Millionaire girl found guilty of riot looting

London Evening Standard/London

A millionaire’s daughter faces a prison sentence after being found guilty yesterday of looting with gangsters at the height of the London riots.University student and former school prefect Laura Johnson, 20, was charged with acting as chauffeur to up to three other looters scurrying “like wild rats” in a six-hour rampage.At Inner London crown court a jury unanimously convicted her of one charge of burglary of electrical goods from a Comet store in Greenwich retail park. But they cleared her of burglary of TVs from a Curry’s branch in Eltham.The jury were still considering their verdicts on a further count of burglary of cigarettes and alcohol from a petrol station in Charlton and two alternative charges of handling stolen goods.Johnson rebelled against her middle-class background and £1mn family home to throw herself into the “exciting world of booze, drugs and gangster rap”, the court heard.Johnson was arrested in Greenwich with her boot full of thousands of pounds of electrical goods last August, and claimed to have acted under duress.She will be sentenced later with two of her fellow looters by judge Patricia Lees.Johnson, watched by parents Robert and Lindsay who run direct marketing firm Avondale from a house in Orpington, swayed as the guilty verdict was returned.She had claimed she was threatened with violence by the thugs armed with a knife. Johnson also said she was in a vulnerable mental state after being dumped by her boyfriend and being raped by two men.It was while under psychiatric care at Groom Park hospital, Bromley, that she met the man she claimed forced her with threats of violence to drive him and his gangster friends on the crime spree. She admitted she “fancied” and trusted the man she knew to be a convicted criminal and claimed she knew him as T Man. But she denied she knew he had been jailed for supplying crack cocaine.