“Conmen, the most devious of all criminals. Charming, cool, and calculating, they betray trust and devastate lives yet remain a complete Enigma. We are about to explore the Mysterious World of these Master criminals, giving an unprecedented insight into the workings of the complex minds of some of the world’s most cunning con men and women. We will reveal the detail and the intricacies of their elaborate crimes and uncover how they were dramatically brought to Justice. In this show, the story of Michael Hammond, a con man for the fame-obsessed Millennium who lied, cheated, defrauded and terrorized celebrities, Royals, and anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path in order to make money and feed his unquenchable desire for power, Fame and notoriety.”
“I would describe Michael Hammond as your narcissistic con man. Hammond was one of the biggest Liars that I have encountered in 25 years of criminal law. This is somebody who is not necessarily in for profit, he’s got a much deeper need. With a callous disregard for the lives he damaged and put at risk, Michael Hammond is a man who lived a double life and seemingly would do anything to feel important and Powerful.”
“I described him as being wicked and evil. He’s driven by his own ego. I’ve seen him twist people’s heads completely.”
“Michael Edward Hammond was born in East Sussex in December 1968, an only child born into a working-class family. His upbringing was unspectacular. He was a decorator’s son from Bexhill-on-Sea. There were early instances of sort of juvenile shoplifting and so on.”
“Hammond’s criminal Behavior was relentless in his youth. It saw him expelled from school and aged 18 Hammond first experimented with the Persona that would become his addiction and ultimate downfall: impersonating a police officer.”
“In 1987 Hammond called the police claiming to be a CID Officer in order to obtain an ex-directory telephone number. His lies were exposed and he was arrested, fined and given community service. A month later Hammond was in court again facing 74 charges to his name with a further 30 offenses taken into consideration. The obscene number of charges included fraud and theft, but even a custodial sentence was not a wake-up call for Hammond.”
“When released in 1989 his criminal career continued to deserve-ingly flourish when he forged documents to illegally obtain a Porsche. His early scam was he managed to get hold of a Porsche um, and he did this by swiping um a sheet of paper with a letterhead on it from someone’s office. Hammond used the headed paper to forge a document saying he was a director and Trustee of a company. Using the fake name the letter was used to open a bank account with a £10,000 overdraft and with that overdraft he bought his Porsche. It’s amazing what you can get away with basically with a fake on a piece of paper.”
“Michael Edward Hammond graduated from his illicit Youth and was now a fully-fledged criminal. But his Relentless and contemptible Behavior was married to a bizarre personal aspiration to appear important and of a high social standing. Even though he had an unquenchable and immoral compulsion to break the law, for some reason he always felt very ashamed of his background. I think that was a factor in his decision to take his name and make it into a double-barreled name. But that strangely enough is a symptomatic of a lot of con men. There was a man named G. de Montford who gave himself that rather Grand name; he was in fact Graeme Lever born in Dartford in Kent, again a humble background. A humble background always seems to be a factor in these things. The strange desire to be something more important than they feel that they are.”
“I think that Michael Hammond is definitely a narcissist. A narcissist is somebody who has fantasies which they’re preoccupied with, of themselves as being famous or special somehow, superior and better than other people. They tend to be incredibly arrogant, but they can also be very engaging and they can be quite High Achievers.”
“His actual name is Michael Hammond, his middle name is Edward so his name is in fact Michael Edward Hammond, but he simply added an S to the Edwards and made it into a double-barreled name, presumably because he thought it was Posh. It’s not always about making your bank balance bigger, it’s about the power and the control and having that sort of um fantasy lifestyle that a lot of people, you know, do want, but he went about it obviously a very different way.”
“Hammond was obsessed with the celebrity world and desperately wanted to be part of it, and his con man charm helped blagging his way into London’s celebrity party scene. No one who met him at these glamorous events could have possibly imagined the sinister dark side the unpredictable con man was hiding. In reality Hammond was a failed businessman and sometime estate agent in severe debt with a prolific criminal record, who funded his life with freelance consultancy work. But he was convincingly selling himself to the London glitterati as a millionaire Playboy, a film producer and TV hot shot.”
“Michael had a vision of where he wanted to get to in life and he used the celebrity circuit to try and achieve that. I think when you’re at a party and there lots of famous people there, when you go up to the famous person and say, ‘Hi, you know how lovely to see you,’ famous person tends to assume maybe they have met you at some point but sort of doesn’t want to make a scene and says, ‘Yeah sure, how lovely to see you,’ and maybe agrees to be photographed with you and will exchange small talk with you. They’re very vulnerable these famous people.”
“Hammond exploited this vulnerability in 2001 when he hustled his way into the National Television Awards. Hammond targeted Coronation Street newcomer Scott Wright whose star was on the ascent and had no idea he was dealing with an accomplished criminal and con man.”
