June 17, 2025 • 10 mins
Wanna win a $100 Visa Gift card? Fill out this short survey and go in the draw Take the short survey
In this episode, Neil sits down with Steve Keogh, a former Scotland Yard detective with over 30 years in the Metropolitan Police. Steve shares gripping stories from his career, including interrogating terrorists, exposing corrupt officers, and confronting child abusers. With a deep understanding of the complexities of these cases, Steve offers a rare glimpse into the intense world of criminal investigations and the pursuit of justice.
Rewind back to Season 10 to hear the full story.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Approche production.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Do you think there was a lot of corruption in
the police force back when you were like on the beat,
not only were detective, but when you first started, did
you see any kind of the corruption? Did you see
like you weren't like by other detectives, like when the
plane closes or whatever, or the superior ones in the
force wouldn't talk to you.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Did you see that a lot in it?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I come at the tail end of it, so I enjoined.
So the way that you used to become a detective
when I did it is you had to prove yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
On the street. You just call yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
People used to call you a thief taker, and if
you were a thief taker, you got invited to be
on the crime squad. So I joined the crime squad
in around ninety seven, I think it was. And there
were some older detectives on there who so they would
have joined in the probably not this what was that seventies,
late seventies, early eighties, And I've been in for a
(01:05):
long time, and they were on some units that were dodgy,
shall we say, And the police commissioner at the time
came in and they were going to sort out corruption.
That was that was their main task, like that's what
they got brought in to sort out corruption. And it
(01:25):
was funny because the detectives that are on my crime squad,
it felt like it probably wasn't. It felt like every
day the net was closing in and they'd be talking
about someone else who's been nicked or and we would
go to court and there would be police officers there
that they knew, and it was like the net was
really closing in on all those people that were left
over from that. They're not saying all detectives back then
(01:47):
were corrupt, but it tended to be certain units and
we had a we had a.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Unit in southeast London.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
It's Beckham, it was it was right next to Peckham,
and so this was the area Crime Squad and they
essentially they dealt with drugs. They dealt with larger street
level would be uniform type people would deal with it
on the crime squad and as you go up they
would be in a more middle tier of drug dealers.
(02:14):
But these coppers nl these were criminals themselves. So what
they would do is they would go to drug dealers
and pretend to be executing a warrant, take the drugs
off of them and then they would give them to
their friendly drug dealers, would knock them out for them,
sell them for them, but they come unstuck. So they
did a warrant on a couple of hippie types in
(02:36):
a caravan and they went in there and they did.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The usual thing.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
And what drug dealer is really going to go to
the police and say I've just had my drugs stolen
by a police officer. Doesn't happen, But these hippie types did.
They went to the police and say, look, okay, look
we admit it. We were selling, we were selling cannabis
or whatever it was. But these police officers come in
they stole their drugs and we think it's wrong. And
that's set a ball roll in where those anti corruption
(03:02):
police started to look at them and they all got
nicked and turning on each other and like.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
For instance, there was one job they had and they
were near Biggin Hill in South London and there's an
airport there and some drug dealers came in and they
dropped bales of cannabis, like big bales of them, about
four or five, and about two of them made it
back to the police station and the rest just got
siphoned off. And I've got no time for these people
(03:29):
at all. I say, I grew up around criminals, but
I don't respect them. But they're in their lane and
their criminals and they do it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Any kind of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Fine, But but those that are in the police got
no sympathy at all. So if they end up in
prison at which they did, they shouldn't be doing that job,
should they the police officers.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
The police officer should be plasing the criminals, not be
criminals themselves.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
You've had murderers and all like that. What you think
in all your career, what is the worst pedophiles, terrorists, murderers,
what drug dealers? What's the worst one you've come across.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
That's a really good question.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I think the worst has to be terrorists in terms
of what it is. So as an example, so we
dealt with this particular job and we were working with
m I five and Special Branch, and we're following these
people and we arrest them and it's not add so
(04:24):
the way that we worked when I was on the
Terrist branch, you had two sides of it. You had
the secretive types who would be doing the surveillance and
listen to people's phone calls, that kind of thing, and
you had us and we were what's known as Anti
Terrorist Branch, and we would do arrests, searches, interview them,
all the stuff where they would see us, all the
overt stuff, so covert and overt, and so we were
(04:49):
on the surveillance with them, but we wouldn't be doing
the following. We would be sort of behind, tailing behind
slightly so that we can get.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Called forward to do the arrest.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And so it's never had decision really, and so when
the arrest would happen, and we arrested this group, this
al Qaeda cell, and god be honest, there wasn't a
lot of evidence, but they decided that it was too
dangerous to let them run because they felt that they
were close enough to executing their plan that they couldn't
let it run just in case they did. So we
(05:19):
got them in and we still an interview at a
place called Paddington Green Police station. It was like a
police station within a police station. It's really really secure,
high walls and all security doors to get into it.
