As the Range Rover turned into Workhouse Lane, Tate received a phone call from his girlfriend, Sarah Saunders. Had Tate mentioned to her that he was with Mick and the boys, the plot would have been scuttled there and then. Tate effectively sealed his own fate by saying nothing of importance at all – Steele breathed a deep sigh of relief.
When they reached the end of the lane, they found the so-called landing field barred by a gate. It was dark, a clear sky and stars illuminated the narrow, rutted track, bordered by thick hedgerow, all blanketed in snow. Steele climbed out and allegedly said, ‘You boys stay in the warm.’ He walked a few yards from the vehicle and was met by Whomes, who handed him a sawn-off, double-barrelled shotgun.
Rolfe was the first to die. As soon as the rear passenger door had opened and Steele was clear, Jack Wholmes leaned in with a pump-action shotgun. He pressed the barrel against the back of the driver’s headrest and pulled the trigger. The shot ripped through the fabric and straight through Rolfe’s skull, leaving him dead where he sat. When his body was found, both hands were on the steering wheel, his foot on the brake.
Tucker was next. With the blast ringing in the ears from just a split-second earlier, he had no time to react. Whomes moved the gun and pumped in another round and shot him in the back of the head. Steele then appeared by the side of Whomes and trained his weapon on Tate, who was the only one given time to know that he was about to die. He screamed and pushed himself back into the corner of the vehicle in a futile bid to escape. Steele fired both barrels into his stomach. Then Whomes finished him off with a shot to the face and another to the stomach.
There was no doubt that the three men were dead but this was more than an execution. Whomes pumped his weapon again and opened the front door of the car. He placed the barrel up against what was left of Tucker’s head and fired again. Then Whomes went round to Rolfe and did the same. Meanwhile, Steele reloaded both barrels and shot Tate’s corpse in the face. This time, his gun fell apart as the stock came away from the barrels and trigger guard. Both men burst out laughing as Steele scrambled around on the floor of the car to retrieve the parts of his broken gun.
Just after 7.00pm, Whomes called Nicholls on his mobile phone and told him to collect them. Nicholls drove back to Workhouse Lane and then Whomes climbed in.
‘Where’s Mick?’ asked Nicholls.
‘He won’t be long,’ said Whomes. ‘He’s dropped something… doesn’t want to leave it there.’
The case was handled by DS Ivan Dibley of the Essex Police. He was a veteran cop from the old school and regarded any gangland slaying on his patch as a personal challenge – having solved 23 of the 25 homicides during 31 years in the force. But the triple Rettendon murders was a tough nut to crack; fingerprints found in the vehicle belonged only to the three victims, and an overnight frost had distorted footprints, making them unreliable as evidence. In fact, the forensic evidence amounted to just seven expended cartridge cases on the floor of the Range Rover.
Mick Steel was swiftly identified as a suspect, but there was not a shred of evidence to convict him. Dibley even worked out how the hit was played out – by two men, one of whom had been a passenger in the Range Rover. A third man must have driven the killers and, if the police could find him, he was the best bet for a first-hand witness to the crime. Cellular telephone network records indicated that the mobile phones belonging to the victims, plus Steele, Whomes and Nicholls, had all logged on to the satellite relay beacon nearest Workhouse Lane from 6.45pm to 7.10pm on 6 December. This placed them all close to the crime scene when the triple murder was committed. But with no firm evidence, the police investigation was stalled.
Then, in January, Nicholls had become very scared when Whomes threatened him. ‘What happened to Pat could easily happen to you, my old son. You can be replaced.’
For months following the murder, the hunt for the execution-style killers led nowhere… that was until May 1996, when Corry and Nicholls were arrested in possession of 10kg of cannabis. DS Ivan Dibley was to be proved correct. He coughed all he knew when he was charged as accessory to the murders.
With a £500,000 price on his head, and now facing a long sentence, Nicholls turned supergrass. He was placed in the Witness Protection Programme. He and his wife Sandra were installed in a safe house in February 1997, with the trial due to commence at the Old Bailey on 1 September, during which time he was kept in jail where he was put in a cell, and had, at his disposal, a multi-gym as well as a colour television. He also enjoyed takeaway meals.
