Bonded by Blood

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  I rang Steve and Nathan and told them there were ten of us going down to Bath in two cars. They had to ensure that they stayed out of the way until I called them. I drove to Bath on my own and met Billy as arranged. I reminded him of the plot and said that I would meet him there again in an hour’s time, but first he would have to give me the car. He agreed.

  I phoned Steve and Nathan and drove to meet them. I said there had been a bit of trouble with Billy and so the other people with me had driven out of Bath because they feared the police may be looking for them. I added that I still had to meet them later as they wanted paying. I gave Steve and Nathan their car and they gave me the £3,000.

  Thomkins, who had arrived with them, was going mad. He said another man, named Steve Woods, had burgled his house and stolen quite a lot of electrical equipment – televisions, videos, etc. – and covered his children’s bedroom floor and walls with excrement. He was under the impression that we were to sort out Steve Woods as well for this money. He claimed that Woods and Gillings were in on it together: Gillings had the car; Woods, he alleged, had done the burglary and given the goods to Gillings to fence.

  I told Thomkins it was the first I had heard of it, but if he wanted us to, we would resolve that matter for him. But it wouldn’t get done today. Thomkins was adamant he wanted it sorted that night. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said. I shook hands with Steve and Nathan, jumped into a cab and went to meet Billy. I gave Billy his £500 and kept the £2,500 for myself.

  Later that night, I got a call from Thomkins. He told me he couldn’t stand the thought of knowing Steve Woods had robbed his house and covered his children’s bedroom in excrement and got away with it. I said that Woods hadn’t got away with it.

  ‘Too right he hasn’t,’ he said, ‘I’ve just fucking shot him.’ He explained what he had done. After leaving me, he was in a rage. He had gone home and picked up a shotgun. He had gone to Woods’s house and put on a balaclava before knocking on the door. Woods’s girlfriend answered the door. Thomkins pushed her aside. Woods was in the hallway. It must have been a terrifying sight for him to see a man in a balaclava with a shotgun. Thomkins fired and hit Woods in the upper thigh. He then ran over to Woods, who had collapsed on the floor, put the gun to his head and shouted, ‘I want my fucking television back.’ Woods’s girlfriend was screaming. Thomkins levelled the gun at her head and told her to shut up. Then he made his escape.

  I remarked to Thomkins that that kind of behaviour was a bit over the top for the sake of a 14-inch Nicam television. He obviously did not think so. This was becoming the norm for more and more people in these firms. It was all about having front. Thomkins wanted people to know you couldn’t take liberties with him.

  Now Thomkins had calmed down, he didn’t have a clue as to what he was going to do. It wasn’t really my problem, but he was associated with us and you have to help your own. I suggested he conceal the weapon, jump in a car and meet me in Basildon as soon as possible. I didn’t know if Woods still had Thomkins’s television or not. Either way, it didn’t really matter: according to the tabloids, everyone who is sent to prison these days gets given their own television anyway, so Thomkins was in luck.

  I could have done without Thomkins’s problem at that particular time. The police in Basildon, although maintaining their distance, were keeping a very watchful eye on my activities. Whatever, Thomkins was in trouble and I felt obliged to help. I wouldn’t be able to keep him at my house because the police often watched those who came and went. I rang Pat, the landlady at a pub called the Owl and Pussycat in Basildon. I had sorted out a bit of trouble for her when she ran a pub in Southend. I asked her if she would put my friend up for the night. Pat asked me what the problem was. It was no good lying, so I told her Thomkins had shot somebody. At first, she was reluctant to help me, which is understandable – she had never even met the man and he had just attempted to murder somebody; the thought of spending the night alone with him must have been quite unnerving – however, in the end, she relented.

  I met Thomkins in Basildon in the early hours of the morning and took him to Pat’s pub, where he spent the night. We would decide what we were going to do in the morning when he had a clearer picture. The following day we contacted people in Bath to try and find out about Steve Woods’s condition. We learned that Thomkins had blasted a large hole in Woods’s upper thigh. It was unlikely that he would ever be able to walk properly again. His life was not in danger, but the police were treating it as an attempted murder.