“I was nominated for an award for the most popular newcomer and I was I was wandering around feeling a bit kind of starstruck by the whole thing. And out of the crowd this guy came up and went, ‘Scotty!’ And I went, ‘Right?’ And he went, ‘I haven’t seen you for ages mate, not seen you since we did that thing on Sky,’ and I went, ‘Uh, right?’ And I’m very polite me, anyway, so I just shook his hand and I said, ‘Hello, can I get you a drink?’ Said, ‘Yes.’ We got a drink and he had some girls with him, which was all good. And then he had the… he had a Range Rover waiting outside with a driver in it, which was also quite impressive. And I thought, ‘Well you know what? I might as well go with him and the chicks.’ And we did that. And so that’s basically how I met him and you know what, obviously now knowing what I know, he’d never met me before in his life. He’d probably just see me up on the screen when I got my nomination. Someone’s being very friendly to you, they seem to know you, you’re a bit concerned that you actually might have met them before just don’t remember and you don’t want to be rude. And by that means he can actually gain your trust very quickly and manipulate people.”
“Despite his double life balancing criminality with celebrity, Michael Edward Hammond was on a one-man mission to move in the same circles as the world’s most famous faces.”
“He would somehow be able to get us into absolutely every party, into the VIP bits in these inner sanctums of nightclubs, talking to all these people to meet Britney Spears and to meet Tom Cruise and everything. And I don’t know how he did it, just the gift of the gab probably.”
“Hammond seems to be the sort of chap who’s obviously very articulate, very friendly, very easy to get on with, obviously has the gift of the gab, is able to sort of engage in conversation with anybody, you know? Whereas some of us would meet perhaps a personality and be a little bit reticent about talking to them and engaging them in conversation, he doesn’t seem to have any qualms about that.”
“I mean he was actually photographed with Elton John, although I did speak to David Furnish about this subsequently and Elton John had no recollection of ever having met this man.”
“One of my favorite A-list stars that I got to meet at these premieres was Tom Hanks, and he seemed like he is a very nice guy. And he came up to me and he went, ‘Like your shirt,’ and I went, ‘Like your career, do you want to swap?’ And he found that really funny. But I guess you know I guess I probably wouldn’t have got so close to someone like that to talk to if it wasn’t for him blagging everything.”
“And I think the fact that he was able to shake hands and rub the shoulders with Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Steven Spielberg, Hugh Hefner, the head of the biggest talent agency in Hollywood, demonstrated that Michael had a way of convincing people he was telling the truth. Legitimate, and he had a very good skill at that. And of course if you mingle in those circles you probably do actually get to meet people, so it’s even hard to separate fact from fantasy. And I think we can be pretty sure that in his own mind there was no separation. He probably lived in a complete fantasy world and was completely unable to distinguish between them.”
“Coming up, Hammond’s insatiable appetite for notoriety escalates to new heights, exchanging Hollywood royalty for the British Monarchy.”
“‘We’re going to go on a polo field with Prince Charles and his sons.’”
“Michael Hammond is a con man for the Millennium. His aim was not simply the typical hunt for money but a hunger for fame and attention.”
“We are in a period where celebrity is all important. You are nobody unless you are in the papers. He is obsessed with that celebrity culture, he just wants that instant fix. This creation of Michael Hammond’s was all about making himself feel important, and being a celebrity these days is a way to be important.”
“Michael Hammond was playing ‘The Fame Game’ and in true con man style, cheating. He knew that if he was going to scam his way into celebrity then he would have to have Fleet Street on his side.”
“He seems to have reached a period where he’s obviously been mixing with some celebrities and decides to take it a step further by actually approaching newspapers and magazines with stories to raise his own profile.”
“His great skill was often, you know, cultivating journalists and calling newspapers particularly when he felt he had a big interview to give.”
“Well we think of a con man and we think of somebody who is motivated by money but there’s usually another motive. There’s usually an emotional need that’s being met. Now for Michael Hammond, his need is to be looked at, his need is to be given some attention and his need is to be seen as somebody who is special. So that’s what’s motivating him, not money but importance, actually some sort of validation for himself as a human being.”
“Celebrity was one of Hammond’s obsessions and he used it to feed his addiction to appear important and obtain attention. From the moment he infiltrated the Showbiz set Hammond ensured he achieved his Twisted aims by selling both kiss-and-tell stories to the press to raise his profile. His first victim was PR Girl Caroline Stanbury, who had been romantically linked to Prince Andrew in the press, and it was being reported that the prince had stolen Caroline from Michael Hammond. Naturally Hammond had made the whole thing up and gone to the papers with his lies.”
