One of the men facing Britain's first criminal trial without a jury gave evidence against the police during a notorious corruption inquiry in the 1980s.

In a historic judgment yesterday the court of appeal allowed John Twomey's forthcoming trial for a £1.75m armed raid at a warehouse at Heathrow to be heard by a single judge because of "very significant" danger of jury tampering.

The trial will be the first crown court case in England and Wales to be heard by a judge alone since new legislation came into force in 2003. Twomey, who with three others is charged with possession of a firearm, robbery and conspiracy to rob, believes he is the victim of a "real stitch-up" and his lawyers believe the decision has been made on the basis of "police whispers" in the ear of the court.

"The ruling has been made on the basis of secret material which we have never seen, presented by witnesses whose identity – other than their rank in the Metropolitan police – has not been disclosed to us," his solicitors said.

Twomey faced three earlier trials. At the first, in 2005, he suffered a heart attack and was severed from the indictment. His six co-defendants were acquitted. The jury failed to reach a verdict in the second. The third was halted by the judge when the prosecution alleged the jury had been tampered with. The estimated cost of the trials to date exceeds £25m.

Seeking a fourth trial without a jury, senior police officers presented evidence in secret under public interest immunity to a judge at the Old Bailey.

In his ruling yesterday the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, overruled a decision to hold the trial with a jury put under protective measures that would have cost about £6m and involved 82 police officers, something he said was an "unreasonable" drain on the public purse and police time.

"In this country trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice," Lord Judge said. "It is properly identified as a right, available to be exercised by a defendant unless and until the right is amended or circumscribed by express legislation."

But he said "the danger of jury tampering and the subversion of the process of trial by jury is very significant" in this case. Twomey and his co-defendants, Peter Blake, Barry Hibberd and Glen Cameron, are accused of carrying out a spectacular heist at the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at Heathrow in 2004. The police had been watching an employee of the warehouse and suspected a robbery was going to take place.

Only one man has ever been jailed for the robbery, a supergrass who pleaded guilty after giving police information.

During the armed raid six masked men rounded up members of staff at gunpoint and shots were fired at a supervisor. The robbers were caught on CCTV.

Twomey, 61, and his three co-defendants deny the charges. Twomey believes the Met holds a grudge against him because he gave evidence against four London policemen in 1982 in a prosecution mounted under Operation Countryman, the most wide-ranging inquiry into corruption in the history of the Met. Two hundred officers spent six years investigating and more than 400 police officers lost their jobs.

The internal investigation recommended that more than 300 officers should face criminal charges but only a handful came to court. Twomey gave evidence at one of the trials in which four officers were cleared of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by planting evidence on him.

No evidence of jury tampering has ever been presented in open court. When the third trial against Twomey collapsed last December, the judge told the jurors: "Events sometimes occur which create the risk of real injustice or unfairness to one side or the other and sometimes those events are so serious that the trial cannot continue." The appeal court yesterday rejected alternatives to a non-jury trial. The judges also refused the defendants the right to appeal to the House of Lords.

James Saunders, Twomey's lawyer, said yesterday: "[Twomey] feels that some police officers have borne a grudge against him for many years and that it is no coincidence that he is now the first defendant to face trial by judge alone, based on undisclosed evidence presented by the Metropolitan police to judges behind closed doors."