  We arranged for people to pick up the gun and dispose of it, and for Thomkins to go and stay with some people in Liverpool for a few days while the dust settled. The dust, unfortunately, in Thomkins’s mind, didn’t take long to settle. Within a week, Thomkins rang from Liverpool. He told me he had outstayed his welcome and had nowhere else to go. I had a friend in Edinburgh who would put him up, but Thomkins wanted to come back to Basildon. I sorted it out with the landlady at the pub again and he returned.

  I knew Pat would not put up our fugitive for ever, so it was decided that Thomkins’s problem in Bath had to be sorted out sooner rather than later. It wasn’t going to be easy because of the nature of the offence. Trying to persuade a man who had been shot that the person who had done it was not all that bad and didn’t deserve to go to prison was going to take more than tact.

  Woods had a bit of form himself, so he knew the score. It meant our task was not impossible. I rang Billy Gillings, the man who had done the deal on Steve and Nathan’s car, and asked him if he would mediate and arrange a meeting between myself and Woods. If it made Woods feel safer, he could bring anyone he wished.

  Billy went to see Woods and he agreed to meet at Leigh Delamere motorway services near Bristol. Woods insisted that his brother, who was nicknamed Noddy, should accompany him. When he was discharged from hospital I went to the meeting on my own. The Woods brothers and I all sat down at one of the cafeteria tables. Noddy Woods started getting a bit lippy about Thomkins, so I told him in no uncertain terms that we didn’t have to sit there and discuss it. I was offering him and his brother a way out. ‘If you persist with your lip,’ I said, ‘you’ll get taken out of the game like your brother. I suggest you go and get some tea for us both, while I discuss this with Steve.’

  It was important to let him know who was in the driving seat. I told Woods that we didn’t normally do deals with people who inform on one of our number to the police but because he had suffered over a rather trivial matter we were making an exception. We were prepared to offer him £20,000 not to make a statement against Thomkins.

  Woods said he had already made a statement. I said he would be paid the money if he retracted it. Woods wanted half upfront and half on completion, but I told him ‘bollocks’. Our word is our bond. Do your part of the deal and you’ll get your dough. He agreed and we went our separate ways. We didn’t have any intention of giving him a penny.

  A member of the firm named Mark accompanied me to the next meeting. Gillings and Woods met us at an out-of-town location near Bristol. Billy came over to our car and I asked if Woods had retracted his statement. Billy said he wouldn’t unless he got half of the money upfront.

  ‘Put Woods in your car and take him down the road,’ I said. ‘Then tell him to get out. Drive away and don’t look back.’ Billy asked why. I told him that Woods was going to be shot. Billy said he didn’t want any part of it. ‘OK. Tell Woods to get in our car because we want to discuss payment with him.’

  Billy agreed, but he kept repeating that he didn’t want to be involved in any shooting.

  Woods came over. ‘There’s no problem, get in the car,’ I said. We drove to a deserted lane. A gun was produced and Woods was told to get out of the car because we didn’t want any of his ‘shit or blood’ messing up our vehicle. Woods was ordered to lie on a grass bank. The gun was put to his head. He was terrified. He had not yet got over being shot six weeks earlier. His whole body was shaking and he was weeping. He was told that the firm did not pay gr
asses. ‘Now you are going to die.’

  ‘I don’t want any money, I just don’t want any trouble,’ he said.

  ‘First you break into our friend’s house and rub shit over the walls and now you come and demand £20,000. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘I’ll retract my statement and that will be the end of it,’ he said.

  He was told that if he didn’t, people would come back and he would vanish. The talking was over. Woods went away and within three hours he had retracted his statement. We returned to Basildon and Thomkins contacted a solicitor. The solicitor said he would check to see if Woods’s statement had been retracted. If it had, he would arrange for Thomkins to give himself up the following day. The solicitor was not aware that Woods had been threatened; he thought he had retracted his statement of his own free will.

  The next day, I took Thomkins to Barking station in east London and we said our goodbyes. He travelled to Bath, where he gave himself up. What we hadn’t counted on was Steve Woods’s wife. She had not retracted her statement, so Thomkins was charged with attempted murder, threats to kill and possessing a firearm with the intention of endangering life. He was remanded in custody to await trial.