The evidence later given by Nicholls was crucial to the Prosecution at the trial of Whomes and Steele. Identified as ‘Bloggs 19’, Nicholls related, ‘Jack made this really weird sound, like a series of quiet little snorts. I could just make out his silhouette in the rear-view mirror and his big shoulders were bobbing up and down. It took me a while to work out what was going on. Jack was giggling.
‘I was still looking at Jack,’ he said, ‘when Mick Steele appeared and opened the front passenger door. The interior light came on and that’s when I saw his hands. He was wearing surgical gloves and they had been splashed with streaks of blood. I then realised what they had done. I felt like someone had sucked all the air out of me and I could not speak. Mick told me to get going and I drove to Basildon on autopilot.’
As he drove, Nicholls listened with mounting horror as Whomes and Steele, still on an adrenalin high, discussed the triple murder. They told him that Pate Tate, the self-styled ‘hard man’ had ‘squealed like a baby’ just before he was shot.
During the five-month trial, the defence lawyers for Steele and Whomes challenged the grim story told by Nicholls in the witness box. However, the carefully prepared alibis provided by the accused men began to unravel under intense cross-examination, with Steele doing himself no favours by boasting of his previous convictions, mostly for drug offences, despite the advice of his lawyers.
The ‘star witness’ for the defence team was a William ‘Billy’ George Jasper. But the Crown proved that he was a ‘Walter Mitty’, a habitual confessor to major crimes. Jasper was a heroin addict who simply loved all the publicity.
The story concocted by Whomes, Steele and Jasper was that the gangsters had been killed by members of the Canning Town Cartel. Jasper had himself been arrested in January 1996 and had given police a yarn that he had met Jesse Gale, another East End heavy, then, with another man, they had gone to a Mexican restaurant to discuss the future of Tate, Tucker and Rolfe. In a nutshell, Jasper claimed that the deceased men had planned to take delivery of a haul of drugs and not pay for them. Jasper explained that Tate and Tucker had ripped off Gale and another man for some £20,000. He added that it had been him, and not Nicholls, who had driven a grey Fiat Uno and, for a fee of £500, had driven a man to Workhouse Lane to collect 4kg of cocaine – but his story was not believed.
The trial, which cost the taxpayer £1.5 million, concluded on 20 January 1998 when Whomes and Steele were jailed for life with a minimum serving tariff of at least 15 years. ‘There is no other sentence I can pass on you for these horrifying murders of which you been convicted than that of life imprisonment,’ Mr Justice Hidden told the pair in the dock. ‘You are both extremely dangerous men and you have not the slightest compunction for resorting to extreme violence.’
But was Nicholls to be believed? His testimony was riddled with holes, although he did earn himself the distinction of becoming the most famous supergrass in British criminal history since Bertie Smalls, who is the subject of some scrutiny in the next chapter. Nicholls was given a new name, a new passport and completely new identity and is now living a long way from Essex. He is quoted as saying, ‘I have this terrible guilt. I feel like I’ve been a right bastard, grassing up my mates. I know I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I just can’t help it. It’s going to be a long time before I can feel good about myself again.’
Whomes and Steele continue to protest their innocence for the triple Rettenden murders. Their appeals have been rejected by the
Court of Appeal and they have now applied for relief from the European Court. It might be obvious to say that, with a life sentence in front of them, any chance of being freed is one to be taken seriously, however long the odds.
8
The Adams Family
‘It is suggested that Terrence Adams was one of the country’s most feared and revered organised criminals. He comes with a pedigree, as one of a family whose name had a currency all of its own in the underworld.’
ANDREW MITCHELL QC, PROSECUTING COUNSEL
Most certainly not to be confused with the American Addams Family, the creation of American cartoonist Charles Addams that appears in print cartoons, television shows, movies and video games. The Adams family ruled through intimidation and violence and are rumoured to have been involved in 30 murders.
They had links to Colombian cocaine cartels and the Russian Mafia, loan sharking, protection rackets and money laundering through the Hatton Garden gem district in central London. They are said to have flooded nightclubs with Ecstasy in the 1990s, and are believed to have invented the ‘bike hit’, where two killers shoot their target from a motorcycle. Their terrifying reputation struck fear into the hearts of rival gangsters, while police, lawyers, and even judges, learnt to tread extremely carefully when they dealt with them – with one judge given around-the-clock armed police protection before the later trial of brother Tommy, who faced a million-pound cannabis smuggling charge.