“With Caroline Stanbury, the moment it started to be reported that Prince Andrew was going out with her, he phones up a newspaper which ran a long interview with him in which he was described as he often was in the early days as a ‘millionaire businessman’. And in this interview he talked about how he introduced Prince Andrew to her and that he was the beginning of the romance, and basically he was the important figure in everything.”
“He was very laid back about the fact Prince Andrew was going out with the woman that he regarded as his. And although she denies vigorously that she had any much to do with him, I think she probably knew him but I don’t think it was anything more than that.”
“And Caroline Stanbury is not the only high-profile woman Michael Hammond lied about having a relationship with and sold bogus story to the tabloids about romantic liaison he never had.”
“I’ve heard Dannii Minogue, um, I’ve heard Renee Zellweger and a lot of other other women.”
“I’d like it on record that I’ve never slept with Michael Hammond. Now actually I don’t think he would ever claimed to have slept with me because I’m not famous. I’m not Dannii Minogue, I’m not Jordan. He maybe hopes that he’d slept with or had relationships with these women, but actually it was a really good way of getting some attention because the Sunday newspapers took him up on this story with actually very little evidence.”
“They advertised to the world that he was claiming to have had these relationships. In actual fact they never heard of him. Probably. They all tell me that they’ve not slept with him, and I suppose the writing was on the wall about how he operated.”
“And the person he was when he used to show me scrapbooks of all his press clippings.”
“Ex-Coronation Street actor Scott Wright had started spending time with Michael Hammond when he visited London, and on one occasion Hammond was very keen for Scott to see his conquests in print. At his Docklands flat, Michael Hammond kept all his press cuttings and ‘kiss-and-tell’ articles in a scrapbook.”
“It’s all about celebrity with Michael. It’s all about that, and… and that’s the my first impression of when I went in his flat. It was just plastered with pictures of him with famous people, and I think the scrapbook… the scrapbook was just insane, completely insane.”
“Another person who spent time with Michael Hammond was celebrity manager Jonathan Shalit. Jonathan met Hammond on the showbiz scene and they briefly became acquaintances. On one occasion Jonathan lunched with Hammond at the famous Ivy Restaurant in London. They were joined by a top Hollywood agent and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.”
“I’ve met Tara a number of times who was a very lovely girl and a very bohemian, and it was quite clear from the relationship between Tara and the top Hollywood agent and Michael that there was a degree of a friendship. As opposed I found out later, he probably wasn’t as close to them as I might have thought he was, but he was certainly a close—but in fact it worked the other way because I think Tara probably thought I was closer to Michael than I was as well.”
“And at the end of the meal Tara had to leave and Michael, as a gentleman, or representing himself as a gentleman, saw Tara to the door. And as he was walking out the door of the restaurant and onto the street, he had his arm over her shoulder putting her coat on.”
“And there like a ton of Paparazzi there. Now the Ivy at lunchtime, there’s not a ton of Paparazzi unless they’re invited. Now I don’t know who tipped the paparazzi off that that day, all I know is Michael Hammond walked Tara to the door as the door opened. So at the very moment when Tara walked onto the street, Michael had his arm around Tara’s shoulder, which is a shot a lot of the paparazzi got. And of course a few hours later the picture desk newspapers were getting lots of calls in from an anonymous person saying, ‘Tara was at the Ivy with her new boyfriend at lunchtime.’ And the picture they had was Tara and Michael Hammond. So read into that what you may.”
“And then there was Renee Zellweger.”
“Read into this what you may, he rang me up from LA and said, ‘Me and Renee are settling down together, it’s all going so well, um you know, it’s brilliant. Um read the newspaper.’”
“So I got the Sunday Sport because it was usually in one of them because they’re the only ones who take it. Then it managed to filter through to some of the other less trashy newspapers and it was him with his arm around Renee Zellweger saying they were happy and they were getting married and kissing her and blah-di-blah.”
“Normally his technique is to meet them to leave parties just at the very time that they’re leaving, and apparently this is what happened with Zellweger. And then it makes it look like he was actually going out with them, and then of course classically he will phone up a newspaper and tell a story to them.”
“Someone who was with him at the time had just told me he just legged it over, give her a kiss, and then sold the story to the paper. Brilliant, genius.”
“Michael Hammond was making small amounts of money from selling stories claiming to have slept with famous women, a claim the women in question vehemently deny. Hammond’s lies and stories may have fooled the celebrity circuit completely, but as Scott Wright spent more time with Hammond, the facade of ‘the fun-loving party guy’ slipped and he witnessed the con man’s darker side firsthand.”