  Obviously a lot of our conversation around that time was about Thomkins. Some liked him, some didn’t. Once he was out of the situation, I was told that he had been talking behind my back about me. It was a hammer blow. I had done all I could to help him and yet he had been slagging me off to big himself up. I wasn’t happy at all, but our world was overflowing with such people.

  I contacted Steve Woods via a third party and told him Thomkins’s protection had been removed. Woods and his friends could do as they wished. I went to visit Thomkins in Horfield prison in Bristol with two friends who were going to see him, while he was being held on remand. I told them I wanted to go and see him first. I would only be five minutes. They could wait outside. I went into the visiting room and Thomkins held out his hand. ‘All right, mate,’ he said.

  ‘You’re no fucking mate of mine. You’ve been slagging me off.’

  A prison visiting room isn’t the best place to settle one’s differences. At that moment, I didn’t really care. I went for Thomkins. The prison officers were alerted and Thomkins backed off to where they were. I walked out of the visiting room and have not seen him since. It is a shame because I considered him a good friend. Why he did what he did to me, I will never know. He was later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for shooting Steve Woods.

  With Thomkins, Steve and Nathan out of the picture, Tucker needed to recruit a new gang of drug dealers for Club UK. He telephoned me and asked how Murray was performing at Raquels. I told Tucker that he and his dealers were discreet, efficient and no problem. Tucker asked me to take Murray over to his house for a meeting.

  When we arrived, he told Murray that he wanted him to take over the sale of drugs in Club UK. Murray would have to pay £1,200 rent each weekend, but in return, Tucker told him, he could earn in excess of £12,000. Murray stuck out his hand without hesitation. The deal was struck.

  For the introduction to Tucker, Murray said he would pay me £500 a week once he started. I would have no further involvement. It was, he said, a drink for doing him a favour. It had been quite a lucrative ten-minute meeting.

  In order to make Club UK pay, Murray would have to run a pretty slick operation. He would have to have enough dealers in the club to meet the demand in order to reap the rewards his predecessors had earned. Murray found the going hard. He couldn’t earn any money because he couldn’t recruit enough dealers. He was selling approximately 500 Ecstasy pills a night, nowhere near enough to reap any benefit. Needless to say Tucker demanded his rent regardless.

  By the time Murray had paid for his stock, there wasn’t anything left. Each week he remained there, he was simply getting deeper and deeper in debt. He begged Tucker for more time to pay, which he was initially granted, but he was never going to be given the time he needed.

  Chapter 5

  In January 1990, Steven Ellis had met Pat Tate in Chelmsford prison. Tate had just been extradited from Spain following his rather dramatic escape from Billericay Magistrates’ Court. Ellis, known to many as Nipper because of his size, had been remanded in custody to await trial for an allegation of robbery.

  Nipper was no stranger to trouble and knew his lack of size was a disadvantage in his dealings with fellow criminals and in an effort to overcome this he began training hard to bulk himself up. Tate, a knowledgeable and competent bodybuilder, agreed to train with Nipper and before long the two had become friends.

  In April 1991, the prosecution dropped the robbery charge against Nipper citing lack of evidence and he was subsequently released from Chelmsford prison. Tate had by that time been sentenced to serve ten years’ imprisonment for the Happy Eater restaurant robbery. This sentence was later reduced to eight years after he appealed. When Tate was finally released in the summer of 1994, he and Nipper began to hang around together in the pubs and clubs of Essex.

  Tate was having problems with his long-term girlfriend, Sarah Saunders, mainly because his years in prison had diluted the love she once had for him. The fact that the couple were living in cramped conditions didn’t help their situation, so, in an effort to rectify this and improve relations between them, Tate asked Nipper if he could rent out his flat, a spacious three-bedroom property. Tate assured Nipper that he only needed it for a few weeks because he and Sarah were buying a larger property together. Nipper agreed, but weeks soon turned into months and eventually he resigned himself to the fact that Tate was going nowhere in the foreseeable future.