In the early days, detectives were no match for the brothers’ sophisticated techniques and ability to corrupt. Scotland Yard failed again and again to nail them. Once henchman was sent a pig’s trotter through the post – a grim warning of worse to come, should he step out of line. He reported it to the Old Bill, who advised him to ‘forget it…what’s the point?’
Ordering brutal and sadistic punishments – and he often carried them out personally – the head of the family enterprise, Terrence ‘Terry’ Adams, was the brains behind their criminal operations. He looked like an ageing dandy, a cross between Liberace and Peter Stringfellow, but he was at the top of his profession and controlled his empire with such ruthless efficiency that he could have run BP or ICI. Yet Terry, who made Tony Soprano look like a pussycat, was the godfather of the nearest underworld network Britain had to the Mafia. He was the Capone of his time and, like Alphonse Capone, it was the taxman who finally nailed him.
One has to give Terry respect. He was ever the dapper gent in his velvet-collared overcoats. He lived in a £2 million house in north London crammed with stolen antiques; it was a far cry from his upbringing on the rough Barnsbury council estate in Islington. His family and close associates were reputably worth about £200 million, and they were feared far more than the Krays ever were.
Sean Adams – aka Tommy – handled the financial side of the firm, which was known as the A-Team, or the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate. Patrick provided the muscle. Terry was the most level-headed of this wild bunch; Tommy was wild, and the other brother, Patrick or ‘Patsy’, could be wild and crazy. As a former associate of the Adams has remarked, ‘A lot of people involved in this kind of business don’t have a lot going on up top. But Terry and his brothers were different. They were a real class act. Terry was always well dressed and in charge of whatever was going on. When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. He was like royalty.’
Terry was the oldest of 11 children, born on 18 October 1954 to a law-abiding, working-class, Irish Catholic family. He was raised in Islington, north London, and he was closest to his younger brothers Patrick, born 1955, and Sean, born 1958, with whom he entered a life of crime – a career of extorting money from traders and stallholders at street markets close to their home, in the Clerkenwell area, before graduating to armed robberies. For the record, Patrick served seven years in prison for armed robbery in the 1970s.
By the 1980s, the Adams family had moved into the lucrative drugs trade. They built up links with Yardie firms and the Colombian cocaine cartels. The money they made was laundered through various corrupt financiers, accountants, lawyers and other professionals; they subsequently invested in property and other legitimate businesses that left the Krays, the Richardsons and all of the Scottish mobsters put together, in the shade. And if anyone crossed them, revenge was swift and brutal.
In 1989, a 39-year-old pub accountant, Terry Gooderham, who skimmed £250,000 of drug money from the brothers, was found dead, alongside his girlfriend, Maxine, in a Mercedes. The killing ground was that most favourite body-dumping ground of east London mobsters – Epping Forest. According to underworld folklore, Gooderham begged, ‘You can’t kill me in front of my girlfriend.’ The executioner turned to Maxine, levelled a gun to her head, and shot her dead, saying, ‘You’re not with her now,’ and squeezed the trigger again.
32-year-old Irishman, Tommy Roche, was shot through the heart by a motorcycle hitman while working for a road repair team near Heathrow Airport in 1993. To alleviate his financial shortcomings, Roche had offered to act as a go-between for a cocaine syndicate, but he was suspected by the Adamses as being a scammer and a grass. He paid a heavy price.
Terry Adams suspected the former 32-year-old British high-jump champion, Claude Moseley, of trying to short-change him over a drugs deal. He sent enforcer Gilbert Wynter to ‘talk it over with him’ in 1994. Moseley was literally sliced in two with a Samurai sword. Wynter went on trial for murder, but the case was dropped when the key prosecution witness refused to give evidence. The hitman later disappeared, possibly concreted into the foundations of the Millennium Dome!
