Hostage negotiator reveals the one thing all kidnappers have in common
On Boxing Day 2002, 29-year-old Eli Hall barricaded himself inside a bedsit in Hackney along with hostage Paul Okere in what would become Britain’s longest-ever siege. Negotiator Martin Richards was one of the people trying to convince him to come out.
The murky world of hostage negotiation is often shrouded in secrecy, but ‘every single day around the world, there are hundreds of kidnaps’, says Martin, and it’s his job to help get them out alive.
Martin is a former Chief Superintendent for the Metropolitan Police and has been working with criminals since 1981 as part of an extensive career that’s seen him involved in various high-profile incidents such as terrorist bombings, police shootings and corporate kidnappings.
“There's probably only about five of us in the world who have done government kidnaps and corporate kidnaps,” he says.
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Martin’s high-pressure job has seen him at the centre of some intensely volatile situations, and while he admits it’s an ‘adrenaline rush’ that can take a ‘few days’ to come down from, ultimately ‘you don't really get that emotional, because you can't’.
Of course, most of us couldn’t imagine being on the phone with some of the most hardened criminals in the world who have someone's loved one in captivity, but Martin is well-versed in all the tactics they use.
“What they do is threaten you a lot, threaten the hostage a lot, threaten the family. Use lots of pressure tactics around that, lots of deadlines - ‘if you don't do this by Friday, we're going to kill them’, gunshots in the background, silence." he said.
“I've had eight days in piracy cases where they just haven't talked to us because basically they’re sulking. You give them an ultimatum: 'We're not going to talk to you unless you come down to less than a million dollars’, for example. They ring up and say, ‘All right, then how about two million?’ And they may have come down three million, and you say, ‘No, we told you we're not going to talk to you unless you come down to a million’.
“They've got nowhere to go now. So they sulk by not talking to us for days.
“They ring up the families and say that we're doing nothing to get their loved ones out of captivity. They'll put the hostage on the phone to their spouses and loved ones. So they try all these tactics, which we know they're going to do. So we brief the families - do not believe anything a kidnapper tells you. Do not believe anything the hostage tells you, because it's a load of rubbish and it's a bunch of lies.”
But if you have any chance of saving someone's life, there’s one thing you must have in your toolbox - empathy.
“You have to demonstrate empathy with people that you don't like because you have to build rapport. But empathy is not about being nice to people. People often confuse it with sympathy; empathy is just showing them that you are trying to understand where they're coming from.
"Then you might then have earned the right to persuade them somewhat."
Martin’s job has taken him from UK criminal gang kidnappings and sieges to piracy cases, as well as warzones and the ‘kidnapping capital of the world’, Nigeria.
While the situations may seem worlds apart, there’s one thing all kidnappers have in common, Martin says.
“They're difficult people to deal with,” he tells us. “There's always a lot of ego there generally."
While Martin explains kidnappers don't tend to be 'sophisticated thinkers', they're 'hardened criminals who are used to making demands'.
"There's a lot of ego there that you have to feed." he says. “We don't get into arguments with these people because you'll lose. You get into an argument with a kidnapper, they'll punish you by putting the hostage on the phone or not talking to you for a few days and treating you with silence. So there's no point arguing with these people.
“So a lot of it is raising their self-esteem. It's making them feel important, giving them a sense of control, giving them a sense of certainty of what's going to happen.”
Martin is one of the rare few that has seen all aspects of the world of kidnapping, but there's one that is the most difficult to deal with.
The UK government has a policy of 'no substantial concessions', which means it will 'never, ever' pay any ransom, release any prisoners or change government policy if a British national is kidnapped abroad.
So how on Earth do you negotiate with a kidnapper, knowing you can't offer the very thing they want?
"When you're in a situation where there's a British hostage abroad, and it's a terrorist-type, propaganda-type demand, it's incredibly difficult, because you know that the government are never going to give it," Martin said.
"So your primary strategy there is to buy time and gain intelligence to affect rescues.
"Our primary job in those sort of incidents is just to build rapport and buy time and try and convince them to release, and sometimes they have done.
"You can negotiate other concessions, things like if they want to release a prisoner in the UK, you can negotiate that down to maybe moving them to a better jail, getting them more legal advice. So there are other more minor concessions that you can actually have authority to implement," he added.
"In Iraq, we lost quite a lot of people, people getting their heads cut off, people being set on fire, people getting executed and shot and buried. That happened quite a lot throughout 2003 and 2008 to lots of British and American and other citizens.
"It was tough."
In the corporate world, however, it's a very different story.
"The kidnaps in the corporate world, where it's about money, everybody pays because they're insured." he said.
"We won't get our people back unless we pay, so all the kidnaps I’ve dealt with since 2011 have been payment criminal gangs. They want a bit of money. They get paid. They don't get paid what they want - you have to negotiate them down, but we pay them."
When it comes to coughing up the money, most of us might be thinking of films like Man On Fire or gritty police dramas where a guy turns up to a dubious-looking carpark with a briefcase in tow to execute the exchange as the kidnapper points a gun at the hostage.
In real life, it doesn't quite play out like that. In fact, they don't even let the hostage go as soon as the money has changed hands.
"What tends to happen is the courier will go off with the money, and he'll get directed to a particular location, told to drop the money, because he'll be followed by the kidnappers at the end of his journey, or he'll meet the kidnapper only and give them the money," Martin explains.
"Then he’ll get told to wait where he is or go away or go and meet at a certain point, they'll take the money, they go back and count it with the hostage still in captivity, and then they let the hostage go later on, or they may have them secured somewhere nearby and get them to walk to where the courier is."
Martin says there are two main reasons why they don't let the hostage go as soon as they have their money.
"One, they don't want law enforcement to be finding where they are because they're under pressure, because they have to keep hostages secure.
"The other reason is, if we've done our negotiation strategy well, they think there's no more money anyway, because we've made it so difficult to get their last few thousand dollars or whatever it is, it's hard work for them."
Meanwhile, over in the UK police force, it's a slightly different approach.
"In the police, when it's a kidnapping, surveillance teams will follow the money and then try and establish where the person's been held, and then firearms support will go and rescue them," he said.
One of the most high-profile cases Martin has worked on during his time in law enforcement was the Hackney siege in 2002, which became Britain's longest ever at a staggering 15 days.
To put things into perspective, Martin revealed that the average length of a siege is usually seven hours.
On Boxing Day, an armed Eli Hall holed himself up in a bedsit, holding 22-year-old Paul Okere, who lived in the same building, captive for 11 of those days. The pair were even said to have cooked meals together.
Luckily Paul managed to make a break for it while Eli was upstairs, but following a lengthy standoff, Eli ended up setting the property alight and taking his own life.
He had taunted police for days, insisting he would never come out alive.
"He was a hardened criminal who was wanted for pointing a gun at a police officer," Martin explains.
"He fired at a load of police officers as they turned up to his address to arrest him. He knew he was going to go to prison for a long time. You don't fire guns at police officers and walk free. So he would never believe anything that we said, because he just knew he was going to go to prison for a long time.
"He was going to go out fighting and that was what he kept saying, and that's what he did."
But no matter how these things end, Martin says it's best not to think about it too much.
"You can go mad making assumptions of why people come out, when they come out, why they stay in.
"All of a sudden somebody will come out and you never know why because they always lie to you anyway, so it's best not to think about it."
If you want to learn more about Martin's work, you can check out his book Just When You Think You Are Winning... and his website.
Behind the Crimes is a limited series on Tyla delving into the reality of those who work behind the scenes of crime
Topics: True Crime
Chloe Jackson