In the late 1920s and early 30s there were a large number of suspicious fires in business premises and claims for insurance. This is the extraordinary story of how one man solved the fraud cases and brought the gang of fire starters to trial. Like all good stories we have a hero William Charles Crocker, and a villain Leopold Harris.
Leopold Harris
In April 1926 there was a meeting between Louis Jarvis and Italian-born Camillo ‘Cappa’ Capsoni, who was an agent for Continental Silks. One of his customers, Jarvis who lived in Deerhurst Road off Willesden Lane, told him he had just had a fire at his premises in 14 Margaret Street Marylebone. Cappa who had flat in the same street, said he was very sorry to hear it, but Jarvis did not seem at all put out, and with a broad grin, said he had received £21,500 (today worth about £1.7M) from the insurance claim. Cappa saw that with the right backers he could make money. The following year, he set up a silk company with his wife Ada and Louis Jarvis. On 7 November 1927, less than six months later, their shop in the centre of Manchester caught fire. They were the torch of other fires and insurance claims. Capsoni and Ada had been shown how to set the fires using the taper and tray method. Here a wax taper is placed upright, pinched between two plastic photographic developing trays. The length of the taper provides 15 to 20 minutes delay before the fire starts.
Louis Jarvis
In 1931 Harry Priest met two acquaintances for a drink at the Highbury Tavern pub. Harry was a printer in Tottenham and had previously done some printing work for the men, and after drinking several pints, he made an amazing suggestion. Harry said they should set up a company and he would introduce them to a well-established fire raising organization, so that they could make a large amount of money from the insurance after setting fire to the business. He said there was little risk, because Priest boasted the gang were in league with Scotland Yard, the fire brigade, the insurance assessors, and the insurance companies. He said he had personally lit four fires for the leader of the group, whom he called ‘The Prince’.
When he was younger Harry had been a London fireman. As a joke, his card had a photo of him in fireman’s uniform. What Priest did not know was that one of the men, George Mathews, had previously worked in the intelligence department at Lloyds. After the meeting in the pub, he told solicitor William Charles Crocker about the conversation. He asked Matthews to meet Priest again and say that he was interested in the idea of setting up a dummy toy company but needed prove of the fire insurance scheme. On 20 May 1931 Priest told Mathews there was going to be a fire at an antiques shop in Poland Street Soho. Crocker immediately dictated the details to his secretary and posted a typed letter to himself in a sealed envelope as evidence of the date. Sure enough, on 1 June a fire broke out at 25 Poland Street. The shopkeeper had a Lloyds policy and put in a claim for £6,000. Crocker was asked to investigate the claim and he found that the assessor was Leopold Harris of L.H. Harris and Co. After Crocker spoke with Lloyds the claim was dropped. 
Harry Priest
Crocker wondered how many people were involved in the scheme that Priest had talked about. He quietly approached two senior members of Lloyds and Sun Insurance, and they agreed to fund Crocker in a secret long-term investigation. He did not know this would have all the elements of a novel by Agatha Christie or Edgar Wallace, from the Golden Age of crime fiction.
The ‘Prince’ and leader of the gang was Leopold Harris. He joined his father’s firm of insurance assessors with his brothers David and Montague. When his father Lewis, retired the three brothers ran the company which was very successful. At first it was an honest company, but after Lewis retired, questions were asked about some of their fire claims.
Leo Harris often arrived in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce with a fireman and hose mascot, while a fire was being fought by the fire brigade. He achieved this by giving Christmas turkeys and cigars to key firemen who tipped him off about fires. He commiserated with the owner of the property, gave them his card, and offered to submit their insurance claim.
The Harris family lived in Northwest London. Lewis the father, lived at Chevening Road Brondesbury, David lived in Walm Lane Cricklewood, and Montague lived in Hodford Road Golders Green. Leopold himself lived in 5 Mapesbury Road Willesden. 
