Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  ‘I was outside my son’s school waiting to pick him up when the mobile phone rang, and it was Alan. I said, “What are you playing at?” And he said, “I can kill you now, bitch. Everybody will think it’s Kenny Noye.”’ Marie Decabral then wrote a letter to Kenny Noye in Whitemoor Prison. ‘I wanted Noye to know the truth,’ she said. ‘But I also reasoned that if he needed my help he would not hurt us.’ Two weeks later, on 3 August 1990, Marie took a call on her mobile phone. ‘Hi, I’m Kevin Noye, Kenny’s son,’ said a male voice.

  ‘I nearly dropped the phone,’ Marie later recalled. They arranged to meet 30 minutes later outside a McDonalds in Eltham, south-east London. ‘I was so nervous that Kevin said he could tell it was me from 20 yards away. We sat in his car and he asked me what information I had and why I wrote to his dad. I told him that Alan had lied under oath and he asked if I could prove this. I said, “Yes.”’ Marie claimed she also told Kenny Noye’s 30-year-old son that she was ‘very scared’ of his father. He responded, ‘Why would my father want to harm you?’

  Meanwhile the trail for Decabral’s killers went totally cold. An inquest into his murder the following summer of 2001 returned a verdict of unlawful killing. As Detective Chief Inspector Bob Nelson said at the time, ‘We have failed to accumulate enough evidence to get the perpetrator.’

  But the legend of master criminal Kenny Noye continues. There were even rumours that he was innocent of the road-rage murder of young motorist Stephen Cameron. Others say he’s so well connected with detectives in south-east London and Kent that he helped to get the Stephen Lawrence suspects out of police custody after making one phone call.

  But the gunning down of Big Al Decabral in broad daylight in Kent by that lone shootist sent shockwaves through the south-east London underworld and police. Noye has friends and enemies on both sides of the fence, and most were asking how Decabral could have been presented at the Old Bailey as the prosecution’s star witness in the murder trial of Kenneth Noye.

  Noye’s world is filled with death, drugs, robbery and gold bullion. Yet he has spent much of his time living openly in palatial splendour, right slap-bang in the middle of Kent. But the death of seedy, obese Big Al provoked a minefield of questions – some of which might end up helping Noye win his appeal against his life sentence for the murder of motorist Stephen Cameron.

  The key to Big Al’s assasination probably lies in a vast area of Kent countryside stretching from Noye’s favourite village of West Kingsdown past Biggin Hill – and its handy airstrip – across to Swanley. It’s known to Kent detectives and villains as ‘The Bermuda Triangle’. As one senior police officer explained: ‘Things that go in there have a habit of never coming out again. And we’re talking about everything from people to lorryloads of bootlegged fags ’n’ booze.’

  The construction of the nearby M25 has meant easy access to the Bermuda Triangle at all times of the day and night. And it was on the Swanley intersection of the M25 that Alan Decabral insisted he saw Kenneth Noye kill Stephen Cameron in May 1996. One Kent detective summed up the police attitude when he told me: ‘I can guarantee that if there were 20 vehicles on that M25 roundabout at the time of the Cameron killing then at least five of those drivers would be known to us as villains.’

  A coincidence? Or was Decabral put up as a star witness at Noye’s Old Bailey trial to ensure that Noye – who once knifed an undercover police officer to death in his garden and was later acquitted of murder – wouldn’t get away with another killing? If Noye and Decabral did know each other before the Cameron murder was committed, why wasn’t it more openly revealed during Noye’s trial?

  And would Noye – as many were quick to claim in the wake of the Decabral shooting – be obsessive (or stupid) enough to commission a hitman to so publicly execute a witness in his trial when he was intending to present himself in an appeal as a victim of some appalling injustice?

  Noye knows full well that Decabral’s previously undisclosed criminal connections would have worked much better for him if he was still alive. As ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Nick Biddiss, who led the early stages of the hunt for Noye, said after the Decabral killing, ‘If Noye was responsible, he shot himself in the foot. If he was going to do it he should have done it before the trial. If he was behind it now he could not have timed it worse because of his appeal.’

