Detective who busted John and Yoko lifts the lid on corrupt 1960s policing

Norman Pilcher, who made some of the decade’s biggest arrests and was jailed for perjury, says he is setting the record straight

He was the detective who busted John Lennon, George Harrison and Dusty Springfield, the officer who was told by an Old Bailey judge that he had “poisoned the wells of British justice”, and the man Lennon supposedly had in mind when he wrote I Am the Walrus. Now, at the age of 84, Norman “Nobby” Pilcher has written his memoir, Bent Coppers.

Pilcher was famous in the 1960s. He felt the velvet collars of the era’s best-known rock stars and was responsible for some of its highest-profile arrests. But the squad he worked for was riddled with corruption and Pilcher himself ended up behind bars for four years for perjury. His memoir seeks to “set the record straight” and in it he claims that he himself, like so many of the drug squad’s targets at the time, was the victim of a stitch-up.