ABSTRACT
On 29 January 1929 George Goddard, a former Station Sergeant of the Metropolitan Police with twenty-eight years’ police service, was sentenced at the Old Bailey to eighteen months’ hard labour, with a £2,000 fine and the requirement that he pay the costs of the prosecution. His co-defendants were Kate Meyrick, a well-known nightclub proprietor who received a fifteen months’ prison sentence, and Luigi Ribuffini, a restaurateur and nightclub proprietor, who also received fifteen months. Goddard had been found guilty of corrupdy accepting and obtaining money from Meyrick, Ribuffini and Anna Gadda - the latter had fled abroad. Meyrick and Ribuffini had been found guilty of paying money to Goddard. And all three had been found guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. A few weeks after Goddard’s sentence Horace Josling, a former sergeant who had informed on Goddard six and a half years before and been forced to resign for his pains, was exonerated. Justice appeared to have been done.2