  Some faces in the badlands of south-east London and Kent reckon it’s more likely that one of Noye’s loyal cronies paid for the Decabral hit out of respect for Noye, forgetting about the importance of his appeal. Others believe Decabral’s killer was paid by Noye’s enemies, determined to make sure Noye would be blamed and his appeal would be left in ruins.

  Another story doing the rounds is that Noye ran up so many debts while on the run from police following the Cameron killing that a group of his angry associates commissioned the shooting. ‘Think about it,’ one underworld contact said to me. ‘It makes total sense. And it would explain why the execution was carried out in broad daylight. They was sending a message to Noye.’ It’s certainly true that Decabral had so many enemies of his own that they might have ordered the hit knowing that Noye would get the blame. Another popular theory is that Decabral took a £100,000 bribe to agree to water down his Old Bailey evidence, but then reneged on the deal and gave such a damning account that it guaranteed Noye would be jailed for life. ‘Whatever the truth a lot of people are going to have to watch their backs – and I’m talking about police and villains,’ says one who should know.

  It can also be revealed now, for the first time, that Decabral boasted of meeting Noye at a number of gangland parties before the Cameron killing in May 1996. ‘If this is true it totally throws into question his validity as a witness in a murder trial,’ explained one criminal lawyer. Other criminals insist Noye and Big Al were well acquainted.

  Kent Police – who masterminded the prosecution of Kenneth Noye – claim they already knew about Decabral’s criminal background but Noye’s lawyers made no attempt to probe it in open court. However, days after Decabral offered his evidence to police, a team of Kent detectives raided Decabral’s home looking for drugs. They found a stash of guns and took away £150,000 in cash which they later returned untouched. All charges against him were dropped when the officers realised Decabral was an important witness in the upcoming Noye trial. The police who prosecuted Noye have always claimed they knew nothing about that alleged raid on Decabral’s home. As one retired detective told me: ‘How could one group of officers in the Kent Constabulary not know about the raids carried out on Decabral’s house?’

  Part of the answer may lie in some of the intriguing developments that occurred in the run-up to Noye’s Old Bailey trial. One ex-Kent detective who followed the proceedings closely explained, ‘I heard there was some wheeler-dealing behind the scenes.’

  The result of this ‘wheeler-dealing’ was that Noye’s representatives hammered out an agreement in an effort to ensure Noye would not face a mandatory minimum sentence after being found guilty of the Cameron killing. As one ex-Kent detective explained: ‘It’s like the wild west out there. There are some outlaws in south-east London who are a law unto themselves. If they’ve got a problem with the cozzers [police] there’s always someone they can call to sort things out.’

  A spectre has hung over police in Kent and their neighbours in the Met ever since Kenneth Noye first started greasing palms back in the early Seventies. Noye even joined a Freemason’s lodge in west London to get nearer to ‘the enemy’. Noye already boasted of a circle of acquaintances that crossed all social divides and included several Kent magistrates. Noye also cashed in on the policeman’s favourite philosophy that ‘a good detective is only as good as his informants. And a copper’s informants, by their very nature, are going to be villains or associates of villains.’

  The problem with this philosophy is that it leaves detectives wide open to accusations of corruption. Criminals, like Kenny Noye, have happily helped police in an effort to divert attention from
their own activities while at the same time obtaining, through the usefulness of the information given, a degree of protection from prosecution.

  And Kenny Noye’s activities have also never been inhibited by incarceration in Her Majesty’s Prisons. At one stage in the late Eighties he was purchasing shipments of ecstasy pills in Amsterdam through a fellow inmate inside Swaleside Prison, in Kent. That inmate was bodybuilding drug dealer Pat Tate who later died in the notorious Essex Range Rover killings when three criminals were shot dead in a field in December 1995. Now I can reveal for the first time that another one of Pat Tate’s ‘clients’ was Alan Decabral. Yet more evidence of connections between Noye and the man who was murdered in a car park after he’d given evidence against Noye.

