“Elvis has left the building” rang the announcement on The Old Bailey tannoy as 4’ 11” Mick Shepherd stepped out into the street a free man for the first time in ten months. Mick had become a minor celebrity at the famous central criminal courts during the month of June, as he entered the dock daily, regaled with western shirt, coiffed Elvis quiff and his own very personal sense of style. “What’s he in The Old Bailey for; crimes against fashion?” posted one wag on a shooting website forum early in the trial. However, the ribbing hides a far more disturbing truth. Mick Shepherd was facing extremely serious charges in the highest court in the land and those charges related to the ownership and sale of firearms.
First some background. Mick Shepherd is 56, a carpenter by trade and a Registered Firearms Dealer with Kent police of longstanding. He has been collecting and dealing in antique guns for some thirty years and has one of the best collections in the country. Mick was a regular face at Hawley Gun Club, where he would straight the Skeet range every Sunday with a relic from the 1860s or an orange plastic-stocked pump gun. He was well-known at the Sporting Guns auctions held at Bonham’s, Sotheby’s, Holt’s and Christie’s, where he regularly bought old guns.
His famous website
http://www.micksguns.com was visited by thousands of enthusiasts from around the world and that is how I came to meet the man. I was researching a book and discovered that Mick had examples of guns I had only read about or seen sketched in patent drawings. A phone call later and I was welcomed into his home and given access to as many of the guns as I wanted to photograph – he even let me shoot them and later, when I was displaying guns at various game fairs, Mick would let me borrow what I fancied and return it when I had finished with it. He was instantly warm, generous and trusting. As he said on his website, one of the bonuses of his hobby was the friends he made through it.
Later, Mick invited me to join him on his annual trip to the Baltimore Antique Arms Fair in the USA. I wrote the story of the trip as an article for Gun Mart. Now an ‘underworld armourer’, as the police claimed Mick to be, would hardly invite a journalist to write of his shady gun-buying jaunts in the biggest selling gun magazine in the country would he?
Little did either of us suspect one evening in September 2006, as I returned some guns I had borrowed and we shared a glass of Coke (Mick does not drink), that all Hell was about to break loose. Hell came in the form of a dawn knock at the door with a Sky News helicopter circling and the tabloid press already massed. Operation Trident had come to call and its officers stood outside Mick’s Dartford home making ludicrous pronouncements about guns being ‘taken off the streets’ and the public being saved from ‘untold misery’ from the ‘hundreds of illegal guns’ they had discovered. Operation Trident only had to ask Kent police what guns Mick had because they not only checked his register annually; they gave him a good number of them!
The truth is that Operation Trident officers either knew they were telling lies or are so incompetent that they should be sent back to Hendon for re-training. The tabloids loved it – the front page of the London Evening Standard screamed of the ‘Biggest haul of illegal guns in Met history’ The Mirror called it an ‘Arsenal of Murder’. The articles were illustrated with photographs of Webley air pistols labelled as ‘illegal handguns’ and Mick went to Belmarsh.
The charges presented to the court numbered twenty three but by the time they got to the jury only twelve were left. The judge dismissed the rest early in the trial when it became clear that the charges were patently ridiculous; at one point demanding that the prosecution provide a firearms certificate they retained from a person whose guns were in Mick’s possession. It showed that Mick Shepherd was the authorised RFD named as their preferred holder of the guns they charged him with possessing illegally. By this time both judge and jury seemed exasperated with the prosecution case and the spurious charges that they insisted on pushing, in a ‘scattergun’ approach to getting Mick convicted of something.
By the time the judge had thrown out the blatantly baseless charges, the jury were left with twelve. These were multiple charges of selling a Section 58 firearm as well as the bullet heads and cases to match. They added to the charge that some of these guns ‘could also chamber’ a modern round of some type. Because of this they claimed that the guns were sold as Section 5 firearms rather than Section 58 antiques.
The defence claimed quite rightly that it is perfectly legal to sell Section 58 antiques and it is also perfectly legal to sell components for ammunition – heads and cases, wads, primers, etc. The fact that a Section 58 antique can be loaded with modified modern ammunition is irrelevant. For example, an 8-bore shotgun is considered Section 58 despite the fact that it can chamber a cartridge that is widely available. If you want to use it, you must put it on your shotgun certificate. Otherwise, the offence is only committed when one buys functional ammunition and tries to use it.
Mick was the subject of a police ‘sting’ (called ‘entrapment’ in the USA and illegal but allowed here). Undercover officers visited Mick and bought Section 58 antiques and bullet heads and cases. Mick told them they were not allowed to use them or make ammunition. They claimed he knew they wanted to use them for illegal purposes.
The jury decided there was no case to answer and announced that Mick was ‘not guilty’ of all charges. The police had nothing to say but that they presented their evidence and respected the jury’s decision. What they must now explain is why they brought this prosecution, why they did not better inform themselves of the law or take reliable expert advice, why they insisted on keeping Mick on remand in Belmarsh for ten months at huge expense to the tax payer and why the public is now picking up the bill for two QCs, four weeks at The Old Bailey and the substantial damages that Mick surely now deserves in compensation for losing almost a year of his life.
Can we now expect to see the return of Mick’s firearms and RFD certificate? Since all the charges have proven to be unfounded, one can see no reason why not. And his historically valuable collection of guns? I hope the police have looked after them with care and respect but the indications are not good. When removing them from Mick’s house, rather than use the keys to remove each one from the racks, they cut the racks off with angle grinders, leaving an unholy mess behind.
This article needs to be balanced by the fact that the police officers of Operation Trident are doing a serious and valuable job in investigating the almost weekly killings within the black community. For this work, we should applaud and support them. The officers from the unit that I met were sensible, personable and dedicated. The shooting community should remain a supporter of the police and on the whole it is.
Shooters are more law abiding, more scrutinised and licensed than most of the population. I believe that this case revolved around their ignorance of the law and too much of a fanfare at Mick’s initial arrest. It would have been too embarrassing to let him go without charge after all the fuss. It looks even more embarrassing now and within all the politics, we must remember that a man’s life, reputation, liberty and livelihood were at stake.
