My part in organ finance scandal

THREE exhausted men spill out of a dinghy at the foot of cliffs on a remote Scottish island, rocked by the huge waves.

They take out a suitcase stuffed with £1,000 cash, carefully peeling out the notes and drying them on the pebbles before hoisting themselves up the cliff.

It may have been one of the more surreal moments of the Southern Organs scandal that rocked Sussex and the country in the 1970s, but it was far from the only one.

Forty years after the multi-million pound church organ fraud that dragged in the Church and tied-up the nation’s police, one man who helped the fraudsters is telling all.

Geoff Green helped his two friends and employers – fraudsters Sydney (better known as Jim) Miller and John Bellord – escape to Priest Island and hid them from the authorities.

The now 73-year-old eventually gave them up after getting a promise he would be spared prosecution in exchange.

Forty years later he has built up a successful osteopath practice in Steyning and says: “Some people may not like what they are hearing – who is this criminal who has been treating me?

“But I am ready for all this stuff to come out of the woodwork.”

To understand how this south London labourer ended up at the heart of a major hire-purchases scam, Mr Green says you have to start with its charismatic mastermind.

He was painting Mr Miller’s luxury Honeywood House, Horsham, in the early 1960s, when the ‘charming philanthropist’ and healing practitioner came over to introduce himself.

“He was a very unusual man and instead of, ‘how do you do?’ and ‘how are you,’ it was straight into talking about character and all these things,” Mr Green recalled.

“I was a young man and had just got married and I was amazed at what he had achieved. And he said, ‘You can do anything you want with your life. I can help you’.”

“His psychological influence was a bit like having your own guru. He was a bit like a father figure to me.”

Philanthropist was another of Miller’s guises.

Mr Green said: “For example, if someone came in and said, ‘I am having a hard time, I am having trouble at work,’ he would say, ‘What would you like to do?’ “And he would help them. So he was philanthropic but it was not really his money.”

The young labourer was among those to benefit from Miller’s guidance, setting up a shop-fitting business – Reynolds, Green, Builders and Shopfitters – under his wing.

He grew closer and closer to Miller and Bellord in the years that followed, bonding over regular discussions on life and philosophy.

“He was quiet but had a very powerful life force,” Mr Green recalled. “You meet these people who just have a big influence on you.

“I think he had too big an influence on anyone who touched him. For example a husband would come home and there would be some influence of what Miller had done, so he would really unsettle people.

“I remember his words like, ‘I suspect you want to be nice and comfortable in your married life,’ and he said: ‘Let me tell you now, nice and comfortable is the worst way to spend your life.’

“He did not see the point of safety and security and he would say things like, ‘If you think money or anything else is going to make you secure, think again, because it does not.”

Mr Green became such a part of the influential pair’s circle that when they later went into the motor racing business, they gave him the job of promotions manager, bringing him into a glamorous world.

“It is a bit funny how these surreal things take you over,” he added. “I had gone from unemployed to owning my own business and working as a racing manager.”

But behind the fast cars and celebrity socialising, Miller and Bellord were struggling to keep on top of a complex financial scam, of which Mr Green was aware of only a tiny part.

Through his organ-selling business Southern Organs International, Miller had been building up a fortune by getting financing for church organs that did not exist or were already financed two, three, four or more times over.

He used his vast social network, including Mr Green, as sponsors, telling them they were helping churches to buy organs via hire-purchase agreements that churches were generally reluctant to sign themselves.

About 100 fake hire-purchase agreements are thought to have been signed by about 78 victims, with Miller and Bellord acting as guarantors, using their personal charm and standing to convince finance companies it was above board.

High interest rates in the 1970s were among the factors making it harder and harder to maintain and the pair decided to ‘end it all’.

Or so they pretended in a suicide note delivered to friends a few weeks after they ‘disappeared’. In truth, they were hiding on the tiny, uninhabited Priest Island, off the west coast of Scotland, scurried away there by Mr Green when things started to collapse.

Mr Green said: “Towards the end of the racing season things started to go really pear shaped.

“The banks were going to start calling on people’s homes to see if they had the organs, which was a bit of a charade because nobody had them and the banks and things were perfectly aware of this.

