NF (2010) Hoods Read online

  First published in hardback in December 2008 by Milo Books

  This paperback edition published in September 2010

  Copyright © 2008 Carl Fellstrom

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978 1 903854 94 5

  eISBN 978 1 908479 13 6

  Typeset by e-type

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  MILO BOOKS LTD

  The Old Weighbridge

  Station Road

  Wrea Green

  Lancs PR4 2PH

  United Kingdom

  www.milobooks.com

  For Mum, Dad and CMS, without whom this would not have been possible

  Hood1

  • a covering for the head and neck with an opening for the face.

  Hood2

  • a gangster or violent criminal.

  Hood3

  • a neighbourhood.

  (source: Oxford English Dictionary)

  Robin Hood:

  Legendary outlaw, hero of a series of English ballads, some of which date from at least as early as the fourteenth century. Robin Hood was a rebel, and many of the most striking episodes in the tales about him show him and his companions robbing and killing representatives of authority and giving the gains to the poor.

  (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 Made in Nottingham

  2 Seek and Destroy

  3 Home Boys and Posses

  4 Turf War in the NG Triangle

  5 The Law of the Gunn

  6 Watching the Detectives

  7 Gun Capital

  8 Warzone

  9 Friends of Ours

  10 Starburst

  11 Family Matters

  12 A Pinch of Salt

  13 Downfall

  14 Within These Walls

  15 Two Lives

  16 Loose Ends

  his has been a long journey, for myself and for all of the people touched by this depressing, brutal saga. Though we have still not reached the end of a dark passage for the city of Nottingham, there are chinks of light to look forward to. Perhaps we are nearing the final chapter of a story that the people of this city will never wish to visit again.

  It has been all too easy to forget that things were not always this way. In the eyes of the victims who have trusted me enough to be interviewed for this book, the first thing that always struck me was the look of fear. Could they trust me? How much could they safely say? What might be the repercussions for those who speak out? Few of these people are angels; many have been born from the underbelly of our city and have helped to propagate criminality themselves. But the brutality of the Bestwood Cartel, as it became known, has shocked even those criminals to the core.

  Take one example. For safety’s sake we shall call him Peter. He, his wife and two young children ended up travelling around Britain for two years, hopping from place to place in fear of their lives. They left their home in Nottingham because associates of Colin Gunn, a violent gangster later to be jailed for conspiracy to murder and who is one of the main characters in this saga, had made it clear their lives would be worthless if they continued to stay in the city. Gunn’s so-called Bestwood Cartel had discovered they were on the point of giving information to police about a robbery carried out in the city centre. Peter was also a witness to a murder which, six years on, no one had been charged with. Peter and his family uprooted themselves from their house when the police said they could not safely live in Nottingham any more. Then their rented home, under the care of the authorities who had told them to leave, was ransacked by the villains once they had left.

  I met Peter and his family at a caravan parked in a desolate field on farmland in the north of England in 2007. The couple’s lives, and those of their two young children, aged ten and eight, had been turned upside down. They were living a subsistence life, just existing, with no roots. The children had not been to school for two years. They had slipped through the protective net of police, council and social services support were now in a Kafkaesque nightmare failing to meet the criteria needed for a new home because they had ‘intentionally’ made themselves homeless even though they had tried to get help from all three agencies. They were living an utterly miserable existence, unable to return to see relatives or friends for fear of receiving a bullet from the Bestwood Cartel as a greeting.

  ‘We just need to be safe and stable,’ said Peter. ‘Our kids need to get some schooling. What can you do to help?’

  They had no money, and it would be another day before a social worker could visit. I felt embarrassed that Peter was so grateful for the £20 I gave him to buy some food. Standing before me was an intensely proud man who felt ashamed that he had been reduced to this, helpless to protect and look after his own family. What had they done to deserve this? Of course, it would be easier to evoke sympathy for more deserving characters. Peter has a long history of petty criminality, and though his family entered protective custody for a time, they then threw it back in the face of the police. It hadn’t helped that just a few months after trying to begin a new life in the north-east, bills from Nottingham began arriving at their supposedly secret address.

  The police had wanted a full statement from Peter about the unsolved murder, but after the episode in Newcastle he became distrustful – not without reason – of the police’s ability to protect the family. They told him they could not provide new identities for all the family. Peter told them he would find his own way out of the mess. In truth there was no way out. Above all Peter had tried to do the right thing; a very brave thing, from which there was no immediate return. He wanted to tell the truth, but the reality was that the authorities were not geared up to deal with the likes of Peter and his family. The city council maintained he had made his family intentionally homeless and the police would not vouch for him with the council unless he gave them his signed statement. The family were caught between a rock and hard place and eventually they split up. With Peter’s reluctant consent, his wife Mary took the two children away to her own relatives, in tears. They felt it was the only option to keep the children safe; extract them from any connection with Peter’s world.

