Operation Elveden cases by the Crown Prosecution Service. They took less than a day to find Norman guilty. He will be sentenced by the judge, the common serjeant of London, at 9.15am on Tuesday. Opening the case, Julian Christopher QC, prosecuting, said Norman was an “extremely experienced” prison officer, having been appointed in 1992. He was also a member of the Prison Officers Association where he acted as a union representative for his colleagues. Norman first phoned the Daily Mirror in 2006 and gave Moyes a story about staff cuts at the prison, for which he was paid £400. The exclusive story described Belmarsh as a “terror prison” and ran alongside a photograph of one of its most notorious prisoners, the radical cleric Abu Hamza, the court heard. As the relationship developed, it became a “two-way affair”, the court was told, and Norman carried on dealing with Moyes when the journalist moved to the News of the World. Christopher said: “Sometimes Robert Norman would approach Stephen Moyes with something he thought would be of interest, at other times Stephen Moyes would approach Robert Norman for inside information about a topic in which he was interested, or for confirmation which he would not be able to get for free from the official channels at the Ministry of Justice press office. Effectively, Robert Norman became the journalist’s paid mole within HMP Belmarsh.” The court heard that when Norman was arrested in 2013 he maintained he had acted in the public interest as a whistleblower. But Christopher said: “While there may well be quite a number of stories which would be said to varying degrees to be concerned with issues in the public interest, the prosecution alleges it is plain that this was not the behaviour of a conscience-driven whistleblower, moved by the desire to see change and accountability where otherwise there would be none.” Cheques for the stories were made out to Norman’s son, Daniel, and the money was then transferred into Norman’s account. This showed the defendant was “worried about the trouble he would get into” if found out, Christopher said. |