“Obviously I didn’t really ever get to know him because he was telling so many so many white lies, or lies, or whatever. But there was a time when a taxi driver pulled out in front of him. He was in this Range Rover and he pulled up, he flew out the car, smacked his fist on the windscreen, told him he was going to rip his head off. The taxi driver shut all the door, all the doors, and then get back in the car and nearly drove the Range Rover over the cab.”
“He never showed a side of aggression towards me. I know he did it to one of our mates once. One of my mates had said something to him and he phoned him up and threatened him, and he’s not a big guy Michael, but he never did anything to me.”
“The disturbing incident Scott Wright witnessed were only a hint of the violence and cruelty Hammond was capable of. In 1998 Hammond impersonated a police officer for a second known time. He shockingly pretended to be a Special Branch police officer and attempted to con a lorry driver out of money when they had a road accident. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison. It would not be the last time he adopted the Persona of a policeman. It was to become his obsession.”
“However, when released Hammond’s criminal Behavior was his basest yet. He was arrested for abh after attacking a woman over a parking space.”
“It’s very easy to see Hammond as some sort of frivolous clown who wanders into celebrity parties, doesn’t seem to be doing anybody any harm, bit of a Jack-the-lad. And you can always sit back and actually laugh at these celebrities who’ve been perhaps duped or taken in by him. But there certainly seems to be a sort of dark side to him.”
“Does have a temper and he’s not afraid of lashing out in a very severe way. Narcissists do tend to just fly off into uncontrollable rages, and I think that the car park incident is quite revealing to me. Here was a case where Hammond was simply asked to move his car, but to him that was probably a greater front: ‘Don’t you know who I am? How dare you suggest that you’re more important than me and that I should move my car for you?’ And clearly that affront to his ego and his identity sent him off into a rage.”
“He ended up having a violent confrontation over a car parking space.”
“Hammond was sentenced to 120 hours community service and fined £866 for his brutal attack. And this was just the tip of the iceberg.”
“The career con man had an astounding 102 criminal convictions to his name by the time he was 30, including 48 charges of fraud and 17 charges of theft. None of Hammond’s celebrity friends could have known or could have predicted the new depths his criminal career would descend into in the years to come.”
“Michael Hammond had successfully scammed his way onto the red carpet, the red tops, and rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty. His con man chicken-and-egg approach to fame paid off briefly in 2002 when he had a one-off job as a celebrity gossip presenter for one of the Sky Sports channels. Hammond filmed at Windsor Castle, a location that would later become intertwined with his notoriety and infamy.”
“Hammond managed to keep his 102 Criminal convictions clandestine and those in Hammond’s Circle were further convinced of his legitimacy when he conned them into the company of the royal family.”
“There was an incident after I’d known him for a year and he rang me up and he said, ‘Come down to Watford, um we’re going to go on a polo field with Prince Charles and his sons.’ And I went, ‘Right, whatever.’”
“But I was coming to London anyway so I did, I jumped on the train. I got off at Watford. He had a driver to meet us, was all very good. It was all dressed smart in suits and everything. Went to the field and there they were, and I was like, ‘Whoa, wow, that’s quite interesting.’”
“And so I got introduced to Prince Charles and he acted like he knew Prince Charles, like they were best mates. I didn’t detect that Prince Charles knew him. But the most interesting part was when he said, ‘Let’s go and say hello to my mate Wills.’ And I went, ‘You don’t know Prince! Come on mate, you’re bullshit, you don’t know him, you don’t know him.’”
“And he wandered straight up to him and he went, ‘Wills! How’s them, how them Phillies doing up in St Andrews? Are you pulling any? How’s it all going? I’ve not seen you since… was it Katrina? Katrina is your bird, wasn’t it?’ And I stood there and looked at Prince William’s face, and he had never met him before in his life. And then he went over and talked to Prince Harry, who he’d probably never met before either, and left me with William who obviously didn’t want to talk to me.”
“And so um… so I think the majority of people um… he thought he… he told me that he knew, he’d probably never met before in his life.”
“But in 2002, after a one-off presenting job, Michael Hammond got a lucky break and with that the chance to go straight.”
“He had been offered a presenting job as the Hollywood correspondent on Granada’s Flagship daytime TV show for ITV1, ‘This Morning’.”
“With alleged knowledge of his criminal background dating back to his youth, including charges of ABH, theft and impersonating a police officer, Granada Television still offered Hammond the chance to become famous in his own right, and with that the opportunity to put his criminal Behavior firmly in the past. A decision they would later come to bitterly regret.”
“And he’d convince um Granada to give him an opportunity to go out to Hollywood. And I said, ‘Well, do Granada know about your background?’ And Michael said, ‘Yes.’ And indeed when the legal Affairs person of Granada called me, he confirmed he knew about Michael’s background. They wanted to give Michael another chance, and they believed in him.”
