The witnesses went on and on, all telling broadly the same story. But sometimes there were inconsistencies in their testimonies, which were pounced on by the defence barristers. The all-white jury found it difficult to follow the Jamaican accents and, after only thirty-eight of the planned eighty-seven witnesses for the prosecution had been called to give evidence, they sent a confidential note to the judge. It was the thirty-third day of the trial and the judge ruminated for a while on what the jury had said in the note. Finally Mr Justice Kilner-Brown announced, ‘I agree with you, members of the jury. It seems to me it would be an absolute waste of time to produce any more witnesses who may be regarded as rubbishy by you.’
The trial was abandoned and, on Monday, 23 November 1970, all the police officers were cleared. The judge thanked the jury and commended them, saying that the trial had at the very least proved that ‘the coloured community had nothing to fear’ from a British jury. Nottinghamshire Police Authority was quick to tell the local paper what a travesty it had been that any police officers had had to face charges. ‘It is regrettable that the force has been deprived of these officers for so long on the evidence of people who have never done a day’s work since they came to this country,’ said the authority’s vice chairman.
PG Man and his friends and relatives had been publicly humiliated, and through successive generations the resentment that built up around the case would prevent many in their community trusting authority in any meaningful way again. Some of the young Robinsons were more convinced than ever that the way to live their lives was to be the ‘bad black man’ and the second and third generations would embrace that role, as epitomised by Jimmy Cliff in the cult 1972 film The Harder They Come, the story of a Jamaican anti-hero who shoots a police officer. ‘I’d rather be a free man in my grave than living as a puppet or a slave,’ sang Cliff in the title track. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of PG Man’s and Douggie Man’s numerous offspring were caught up in crime. PG Man alone fathered seventeen children, while by the time Douggie Man’s eldest daughter Elaine had reached twenty, she had five children all by different fathers. One of Douggie Man’s sons had fathered seven children by five different women by the late 1980s. It seemed to the women that that was how many young Jamaican males behaved: they spread their seed and then abandoned you with a pile of dirty nappies and no money to bring up the children.
The British ska revival of the late 1970s, spearheaded by Jerry Dammers’ 2 Tone record label, and the popular reggae sounds of the Rastafarian movement gave Douggie Man’s V Rocket sound system a boost and some welcome earnings but some of the family seemed to see criminality as their only route to financial survival. The young rude boys of the second generation were of a grittier character than their fathers. PG Man and his peers had been happy to deal in cannabis and take in a bit of cash by running blues nights, but they generally eschewed violence. Some had put a few white women onto the streets but they looked after them better than the Glaswegian pimps they had taken over from. The next generation, though, were carrying knives and even guns, robbing people and trafficking prostitutes all over the country. If you were in London and picked up a prostitute near Paddington or King’s Cross during the late 1980s, there was a good chance that they had come from Nottingham. And then crack cocaine burst into the ghetto.
By 1989, Nottinghamshire Police had begun to see the symptoms of this new cocaine derivative on the streets of Radford, St Ann’s and the Meadows. It wasn’t that they were arresting more people or busting the crack houses which had begun to spring up, or that they were making huge seizures of the drug; it was the sinister breakdown of morality. Crack left an indelible trail everywhere its users went: prostitutes beaten black and blue by their cane-carrying, crack-smoking pimps; men willing to sell their own girlfriends on the streets to buy more crack, and the girlfriends willing participants because they needed their crack pipe full too; robbers who previously drew the line at stealing a handbag from a pensioner now not only robbing them but beating them black and blue when there wasn’t enough money in the stolen purse to get a rock. It was not just that this drug left the rude boys unable to pay their debts, it was morally bankrupting sections of certain communities in Nottingham, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and London.
