A Havering paedophile has been found guilty of plying sea scouts with booze and drugs, then sexually abusing them.
The Romford Recorder can now reveal that Michael John Costin, 59, is already serving an indeterminate sentence at HMP Pentonville over a string of previous sexual assaults on teenagers.
We reported last month that Costin had confessed to sexually abusing three scouts he was supposed to be looking after in Rush Green, Romford.
He molested the boys while volunteering as a scout leader at St Augustine’s Church in the 1980s.
One of the Romford victims has since died – but his parents had kept a handwritten letter in which he revealed the abuse Costin had subjected him to.
However, he remained on trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court over other offences, meaning we were limited in what we could report.
We can now disclose that Costin appeared at Snaresbrook on June 13, 2023, facing 22 charges of indecent assault.
The charges related to 12 former scouts who came forward between 2017 and 2022.
Three said they were molested in Rush Green between 1982 and 1986.
The other nine said Costin molested them in and around Kirton, Suffolk, between 1989 and 1994, after he moved there to work as a geography teacher and continued volunteering as a scout leader.
Costin pleaded guilty last June to 14 of the 22 charges - including all of the Romford offences.
But he pleaded not guilty to the other eight Suffolk offences.
As he faced trial over those eight, we were legally barred from reporting anything which might prejudice a jury.
We were only able to report his guilty pleas last month because Judge Alex Gordon allowed the jury to be told about them, as evidence of his “bad character”.
Prosecutor Walton Hornsby said Costin’s admitted offences showed “a tendency to the systematic abuse of teenage boys – in particular, scouts that he has come into contact with as a scout leader.”
Mr Hornsby said almost all of the 12 victims had disclosed their abuse independently of one another and their accounts had been very similar, with Costin “grooming” boys by showing them pornographic films and introducing them to alcohol.
“Such was his influence over them that it took some time and a great deal of difficulty for any of them to come forward and make any allegations,” he said.
“In fact, some of them expressed guilt. He was, in a sense, a hero of theirs and they did not want to do anything that would harm him.”
A Met Police spokesperson said: “Costin groomed his victims, who gave harrowing accounts in their interviews to specialist Met officers, with some describing how they were sexually assaulted while they slept at camps, received ‘love letters’ from their abuser and were forced to perform sexual acts.”
Mr Hornsby said the victims had found the courage to come forward after high-profile cases, including the Jimmy Savile allegations and Operation Yewtree, then the setting up of the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
After a two-week trial at Snaresbrook, Costin was yesterday (February 9) convicted of seven out the eight indecent assaults he had denied.
DCI Tari Farooqi praised the victims’ bravery.
“What they had to go through as children is deeply unsettling and I hope the verdict helps in some way in providing closure to both the victims and families,” he said.
"I hope this result demonstrates we’ll do all that we can to protect vulnerable children and tackle sexual violence.”
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