“Now at this point, I would have gone: ‘Right, I’ve blagged everyone for ages, I’ve got away with it for this far. Now I finally got a job which might be befitting an aspect of my talents.’ But oh no, he couldn’t let it lie. He had to go one step further.”
“‘I’m in the south of France a week later on holiday, lying on my lounger in the pool. The phone goes and I get a call from the head of legal Affairs at Granada Television, saying to me, ‘Um, did I know anything about Michael and Air France and fraudulent activity? Because Granada would possibly going to be sued by Air France.’’”
“To which I said, ‘No.’”
“With the ink still wet on Hammond’s contract he began fraudulently using his new job as a tool to scam and boost his ever-hungry ego. He forged a letter from Air France management stating that he and his companions had been upgraded to first class for their flight out to LA to begin his new career. The con works for the first leg of the flight, but in Paris staff became suspicious and exposed the Web of Lies, and words soon got back to his new bosses at Granada Television.”
“Hammond’s need to scam had ruined his career before it had even got off the ground.”
“By the time they got to Paris to change over to the LA part of the flight, Air France had sussed that it wasn’t a legit letter from the head of Air France. And there was a massive kind of furor and arguments and shouting. And to cut a long story short, when they got to Los Angeles the relationship between Michael and the Granada team went from bad to worse. And that point pulled out, realizing that they couldn’t deal with Michael Hammond.”
“He blagged his way into it, he got it all teed up and blown it big time. You would have thought it’d be stupid to ruin this nice little earning that you’ve got set up. But that’s classic con man psychology: to not think about consequences.”
“Coming up: Hammond feeds his obsession with the royal family and turns his attention to terrorism.”
“‘Hammond was phoning the police having quite innocent people um investigated and arrested for terrorism.’”
“Michael Hammond is a con man hungry for Fame, power and attention.”
“He is a genuine fantasist. He genuinely believes while he’s playing these parts that they are true. The stupidity of Michael Hammond was that he actually has caused his own downfall by an inability to know what right or wrong was.”
“You do have to wonder though, you know, if he’d just been a little bit more tempered, if his ego hadn’t been so hungry and needed feeding so constantly, just what he could have gone on to achieve.”
“After personally wrecking the career opportunity of a lifetime as a TV presenter by fraudulently trying to upgrade a flight, Hammond returned to the UK and carried on crashing celebrity premieres and parties. But he also went on to change tactics, adopting a whole host of different but telling personas.”
“In terms of the roles that he gives himself in life, they’re always authority figures. They’re always policemen, surgeons uh film producers.”
“I think an awful lot of these roles too have been uh hit upon in order to hit upon women, perhaps.”
“And in 2004, Hammond adopted the audacious role of a bogus doctor, compulsively calling the police five times when he was stuck in heavy London traffic.”
“He was in a car, very heavy traffic, center of London. Normal people would just sit there and bear it. But of course being him, he had to do something dramatic. I don’t know whether he had a glamorous girl in the car with him that he wanted to impress, but what does he do? He phones up the police uh says he is a surgeon on the way to perform a major life-saving operation for a young girl suffering from a terrible illness.”
“On this particular occasion the police facilitated his passage through traffic from, I think it was Bow Road in East London to St Thomas’s Hospital. This was just purely so he could travel through London and have other people look at him, you know, with the lights blaring and the sirens going and think, ‘My, he must be a really important character.’ We don’t get much more power-mad than that.”
“And in fact uh he tries this on several occasions and he even has the audacity the next day to ring up and thank them for their help.”
“Using figures like doctors, surgeons, police officers is quite traditional ground for a con man. They like being figure of authority, someone who is respected in the community.”
“This is oxygen to this person. He obviously needs this to feel that he’s in any way shape at all important or validated.”
“You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for him. It’s obviously a deeply, deeply inadequate and pathetic character.”
“It wasn’t just doctors Hammond impersonated. He strangely also adopted the personas of high-ranking police officials.”
“I mean what was unusual about him as a con man is that he actually seemed drawn to and fascinated by the police. I mean most con men, obviously by their very nature, keep away from the police, but he seem to like getting in touch with them. I think a lot of his knowledge of the police came from his various dealings with police officers, and some of the names uh that he used were names of officers that had previously arrested him. So he would know who they were and where they were attached, and a lot of the terminology that he used would be similar to what one would hear on police dramas such as ‘The Bill’.”
“Impersonating policemen was not a new weapon in Michael Hammond’s con man artillery. The first record of him adopting the Persona of a police officer can be traced back to 1987, followed by another astounding instance in 1999 for which he served 6 months in Wandsworth prison. But between September 2003 and August 2004, Hammond’s obsession with the police and pretending to be a police officer spiraled out of control, resulting in an astonishing 133 bogus calls to police constabularies around the UK.”