  Tate introduced Nipper to Tony Tucker, whom he described as being a ‘great friend’. Tucker in turn introduced Nipper to Craig Rolfe, whom he also described as being a ‘great friend’. Tate was constantly telling Nipper how ‘brilliant’ Tucker was, and Tucker was constantly telling him how ‘brilliant’ Rolfe was. They made Nipper feel as if he had really landed on his feet by meeting them. He thought he’d found three great mates and believed they would do absolutely anything for him.

  Little did Nipper know, that’s the way Tucker, Tate and Rolfe treated everybody initially. They would make someone feel as if they were the best friend they ever had. They would use them, then discard them, as if they had never existed. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe’s excessive use of drugs began to concern Nipper. When the three men were out of their heads, they were very different to the warm, helpful men Nipper knew and respected.

  One evening, Tucker called a drug dealer over to his table in a nightclub and asked the man if he had any cocaine for sale. The dealer smiled, thinking he was making a useful contact, and said he had. Tucker told the man he wanted three grams. When the man put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the drugs, Tucker grabbed him by the throat, slapped him across the face, took the parcel of drugs and told him to fuck off. Nipper was horrified and told Tucker that he was out of order. Tucker, as usual, just laughed.

  In another incident, Nipper had been asked by a friend if he knew anybody who would be interested in purchasing £250,000 worth of stolen traveller’s cheques for £60,000. When Nipper mentioned it to Tucker, he said that he and Tate would buy them. Nipper was told to set up the deal and he would be given a ‘drink’ for doing so. Tate, Tucker, Nipper and four other men went to purchase the cheques at a meeting in a pub in Canning Town. When the man who had the cheques came out of the pub to greet his new business associates, Tate punched him to the ground and began beating him up. Tate made his bloody victim hand over the cheques and the gang walked off laughing. Nipper was mortified because he knew his friend would blame him for setting him up.

  Concerned for his safety and disgusted by such behaviour, Nipper began to distance himself from the trio and they soon noted the fact. In an effort to sever all links, Nipper told Tate he needed his flat for himself. Reluctantly, Tate moved back in with his partner. This caused further resentment, and relations between the men began to fester.

&
nbsp; The inevitable confrontation came one weekend when Tate, Tucker and Nipper went into a 7-Eleven store in Southend. Nipper threw a bread roll at Tate, who retaliated by throwing a cake at Nipper. The three men were all high spirited and were soon enjoying a full-on food fight in the shop. The male assistant kept telling them to stop, but they just got more and more carried away. Eventually, the assistant had had enough and told them he was going to call the police. Tate pushed the man and then ripped the phone out of the wall, shouting, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that!’ Tucker said they would pay for the damage, but as they were talking, the police arrived. Tucker and Tate walked off down the street and Nipper was left to face the music. It was no big deal for people like them. They thought it was all a big laugh.

  The following Sunday, Donna Garwood, Tucker’s teenage mistress, was trying to get in touch with him. She couldn’t ring Tucker at home because she knew he would be with Anna Whitehead, his long-term partner. Tate was at home with Sarah, so Garwood couldn’t call and ask him to contact Tucker either. Garwood, not for the first time, felt isolated and grew increasingly frustrated.

  Tucker had installed Garwood in a small, one-bedroom flat that Tate owned in Basildon so that he effectively had 24-hour access to her. Being just a teenager, Garwood felt lonely and unable to cope when Tucker was not around. In order to try and alleviate the situation, Tate had moved a prostitute he knew named Paula into the flat so Garwood would have company. Paula was 18 and had just come out of prison with a fair amount of emotional baggage, not least her drug problem, but Tate had warmed to her. He used to call her ‘Wild Child’. Such were his feelings for Paula, he eventually told her she was no longer allowed to work as a prostitute. Unfortunately for Donna, Paula rarely stayed at the flat.

  Desperate to hear from Tucker, Garwood decided to telephone Nipper, who was at home but, unknown to her, asleep in bed. When Garwood asked Nipper, who was annoyed at being woken, if he had seen Tucker, true to form, he was sarcastic. ‘He’s probably at home giving his old woman one up the arse,’ he said. Nipper hadn’t said it maliciously. You could never get a straight answer out of him. He was always joking.