THE MAJOR INGRAM FRAUD CASE - Major Charles Ingram

In the Major Ingram case, a rising officer of the British Army and MENSA achiever answered the challenge of ITV's quiz show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", hoping to win £32,000 that he wanted for domestic reasons. He worked his way through all the questions and won the £1,000,000 offered, but the TV company refused to pay up, accusing him of cheating. The Major took this blow with the dignity of an officer and soldier who had been in action before, and so he was prosecuted for fraud in our criminal courts, where he was convicted.

The criminal prosecution was based on the TV company's theory (or excuse) that in answering the questions, he had used the assistance of an acquaintance in the audience, who was also challenging for a spot on the show. The company's case was based on the coughing of this third party, who coughed throughout his performance, as did others, and their theory was that when Major Ingram read out the four options to a question as he mulled it over, the man in the audience coughed to identify the right answer for him. Since the acquaintance had coughed throughout his performance and that Major Ingram had spent some time in concentration over most of the questions, this means that the third party must have answered most of the questions for him.

The prosecution at the criminal trial was based on this theory, which succeeded in turning the rising Army officer and MENSA achiever into an intellectual dud, and the unsuccessful challenger as the successful intellect (except that he wasn't in a position to win the prize), and it has the Major as being lucky with his strategy (though he was evidently not lucky with his winnings), and it has Major Ingram as the cheat instead of the TV company itself, with the TV company profitting. These reversed values in a trial equation are worth noting because they can identify a central hypocrisy. Another interesting symmetry in this case is that the prosecution has the third party producing Major Ingram's performance, which reflects the professional psychology of TV people.

The defence side of the equation is that Major Ingram had worked his way through all the questions himself, using either logical deduction or sometimes deep memory, and all that needs to be done to resolve the equation is to compare the two sides to see which corresponds fully with the evidence.

There are many problems with the prosecution case. To begin with, neither the programme's question master, Chris Tarrant, nor Major Ingram, nor the TV audience at home, heard any of the coughing, and it wasn't until a boosted off-air recording was produced by the TV company for the criminal prosecution that anyone knew of it.

This quiz show is unusually well designed by today's standards, beginning with joke questions to help the contestant settle in with the cameras and so forth, and then proceeding with easy questions to aid concentration, and through this process the contestant would be able to tackle any such questions that might be answerable to deep subconscious memory or to logical deduction, these getting progressively harder as the prize rises in value. If the Major had undertaken the challenge with the system that he was accused with, his success would be entirely dependent on it, because he would not be able to develop the concentration needed to progress by himself. So either he would need to know all the answers immediately or else the other would, and if neither did, his bid must soon fail.

Major Ingram used all three of the assists that WWTBAM? offers its contestants, and this shows that he needed them, and that his performance was in accordance with the game's rules. He used the "Ask The Audience" option for a pop TV question about Coronation Street (they were after all a mass TV audience), and the "Phone A Friend" for the River Foyle question (and he went with his friend's suggestion), and he used the "Fifty-Fifty" option for the Craig David/A1 pop song question, and here, his performance shows that he needed to simplify the job of recalling the answer from his own memory.

In this Craig David/A1 question, the prosecution case singled out a coughing incident as evidence for their theory, in which Major Ingram had read out the two remaining names as he mulled them over, and a cough from the third party immediately followed the second name, which was the correct one. The prosecution claimed that Ingram had read out the two names and that the other had picked out the right answer for him with his cough, but it failed to notice that in reading out these names, Major Ingram had not left sufficient time between A1 and Craig David for his alleged coughing assistant to cough had A1 been the right answer. This cough therefore occurred naturally after he had read out both names. Furthermore, if the third party had known the right answer to this question, then Major Ingram and his scam would have wasted the "Fifty-Fifty" option which he might well have needed later on. His behaviour here is evidently not consistent with the theory.

To understand the defence, it is necessary to understand not only the professional psychology of TV people, but also that of the MENSA achiever and the rising Major in the British Army. The fact that neither government nor anyone else was able to do this should be a matter of concern to everyone.

To achieve professional advance and excellence one has to develop the compunction to challenge oneself and to achieve, and in the course of a career this hunger becomes basic to one's psychology. The irony is that if Major Ingram had won his million it would have undermined his future career in the Army because it would have undermined his ambition for it. There would have been a subconscious conflict of interest between himself and his wife here, because his wife would have wanted the £1,000,000 while Major Ingram's career would not. In fact he was prepared to gamble £468,000 on the last of the questions, having won the £32,000 that he had hoped to get, and the prosecution case against him had no coughing incident that it could use to account for his success with this last question, which was the most difficult of all.

This last question, like several others, could have been accessible to logical deduction, but one would need to be in a very deep state of concentration to identify the right answer instinctively, and only a daring soldier and compulsive achiever would have dared to go with his intuition with so much money to lose.

The answer to this last question, Googol, is actually accessible to logic because it is composed of the materials that identify it as the right answer. There are two 'g's in it (for "grand" - American for 1,000), and three zeros (1,000 again), and a lower-case 'L', which serves as a '1', and it is evident from this that the word Googol was created by an American to represent the mathematical figure that was the subject of the question. This and the fact that it was the only option that did not look obviously like a technological word, would help to identify it as the likely right answer.