Harry Gould, another member of the gang, was the brother-in-law of Leopold Harris. Gould ran a salvage and auction company in Wilson Street near Moorgate in the City, a few doors away from the office of the Harris brothers at No.7. He supplied recycled stock from one fire to another, these were re-wrapped and called ‘old soldiers’.
After several other fires in Leeds and Manchester, Leo Harris funded Capsoni, and he opened a shop where he sold imported silks at 185 Regent Street. The stock was mainly ‘old soldiers’ of fabric re-wrapped. On 29 May 1930 Ada lit the taper and left the stock to catch fire. She calmly walked away and spent several hours in a nearby cinema. When she returned to their flat at 5 Margaret Street, she found Harris with a police constable who told her about the fire. Cappa arrived in his role as honest merchant. He modelled himself on Hollywood films, loved acting and burst into tears. After the PC had gone, Leo shouted ‘Cut out the comedy Cappa, get down to business and sign the insurance forms’. Then they spent time cooking the books by forging invoices for the stock.
In the spring of 1931 Leo introduced Cappa to Harry Priest. In a rare touch of humour, Harris said, ‘Show him your card’. They waited to see Cappa’s reaction to the picture of Priest in his fireman’s uniform. Although shocked, Cappa gave the expected laugh.
Later, Cappa fell out with Harris and the gang, when he did not receive his promised cut from some of the fires he had set. In August 1932 he began a court case against Jarvis who quickly settled out of court by paying Capsoni £300. The gang saw this as blackmail and threatened Cappa with possible violence. In financial desperation, Ada and Cappa went to see Crocker in September 1932 and told him the complete story. Crocker paid their outstanding rent and their debts and gave them £5 a week while they helped him.
Crocker devised a dramatic plan to trap Leo Harris. This involved the courageous Cappa being knocked down in the street by a car and taken to a private hospital. Supposedly, this would look like an attempt on his life by the gang. Crocker had set up a hidden microphone in the hospital ready to record any conversation that Harris had with the injured Capsoni. But Harris did not fall into the trap as we shall see.
A London Salvage Crew
The London Salvage Corps had been set up in the 1866 and were funded by the insurance companies. They were independent of the London Metropolitan Fire Brigade. The chief officer of the London Salvage Corps was Captain Eric Brynmor Miles, who had a glorious army career and was awarded the Military Cross. After five years in the London Fire Brigade, he joined the Salvage Corps as its deputy chief, and was promoted to chief officer when he was just 32 in 1928. He enjoyed an annual salary of £1,050 free of income tax (worth about £86,000 today), free lodgings at the Corps’ headquarters in Watling Street, and the use of a car and batman. Unfortunately, he got into debt with moneylenders after speculation on the stock exchange.
Captain Brynmor Miles
Miles met Leo Harris by chance in May 1930 when they were watching a trial at the Old Bailey of two fire assessors. After several meetings, Harris agreed to pay Miles £25 a month to to provide information and help with claims. They regularly had lunch in a private room at Frascati’s restaurant, or at Harris' home in Mapesbury Road.
William Crocker did not know that Miles was feeding information about the investigation back to Harris. This included warning him about the trap with the staged accident to Capsoni.
After almost two years of hard work, Crocker assembled the evidence and went to see Chief Inspector George Yandell who was very trustworthy. A large team from the Flying Squad made coordinated arrests of the gang members on 1 Feb 1933. 
Willesden Junction diagram
To summarize the information in visual form, Crocker made a diagram which showed 15 of the key fires and how they were connected to members of the Harris gang. He called it the ‘Willesden Junction’ diagram. When they saw the mass of evidence that Crocker and his team had assembled Harris, Jarvis and Gould pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey. The rest of the gang pleaded not guilty.
The huge collection of evidence
When the trial of 16 men opened on 4 July 1933 Mr Roland Oliver KC opened for the prosecution. ‘Our allegation, he said, is that in the heart of this city, there exists a combination, a gang of people, of whom those in the dock are specimens only, although we believe they include the heads of the gang. We say that their object has been to establish fraudulent, bogus businesses, grossly to over-insure them, to equip them with false documents and to furnish them with largely useless merchant’s stock, much of which has been through fires before, bankrupt stock and stuff like that, and having so over-insured and equipped the premises, to set fire to them for the purpose of defrauding insuring companies and underwriters of their money’.