“Bellord had said, ‘I think we are just going to give ourselves up and say that we have done wrong’.

“At the end of ’74 I was in Brighton going through the book ‘Island Years,’ by Fraser Darling. A lot of it was about Priest Island.

“I told them about Priest Island and said in about an hour [from a launching point] they could get there and think it out.

“The idea was when they had sorted it out they would send flares up and people would come and pick them up and they would give themselves up.”

The pair agreed, but the journey started ominously.

“The water was very choppy – and they could not swim,” their inexperienced captain recalled. “By the time we got to the island there were huge waves trying to throw us against the rocks.

“I jumped into the sea and swam ashore with the rope, wearing a wetsuit and flippers. It had taken us a whole day to get there and get the boat ashore.

“Darkness was closing in and when we got on to the shore we were surrounded by 30-foot cliffs.

“Bellord had a suitcase with about £1,000 in cash. Because it had been swamped with water we put the notes on the pebbles to dry them out.

“I had to climb the cliff with a rope and hoist the guys up and then we found this little space where we set up a couple of tents.”

Back at home pressure was building as authorities ramped up their efforts to find the pair. One national newspaper even called in a ‘psychic detective’.

Mr Green, who had returned from the island the next morning, was beginning to realise the extent of the scam, and started to crumble.

When Miller phoned months later saying he was on the mainland and asking for money, he made up his mind.

“I suppose that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he recalled. “All the time I had thought they were going to come back.

“Through all this time I was getting worn down as well; my decision-making, my ability to think straight, my ability to focus.

“It was a bit like a hangover where it all seems slightly unreal.”

After getting a promise he would not be prosecuted, Mr Green prepared to expose the pair and put an end to their now more than seven-month spell in hiding. But first he had others to tell.

“I said, ‘before telling, there is one thing I have got to do. I have got to go around to all of my friends and tell them what I have done’,” he said. “Obviously I lost quite a few friends but some stood by me. Some just showed me the door.

“I expected it. I did not expect anybody to be throwing their arms around me.”

Exposed by their protégé, Miller and Bellord were arrested in Ullapool, a tiny town in the Scottish Highlands and one of Miller’s favourite places.

The woman whose back garden they had been staying in was apparently shocked to learn she had been harbouring fugitives in a caravan.

Both men pleaded guilty at Lewes Crown Court in 1977 to plotting fraud, theft, forgery and obtaining theft by deception

Miller, aged 56, and Bellord, aged 48, were each jailed for six years.

Their lawyer told the court they had started raising money due to being blackmailed late in 1959 about a womanising church leader.

Both have taken that secret, if true, to their graves. So has the unidentified churchman, said to have died years before they were jailed. The court was also told their crimes were not for their own gain but to “help people”.

• A life after crime

THE intervening years have been kind to Mr Green.

Prosecutors stuck with their decision to not charge him, he remarried and trained as an osteopath. Now he has written a book about his experience. At first he did not respond when Miller and Bedford both wrote to him from jail.

“Their letters were a bit rambling,” he said. “Basically they were about them coming to see me again, but nothing in terms of an apology.”

Years later, when he changed his mind and tried to find Miller, it was too late.

“He was almost impossible to find and when I did find him he was in end of life care in a nursing home.

“I thought, serves you right you silly sod for waiting 20 years. You should not expect a 90-year-old to be sitting around waiting for you.

“I didn’t have a script as to what I wanted to say. I had lots of scripts running through my head but nothing that made any real sense until I confronted him.”

Mr Green says he “certainly does not” wish he had never met Miller.

He added: “What I perhaps would have done differently was back pedal a bit more when he said, ‘I think we want to give ourselves up’.

“I should have said, ‘that will be the best, then it will all be over and you will just have to swallow it’.

“But being a young man I probably had enough faith in them to say, ‘have some time’.”

His life has worked out “brilliantly,” he added, even if that was not what he expected at the height of the crisis.

He said: “I expected to end up in prison. In fact in a way I would have almost welcomed it. In a way I needed to be seen to be punished for what I had done.”

Geoff Green’s book: Paying for the Past: My True Life Crime Story, is out now.