So I had two of these terrorists there and there
were six, so we're three interview teams are two each
I was lead on two and we didn't have a
lot of evidence really at the beginning, and you kind
(05:41):
of fill in time when you've got some of the
fourteen days and never got a lot of evidence, so
you're kind of talking about all sorts of rubbish. And
then slowly stuff started to come through. And in one
of their carriages they found a hard drive and on
this hard drive were the plans that they were putting
together for their terror sacs and they were chilling, honestly.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
So just an example of some of the things that
they were planning.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I say, I grew up and police in Greenwich and
we've got an underground station near North Greenwich, and their
plan was to put a bomb in North Greenwich because
it's under the Thames, that would bring the river down
and flood the London underground system.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
So it was one of the plans.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
In light bulbs, no sorry, smoke alarms, there's something called
a meriseum. It's an element in all the smoke detectors
and it's radioactive if it sets on fire. And there
was a fire accidental fire in a lorry in France,
carrying like a couple of thousand of these smoke detectors
(06:45):
and it became radioactive. So their plan was to buy
up thousands of smoke alarms, and even planned it to
so they didn't raise people's suspicions that suddenly all these
smoke alarms being born. They where they would buy them,
how many days it would buy them over, put them
in a lorry, drive the lorry into central London, set
it on fire, and they had calculated how many people
(07:09):
would die. They calculated how many people would be given cancer.
They calculated defects in berths. So they've worked out how
many people would have defective births.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Because because I.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Mean, these plans were just like crazy another one, and
they'd also started to do this thing in America as well,
and this whole it was this document.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When you read it, it read.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Like something you would see in a film or in
a book. It was called the gas Limos project. And
the reason that was another one of their plans was
that they were going to get a hearse, fill it
with the gas canisters that you would have for like
in your barb your barbies over there, and stack them
(07:55):
in the car, drive it under a building and explode.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It in order to bring the building down.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
And they'd also been doing some reconnaissance in America up
and they'd looked at four different buildings in America, the
New Stock Exchange, a couple a couple of other high
profile buildings and they'd done hostile reconnaissance on them. So
they looked at where the cameras were, where security guards were,
and we fed this back to the Americans. And at
(08:22):
that time, it would have been two thousand and four,
I think two thousand and three, two hundred and four.
The army were on the streets in New York and
it all came back from us feeding them back the
plans that they had. And one of the terrorists that
I was interviewing, so, as I said, we didn't have
a lot of evidence, so they started to feed stuff
back to us, and some of it they were asking
(08:43):
us to look at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So we found this, I don't know, this hard drive
or something.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Can you ever look at it because we haven't got
a lot of people and see if you can find
them the evidence on it. And so one of the
ones I was interviewing, we had some videos that have
been downloaded from his phone, and he was in New
York and this was it would have been about year
two thousand, so it was before the ninety eleven y
(09:07):
and he was filming across Hudson Bay and you see
him the camera going across Hudson Bay until they get
to the Twin Towers, which is still there. The camera
stops and you hear and carry on. And it was
one of those moments where the hair stood up on
the back of my back of my neck and I
was like, can you rewind that?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Can you rewind that? And we did it again.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
It's like and it just it highlighted how high up
these people were, because they clearly knew about nine to
eleven before it happened, and it was just chilling to
think that these are the kind of people that you
spend two weeks in an interview room talking to, and
when you're talking to these people, I always I had
(09:51):
a technique when I interviewed terrorists, anybody, really, and it
fall back to what I was talking about earlier about
having that rapport with people and being able to get
on with someone. And I always felt that it was
much easier to try and break someone down or get
them to talk talk to you if they liked you.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So in between a terrorists won't even talk to you.
They won't.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
They won't say no comment, they won't answer their name,
They just they will just leave a look at the floor, look.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
At the wall, or whatever.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
But in between you can talk to them and you
kind of get a rapport going with them.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Do you like, what football team? Do you like? What
do I mean? Where'd you get? What do you do?