In June 1989, the Nottinghamshire drug squad made its first major seizure of crack. Roy Scott, aged thirty-six, a small-time street dealer from Denman Gardens, Radford, was stopped in the street with more than 120 rocks after a tip-off. Each rock of crack, from which you got about five smokes, was then selling at £25-£30. Scott was jailed for seven years. It was the largest single seizure of crack cocaine in the country that year and it came straight off the street; crack didn’t hang around in lock-ups for weeks like cocaine, heroin, speed, ecstasy or cannabis might, with dealers waiting for the right moment to shift it wholesale. Crack, by its nature, is consumed rapidly by its users and when it’s gone they crave more. It was a high-turnover trade. Mobile phones had also made dealing easy and the dealers distanced themselves from potential arrest further by corrupting the local youth. At the bottom of this huge business pyramid, permeated with crack and heroin, the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who rode around St Ann’s on mountain bikes would take the risks. Rocks of crack in pocket, they would make handovers and get paid a few pounds by the dealer. Career paths no longer meant anything to these teenagers; they weren’t bothered if the police picked them up. What could the police do when they told officers they had just found the bag of drugs in the street? As youngsters they aspired to be footballers or pop stars, not doctors or police officers, and if they didn’t make it they knew they would be able to make it as drug dealers in a few years’ time. Then they too could have a BMW and some nice jewellery.
One of the principal reasons that crack cocaine was turning up with the same regularity and volume as in London was Nottingham’s links to Jamaica. Even before crack began to appear, Jamaican criminals on the run, often from London, would regularly lie low in Nottingham with a distant relative or friend. But now the violent gangsters known as Yardies were appearing on the streets. Political turmoil in Jamaica caused many to flee for the United States and the United Kingdom. Many gravitated first to London, then began moving to provincial cities like Nottingham. They hung around the Black and White Café on Radford Road and the Marcus Garvey Centre on Lenton Boulevard, and swaggered around in heavy gold selling rocks down at a cavernous late-night drinking hole on Ilkeston Road, the Tally Ho (later called the Lenton, then the Drum). It was popular with some of the black homeboys, but even they knew not to push it when the Yardies were around. They were all unaware that an undercover cop from London was hanging around too, having managed to convince everyone he was a Yardie. The Tally Ho was seen as an ideal shopfront from which to peddle rocks without the potential danger of bumping into rival posse members, as frequently happened in London, often with fatal consequences. In addition, they had a ready-made market, as the Tally Ho was a favourite haunt for white street girls who would sell their skinny bodies every night on Forest Road for the price of a few rocks of crack.
Politically and socially, Jamaica was going through torrid times. The peaceful movement of Rastafarianism, led by Bob Marley, masked deep troubles. Corrupt politicians working for the two main political parties, the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), were recruiting crack dealers from the ghettos of Kingston and Spanish Town at an alarming rate. These politicians needed the fear the Yardies brought to enforce their will and keep the lid on their own criminal activities. This was complicated further by the fact that Jamaica had become a stop-off point in the shipment of cocaine from South America to the United States. Someone on the island had discovered that if you boiled down the cocaine with some baking soda in a pan you could remove impurities and create a hard rock which, if smoked, could take you to the moon – but only for a brief few minutes. Young Jamaican men soon didn’t care if smoking this stuff was like putting a gun to your head; after just
a few tokes from a makeshift pipe fashioned from a beer or pop can, they were ready to sell their souls for the next hit. It was just about the most addictive drug that enforcement agencies had ever come across and pretty soon it was making its way to the UK – and taking a leading role in the most violent crimes in this country. The three things you could be sure of if you had bumped into a Yardie in the early 1990s were that they would have a wad of cash on them, some rocks of crack (or access to them), and, most of all, a firearm close to hand.