“Mr. Hammond contacted the local police to where he was living and told them that there were uh men armed with shotguns trying to break into his home address.”
“And of course the police have got to respond. You can’t make a value judgment there and then and say, ‘Well, this obviously sounds a load of rubbish, we’re not going to bother.’ Uh you have to respond, that’s what the police are there for.”
“So the local police, in conjunction with armed support, uh went to his home address. They spoke to Mr. Hammond who was partially intoxicated and and left the area. No offenses being discovered.”
“There’s no financial gain, so it’s very difficult for most of us to understand why someone would want to do that. But it’s it is about power and manipulation and seeing yourself as being better than others and being able to control what they do, manipulate people. And clearly he got some sort of real kick out of doing that.”
“You know, the way that other people would maybe watch the TV or or play card games, his idea of a pastime would be to phone up the police, usually after he’d had a bit to drink, and say that maybe an armed assailant was in his home.”
“And the police would then again dutifully, they have to respond to these things, turn out with armed guards to try and save him.”
“And I think what’s happening is that he’s becoming less inhibited, is becoming less calculated in how he cons and how he manipulates. And actually what he’s doing are just very uh crude behaviors, crude attempts to gain some sort of attention.”
“Michael Hammond’s Twisted bid for attention was spiraling out of control. Despite still mixing with the showbiz set, he was consistently offending, including a police charge for drink driving on the 10th of February 2004. And just 10 days later he made his next bogus police call. Hammond was once again contacting the police, pretending to be an officer. Only this time he had upped the ante, creating a national security alert.”
“He calls the police saying that two black men are acting suspiciously in Downing Street with Firearms. He pretended to be an officer with ‘Trident’, the the aspect of the police force that deals with black-on-black crime.”
“And he said that he saw in McDonald’s near number 10 Downing Street uh a group of black gentlemen who he believed were involved in crime.”
“And those black lads were searched on the ground at gunpoint. One of them was taken into a police vehicle and searched. It was an enormously frightening experience for all of them, and of course they were completely and totally innocent.”
“Obviously it was incredibly dangerous thing to do and somebody could have ended up being shot by mistake. Um that without the sort of time, effort put into it by the police and the fact somebody else could have needed the services of those police officers at the same time and it just weren’t available because they were sorting out Hammond. And at that particular moment when he’s phoning the police he wants to believe that he is somebody incredibly important. What’s more important than somebody who’s actually tipping off the police on an issue of National Security?”
“He’s just engaged in his own Fantasy Life. He’s just engaged in his own need to be somebody, cuz who is Michael Hammond actually? He’s nobody.”
“The implication is that to truly Revel in his Fantasy Life Michael Hammond would have to see the results of his actions, just to confirm how important he is.”
“10 minutes after making his Twisted call to the police Hammond called a second time, claiming to be from Operation Trident, confirming the unit was at the scene.”
“The case seems undeniable. Hammond was watching his warped fantasies unfold.”
“He was certainly never found at the scene though, one would speculate that there’s hardly much point in doing it if you’re not going to observe it. But there was no evidence that he did.”
“There is evidence cataloging Hammond’s compulsive police calls, proving they span the following four months. As bizarre and childish as his crimes seem, they were bolstered by the use of alcohol, drugs and the need for attention and power. And his criminal Acts were growing in numbers and on the verge of obsessive.”
“But like in the past Michael Hammond’s need to be seen as somebody important and someone who moves in the highest of Social Circles set off a chain reaction of events that led to his inevitable downfall. Once again Hammond’s obsession with the royal family came to the fore, and he set his sights on infiltrating Windsor Castle by creating a Web of Lies and impersonating a police officer.”
“On the 17th of May 2004 uh Mr Hammond contacted the control room at Windsor Castle uh identifying himself as a ‘Detective Superintendent Sam Morgan’.”
“He said that he was in company with two friends, two celebrity friends of Prince Harry and Prince William. They were well known to the public and wanted access for them through an entrance other than the public could use.”
“The name of the officer that he decided to use was the name of an officer he happened to have remembered from the newspaper. So it’s not like he just made up a name, he usually use a specific, and that was one of the reasons why he was such a convincing con man generally.”
“And he stayed in the ground. He didn’t actually gain access to the building for the best part of an hour, and it was only when he was seen behaving rather oddly on the CCTV cameras that he was actually detained.”
“He was arrested uh at the castle for one matter of impersonating police uh and obtaining a service by deception.”
“Hammond was taken to Heathrow police station and interviewed by Sergeant Neil John.”