  In the mid Eighties, multi-million-pound drug deals took over from security van robberies as the number one source of income. Dozens of upwardly mobile druglords, money launderers and handlers of stolen property turned the Kent countryside into their premier destination and they spent a lot of out-of-pocket expenses on keeping certain members of the local constabulary happy.

  Step forward Alan Decabral – once a renowned drug dealer in Acton, west London – now looking for pastures new and a bit of peace and tranquillity in the Kent countryside. He, like Noye and dozens of others before him, was attracted by the idea that it was ‘much more tricky to shadow a villain down a deserted country lane than a busy London street’.

  At the other end of the county, the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone provided the gateway to Europe and all its highly lucrative drug-trafficking routes. One retired bank robber has made a small fortune running villains such as Noye and Decabral from a tiny port near Dover across to Holland where drug barons head off for ‘company meetings’ in Amsterdam. ‘You can get in and out of Europe without the cozzers knowing anything about your movements,’ explains retired cannabis smuggler Gordon Scott. ‘The fella who runs it has this tasty motor launch complete with bedrooms and a fully stocked bar. He’ll even bring on the dancing girls if you book well in advance.’

  Another of Noye’s one-time neighbours who no doubt crossed paths with Decabral was John ‘Little Legs’ Lloyd. He recently returned to his detached home after a five-year stretch in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. One south-east London source told me: ‘I’ve heard that Decabral used to boast about his connections to Lloyd. There’s no way that Kenny Noye didn’t know all about him.’ There are quite a disturbing number of Kenneth Noye’s associates who’ve met violent ends. Decabral came across many of them at the Kent gangsters’ parties he boasted about regularly attending.

  On 1 April 1998, the UK’s first National Crime Squad was set up by the Government to combat the growing menace of organised crime. The unit’s launch was directly linked to the newly installed Labour government’s dissatisfaction with the way that criminals like Kenneth Noye and Alan Decabral had been able to increase their activities and continue to live openly in luxurious surroundings.

  Not surprisingly, many of Kent’s most infamous ‘faces’ were among the top targets. National Crime Squad chief Roy Penrose even insisted at the time: ‘We will be targeting criminals who are the most difficult, the most prolific and the most lucrative. There is no hiding place. We will use every legitimate method to track them down.’

  Police in south-east London still believe that other villains in the area were ‘queuing up’ to pull the trigger for their hero, Kenny Noye. ‘The money paid for the job is almost insignificant against the brutal kudos to be gained from being “the man” to blow away the chief prosecution witness against Noye,’ explained one detective. ‘The killer would have respect and forever be owed a favour by Noye. You cannot underestimate Noye’s continuing influence in the underworld because of his access to untold wealth.’

  Kenny Noye’s appeal against his conviction was dismissed, but a later appeal against his life sentence was accepted and it was reduced to a minimum 16 years. The mystery of who commissioned the hit on Big Al Decabral remains to this day.

  Chapter Three:

  SWIMMING WITH SHARKS

  The Lincolnshire village of Uffington (population 530) lies just a few miles from the ancient market town of Stamford, the setting for the BBC TV series Middlemarch. Most of its houses are occupied by wealthy, middle-class professionals: businessmen, lawyers, accountants and officers from nearby RAF Wittering. Estate agents use words such as ‘idyllic’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘tranquil’ to describe Uffington.

  Resident Diane Emerson-Hawley seemed the perfect example of the sort of glamorous blonde that the village welcomed into the fold. Diane and her new husband Colin Harrold moved into their £400,000 home – set in half an acre of grounds and screened from the road by a tree-lined garden and driveway – in the first few weeks of 1999. Mr Harrold had originally trained as an engineer but now ran a printing business and a separate enterprise selling recycled books for use as pet bedding. The couple, both divorcees, had first met on a blind date and married in 1997. Mr Harrold had two sons aged six and ten by his first wife.