The Robinsons were caught up in this. The first evidence of the wave of mayhem that crack would bring came in a quiet street in the Wollaton area on 11 October 1991. Ian Bedward, a twenty-eight-year-old homeboy, had succumbed to the drug and the paranoia it brought on made his tempestuous relationship with partner Sophie Robinson, Douggie Man’s granddaughter (her mother was his eldest daughter Elaine), with whom he had three children, worse still. Bedward was involved in armed robberies in the city, ran various drugs as a courier, and had robbed some drug dealers of their cocaine. He had armed himself, fearing they would come after him. One Tuesday, after a row, Sophie left their house in Whitby Close for a few days to go down to London, leaving the children with him. Ian, who thought she was seeing other men, consoled himself by writing rambling letters that he hoped would make some sense of his turbulent life. They rambled on about how some of the Robinsons were mixing with Yardies and mentioned a gunman called Eaton Green, known as ‘Leon’, who was selling crack around the housing estates of St Ann’s and Radford like a candy store salesman. Bedward became more and more distraught as the hours ticked by and he sat alone with his thoughts. By the next day he could see only one course of action open to him: he lined up his three children, Lorne, aged four, Loren, three, and Lorene, two, and shot them through the head as they lay on the sofa. Then he sat beside them and pulled the trigger of the Colt 45 resting against his head. The bodies were discovered on the Friday when neighbours, worried they hadn’t seen the children and unable to get an answer from the house, called the police. Sophie arrived home the same day, just as police made their grim discovery, and ran down the street screaming hysterically. Two of the children had been killed by the same bullet. One part of the letter Bedward left said, ‘See you in heaven cos down here is hell.’
Detective Peter Coles, who later became head of CID, said the horrific scene was one of the worst he encountered in his police career. ‘It really was truly sad and shocking and just so distressing seeing these little bodies. It was really the first time we had also come across the Yardie phenomenon in terms of violence in the city. We had the letters examined for intelligence purposes, some information was extracted which proved useful. It was the first time we encountered Eaton Green’s name but they were such rambling letters it was hard to make much sense out of them. What we did have was the first bit of information that there was a connection between the Robinsons and Eaton Green.’
Next it was PG Man’s family who had tragedy knocking at their door. Some of his sons had formed a gang with friends from the St Ann’s estate, now known in ghetto terms as the Stanz, and they called themselves the Playboy Posse. In the early 1990s they got into a war with the Meadows Posse, who would also become known later as the Waterfront Gang. It was the beginning of the black-on-black gang violence that was to blight the city intermittently over the next fifteen years. At the heart of it was the territorial drug business and, in particular, cocaine and its derivative crack. A number of the Robinson clan had succumbed to crack by the early 1990s and turned to crime to pay for their drugs. Some of the Robinson girls took to street robbery and prostitution as a means to buy their next rock, organising gangs of shoplifters who would fleece designer ware from the city’s fashion houses or carry out street robberies. The rude boys of the 1980s, with their neat clothes and flash cars, who had earned a significant living off the street girls and weed they traded in, were now virtual down-and-outs, like the prostitutes who worked for them. Crack had created a major economy in its own right as the consumption of the little brown rocks spread like a cancer through the ghetto. One of Douggie Man’s sons, Easton ‘Bubsie’ Robinson, went to prison for six years for robbing women on the street to fund his crack habit (twenty-three years after tasting his first crack pipe, Bubsie was still at it: in 2008, at the age of fifty-seven, he pleaded guilty to shoplifting from the Gap and Madhouse clothes stores to buy crack). Another son had been lifted by the police for attempted murder after violence erupted in a black club where two Birmingham dealers had stolen crack from one of the Robinson’s dealers. Then the third generation of Robinsons started to succumb to crack. Douggie Man’s granddaughter Sophie, who had had the life sucked out of her when her three children were murdered, became a crackhead and began to sell her body on the streets.
Against this backdrop, the men were still able to maintain some semblance of togetherness and organisation through membership of the posses. These small, tight-knit groups gave those living in the ghettos of St Ann’s and the Meadows a sense of meaning; an order among all the chaos that surrounded them. They knew what constituted their patch and who to be wary of, and the Playboy Posse knew they had to be on the lookout for the Posse from the Meadows. No one knows quite how it all started, but by the early 1990s gang life within St Ann’s and the Meadows estates was flourishing. One of the major flashpoints between the gangs, which acted as a catalyst for the war, was ignited when some of the Playboy Posse were ambushed and one of PG Man’s sons was slashed and needed sixty stitches. Four weeks later the Playboy Posse took retribution and attacked five members of the Meadows gang as they came out of a club, leaving one with his skull fractured in two places. Then the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl was alleged against three of the Playboy Posse. More violence followed.