Trying to where did you go to school? Where do
you grow up? All that kind of thing. So you're
trying to build up.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
A rapport with them, and you have to do that
despite in that these people are so evil. But even
to go down to that detail of how many defects
in birth are going to cause, I mean, that is evil,
isn't it. I can't I can't think of anything worse
than that.
Approche production.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Do you think there was a lot of corruption in
the police force back when you were like on the beat,
not only were detective, but when you first started, did
you see any kind of the corruption? Did you see
like you weren't like by other detectives, like when the
plane closes or whatever, or the superior ones in the
force wouldn't talk to you.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Did you see that a lot in it?
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I come at the tail end of it, so I enjoined.
So the way that you used to become a detective
when I did it is you had to prove yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
On the street. You just call yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
People used to call you a thief taker, and if
you were a thief taker, you got invited to be
on the crime squad. So I joined the crime squad
in around ninety seven, I think it was. And there
were some older detectives on there who so they would
have joined in the probably not this what was that seventies,
late seventies, early eighties, And I've been in for a
(01:05):
long time, and they were on some units that were dodgy,
shall we say, And the police commissioner at the time
came in and they were going to sort out corruption.
That was that was their main task, like that's what
they got brought in to sort out corruption. And it
(01:25):
was funny because the detectives that are on my crime squad,
it felt like it probably wasn't. It felt like every
day the net was closing in and they'd be talking
about someone else who's been nicked or and we would
go to court and there would be police officers there
that they knew, and it was like the net was
really closing in on all those people that were left
over from that. They're not saying all detectives back then
(01:47):
were corrupt, but it tended to be certain units and
we had a we had a.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Unit in southeast London.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
It's Beckham, it was it was right next to Peckham,
and so this was the area Crime Squad and they
essentially they dealt with drugs. They dealt with larger street
level would be uniform type people would deal with it
on the crime squad and as you go up they
would be in a more middle tier of drug dealers.
(02:14):
But these coppers nl these were criminals themselves. So what
they would do is they would go to drug dealers
and pretend to be executing a warrant, take the drugs
off of them and then they would give them to
their friendly drug dealers, would knock them out for them,
sell them for them, but they come unstuck. So they
did a warrant on a couple of hippie types in
(02:36):
a caravan and they went in there and they did.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The usual thing.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
And what drug dealer is really going to go to
the police and say I've just had my drugs stolen
by a police officer. Doesn't happen, But these hippie types did.
They went to the police and say, look, okay, look
we admit it. We were selling, we were selling cannabis
or whatever it was. But these police officers come in
they stole their drugs and we think it's wrong. And
that's set a ball roll in where those anti corruption
(03:02):
police started to look at them and they all got
nicked and turning on each other and like.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
For instance, there was one job they had and they
were near Biggin Hill in South London and there's an
airport there and some drug dealers came in and they
dropped bales of cannabis, like big bales of them, about
four or five, and about two of them made it
back to the police station and the rest just got
siphoned off. And I've got no time for these people
(03:29):
at all. I say, I grew up around criminals, but
I don't respect them. But they're in their lane and
their criminals and they do it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Any kind of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Fine, But but those that are in the police got
no sympathy at all. So if they end up in
prison at which they did, they shouldn't be doing that job,
should they the police officers.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
The police officer should be plasing the criminals, not be
criminals themselves.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
You've had murderers and all like that. What you think
in all your career, what is the worst pedophiles, terrorists, murderers,
what drug dealers? What's the worst one you've come across.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
That's a really good question.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I think the worst has to be terrorists in terms
of what it is. So as an example, so we
dealt with this particular job and we were working with
m I five and Special Branch, and we're following these
people and we arrest them and it's not add so
(04:24):
the way that we worked when I was on the
Terrist branch, you had two sides of it. You had
the secretive types who would be doing the surveillance and
listen to people's phone calls, that kind of thing, and
you had us and we were what's known as Anti
Terrorist Branch, and we would do arrests, searches, interview them,
all the stuff where they would see us, all the
overt stuff, so covert and overt, and so we were
(04:49):
on the surveillance with them, but we wouldn't be doing
the following. We would be sort of behind, tailing behind
slightly so that we can get.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Called forward to do the arrest.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And so it's never had decision really, and so when
the arrest would happen, and we arrested this group, this
al Qaeda cell, and god be honest, there wasn't a
lot of evidence, but they decided that it was too
dangerous to let them run because they felt that they
were close enough to executing their plan that they couldn't
let it run just in case they did. So we
(05:19):
got them in and we still an interview at a
place called Paddington Green Police station. It was like a
police station within a police station. It's really really secure,
high walls and all security doors to get into it.
