John Grieve, head of the S011 team that handled Green, seemed unperturbed. He did, however, apologise for not sending Nottinghamshire the ‘right information in the right format at the right time’. He told reporters, ‘Green was well worth the investment. It is extremely unfortunate and to the detriment of the people of London that we no longer have him.’ Nottinghamshire Police’s Head of CID, Phillip Davies, took a different view. ‘Informants are essential,’ he said. ‘However, there are stringent guidelines and procedures which must be observed if the integrity of the system is to be maintained.’ No doubt his officers wouldn’t disagree with the sentiments of using informants like Green in the ongoing battle against such seemingly impenetrable problems such as Yardie gangs – after all, they have used many such duplicitous informants themselves. Years later, in February 2006, a man whose identity they protected as a witness in a murder case, Trinidadian Trevon Thomas, shot and seriously injured one of their own officers, Rachel Bown, as she investigated a burglary in Lenton. What angered Nottinghamshire Police was that their Scotland Yard counterparts had failed to control their source and then, when presented with the unpalatable truth, tried to protect his identity and stymie the work to arrest him by withholding information. The fallout led to poor relations between the two forces for years. It also led to tensions between local police and the victims of the blues party robbery, who felt Nottinghamshire and the Met were using the black community as pawns in a game between each other.
For Eaton Green it was to be, predictably perhaps, a short-lived existence in Jamaica. On 20 April 2005, police were directed to his Mitsubishi car close to the Central Sorting Office in Kingston. In the boot they found Green’s body, wrapped in tarpaulin and riddled with five bullets, signifying a Yardie execution. Green had been lured from his Craig Town home along with two other men, who were also shot dead. It seems that Green, who had been back for more than three years, had carried on his trigger-happy exploits. Police suspected him of a number of crimes, including the murder of a young woman found dumped at Constitution Hill the previous year. Green was the 508th murder victim in Jamaica in a year that was not even four months old. He was thirty-seven, having passed the average life span of a Yardie criminal by some five years. The scale of the death toll demonstrated just how cheap life in Jamaica had become. The ripple effect, seen in Britain with Yardies like Green and his associates, carried with it a cut-price attitude towards life. By the turn of the century, black-on-black violence had become an everyday occurrence in Nottingham, London, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham. The difference was that the crimes were being committed by a new generation of criminals: so-called homeboys, born and bred into British life who were now setting up their own posses, rapping in patois, dripping in gold jewellery and carrying guns.
CHAPTER 3
y the beginning of the 1990s, as the Robinsons fell under the spell of crack cocaine, a new drugs king emerged who would rise to such an influential level he would be feted by politicians in Westminster and police officers alike. I met David St Anthony Francis at a hospital next to Nottinghamshire police headquarters. The meeting had been arranged as part of research into a television documentary about the drugs, gangs and firearms problems being faced by the city in 2004. Francis, by then a veteran of the crime scene, had been out of prison for a few years – urban legend has it that on his release a friend arrived at Derbyshire’s Sudbury Prison in Francis’ favourite Porsche to pick him up – but the only way I could make contact with him was to visit his jewellery shop in the Sneinton area and drop off a message.
He responded promptly, partly because the message had contained a letter from a former police officer who knew Francis well and had effectively used Francis, albeit unwittingly, as an informant. He arranged to meet me at the private Nottingham Park Hospital, as he was undergoing treatment for diabetes. The hospital is just a stone’s throw from police headquarters at Sherwood Lodge, a place Francis was very familiar with. He was not at the hospital when I arrived, but shortly afterwards a phone call came through. He apologised. ‘I’m down at the Ferrari dealership having a look at a car but I won’t be long,’ he said. I wondered if this was some sort of joke but then, while having a coffee in the hospital’s cafeteria, I saw a car draw up. It was a new Bentley. From the driver’s side a bulky white man in his late fifties, reminiscent of a minder, got out. There was a pause of a few minutes, then Francis appeared, stepping almost regally out of the passenger door. It transpired that it was his own vehicle and the Bentley dealership had provided him with a driver for the day so that he could browse some new cars down at the Ferrari showroom.