Finally, on 1 August 1993, PG Man’s twenty-one-year-old son Lloyd, who had taken to carrying a machete for self-defence, got into a dispute with some of the Meadows gang. One of Lloyd’s friends had stolen a bike from a youngster and the Meadows crew were not happy about it. They considered it to be disrespect of a grave nature and someone had to pay for it. PG Man’s family had gathered at his house to celebrate the birth of his latest grandson and, after a while, Lloyd and his brother Daston, aged nineteen, went off to the nearby Afro-Caribbean Centre, near Hungerhill Road. Just after midnight, the pair were about to leave the club when they were confronted by around fifteen youths looking for a fight. Daston went to raise his father from bed, but before PG Man could intervene, the Meadows gang had attacked Lloyd, striking him so hard with a baseball bat that the force almost split his head in two. He died three days later in hospital.
PG Man was a broken man from that day on. ‘I saw a boy holding a baseball bat walk behind the crowd, come up behind Lloyd and whack him on the head,’ he later told the Nottingham Evening Post. ‘As he collapsed to the ground, I fell to my knees and put my hands on my head. From that lick I knew he must be dead because it went right through me. I can still hear the crack of the baseball bat against my boy’s head. I was broken down bad by Lloyd’s death. I am not the same person no more.’ The young man who struck the fatal blow, Gary Mayor, a nineteen-year-old amateur boxing champion, was jailed for life for the murder in November 1994. Three more gang members, Sean Cope, aged twenty, Dean Johnson, nineteen, and Simon Rowbottom, twenty, received between three and six years for manslaughter.
CHAPTER 2
n the early hours of 30 May 1993, a blues party was well underway in a disused warehouse in Ashforth Street, St Ann’s. Among those who had been forewarned about the event was the Yardie Eaton Green. Green had fled to the UK to escape an attempted murder charge in Jamaica and to elude fellow Yardies who had scores to settle. By the age of twelve, he had left school in downtown Kingston and was mixing with gangsters who had affiliations with the PNP. They ran areas of the city with the help of corrupt politicians and policemen. By the time of the 1980 elections in Jamaica, the criminal gangs were merging almost seamlessly with the politicians. Green
was at the vortex of it, now a gunman doing the bidding of corrupt PNP leaders who wanted to take down rivals working for the JLP.
Green became part of the Tel Aviv Crew, named after the slum area of Kingston where he was brought up. These were government housing projects built around yards, hence the name ‘Yardie’. The Tel Aviv Crew was divided into a number of posses or gangs, including the Rapid Posse, the Kremlin Posse and the Desert Posse, to which Green belonged during the 1980s. Before the decade was over he had been involved in a number of murders, which he would later confess to, spent four years in prison and been arrested for a multitude of crimes, from murder to armed robbery. Reluctance on the part of witnesses to come forward shielded him from several life sentences in Jamaica. In 1991, awaiting trial for a shooting, he jumped bail, booked a flight to the UK and walked through immigration to begin what he hoped would be a new and prosperous life.
Green was a dangerous man who was known to use a firearm at the slightest provocation. He became a frequent visitor to Nottingham from London and was soon known to the police. Nottinghamshire Police intelligence picked up information that Green was selling crack cocaine in the city: his name had cropped up in the letters written by Ian Bedward which were seized by police. In fact Green was only one of a small but growing number of Yardies branching out from the capital and selling drugs in the major provincial cities of Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.
According to testimony at a later court trial, two brothers from Birmingham who had recently fallen out with the Robinsons in an apparent turf rivalry were expected at the blues party, which began on the night of 29 May. Police suspected these brothers were ferrying large amounts of cocaine into Nottingham. At a party two weeks earlier, two of the Robinson clan, Peter and Ricky – Douggie Man’s grandsons – had been severely beaten up. Another of the family, Leslie, who was working as a clerk at a law firm and would later become the main organiser for the Nottingham Afro-Caribbean Carnival, had his car torched in an attack police believed was linked to the feud. Eaton Green, who had been partying at the Marcus Garvey Centre in Nottingham the same night with some Yardie friends, had also been ‘dissed’ by some of the locals. One of them had saluted Asher’s sound coming from the speakers with a volley of gunfire into the ceiling, which had almost deafened one of Green’s associates, Rohan ‘Bumpy’ Thomas. Bumpy wasn’t happy.
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