During the police operation to capture the men, £10.1 million in assets were seized, along with a staggering £73.5 million in drugs. Police carried out more than 80 operations and arrested more than 100 people to get to Colin Gunn, who was by now serving 35 years after being convicted, in June 2006, of the murder of an elderly couple whose son had killed a friend of the Gunn family.
41-year-old Gunn, a shaven-headed bodybuilder, was charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. Police officers Charles Fletcher and Philip Parr were also found guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Gunn and his gang (including his brother, David, who also has an extensive history of serious crime, and is now serving 8.5 years for conspiracy to supply amphetamines) based their operations on the Bestwood Estate. They ruled by fear and intimidation. They were involved in selling drugs and guns, torturing and murdering those who crossed them.
The Gunns even threatened senior police officers with death, and they paraded their wealth, boasting of their millions to unemployed teenagers. But police found it impossible to implicate Colin Gunn as the mastermind as he rarely got his hands dirty by ordering his henchmen to carry out beatings and murders. Detectives also suspect that Colin had been involved in many murders and punishment beatings on both men and women.
Police also believe that Colin Gunn ordered the shooting of a social worker who dared to give evidence against his gang, but the cops have no evidence to prove those allegations. On Monday, 17 May 2004, 50-year-old Derrick Senior was shot after he helped to convict a gang that had racially abused and beaten him in the Lord Nelson pub in Bulwell, including tearing out one of his dreadlocks. Senior, who should have sought police protection, but didn’t, claimed that he would not give in to criminals. He was shot several times as he reversed out of his drive on the Heathfield Estate three days after his abusers had been convicted.
Senior had been having a drink with a female friend when a group of drunken men started picking on her. When he went to her defence, they turned on him, dragging him into a corner of the pub by his dreadlocks. He suffered a fractured eye socket and a broken rib during the attack. He was racially abused and the drunks paraded the dreadlock around as a ‘trophy’. Robert Watson, 25, Joseph Graham, 23, Lee Marshall, 24, and John McNee, 24, were jailed for racially-aggravated assault.
On the day of the attempted murder of Mr Senior, John McSally, 50, a gangland ‘enforcer’ for Colin Gunn, rode up on his motorbike and opened fire, yelling, ‘You grassing bastard.’ Senior was hit in the chest, stomach and legs, but survived after playing dead, slumping over the steering wheel of his car.
On Friday, 1 June 2007, McSally, of Plaza Gardens, Basford, was jailed for life for shooting Senior. Gunn had offered Senior a ‘substantial amount of money’ to withdraw his testimony against the four drunks, but he refused. Sentencing McSally, Mr Justice Pitchers said, ‘You are an incredibly dangerous man – ready, for money, to kill without a second thought.’ Ordering McSally to serve at least 35 years, the judge added, ‘Even by the warped standards of those who enforce their will by violence, these were evil offences.’
McSally, allegedly acting on Gunn’s orders, had also shot gang associate 46-year-old Patrick Marshall outside the Park Tavern pub in Basford on 8 February 2004. Marshall was Colin Gunn’s odd-job man, but he had got on the wrong side of him after going on a £100,000 cocaine run to Lincolnshire without his boss’s permission. Then word spread around that Marshall was trying to get a gun to shoot associate ‘Scotch Al’ after a feud. Marshall contacted McSally, who found a gun and went to meet him. But instead of handing him the weapon, McSally blasted him in the head in the pub car park. The getaway car was recovered by police and had Colin Gunn’s overdue phone bill inside it and three photographs of his brother, David. McSally is now serving a life sentence for this offence. His co-accused, Craig McKay, denied any involvement in the shooting and was cleared by a jury.
Today, tales abound on the Bestwood Estate about Gunn’s ruthless streak. It is said that he once broke the arms of one of his own men after he drove badly and ‘disrespected’ him. People were shot through their hands for carrying out burglaries on the estate without his permission. People moving to the estate were visited and told that Gunn ruled the roost. Many were too scared to stay.
A senior officer said, ‘These are not normal villains. They would shoot someone to get respect. They are extremely vicious and brutal people. The smallest slight to Gunn would end with a severe beating. Some of his guys are just psychopaths. There are a lot of bodies – dead and alive – that have the hallmark of Colin Gunn. I don’t think there is anyone who is grateful for ever having met him.’