So I had two of these terrorists there and there
were six, so we're three interview teams are two each
I was lead on two and we didn't have a
lot of evidence really at the beginning, and you kind
(05:41):
of fill in time when you've got some of the
fourteen days and never got a lot of evidence, so
you're kind of talking about all sorts of rubbish. And
then slowly stuff started to come through. And in one
of their carriages they found a hard drive and on
this hard drive were the plans that they were putting
together for their terror sacs and they were chilling, honestly.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
So just an example of some of the things that
they were planning.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I say, I grew up and police in Greenwich and
we've got an underground station near North Greenwich, and their
plan was to put a bomb in North Greenwich because
it's under the Thames, that would bring the river down
and flood the London underground system.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
So it was one of the plans.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
In light bulbs, no sorry, smoke alarms, there's something called
a meriseum. It's an element in all the smoke detectors
and it's radioactive if it sets on fire. And there
was a fire accidental fire in a lorry in France,
carrying like a couple of thousand of these smoke detectors
(06:45):
and it became radioactive. So their plan was to buy
up thousands of smoke alarms, and even planned it to
so they didn't raise people's suspicions that suddenly all these
smoke alarms being born. They where they would buy them,
how many days it would buy them over, put them
in a lorry, drive the lorry into central London, set
it on fire, and they had calculated how many people
(07:09):
would die. They calculated how many people would be given cancer.
They calculated defects in berths. So they've worked out how
many people would have defective births.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Because because I.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Mean, these plans were just like crazy another one, and
they'd also started to do this thing in America as well,
and this whole it was this document.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When you read it, it read.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Like something you would see in a film or in
a book. It was called the gas Limos project. And
the reason that was another one of their plans was
that they were going to get a hearse, fill it
with the gas canisters that you would have for like
in your barb your barbies over there, and stack them
(07:55):
in the car, drive it under a building and explode.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It in order to bring the building down.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
And they'd also been doing some reconnaissance in America up
and they'd looked at four different buildings in America, the
New Stock Exchange, a couple a couple of other high
profile buildings and they'd done hostile reconnaissance on them. So
they looked at where the cameras were, where security guards were,
and we fed this back to the Americans. And at
(08:22):
that time, it would have been two thousand and four,
I think two thousand and three, two hundred and four.
The army were on the streets in New York and
it all came back from us feeding them back the
plans that they had. And one of the terrorists that
I was interviewing, so, as I said, we didn't have
a lot of evidence, so they started to feed stuff
back to us, and some of it they were asking
(08:43):
us to look at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So we found this, I don't know, this hard drive
or something.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Can you ever look at it because we haven't got
a lot of people and see if you can find
them the evidence on it. And so one of the
ones I was interviewing, we had some videos that have
been downloaded from his phone, and he was in New
York and this was it would have been about year
two thousand, so it was before the ninety eleven y
(09:07):
and he was filming across Hudson Bay and you see
him the camera going across Hudson Bay until they get
to the Twin Towers, which is still there. The camera
stops and you hear and carry on. And it was
one of those moments where the hair stood up on
the back of my back of my neck and I
was like, can you rewind that?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Can you rewind that? And we did it again.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
It's like and it just it highlighted how high up
these people were, because they clearly knew about nine to
eleven before it happened, and it was just chilling to
think that these are the kind of people that you
spend two weeks in an interview room talking to, and
when you're talking to these people, I always I had
(09:51):
a technique when I interviewed terrorists, anybody, really, and it
fall back to what I was talking about earlier about
having that rapport with people and being able to get
on with someone. And I always felt that it was
much easier to try and break someone down or get
them to talk talk to you if they liked you.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So in between a terrorists won't even talk to you.
They won't.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
They won't say no comment, they won't answer their name,
They just they will just leave a look at the floor, look.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
At the wall, or whatever.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
But in between you can talk to them and you
kind of get a rapport going with them.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Do you like, what football team? Do you like? What
do I mean? Where'd you get? What do you do?
Trying to where did you go to school? Where do
you grow up? All that kind of thing. So you're
trying to build up.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
A rapport with them, and you have to do that
despite in that these people are so evil. But even
to go down to that detail of how many defects
in birth are going to cause, I mean, that is evil,
isn't it. I can't I can't think of anything worse
than that.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com