Early April – August 1941
On 9 April a second salvage boat arrived at Eriskay. While Kay and the Liverpool & Glasgow Salvage Association had been retained to salvage what they could, the scrap metal was of no concern to them. The second salvage company was British Iron & Steel Corporation (Salvage) Ltd (BISC). Their remit was to check Kay's conclusion about the inability to refloat Politician. If it could not be refloated, then it was planned to tow part of the superstructure to be reused. If that was still not possible, stripping the vessel of as much metal as possible was sometimes financially viable. The wreck of Thalia was nearby and known to contain iron ore, which made the salvage more lucrative for them.
After two visits to Politician in early April, BISC considered that it was possible that the wreck could be refloated. McColl had visited the ship with the salvors, and was angered by that state of the vessel, which showed signs of having been extensively looted. He wrote to Ivan Gledhill—the local Customs surveyor and his direct superior—and told him "I should imagine that 300 cases have gone out of her. That, I believe, is a conservative estimate." He also told Gledhill that he intended to step up his search efforts, and ensure that as many of the malefactors from Eriskay and South Uist were sent to prison for as long as possible. Gledhill agreed with the strategy. He accompanied McColl as often as he could, although his territory was too large and his workload proportionally higher, so the visits were not as frequent as he would have liked.
With the arrival of Captain Edward Lauretson and the salvage ship Assistance, BISC returned to Politician on 21 April. The salvage operation they conducted took several months, and involved divers descending into hold five to clear out the cargo. They removed 13,500 cases and three casks of whisky from the wreck, as well as stout and sherry. Several eyewitnesses later said the salvors helped themselves to whisky whenever they wanted, and would often return to their billets on Eriskay and South Uist with bottles to share with the islanders. A report from the salvors to the Salvage Association passed information that some of the Jamaican banknotes had been seen on Benbecula—25 mi from Politician. The organisation that provided the administration of British Crown colonies for the government, which included providing banknotes, was the Crown Agents; it was they who had arranged for the printing of the money by De La Rue, and who organised its shipping to the Caribbean. On hearing the news of the loss of the money, the Crown Agents thought that:
"The local police service is no doubt on a very small scale but the nature of the place and its surroundings should tend to reduce the chances of serious loss through the notes being presented and paid."
Children on the islands were found playing with the notes, and within two months water-stained Jamaican notes were being exchanged in banks in Liverpool.
The first court cases took place at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court on 26 April; they involved four men arrested on Barra three days earlier when the police saw them unloading whisky and barrels of oil. Three of the men were fined £3 each; the other two had to pay £5. McColl and Gledhill applied pressure on the legal authorities, directly and through their superiors. McColl argued that the looters should be tried under the terms of the specialist Customs Consolidation Act 1876 or the Merchant Shipping Act 1894, both of which carried more punitive punishments than ordinary legislation for theft. McColl and Gledhill wrote reports to their superiors that accused the looters of vandalism on Politician and widescale black-marketeering of the stolen whisky, and claimed the local police were being bribed to ignore the situation. The journalists Adrian Turpin and Peter Day write that the outrage of the customs men should be taken "with a pinch of salt"; the organisation was in the midst of providing evidence for later prosecutions and was not neutral.
McColl continued with his attempts to find the whisky. On 5 June he and Gledhill persuaded Edward Bootham White, the Customs officer based on Harris, to assist them; they were also provided with two police sergeants from the mainland to assist them. On 6 and 7 June they conducted intensive searches of crofts and farms on Eriskay and Uist. Hutchinson relates that the searches destroyed peat stacks, forced entry into people's homes and disrupted the innocent and guilty alike, "an unnecessary, disproportionately harsh harassment". Sources differ over the success of the raids: Swinson quotes Gledhill, who states that "wherever we went, we got tons of the stuff ... [At Lochboisdale, South Uist], it filled the cells, the police garage and the policeman's house. A lot of it had to be stacked outside". Hutchinson writes that the raids were "spectacularly unsuccessful", only two cases of whisky being found. Hutchinson also quotes Gledhill, who says "The ineffective result was due to the fact that on the first day the local inspector of police refused to continue the search after lunchtime". The police did not work on the Sunday (the 8th), and those on Eriskay spent the day hiding or moving goods to better locations, waiting for a resumption of the raids the following week. A storm blew up on Monday 9, so the mail boat could not carry McColl and his colleagues across, and by Tuesday the policemen had returned to the mainland to resume their normal duties.
Between 10 and 13 June the trials took place of 32 men arrested for the theft from Politician. McColl gave evidence and stated that the men had stolen whisky from a vessel that was still seaworthy; the sheriff-substitute hearing the case accepted McColl's statement. One man was found not guilty, nine others were not proven—the Scottish legal verdict to acquit an individual but not declare them innocent—three were fined and 19 were incarcerated at Inverness Prison for terms ranging between 20 days and two months. McColl still thought the sentences were too lenient, and wrote to the interim procurator fiscal to complain; he also wrote to the Customs commissioners and said:
"In my opinion these few small sentences are quite inadequate to act as a general detriment to the population of these islands, who in my opinion will probably seize their next opportunity to further looting and damage."
The night the prison sentences were handed down, a hole was made in the roof of the shared garage where McColl's car was parked; paraffin was poured in and set alight. McColl's car was only damaged in the event, but another was destroyed. According to the Customs men, they were subjected to threats of violence throughout their investigation; Bootham White reported to the commissioners in London that McColl should not be active in any further searches because of "threats and warning of bodily injury".
On some of the raids by Gledhill and McColl, they seized boats that had been identified as being involved in visiting Politician; these were either through reports from informants, or because there was the ship's fuel oil on the boat. Those that were not seized at the time were painted with an arrow for seizure later. By the time the court cases had been heard, the customs men had amassed a considerable number of the vessels. Several islanders wrote to him asking for the boats to be returned, as the lobster fishing season was in progress, and they were unable to work; one man pointed out that his sons had used the boat against his wishes, and as one of the sons was in prison and the other fighting in North Africa, he wanted his boat back; one farmer whose boat had been used by local boys to visit the wreck needed his craft to tend 200 sheep and lambs grazing on a smaller island nearby, and was unable to access it without his vessel. All the requests were turned down by Gledhill, who instructed McColl to continue seizing any craft he thought were involved.