Police realised that, if they were to bring down Gunn, they would have to establish a new way of working. Knowing that at some stage they would come across corruption in the force, they set up operations within operations, like a Russian matrioshka doll. These were kept so secret that officers outside the squad had no idea that they existed.
To capture Gunn, officers identified his lieutenants, thugs and drug-dealers and started at the bottom, taking them out one by one, piling the pressure on Gunn to encourage him to get involved personally. Chief Constable Green told his men, ‘Shake these criminals to the core and lock them away in any way that is ethical and lawful.’ The main operation was called Stealth, and beneath that, cloaked in secrecy, was Utah, which had been set up solely to catch Gunn.
It soon became known that Gunn was heavily involved in the murders of 55-year-old textile worker John Stirland and his wife, Joan, 53, who were tracked down and murdered at their seaside bungalow in Trusthorpe, Lincolnshire, on 8 August 2004. Mrs Stirland’s 22-year-old son, Michael O’Brien, had shot dead an innocent man outside a Nottingham pub in 2003. The victim, 22-year-old shop-fitter Marvyn Bradshaw, was a friend of Jamie Gunn, Colin’s nephew. It later emerged that Bradshaw, a family man with no links to crime or gangs, was killed after being mistaken for someone who had assaulted O’Brien in The Sporting Chance pub with an ashtray.
There had been a ‘lock-in’ during the night in question. Customers were inside enjoying a late drink and, at the door, a young man was refused admission. He was Michael ‘JJ’ O’Brien. He had already been turned away from two other pubs for wearing trainers and a tracksuit top.
A scuffle took place and O’Brien, a small-time drug-dealer, who had already served jail time, now the worse for wear with drink, was hit in the face with an ashtray. O’Brien, who was with his mate, 31-year-old Gary Salmon, retreated to Salmon’s flat nearby, where they changed into dark clothes and balaclavas. They also picked up a single-barrel shotgun to commit what was to become the seventeenth shooting in Nottingham that August.
Back at The Sporting Chance, four men left the premises and climbed into a silver Renault Laguna car. At the wheel was Marvyn Bradshaw. Sitting beside him was his longtime friend Jamie Gunn. As the car edged out of the car park, a shot was discharged and Bradshaw, hit in the head, slumped sideways. He died later in hospital; having been shot from such close range, death from the head wound was inevitable. The lad had most certainly been killed in a case of mistaken identity. Indeed, neither he nor Jamie Gunn had been involved in the ashtray incident.
After the shooting, the two men returned to Salmon’s flat where O’Brien boasted to two teenage girls, ‘I shot him… he was a bad man.’ Scared to death, they contacted the police. The loud-mouthed O’Brien’s bragging proved to be his downfall, and that of his parents, too.
As the result of the shooting, the Stirlands were forced to flee their Nottingham home after several shots were fired into their living room. Thugs had warned the couple to leave the area or ‘stay and face the consequences’. They immediately packed up a few possessions and left without telling friends where they were going.
First, they moved to Humberside, but it is believed that they may have been forced, once again urgently, to abandon their new home because they turned up at a second address, a bungalo
w in Trusthorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast, in December 2003, with only the clothes they stood up in.
In April 2004, they told Nottinghamshire Police that they had moved and senior officers in Lincolnshire were made aware of the problems and their background.
In July, their son, 23-year-old O’Brien, was sentenced to life for murdering Marvyn Bradshaw. O’Brien rubbed salt into the wounds of the dead man’s parents, taunting them from the dock, ‘I’m not bothered, I’m a bad boy. It means nothing to me. Your son looked like a doughnut with a big hole in his head. I know where you live.’ Before being escorted away, he threw a beaker of water towards Mr and Mrs Bradshaw, screaming, ‘I will do my time standing on my head.’ Quite understandably, Colin Gunn was livid when he heard of this.
