Did I always want to be a lawyer? No. I didn’t think I wanted to sit behind a desk, so that hasn’t really worked out. I thought I might want to do something outdoors, and that hasn’t worked out either. I wasn’t one of these people that knows from the age of two that they’re going to be a forensic pathologist or a marine biologist. When I was at school and then university, my parents were very supportive and said: ‘You don’t need to decide on a career now. You don’t have to have a grand plan.’
I didn’t read law at university. I read philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. Partly because it was the degree subject I was most interested in and partly because I didn’t want to study any of my school subjects any further. I converted to law a few years later. I think if I’d studied law at university for three years, I might not have become a lawyer.
My mum kept saying that I should become a barrister. I had moved to London and had a series of random jobs. Then I joined the marketing department of a publishing company in Berkshire. I wasn’t particularly enjoying the job and was thinking of leaving. I think I’d reached a level of maturity where I realised my mum had a good point: there were a lot of things about being a barrister that would suit me. I had also met my future wife, and she agreed with my mum!
I enjoy a geeky legal discussion as much, if not more, than most, but the greatest satisfaction comes from delivering the right outcome in a case.
I realised quite early on that although I really loved the law it was the practice of it that was going to really inspire me, rather than the academics. I enjoy a geeky legal discussion as much, if not more, than most, but the greatest satisfaction comes from delivering the right outcome in a case.
My first six pupillage was at Queen Elizabeth Buildings, which was the chambers of Lindsay Burn. My second six was at 5 King’s Bench Walk when it was the chambers of Brian Higgs QC, now chambers of Sarah Forshaw KC and Mark Heywood KC.
I was Sarah Forshaw’s pupil. She was a great influence, just seeing the way she dealt with clients, the way she approached a case, and especially the way she presented in court. Her standards were so high and she was incredibly professional and yet she did it with a beautiful lightness of touch that I thought: ‘I wish I could emulate that.’ At that time, Mark Heywood was being monitored for Junior Treasury Counsel. He would let the pupils take his papers and look through them and scribble what we hoped were helpful notes for him, and then give us feedback. He brought intellectual heft, gravitas and integrity to everything he did.
I was doing a lot of criminal advocacy as a junior tenant. On a good day, I loved it, but I realised quite early on that I was better suited, intellectually and temperamentally, to the out of court work.
I heard that Customs was recruiting for prosecutors. A friend of mine had just started there. Back then it had a reputation for being better resourced than the CPS and for giving prosecutors more time to prepare their cases. The starting salary was very attractive. I was looking to leave the Bar but I wanted to stay within criminal law, so I applied.
Within Customs, initially I was dealing with lots of ‘stuffers and swallowers’. People would arrive at Heathrow and Gatwick who were concealing cocaine inside their person. Customs officers would put them through X-rays and then the special toilets and my job was to prosecute. Sometimes the drugs were concealed in the frame of a suitcase or dissolved in a bottle of alcohol. In one case the smugglers had even sewed packages of cocaine into the stomach of a dog.
One case I particularly remember involved a big drug gang in Birmingham with contacts in the Caribbean. They would recruit deprived people from the Birmingham area who were a bit desperate and offer them a free holiday in the Caribbean as long as they brought back cocaine. We were going after the organisers, not the mules, and eventually we managed to convict all of them. One of the ‘swallowers’, who had pleaded guilty on advice, we later discovered through intelligence had been forced through violence and threats to import the drugs. They had never said any of this in their interview.
We contacted their defence, long after they had pleaded guilty, and said: ‘Look, we can’t tell you why, but you need to apply to the court for leave to appeal out of time. We will then send a letter to the judges explaining why we think they had a defence of duress and shouldn’t have been convicted.’ The conviction was quashed, which gave me a lot of satisfaction.
In my role as a prosecutor, I became more focused on international work. I was handling a lot of cross-border cases in customs. Then I was fortunate enough to get the job of liaison prosecutor in Washington DC, which was a CPS post but representing all UK prosecution agencies. I focused primarily on extradition, mutual legal assistance (MLA), and cross-border co-operation. When I came back to the UK in 2010, I went on secondment to the Home Office to be the head of the UK Central Authority (UKCA), which deals with all the MLA requests in England and Wales. Until then, I thought that I only wanted to do casework. But I realised that if I wanted to progress, then maybe I should try management. Luckily, I really enjoyed it.
Within Customs, initially I was dealing with lots of ‘stuffers and swallowers’. In one case the smugglers had even sewed packages of cocaine into the stomach of a dog.