  Corruption and complacency within agencies like the police and local authorities are cancers that significantly blight the fight against crime and at the heart of the problem there is another unpalatable truth: we are now running out of people like Peter who are willing to stand up and speak out today, because they simply don’t trust our public institutions any more, let alone believe they can protect them. They have all seen what happens when you ‘grass’ on someone. There is no place to hide. Many choose not to risk it; some have no other option because they have already been tainted as grasses by the criminals who assume they are talking to police because they have fled their homes. A former police officer who knew the Bestwood Cartel well told me of one instance where a man suspected of grassing them up was taken to a remote area, where his hand was nailed to a wooden bench. He was then saturated in petrol while Colin Gunn tormented him with the promise of a naked flame. When the police found the victim he was barely able to speak his own name, let alone name his attackers.

  What surprised me more than anything else while researching Hoods was the discovery that some of the major criminal figures, who have been enforcing the rule of not grassing up your own, have been informants for the police
themselves. But these people have no interest in making things right, they have been cleverly using the system to their own ends, feeding information into the police to take out their opponents while creating for themselves a protective zone courtesy of the authorities. These are the same criminals who would have you believe that grassing somebody up is a heinous crime, worthy of the most severe retribution. And police officers, some of whom have tried their hardest to bring down the gangsters, have themselves been faced with very real threats, even contracts being placed on their lives.

  At the height of the Bestwood Cartel threat, senior officers at command level within Nottinghamshire Police were given exit strategies designed to get them safely out of their homes should the mobsters pursue them. Sometimes fear of the violence that may be visited upon you is as devastating as the real thing – this is what urban terrorism is really all about and this is what happened to communities in Nottingham as the twenty-first century dawned. Was this really the Nottingham I knew and had come to love? The city that had one of the highest university applications from students or that had attracted thousands of new residents eager to relocate to the city of Robin Hood in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

  I came to live in Nottingham in 1995. It was a place I had fallen in love with during many weekend visits over the preceding years. The adjective ‘vibrant’ was a favourite word used to describe the atmosphere of those weekends and rarely in my first few years here did I see any real trouble in the city centre. Between 1994 and 1999 there were only two recorded murders involving firearms. Neither was drug-related. However, change was on its way. Cocaine began to blow like an indiscriminate blizzard. With it came crack and huge profits to be made. With huge profits came the need for the gangsters to enforce and protect their material wealth and their standing. With that came guns and knives. In the past seven years I have seen lives battered by use of crack cocaine and heroin, but cocaine more than anything else. It is arbitrary in its social networking – I have seen accountants, barristers, financiers, footballers, factory workers, students and villains take the drug and seen the impact on their ego. Long before night leads into morning they are babbling and railing at the world and before they know it they’ve burnt wads of money and can’t function as responsible human beings any more. And I’ve seen the families mourning the loss of their loved ones, murdered victims of the profits to be made from these drugs.

  In 1995 you could go into most city centre bars and the most aggressive behaviour you encountered was the result of revellers drinking too much alcohol. Cocaine was simply not available on the scale it is now and, if it was, the price, at £60 per gram, was prohibitive. Now you can go into those same venues and more besides and, uniformly, there is the depressing sound of young and middle-aged people, men and women, snorting lines of cocaine from any flat surface they can find inside the cubicles. The same person who was worse for wear for drink in 1995 is now, in 2007, with a few lines of ‘Charlie’ down them at £30 a gram, able to drink twice the volume of alcohol as their 1995 counterparts and is standing up and spoiling for a brawl, or worse. It was no surprise to me that when police carried out their own tests, in 2006, they found traces of cocaine in the toilets of twenty-four out of twenty-eight of the bars they checked in the trendy Lace Market area. The depressing truth is that evidence of this scale of drug taking would be found in every city in the UK on Friday or Saturday evenings in 2008. This commodity is one of the products that has been fuelling the violence in our cities and the Bestwood Cartel was one of the groups at the heart of it in Nottingham. I asked a villain what changed between 1995 and 2000 and, ultimately, what led to the orgy of violence that Colin Gunn presided over from 2000 onwards.

  ‘It was the powder (cocaine), mate, everyone has been on it,’ he said. ‘And they all want to use a gun these days and you mix up cocaine with steroids and guns and all this gangsta rap stuff and it’s like “boom”. It all kicks off. The powder made them think they were in some kind of Sopranos show. Too much powder, mate, that’s what it is.’

  And so it goes on, like a runaway train. What has also struck me about this episode is the response of the police and the city authorities, some of whom ultimately failed in their work. Organised crime was staring them in the face and had the city in a clench-fisted grip before they really began to take action. I asked a senior police officer about Colin Gunn and the Bestwood Cartel in 2005, at the peak of a massive operation to nail them. I was stunned to learn that plans had been in place to take out the Bestwood Cartel as early as 2001 as part of an ongoing operation against major drug dealers in the East Midlands.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he said. ‘We had the operation ongoing and had taken out the middle tier and Colin and his associates was the next tier. Everything was in place. It was just a question of moving up a gear and we would have had them within four months. Some people in authority didn’t want to spend the resources needed on it. We had just finished another big job [against drug baron Robert Briggs-Price, see Chapter Five] and the top corridor said, “We are not doing any more jobs like that. Too expensive, we need to tackle volume crime, show we are tackling the figures.”’