Three days later, 53-year-old Mrs Stirland rang Nottinghamshire Police to say that fresh threats had been made against her and her family. Lincolnshire Police were informed the next day. Despite this, when she rang Nottingham Police at 11.30am on Sunday to say that there had been a prowler in her garden the previous night, the police did not consider it immediately necessary to inform their neighbouring force. Instead, an officer Mrs Stirland knew rang her back at 2.00pm. After a seven-minute conversation, the officer called Lincolnshire Police to tell them of the prowler, but did not ask for a patrol car to drive past the bungalow. She did not want to call 999 because she didn’t want police cars swooping on the house and alarming her neighbours.
Within minutes of speaking to the Nottinghamshire officer, and almost three hours after first reporting the prowler, the Stirlings were shot dead. Two men wearing blue boiler suits were seen in the vicinity of the murder scene. Witnesses described them walking or running away from the bungalow while a black Volkswagen Passat was parked nearby with its hazard lights flashing. The car was later found ablaze in a quiet country lane. The two men were spotted close by. The car had been stolen on 31 July, from Nottinghamshire.
Chief Constable Green said, ‘The ruthlessness with which Gunn tracked the Stirlands down after they fled Nottingham was characteristic of a man who led a bloodthirsty and violent regime.’
But, the question now was: how had Gunn tracked down the Stirlands so quickly? A former Nottingham neighbour explained that the couple’s rented address had become local knowledge in the city after a family friend, who lived on the same estate, accidentally met the Stirlands in Mablethorpe, just four miles from the bungalow.
Another rumour was that the couple’s daughter had been followed when she visited her parents the day before they were killed. Or was it because, just two weeks before they were murdered, the couple took the risk to returning to Nottingham to attend the wedding of Mr Stirland’s son, Lee, and his fiancée Adele?
More revelations were to follow. According to Nottingham residents, Mrs Stirland, a children’s care nurse at the Queen’s Medical Centre, had previously been heard in a Nottingham pub praising her convicted son. She told fellow drinkers that O’Brien had vowed to take revenge on the people who put him away, which would have done nothing to endear her, her husband and her mindless son to Mr Colin Gunn.
However, now the true facts can be revealed. In an effort to track down the Stirlands, Colin had contacted a former BT worker, Stephen Poundall, in a bid to find the couple’s address. In turn, Poundall spoke with past colleagues, Anthony Kelly and Andrew Pickering, who ran a computer search. They found the address and passed it on to Poundall, although they had no idea why he wanted it. Kelly and Pickering later admitted computer misuse and were sacked by BT, as well as being handed down suspended jail sentences.
Aged just 19, Jamie Gunn never recovered from the shock of seeing his friend die and, a year later, on 2 August, just three weeks after O’Brien’s conviction, he was found dead in his mother’s bed by a younger brother and sister. Jamie had died of pneumonia. He had stopped eating and begun drinking heavily and his immune system was weakened. Jamie had died as surely as if O’Brien had killed him, too.
The Gunns decided to give Jamie a proper send off, and the funeral was as lavish as that of any Mafia family member. On Friday, 13 August 2004, 1,000 mourners descended on the hilltop surrounding the Arnold parish church of St Mary in Bulwell; 700 of them crammed into the 17th-century church, while another 300 stood in the drizzle outside. A horse-drawn, glass-sided hearse waited at the gate below, alongside two motor hearses bearing flowers, including huge wreaths saying ‘Jamie’, ‘Brother’ and ‘Jim Bob’.
As crime writer James Cathcart reported for the Nottingham Evening Post, ‘There were three of the most stretched kind of stretch limousines, plus three big funeral Daimlers, a convoy of bulky, dark 4x4s and a conspicuous black Mercedes two-seater… Hard-looking men with stubble for hair stood smoking and chatting quietly in the churchyard, their jackets straining across their shoulders. The style, as well as the scale of the funeral, would have suited a Kray brother, rather than a teenage bouncer unknown to the world outside Nottingham before his death… just a mile away, on Hucknell Road, a demolition team was tearing down the last recognisable traces of The Sporting Chance.’
Colin Gunn is now serving life for conspiracy to murder the Stirlands. His fellow plotters, Michael McNee and John Russell, will serve 95 years before they are considered for parole. After being sentenced on Friday, 30 June 2006, the verdict went down very badly among Gunn’s supporters on the Bestwood Estate. That weekend, around 30 people started a mini-riot, setting fire to cars and causing £10,000 worth of damage.