“I remember walking up to Mr. Hammond in the custody suite and introducing myself and telling him that he would have to have his fingerprints taken uh because that’s standard practice to ensure we know exactly who we’re dealing with. And I remember asking Mr. Hammond had he ever had his fingerprints taken and him replying he hadn’t. Needless to say within a very short space of time his true identity, which was Michael Hammond, came back uh together with the fact that he had over 102 convictions dating back to 1982. And as you might imagine his fingerprints had been taken almost as many times.”
“Myself and my team then started looking into the background of Mr. Hammond and it was at that point then we discovered this was one of many incidents where Mr Hammond had been purporting to be a police officer.”
“The game was up.”
“But Michael Hammond couldn’t let go the fantasy that he was a somebody.”
“He said that he was a a famous TV presenter. Um I remember searching his home address and there were various pictures on the wall with him in the company of Prince Charles was one of them, uh Chevy Chase was another. His telephone book had telephone numbers of Dannii Minogue, Kylie Minogue, a whole host of TV celebrities.”
“There was some way there was some connection with him.”
“And once in police custody, Michael Hammond’s mobile phone was the key to unlocking the full extent of his Relentless and dangerous 12-month scam.”
“They subsequently looked through his mobile phone records and found that over 133 calls have been made to different police stations all over the UK. And the calls varied considerably from anything to do with drugs, Firearms, or even instant where he was alleging that he was following a pedophile.”
“The Windsor Castle incident became high-profile news and ironically Hammond found himself for the first time the legitimate focus of the press. But Hammond couldn’t help but revel in the Press attention and turn his crime into a Fantastical tale.”
“When he was released on bail Hammond was absolutely relentless in that. Actually, when it was brought very much to his attention that he’d been wasting police time and nobody’s buying his pathetic stories, he still continued.”
“Such was his need to view himself, I think, as important and have other people view him as important. He saw himself as a confidant of the royal family, a man more sinned against than sinning, uh and a man who somehow was doing the royal family a favor because what he thought he had done that day was actually expose a weakness in the Royal Family’s security arrangements. And he also claimed for good measure that Prince Charles and him had actually spoken about this matter, and indeed Charles had intimated to him that members of the SAS should in fact be involved in protecting the royal family.”
“So it was a usual sort of mixture of information that perhaps he might have called from the cuttings about Charles’s view on security, and of course this perennial need he has, this continual need he has to see himself as a hero of the hour.”
“I mean this is somebody who has such a need that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what you say to him. You can be absolutely blatant: ‘No Michael, you’re not important, we don’t buy you.’ And he won’t be able to accept that, he won’t be able to face that, because to face it he would have to accept that he is a nobody and he would crumble, I think.”
“Coming up: while on bail, Michael Hammond’s Behavior becomes even more dangerous and extreme, threatening the life of an innocent family.”
“‘You even feel that the the gentleman and his family were connected to Al-Qaeda, getting into into the smuggling into the country with potential bomb threats.’”
“Michael Hammond’s con man career was spent scamming the police and celebrity world in equal measures.”
“It’s clear right from the beginning he doesn’t seem to have that sort of sense of right and wrong. A ‘blagger’ isn’t someone who’s breaking the law. Later on Michael went on to do that.”
“We get to see this dark side of Hammond moved from the celebrity world into the police world.”
“This is somebody who doesn’t have an identity of his own. It’s fluid, it’s shifting, he creates identities by the moment it seems.”
“By 2004 Michael Hammond’s lies had caught up with him. After posing as a policeman in order to gain entry to Windsor Castle, despite plaguing the police with bogus and potentially life-threatening calls, he still hadn’t given up praying upon the celebrity world. Astonishingly, less than a week after being released on bail, Hammond targeted his next celebrity event: the ‘Celebrity Soccer 6’ charity event. He found himself a kit and blagged his way onto a team. The organizers hadn’t invited Hammond to appear and were baffled by the recently released criminal’s presence.”
“Now anybody who doesn’t have a narcissistic personality disorder is going to be incredibly embarrassed and probably go to ground. What he does is actually he blags his way into a charity football match. He’s not been invited, he’s just shown up in full kit. What is that about?”
“I mean clearly even when Michael has a policeman saying to him, ‘I mate you…’ you know this behavior is not acceptable, he’s relentless in still pursuing this Fame that he wants so badly.”
“But not all of his scams were frivolous. In spite of being on bail he once again revealed his dark side and pulled his most ruthless police scam yet.”
“Next in July 2004 we see our man Hammonded on a piano ferry going back and forth to France. On both trips he calls police claiming to be an Interpol officer, and on one occasion actually accuses a family, an Iraqi family on the boat, of being Al-Qaeda Representatives.”
“Hammond had an earphone in, wire for sound. He quickly opened his jacket to show me he had a some sort of radio communication.”
“He said he’d already been in contact with UKIS, United Kingdom immigration service based in Croydon, which was factual. They are based there, so he had the right soundbites for things.”