After waiting a few minutes for him to make his way into the building, we wandered down towards his room. The forty-one-year-old Francis, bespectacled and with long dreaded hair, lay himself on his hospital bed, kitted out with his own Versace bedspread, ready to hold court. He was keen to give very little away but exuded a kind of enigmatic charm which you couldn’t help but admire. I can’t better the description of him by investigative journalist Nick Davies in his book Dark Heart. ‘Dave positively breathes money,’ wrote Davies. ‘He wears diamonds in his teeth. They have been drilled into the enamel by a specialist dentist – half a dozen sparkling advertisements for his success in life. When Dave smiles, the rest of the world sees his wealth winking back at them. In his ear, he has another diamond, on his wrist he wears a heavy gold Rolex with diamond studs which he says cost him thirty grand. There is gold around his neck, more gold around his wrists.’
I mentioned to this black Goldfinger the media coverage he had received and in particular Davies’s book, in which he prominently features. ‘Just as well I’m not the sort of person to bear a grudge, eh?’ he said, pointedly. When I raised the subject of wanting to do a documentary with him, he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why would I want to do that? There’s nothing in it for me. My days of all that [crime] are over. I’m a grandfather now, I’m just getting on with things at the shop and keeping out of trouble.’
I was interested in his views on white criminals, particularly as the vacuum created by his own arrest and conviction for supplying heroin had been filled by the mob known as the Bestwood Cartel, and signs were that the police were about to bring them down. ‘It’s taken them long enough,’ he said. ‘I mean do you think they would have got away with it for so long if they had been black? That’s Nottingham Police for you. I’m black so they make me out to be this big dealer. I’m just another nigger dealing drugs to them.’ Francis was always quick to play the race card. When I raised the subject of a friend of his who had been forced to quit a high profile job because of allegations of impropriety, he said, ‘Ah well you see, he’s got his troubles now just because he was trying to help out a few brothers. Don’t tell me it’s not because he’s black.’ The fact was, as I was to discover, that Dave Francis had done more to damage the black community in Nottingham than possibly any other individual.
He grew up in Arnold, a leafy suburb to the north of the city. By the time he was fourteen, he had already come to the attention of the police for handling stolen goods. He was, as a youth, very much feared at school, taking on pupils much older than him in the playground and often leaving them bruised and battered. By the time he was a young man he was beating up hardened thugs twice his age. The playground fights didn’t always go his way though. One fellow pupil remembered an incident in which Francis almost came off worst – to a girl. ‘Dave had these huge hands which gave him the tools to be a formidable fighter. One day this girl, who was very hard and very useful with her fists, got into an argument with Francis and launched at him. As the fight went on the classroom resembled a warzone, there was blood and desks and chairs strewn everywhere and the teacher just ran off because she couldn’t handle it. In the end, after her beating seven shades of shit out of him, they called it a draw. Francis so respected her that he then asked her out, even though she had left him battered and bruised.’
By his early twenties, having moved to the
Meadows estate, he was a prolific young offender and was on his way to heading the Meadows Posse. This gang of black criminals, which was highly organised by four main leaders, specialised in armed robberies, burglary, handling stolen goods and drugs. To avoid detection they wore Jackson Five-style afro wigs and used stolen cars. If stopped by police they would admit to taking the car but could claim that any evidence found in the vehicle, such as a firearm or overalls that matched the description of the armed raiders, must have been in the car when they nicked it. When a burglar cleared out a gun shop in Carlton, the Meadows Posse took control of the haul of firearms. These guns would regularly turn up at crime scenes over the next decade. Later, Francis even admitted to officers that he had control of the distribution of firearms across the city. ‘Guns are fine if they are in the hands of people who know how to use them,’ he told officers.