Colin Gunn was also arrested in connection with the murder of Marian Bates, a 64-year-old Arnold parish jeweller, who was shot dead at point-blank range while shielding her daughter Xanthe from two crash-helmeted robbers at 1.30pm on Tuesday, 30 September 2003. Her bespectacled 67-year-old husband, Victor, picked up a fencing foil to try to protect his wife but was attacked with a crowbar. Wearing washing-up gloves, the men escaped with a pathetic haul of two rings, one pendant and three pairs of earrings worth £1,120.00.
Although Colin Gunn was never charged with any involvement in the raid on the couple’s shop, his name has been linked to the investigation a number of times. It is thought that he feared he would be implicated immediately after the shooting and sought the services of corrupt trainee detective, Charles Fletcher, to find out what he could about the investigation less than 24 hours after Mrs Bates had been murdered.
Indeed, Gunn’s common-law wife, Victoria Garfoot, had previously been stopped by police driving a maroon-coloured Peugeot in July 2003. She told police that the car belonged to Colin Gunn. Three months after that incident, the very same Peugeot was used as the getaway car for two gang members – 19-year-old Craig Moran and Dean Betton, 23, who were known associates of the Gunn clan and who were accomplices in the bungled raid on the Time Centre jewellers on Front Street.
Betton, from Broxtowe, and Moran, a Bestwood resident, were jailed for 13 years each for conspiring to rob the jewellery shop. Peter Williams, the teenager who accompanied the gunman into the Time Centre, was convicted of murder and jailed for life, with a minimum tariff of 22 years. Then aged 19, Williams had a string of convictions and should have been electronically tagged at the time of the raid – he hadn’t been. Moran’s girlfriend, Lisa Unwin, 23, from Bestwood, Nottingham, was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, along with Moran, by providing him with a false alibi.
In describing the robbery to a jury, Victor Bates explained that two men came into the shop, pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. At first, the pistol failed to fire, but a few moments later his wife was lying on the floor with a bullet in her chest.
‘My wife moved forward quickly and stepped in between the gunman and my daughter, Xanthe, and the swine shot her in cold blood. He just shot her from about three feet – and she went down heavily… like a lump of bricks.’
Victor said that he tried to kill the intruder with a fencing foil he had hidden in the shop, but he failed. ‘I was intent on killing him but he started whirling around like a Dervish
and I couldn’t get a clear shot at him. I would have made justice very summary if I could have. The other guy, who was small, whacked me on the wrist with the crowbar and then hit me in the head – and missed my eye by about an inch. I was dazed and went down stunned – he fractured my cheekbone and cut my face.’
Clearly now upset, Mr Bates added, ‘I feel like a fool – when you are faced with a gun, you don’t think about a prearranged act like falling on the floor and feigning a heart-attack. You blame yourself for not taking strict security provisions. I wanted to help my wife but I couldn’t – I think I knew she was dead. She was a very well-known girl and very popular and hadn’t got an enemy in the world – it makes it all the more frustrating that it should happen to her.’
The actual shooter of Marion Bates is widely believed to be young Gunn associate James Brodie, who has never been traced. He disappeared the day after the murder and is presumed dead, according to police. One theory is that Brodie, a heroin addict, was executed on the orders of Colin Gunn within 48 hours of the murder for fear of him implicating those higher up the pecking order. Rumours abound as to how he met his grisly end, including tales of his body being dumped in sewage works or his remains fed to pigs on a north Nottinghamshire farm.
Police intelligence led a team of body-searchers to the Willows Fish Farm, Wanlip Road, Syston, Leicestershire, where divers and forensic specialists looked for clues. Police divers dredged a stretch of water, while a team of forensic archaeologists surveyed a pit of quicksand.
Barrie Simpson and his colleagues, who are more used to excavating mass graves in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, used ‘non-invasive methods’ so that they didn’t disturb the ground. Simpson, an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and part of a national network of academics called the Forensic Search Advisory Group, said, ‘It [the ground] is like an underground room. Just as a fingerprint officer searches a room for fingerprints, we search for evidence like this. We specialise in the search, location and recovery of buried items. It could be a weapon, body or ransom money.’
Gangland UK Page 3