  Eventually, money and resources were thrown at the problem. But by then the Cartel had become a stronger entity and a number of people had lost their lives. Those lives cannot be brought back, nor can the ripple effects on the lives of those directly affected by those tragic deaths be diminished. I hope more than anything else that those that bear responsibility directly or indirectly for those deaths – from the criminals who pulled the trigger to those who valued their budgets more than someone’s life, to those who sold their souls to the dark side when they knew they were doing wrong – will one day comprehend the damage they have done. Perhaps they can learn to be more courageous in the future and put right the wrongs they encounter instead of adding to them. A civilised society, and one which everyone should aspire to if we are caring people, cannot function where a culture of revenge and violence is allowed to prevail. To an extent the Bestwood Cartel, under Colin Gunn’s leadership, was allowed to perpetuate a Robin Hood image on the Bestwood estate, a 1950s housing scheme two miles north of Nottingham city centre. The Gunn brothers were almost latter-day Kray Twins, ‘looking after their own’, keeping petty crime down in their area while controlling it with extreme violence.

  Hindsight is a great thing but it has often seemed to me that the authorities have found it far easier to get hot under the collar about the media’s portrayal of Nottingham than proactively dealing with the reality of the problems which created those headlines. If we really want to rid the cancer of organised crime from our streets then we need to nurture a caring society, something that has been too often absent from British life in the past three decades. Above all our recognised institutions, and those who are influential within them – from police and prison officers to council officials and social workers – must be more vigilant. They must be unwavering in cracking down on corruption within their own ranks. And we need those people to be fully supportive and, above all, compassionate towards those, both within and outside the petty criminal fraternity, those disconnected from society, who are brave enough to come forward to try to put things right. They deserve our protection, regardless of the cost, and they deserve our respect. If we don’t strive to accommodate them, we may wake up one day and the mob, as it has already shown itself capable of doing, will be ruling the roost.

  What I have set out to do in Hoods is try to provide some sort of context to what has happened in Nottingham. The serious criminality exposed here is a microcosm of criminality in every other city in the UK and if the right ingredients are mixed together the same results unfold. The same characters can be recognised in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, et al. More than anything else, the alarming expansion of this country’s black economy – an expansion fuelled by materialism and the social chasm that now exists between
the haves and have-nots – is something that must be combated. This black economy, particularly the drugs trade, has created some of our most violent criminality and diminishes respect both for our law-abiding citizens and morality. The more it grows, the smaller the number of people there are who are impervious to its infections; it breaks down their ability to see what is right and wrong, their moral immune system against bad faith. It is a global business in its own right, now worth some $320 billion according to conservative estimates. In Britain alone, the illegal drugs trade has a turnover of at least £8 billion, according to 2005 Government figures. It has been breaking down parts of our society slowly but surely for over four decades now, pitching community against community, individual against individual and, in the case of the illegal drugs market, has been leaving young people dying on our streets – sometimes explosively in a hail of bullets, sometimes silently with the blade of a knife.

  Why is this happening? How, in one of the richest and most advanced nations on earth, can it be tolerable to have twelve-year-old children selling crack cocaine or heroin on the corner of our streets in broad daylight? It should be a grave cause for concern among those sections of society who so often ignore what is going on around them until it touches their family or friends. We need a serious and comprehensive debate about the drugs issue before the problems associated with the culture lead to further avoidable tragedies. Does that mean we should be considering legalising recreational drugs? I don’t have the answer to that, but I know that there is a trail from all the tragic deaths that are contained within these pages which lead all the way back to this problem and that must surely be our first concern.

  Hoods is by no means a comprehensive account of recent events in this city. It does not purport to be a pure historical record. History, as we have learnt, is constantly being rewritten, updated and is ultimately flawed as a fixed entity to be relied upon. What I hope is to provoke some thought. In order to create a picture of certain significant events I needed to dramatise some episodes. Though these vignettes are dramatisations, they are based firmly on the factuality of those events derived from interviews with those involved and details from the resulting court cases. To that end this is a faithful and true account of how crime can destroy communities. As such I am indebted to the many people who have helped me try to understand what has been going on. Most of these people have chosen to remain anonymous for a myriad of reasons, ranging from fear of retribution to professional pride. Aside from the research I have undertaken myself, I can’t thank enough the former head of Nottinghamshire CID, Peter Coles, for his willingness to pick up the phone for hours on end and explain some of the history of crime in this city. I am also indebted to Nick Davies’s brilliant book Dark Heart, which I would recommend to anyone seeking to understand how impoverishment on a financial and moral level can create such darkness in the human soul. I should also thank the Nottingham Evening Post for some of the images reproduced here and Jacqui Walls and Steve Fletcher on the news desk for their help in tracking down material. Similarly Alistair Jackson at the BBC deserves my thanks. Above all I can’t thank enough all those anonymous and often very brave people who took the time out to tell me their own stories, or spare the time to help me formulate my own thoughts and give them purpose and conviction – they all know who they are and this is their story. I hope I have done them justice. Finally, if there are errors, they are, of course, all my own.