In July 1989, the gang came a cropper after a painting was stolen from the house of an eighty-three-year-old woman in the Bilborough area of Nottingham. Believed to be a Gainsborough worth £1 million, it passed through the hands of Francis and his Meadows Posse; they were arranging for it to be handed over to some unscrupulous art dealers for £300,000. In fact, they were dealing with undercover police officers. Francis stayed on the periphery of the sale and let two other Meadows Posse main men, Tony Slacks and Alvin Henry, arrange it. Slacks met the ‘dealers’, who included an undercover police officer and a police informant, at the city’s Albany Hotel and said he was willing to sell the painting for a discount price. It had been almost a year since the burglary and the Posse were keen to shift it. Slacks and Henry arranged to meet the ‘art dealer’ himself at a Gamston Airport, near Retford in Nottinghamshire, where the exchange would take place. An undercover officer flew up from London in a light aircraft. While the Meadows gang had no inkling they were dealing with undercover officers, the police were also unaware that the gang planned to rip them off. Henry and Slacks were armed with sawn-off shotguns and had brought flex to tie up their victims. When it came to the exchange, Slacks became suspicious and asked to see the money again. Then he realised it was a setup. ‘We’re both playing same game,’ he told the undercover officer. ‘That’s not the money. I was going to rip you off but you are doing the same.’
The incident descended into chaos as police moved in to arrest Slacks and Henry. Slacks was apprehended as he tried to run off, but Henry threatened to shoot some of the unarmed officers and managed to escape. He was arrested a few days later. Despite feeling he had been fitted up, Slacks was given twelve years for his part in the crime, which included possession of two firearms. Henry was cleared of conspiracy to rob but convicted of firearms offences and sentenced to three years. The painting turned out to be a fake and was probably worth just a few hundred pounds.
The case dealt a severe blow to the Meadows gang and, though they had all grown up together, they began to distrust each other. Then they were caught up in another case, after attempting to rob a store in Nottingham. Again, police seemed to have inside information and the robbery went wrong, resulting in the arrest of one of the Posse, Godfrey Hibbert, an ex-boxer from the Meadows. A white man called Kevin Morledge, who had acted as a dogsbody for the gang – Francis called his white helpers ‘tampaxes’ because they were on a string controlled by him and would absorb any unwelcome problems around him – had been approached by the police after he was arrested on burglary charges. Francis evaded the police and was busy devising a cunning plan to destroy the police case against the Posse. He gained access to the depositions in the attempted robbery case and knew who was saying what to their solicitor and what evidence the police had. In Morledge, he saw an opportunity to wreck the police probe. Officers had been to see Morledge in Lincoln Prison after he let it be known that he wanted to speak to them about a deal. Before they could make a follow-up visit, Francis smuggled a tape recorder to Morledge. When two officers from Nottinghamshire Police arrived again at Lincoln Prison, they outlined the help Morledge might receive if he gave evidence that Hibbert and Francis were involved in armed robbery. Morledge secretly taped the conversation, and then got the tape out to Francis, who edited the recording to make the case against the detectives even more damning.
By the time the case came to trial, in December 1989, Morledge was claiming the police had tried to get him to make a false confession in return for immunity against prosecution. The judge at Nottingham Crown Court dismissed the jury and then heard, in closed sessions, about the tape recordings. Though the police denied making the offers and said the tape should be scrutinised forensically to see if it had been tampered with, the judge had little option but to dismiss the case against both Hibbert and Morledge. Five years later, Morledge received £10,000 from Nottinghamshire Police as compensation. Dave Francis was once again safe, and as Hibbert had ended up going to prison anyway after being convicted of a separate drugs offence, could now crown himself King of the Meadows Posse in his own right.