The trial concluded on Friday 18 August with all defendants convicted and sentences handed out the following morning. After the judge, Mr Justice Christmas Humphreys had completed his 13 hours summing up, the jury retired at 12.30. They returned at five o’clock to give their verdicts. As the gang leader Leopold Harris was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Harry Gould 6 years, David Harris 5 years, Louis Jarvis 3 years and Harry Priest 3 years. Other members of the gang received lesser sentences.
The Daily Mail reported that three beautiful bouquets of roses, carnations and gladioli lay on the juror’s bench and were handed by order of the judge to three women members of the jury.
But notice who was not sentenced. Camillo and Ada Capsoni who pleaded guilty to 25 charges were not sentenced because of the help they gave to Crocker. At the time there was not enough evidence to convict Captain Miles.
While in Maidstone Prison, Leo Harris agreed to talk with Crocker and Chief Inspector Yandell. Harris had a fantastic memory for details, and this allowed charges to be brought against Captain Miles. He was arrested and convicted of corruption in February 1934 and sentenced to four years.
Because Harris had helped and turned King’s Evidence, on 12 Aug 1940, he was released on license from Camp Hill Prison on the IoW after serving seven years. He immediately joined the firm of Harris and Co. now at 128/134 Baker Street, where his sons and his wife Florence were partners. Surprisingly, when he came out of prison, he seemed to have a lot of money despite being declared bankrupt.
Presentation of silver fire engine
For his incredible work on the case Crocker was given a model silver fire engine by the Chairman of Lloyds. He was elected president of the Law Society in 1953/4.
In January 1952 Leo Harris sued a solicitor, Lawrence Dennis, who practiced in Hanwell, for slander by saying he still committed fires when a client told him who was the fire assessor. Harris lost the case because the jury found the words were spoken as a joke and not maliciously. Harris was then living in Bentinck Close, Prince Albert Gate, near Regents Park.
In 1968 Harris was working as an adviser to Tesco. He arrived at the scene of a fire in a Tesco supermarket in his chauffeur-driven Rolls with his dog Suzi, a tiny fox terrier who travelled everywhere with him.
In Parliament on 27 January 1972, Labour MP Tom Driberg, asked the Home Secretary to investigate the increase in the number of fires in London, and the activities of certain loss adjusters, including L.S. Harris, ‘who were up to their old tricks and submitting fraudulent claims’. Leo Harris asked Driberg to repeat the claim outside parliamentary privilege and he would sue. It appears nothing further happened.
Leopold Harris died on 18 December 1982. His address was 3 Vale Rise Childs Hill, off Finchley Road, and he left £195,540, worth about £940,000 today.
William Charles Crocker had an interesting role during WWII. In 1940, after Winston Churchill had sacked Sir Vernon Kell as head of MI5 he appointed Crocker as a member of a secret committee, to transform the running of the service to combat Nazi subversion and espionage. Crocker became Joint Head of B Branch (Investigations) at MI5, working alongside Guy Liddell. His primary responsibility was implementing Defence Regulation 18B to round up fascist sympathizers, including members of the British Union of Fascists. But he was criticised for his anti-Semitic views.
After the death of his wife Mary in 1953 he secondly married American Ruth Chandler. Crocker received a knighthood in 1955.
He died on 29 September 1973 in Santa Barbara California.
Phyllis Crocker, one of William’s five daughters, became a script and continuity woman working on major films such as, ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ (1951), ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1959), ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963), ‘Life at the Top’ (1965), ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ (1970), and ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ (1970).
The Fire Raisers film
In 1934 Michael Powell directed a film called ‘The Fire Raisers’. However, the film only uses the idea of fire insurance fraud and is not based on the Harris case directly.
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