  At the back of the property – called Barn House – was an impressive-sized swimming pool where Diane liked to keep fit most mornings before she drove her sports car with personalised number plates to the beauty salon she owned in nearby Stamford. Diane and Colin often went jet-skiing or took Colin’s powerboat out at weekends. Thirty-six-year-old Diane was known as a down-to-earth, warm and generous lady without an enemy in the world. A lot of that attitude came from having started her working life as a low-paid casualty nurse who’d sacrificed her youth to look after her sick mother. Diane had certainly packed a lot into her life.

  In the middle of October 1999, Colin Harrold flew to Amsterdam on one of his regular business trips. The following day, when his wife did not answer the phone at their home, he contacted his brother, Neil, who lived locally.

  Neil went to the house and found the back door wide open and no sign of a break-in. In the couple’s bedroom a wardrobe had been ripped open and Colin Harrold’s clothes were scattered everywhere. A nearby door that led to the loft was slightly ajar. It appeared that someone had been frantically searching through the house. Neil Harrold then noticed a trail of blood from the kitchen towards the front door. He immediately left the house and ran to the local pub, Ye Olde Bertie Arms, arriving at 7.45pm ‘in a very distressed state’. He asked to use the telephone to contact the police.

  Officers arriving at Barn House found Diane Harrold’s body floating fully clothed, face down in her outdoor swimming pool. The couple’s home was immediately cordoned off by police. It appeared Diane had first been attacked in the kitchen and then dragged outside. A tap in the sink was still running when police arrived at the scene and a bottle of washing-up liquid lay on the floor where it had fallen during some sort of struggle.

  Detectives concluded that Diane must have still been alive, though possibly unconscious, when she was hauled outside and thrown into the water. Her killer had left a chilling ‘calling card’: the body of Diane’s beloved pet cat was floating in the pool beside her. Investigators also found that a substantial amount of cash was missing. But with no sign of a forced entry there wasn’t a clear motive for the murder.

  Meanwhile husband Colin Harrold flew home from Amsterdam and went to stay with friends. As Diane’s father-in-law later told reporters: ‘If I could have picked a daughter from anyone in the world, it would have been her and I know Colin loved her very much.’ Everyone was in an understandable state of shock.

  The news of Diane Harrold’s violent murder sparked a series of lurid headlines in newspapers across Britain. There were rumours of a vendetta against her beauty salon. One year earlier she’d bought the Cameo Health and Beauty Salon in Stamford and had been struggling to make it work. Then all the windows were smashed and she was also plagued by a series of strange phone calls, including bogus bookings and cancellations. Lorraine Rose, who ran the nearby Poppies dress shop, later explained: ‘The girls in the salon were scared by all the strange
phone calls and cancellations. They knew something was not right but we never imagined something like this could happen.’

  Back in Uffington, residents were understandably stunned by the murder. ‘Diane was a terribly nice person and there has never been a cross word about her in the village. How does someone so nice come to an end like this?’ asked one neighbour.

  Police appealed through the media for help in tracing Diane’s movements between 3pm on Tuesday, when she was last seen alive, and Wednesday evening when her body was found. As Detective Superintendent Chris Cook pointed out: ‘It is likely that the offender will be bloodstained and I would appeal to anyone who has any suspicions regarding any relation, friend, neighbour or associate to get in touch.’

  Then investigators began unravelling the life of Diane and Colin Harrold. It emerged that they’d met through a lonely hearts advert placed in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph newspaper. For Diane, it had been love at first sight and friends admitted she was much more keen to get married than he was. Two years after their wedding – in early 1999 – Colin Harrold told his best friend Darren Lake that Diane was ‘bleeding him dry’ of money. Lake later recalled, ‘He said Diane wanted children, which he did not. He wanted his freedom.’ Lake and Harrold had met many years earlier when they were both apprentices at an engineering firm.

  At the point when he got married for the second time, Harrold’s speciality was buying thousands of end-of-line books from publishers for a few pence a title, claiming they were to be shredded. In fact, police discovered he’d then sell them on to shops at home and abroad, making massive tax-free profits. He claimed he even bribed officials at book companies to turn a blind eye. ‘People were looked after,’ Harrold later said. ‘It was a win-win situation all the way down the line.’ Many of the deals were in cash and he planned to set up bank accounts in Malta to avoid tax.