“He inferred that the the gentleman and his family were connected to Al-Qaeda, getting into the smuggling into the country with potential bomb threats.”
“Well as you can imagine, this triggered somewhat of a security alert um. And the poor family, who once again I emphasized perfectly innocent, were searched and detained, children very upset.”
“So Hammond again is manipulating the truth, i.e. the environment, the fact that Al-Qaeda was something that was in the news at the time, and playing on the fears of the public and also the heightened awareness of the police in order to distress, extremely distress, that family.”
“You could argue that it’s like racist element in some of these these people that he tended to Target and whose lives he tended to make, you know, unpleasant for a period of time.”
“So that was actually committed whilst he was on bail for the incursion into Windsor Castle.”
“It wasn’t long before the police realized that their supposed Interpol informant was serial scammer Hammond, who was on bail awaiting trial at the time for the Windsor Castle incident.”
“And on the 4th of February 2005 Michael Hammond’s date in court finally arrived to face the statest charges in an inexhaustible criminal career.”
“The evidence against Mr. Hammond was dare I said overwhelming. In all the incidents that we investigated in terms of the number of offenses he’s committed, uh 102 previous convictions were mentioned and I suspect that was a tip of the iceberg if I’m honest, and he you know he probably did a lot of other stuff as well. But the fact he accepted that suggests that there were probably more.”
“Hammond pleaded guilty to one charge of public nuisance and asked for an additional 16 charges relating to his bogus police calls to be taken into account.”
“Despite the public revelation of Hammond’s Twisted fantasies, he seemed to revel in the attention.”
“Hammond, in a strange, I think, rather enjoyed it. I think, you know, he did finally find himself on a stage, you know, with so many people looking at him. And I got the impression, you know, he rather dressed up, you know? His hair looked Immaculate, looked well-groomed. He was rather enjoying it.”
“I think the thing about him is ultimately he was really a frustrated actor, and there he was playing a part again. He had his audience.”
“One member of Hammond’s audience did not enjoy the performance. The judge took it very seriously indeed and I don’t think he found it the least bit amusing.”
“I think a lot of the journalists who were covering it, a lot of the coverage that you saw in the newspapers, showed that there was some levity among the media people who were there, because they did think it was a rather entertaining case because of the illustrious names that were being mentioned and so on. So there was a slight sort of disconnect between the judge and the the media people.”
“Well, the judge in sentencing Hammond drew attention to how frightening it is to have uh police officers drawing firearms in public, not only to the people whom they may be challenging but to everybody else of course.”
“Uh, it’s not like the films. These are real guns with real bullets uh with real human beings. And it must have been enormously frightening for these people who, I emphasize, were completely utterly innocent.”
“Before sentencing Hammond to 4 and a half years in prison, the judge acknowledged that he may be in need of psychological help and had no choice to impose a custodial sentence due to the severity of Hammond’s crimes.”
“He also commented that Hammond’s desire to exercise power and gain attention were no doubt enhanced by his excessive use of alcohol and tranquilizers.”
“Speaking directly to Hammond the judge also stated, ‘Quite apart from the distress and fear that must have been caused to these people, you created the risk of something much worse. You could not possibly know how those being searched would behave or react, and however well-trained or disciplined armed officers are, the necessity for carrying and producing loaded weapons in such circumstances inevitably carries with it a risk that an action or a reaction may be misunderstood with tragic consequences. Fortunately that did not happen. You had no way of knowing whether it might or not.’”
“Michael Hammond was sent to Mount prison in Hempstead.”
“The saddest, if you like, of Michael Hammond is he had talent, and if you put his energies and time into being legit and using the natural Talent he had, he could have been successful.”
“I imagine that the thrill he gets from it is exercising some degree of power. He can pretend that he’s an important man. He’s caused all of these people to rush around as a result of his actions and his commands.”
“As far as I’m aware, as investigations go, it was unprecedented in the extent of all the various hoaxes that Mr. Hammond completed over that period.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a lot more action to come before the final credits come down on this man’s life. I think he is a natural performer, I don’t think he can help it, poor chap. And I think, you know, we will hear a lot more from him.”
“And true to form, following his release from prison for the Windsor Castle incident, Hammond did go on to disturbingly reoffend.”
“On the 27th of March 2008 Michael Hammond walked into Kennington Tube Station in London and began shouting ‘Al-Qaeda!’ and heartlessly pretended to have a bomb in his bag, striking fear into the large crowd on the platform.”
“In September 2008 at Blackfriars Crown Court, Hammond pleaded guilty to communicating false information about a bomb hoax and sending a false message to cause annoyance. He was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. The authorities hope this time he has learned his lesson.”
“Oh.”