In the 1980s, the gang’s reputation for violence was pushed even further. The decade produced a shoot-out with a rival Irish family, the Reillys, who challenged the Adamses’ dominance of Islington. Patrick Adams and an associate went to a pub controlled by the Reillys and insulted one of them. The Reillys left the bar to arm themselves and returned. It was an ambush. Their BMW was fired on repeatedly by members of the Adamses’ gang. Remarkably, no one was killed, but the message sent out was crystal clear – ‘the Adamses run Islington.’
In 1991, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, a gangland veteran, was shot in the head outside a London club in another attack attributed to the Adams gang.
David McKenzie, a Mayfair financier, paid a high price for losing £1.5 million for Adams. He was summoned to ‘The Godfather’s’ house to explain. ‘Everyone stood up when he walked in. He looked like a star; he was immaculately dressed in a long black coat and white frilly shirt. He was totally in command,’ McKenzie said. Several days later, McKenzie was savagely beaten. The man accused of the attack stood his trial at the Old Bailey in 1999. However, the jury accepted his version that he had broken up a fight between McKenzie and another man.
By now, the Adams brothers were gaining a Teflon reputation – no accusation would stick. Tommy was acquitted in 1985 of acting as a courier, moving gold bullion stolen in the £26 million Brinks Mat robbery out of London. Patsy, who had been jailed for armed robbery, was acquitted of importing three tons of cannabis.
By the late 1990s, the heat was on. In 1996, the Inland Revenue caught up with Terry Adams. He offered to settle with them for £95,000 in cash.
In 1998, Sean ‘Tommy’ Adams was convicted of organising an £8 million hashish smuggling operation, and was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. When a judge ordered that he surrender some of his profits or face a further five years, his wife turned up twice to the court, carrying £500,000 in cash inside a briefcase on each occasion.
In May 2003, Terry Adams was arrested and charged with money laundering, tax evasion and handling stolen goods… and only with the full co-operation of MI5 was a solid case built. But the cost was colossal, and what was surprising was that Terry Adams’s boastfulness eventually turned out to be his undoing – he was caught on tape crowing about his crimes, battering his enemies with iron bars and kneecapping debtors.
In July 1997, Terry Adams was overheard talking to 41-year-old Saul ‘Solly’ Solomon Nahome, about a ri
val gangster who owed him £250,000. He said, ‘Then you let Simon give the geezer a hiding, right? I don’t give a fuck about the geezer… the geezer’s gonna be stamped on. He’s using the family name, the geezer’s using the family name… And, he’s gotta be hurt, this fella. We ain’t gonna be no one’s cunt, Sol.’
On 27 November 1998, financial adviser and diamond merchant Saul Nahome was shot dead outside his home in Arden Road, Finchley. Nahome was said to have arranged for £25 million to be hidden in property deals and offshore accounts. He was ambushed by a gunman who pumped four bullets into him and escaped on a motorcycle. Married to Joanna, with an 11-month-old daughter, it had been Nahome who had helped the Adams family melt down gold bars, and they believed he had squirrelled away some £25 million and transferred the cash away into offshore accounts.
Police also claimed that the family tortured a businessman so badly his ears and nose were left hanging by slivers of skin.
In another conversation, Adams tells a mobster, ‘He’s got to be spoke to and a slap… a right-hander in his face. You’ll have to tell Jimmy from me, I want the geezer livened up. I want them hurt double, double, double bad.’
He tells his notorious enforcer, Gilbert Wynter, how to deal with someone who has not ‘come up with the goods’ – repaid the money he owes. ‘I want to grab him, that’s it. That’s what I want, Gil. Gil, you do that for me, I’ll love for that, mate… I mean it, Gil. You’ve got to liven him up, put the fear of God into him, mate, and he knows it’s only down to you that he’s walking about and breathing fresh air.’ Wynter assured Adams he’d ‘open him up like a bag of crisps’.
The MI5 tapes would later prove crucial evidence against Terry Adams. He later told Wynter that when he catches up with another associate he is going to ‘knock him out, put him on his arse.’ In another recording, in September 1997, while watching the TV show Blind Date with a friend named Dan, he says, ‘Anyone who has it with a grass, is a grass. On my daughter’s life, I’ll do what I’ll do… on my baby’s life, I’m gonna butt him. I’m gonna smash him in the face with an iron bar.’
Gangland UK Page 15