I loved the work because it was mostly operational, with management on top. While I was at the UKCA, the CPS created the post of head of extradition. I had a lot of great international experience by this time, so I was delighted when I got the job. After head of extradition, I moved to head of special crime which was almost completely domestic, rather than international work. It’s the part of the CPS that handles the highest profile cases other than terrorism, for example deaths in police custody, corporate manslaughter, election offences, police corruption, medical manslaughter and so on.
I particularly enjoyed the prosecution of Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’. I was the head of the team rather than the prosecutor, but I was very heavily involved and I made the decision to charge him with perverting the course of justice. We then instructed Sarah Forshaw to prosecute. That was a really interesting case, involving the collapse of the earlier trial of the singer, Tulisa Contostavlos.
I was in charge of handling the ‘Battlebus’ investigation arising from the 2015 general election. Michael Crick, the investigative journalist, had uncovered evidence of potential breaches of campaign spending limits by Conservative candidates. There was a lot of pressure on the Electoral Commission and the police to investigate. Over a dozen different forces were involved. All election cases were dealt with by Special Crime, so we co-ordinated the whole investigation. I made the decisions on who to charge, which were announced directly before the 2017 general election.
I remember my brother called me up that night and said: ‘You’re all over Twitter.’ I don’t use social media so I asked him what he was talking about. My decision not to charge most of the suspects had started a minor Twitter storm, with lots of people calling me a ‘Tory stooge’ or worse. For my birthday, six months later, he had a board made up with screenshots of the funniest and most offensive things that people were saying about me at the time, which I still have hanging in my office.
In extradition proceedings, the CPS has to represent the requesting country. So, if Russia sent an extradition request for one of Putin’s political enemies that looked politically motivated, we still had to argue the Russian side in court. Quite often it was Peters & Peters on the other side. I remember thinking that they were really good at their jobs, although I wasn’t thinking about switching sides at that point.
I’m a great believer in not trying to plan my career too much. Even if you achieve the goal you set for yourself, it might turn out not to be what you really wanted, or you might miss out on a fantastic opportunity along the way because you were overly focused on getting somewhere else.
My brother called me up that night and said: ‘You’re all over Twitter.’ My decision not to charge most of the suspects had started a minor Twitter storm, with lots of people calling me a ‘Tory stooge’ or worse.
One day an email from Peters & Peters arrived in my inbox, which was one they had sent to everybody on their mailing list, announcing the appointment of Michael O’Kane as senior partner. Michael is also ex-CPS and we had previously spoken on a panel together. I loved my time at the CPS, but I was thinking about opportunities elsewhere, so I decided to get in touch. Fast forwarding over a lot of detailed discussions and interviews, I joined the firm about a year later.
Peters & Peters is a brilliant place to practise criminal law. I know some lawyers who feel like they are just moving pieces of paper around and other lawyers somewhere else are doing the real, exciting work. We don’t want that here – the partners are hands on, and we like to give the associates plenty of responsibility. The variety and level of work is fantastic. Everybody was so supportive from day one. The only pressure I’ve felt is what I placed on myself.
Like any criminal lawyer, I’m a nightmare to watch crime dramas with, because I’m constantly saying things wouldn’t happen that way in real life. That’s not unique to me, of course. I’m sure every criminal lawyer is like that. A lot of criminal law is about making careful, nuanced judgements based on complicated factual and legal situations. And it’s very hard to distil that down to a simple, televisual decision that is either right or wrong.
When the media covers a high-profile criminal case, they’re looking for an angle and they’re looking for a story that’s going to be newsworthy for a while, then they’ll move on. Even very respectable, highbrow outlets only scrape the surface, but at least they are accurate, and they do their best to reflect the complexity. Anything that explains a case to the public in a way that’s not misleading is probably better than not explaining it at all. If you sat down and told somebody what really happened, they would fall asleep after ten minutes. Unless they were another criminal lawyer, in which case they would interrupt you after five minutes to talk about their own case.
In my free time, I enjoy hanging out with family and friends. I’m a very keen skier, so I try and go as much as I can. I live in Surrey, so I take my bike out on the Surrey Hills often. Recently, I’ve been on a couple of wonderful hiking trips to the Lake District with my son and some family friends and we’re already planning the next one.
Nick Vamos is head of business crime at Peters & Peters and was head of extradition and head of special crime at the Crown Prosecution Service.
mark.mcateer@legalbusiness.co.uk
Portrait: Juan Trujillo