Neither greed nor a cheat would have gambled £468,000 on this last question, and only someone who could trust his instincts would do it.

Another part of the prosecution theory concerned his wife’s anxious glances in the direction of the third party, their alleged coughist, which the prosecution interpreted as being her urging him to answer her husband’s question for him. Her behaviour was certainly anxious, but the innocent reason for why she repeatedly glanced in his particular direction would have been that, her husband being the source of her anxiety, her friend was the only other person in this strange and stressful situation who offered her a sense of domestic familiarity and emotional stability. That stress was the cause of her behaviour is undeniable because of the backlash that her husband got after the show, when she off-loaded it on to the source of it, namely the intrepid Major.

A logical examination of the prosecution case shows that it is founded entirely on a lack of intelligence or thought, both in its structure and in its pretence, and that it is based on a failure to recognize these qualities in Major Ingram's performance. Its interpretation of the coughing by the third party was absurdly unobservant and illogical, and this quality corresponds with their idea for the scam itself, which is unrealistic and impractical. Even if the third party had had mobile phone access to a team of people with encyclopaedias etc, the idea is not feasible.

In any court equation a central factor in the case is that of motive, and it is necessary to determine on which side of the equation it belongs here. In this case the motive is given by the prosecution as "greed", but the defendant's gambling of £468,000 on his intuition suggests that it doesn't belong on his side, so we should look at the prosecution side of the equation. Here the motive appears on one count, namely in its accusation against Major Ingram, and it also appears again on a second count as well, because, if greed motivates the contestants on the TV show, then the designers of the show have created that greed. The question that remains is whether the TV company is also responsible for the "greed" factor on a third point, namely the motive behind this particular fraud case. Major Ingram's performance on the Googol question and the TV company's success in taking the money suggest that it is. There is a fourth motive factor too, which is the contempt that our TV service has for public intelligence and talent everywhere else, and also their exploitation of the public generally.

A prosecution has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and the case against Major Ingram fails to do this in every particular. All the points of the prosecution case have an innocent explanation to them which is consistent with the evidence, and only the defence corresponds fully with the evidence.

The judge at the conviction used the threat of jail to forbid Major Ingram to defend his case or continue his struggle on TV, so that the judge banned him from using the very medium that created his cheat to undo it. The injustice of this arises from two injustices within the trial, the first being the TV company's refusal to pay his winnings on the basis of its cheat theory, and the second being that he was prosecuted for criminal fraud at all, because this trial was based on a misuse of the term fraud. It is not in the interests of the nation that a TV company should be able to use the criminal courts to protect its game rules, or that it should be allowed to make criminals out of its customers or British citizens. Major Ingram was a customer of theirs, and he responded to the challenge of the quiz along with many others who are tarred with the term "greed" by this company. Any such dispute is a commercial and civil dispute requiring a public tribunal to determine whether he had found a way round their rules, and if he agreed that it was so, how much he should get in exchange for the information as to how it was done, so that the TV company could prevent it happening again. This would be the honourable outcome.

The first injustice has led to the others, and rippling out naturally from this sequence is another injustice, because the Army, on the strength of this conviction, stripped Ingram of the rank that he had earned and the pension that went with it, and threw him out of the Army. The Army Board of Inquiry did not do the job of inquiring into the situation presented to it, and this again continues the theme of lack of intelligence in the case against Major Ingram.

The logical resolution of this case has the fraud and the hypocrisy factor on the prosecution's side of it, and there is no evidence for fraud on the defence side, either political or actual. The case against Major Ingram is purely exploitative, and so was its motive, because Major Ingram differed from the company's preferred customers, as he was intellectually alive and had a talented psychology, and this is clearly not the type that TV people want for an audience nowadays. In making an idiot out of him with their cheat theory, the TV company has turned him into what they want their audience to be, namely idiots that they can manipulate and rip off as a reward for their work. Major Ingram's disaster is shared by the nation itself.

This case consists of a TV company robbing an unsuitable custiomer (he was not a TV spud) of the £1,000,000 that he won on their TV show, then using our police and criminal courts to off-load the wrong on to the victim. This is in keeping with common practise in New Labour television companies, which are using members of the public to "entertain" the public while they themselves are raking in all the dosh. And talent is forfeit again.

This TV company saw Major Ingram's intelligence as cheating, hence his criminal conviction, and its audience, namely the British Police and Army, have agreed with it. Modern TV companies manifestly see service as self-service and cheating as service, and this is a consequence of nearly thirty years of Thatcherism, which has also left Britain without a qualified government. The Crown Prosecution Service has shown that it can no longer tell the difference between criminal fraud and commercial disputes (Thatcherism), and once again the police have allowed themselves to be pressured into an improper prosecution by exploitation from the media and public (Thatcherism).

In 1998 a railway employee was sacked for doing his job properly when Mrs Blair didn't have a railway ticket, and this is another incident that reveals the attitude of Thatcherism and its achievers to professional competence, service and talent.

By David Dixon

For the Algebra of Justice click here.

For a geometric tesseract of deception and pretence click here.

For the Michael Brookes case click here.

blackneck@gawab.com