But the fact was that by 1991, there really was no Meadows Posse left, or at least not as it had been. Francis was still organising the movement of stolen jewellery and gold but had moved into the drugs business in a big way by 1990. Though he owned a gold shop, he still made regular trips to Birmingham to see two contacts who were prepared to melt it down for him, no questions asked. Still, Francis saw that the drugs business was where the money was to be made. There were two drugs which were bringing in colossal profits for those wanting to trade. Ecstasy sales were booming. It was clubland time in Nottingham and people were coming from London, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham to enjoy the sounds and hedonistic nightlife at venues like Venus, as well as at illegal raves. Francis organised security for some events, along with nights at the Marcus Garvey Centre, which would spill over into violence when rival gangs fought it out on the neutral turf of Radford.
Controlling the doors at large raves effectively meant control of the drugs going into the venues. Francis’s street dealers could sell the pills without any worries and he could cream off the profits. A genuine ecstasy pill, most of which were coming in from factories in Holland, sold for around £20 in the UK at the time, and dealers were making huge profits. Speed was also still one of the main drugs of choice in Nottingham. Some said it had been around since the days of the miners, who would take doses to stay awake on long shifts underground. By the late 1980s, the mines were all but gone and the speed culture became a recreational one. The rate of consumption during the late 1980s and early 1990s was such that police were often baffled when they came to make busts. Frequently they would discover that in the few days it had taken it to organise the raid, kilos and kilos had already been sold off and consumed, suggesting a quick turnover.
Cocaine was also increasing in availability. It was already destroying the Robinson family, some of whom were members of the St Ann’s Crew (or St Ann’s Massive or Playboy Posse). During his trips to Birmingham to melt down the gold he was accumulating, Francis hooked up with the two Birmingham brothers whose feud with the Robinsons had led to Eaton Green’s infamous blues party robbery. Francis believed he could help the brothers make inroads into the Nottingham drug scene and at the same time gain help in distributing cocaine with some heavy backers who would not fear other traders from the St Ann’s estate. But this move, together with potential flashpoints at the nights he ran at the Marcus Garvey Centre in Lenton, meant trouble was always just round the corner. It ultimately brought him into conflict with the Yardies and Francis decided to strike out further on his own.
By 1993, Francis had served a number of spells in prison and had thirty-odd convictions dating back to 1976. They included possession of a firearm, actual bodily harm, unlawful sexual intercourse and possession of drugs. Now he embarked on a new criminal project, building up a network of contacts who ranged from the influential within local politics and the police to the useable young wannabes who saw the chance of a career doing the bidding of Nottingham’s premier gangster by becoming street dealers. Francis
was to achieve this partly by getting himself a proper job. He applied for, and amazingly landed, a posting as the manager of a local drugs charity project which specialised in 24/7 outreach work for addicts, particularly those ravaged by crack cocaine. The charity, the Association for the Prevention of Addiction (APA), later to become Addaction, was setting up units across the country and Nottingham addicts were to be among the first outside London to benefit from its Open Doors crack awareness team. Francis, despite his convictions and his flamboyant lifestyle, was the ideal candidate as far as the APA was concerned. Here was an intelligent, streetwise black man with whom drug users could identify. He breezed through the interview.
Former CID boss Peter Coles remembers Francis visiting him at the time. ‘He had just been to the interview and he drove down to Central Police Station and parked his Porsche up in the garages there. He was keen to stress his life of crime was over, he said he had made four million pounds by that time and he was going to be a Good Samaritan now and help the community. I was aghast. I couldn’t understand how this man who was wearing an Armani suit, driving a Porsche and had all these convictions could have got the interview, let alone the job. Didn’t anyone think to ask why this man, dripping in jewellery with a Rolex watch worth fifty thousand pounds on his wrist, would want a job as a minor social worker? These crack awareness teams were beginning to spring up all over the country and ironically there was another individual who had done a similar thing down in north London. Francis knew this man well through the national drug supply network. He was higher up in the chain than Francis and I think Francis aspired to be someone like him and I think that’s where he got the idea from. It was a perfect cover for him to branch out into large-scale dealing.’
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