‘Tell your husband to keep his mouth shut or there will be more of the same,’ said the voice.
Fortuitously for the police, the raiders left a baseball bat behind, mistakenly picking up one in the house owned by her son as they left. It had DNA on it, and could have identified one of her assailants. After a few weeks the baseball bat went missing from the police’s exhibits. No one was able to find it.
Kevin Musgrove eventually served four years in prison. When he came out on parole, assets investigators demanded £200,000 which they said was his share of the value of the cannabis, even though the cannabis never was his and he had made nothing from the sale of illegal drugs. When I met him, he had not long completed his sentence and there did not, on the surface, seem to be a great deal to explore. He had been convicted, after all, by a jury of twelve people ‘true and good’. But once he had finished telling me his story I had no doubt that a serious miscarriage of justice had taken place. His greatest crime was to be naïve in not checking out the tenant of his property. The police had asked him why he hadn’t checked up on his tenants with regular visits. That may be a priority in the current age of hydroponic cannabis factor-ies in rented properties, but this was 2000 and such checks were only made then by the most circumspect of landlords. The evidence on which he was convicted was circumstantial at best and, though Musgrove’s legal team was given disclosure in the case, they believe that there should have been more video footage from the surveillance bug. They also suspected that there was a participating informant used by the police, which was not disclosed to his defence team.
More information emerged about Musgrove’s miscarriage of justice after the first publication of this book. A deal had indeed been done between a police officer and Colin Gunn which was brokered through a solicitor used by Gunn. In essence the deal was this: Gunn would tell them all about the drugs found in the house in Kimberley if he was given a favourable outlook on his own case for which there had been an arrest warrant issued after he failed to answer bail on grievous bodily harm charges over a fight outside the Astoria nightclub in 1998 (see here). Secondly, questions were also being asked about why the judge who had heard the original outline of the prosecution case against Kevin Musgrove during his first few appearances at Nottingham Crown Court in February and March 2000, and who had told the prosecution in open court he would not countenance the use of a serious drug dealer as an informant, was replaced with another judge before the case went to trial. At the time of writing, a submission regarding these matters and others which raise serious questions over the handling of Musgrove’s case was being drawn up for Criminal Cases Review Commission, which will decide whether to refer it to the Court of Appeal. It is hard to see what Musgrove could have done to prevent the catastrophe that befell him. He had to sell everything to pay a drug debt which wasn’t his. He no longer has a garage and has to use the facilities of a friend but, more than anything else, he is desperate to prove his innocence.
If Musgrove’s case is placed alongside that of another drugs case which took place a year earlier, the injustice seems even more acute. In spring 1999, customs investigators had been tracking a large shipment of cannabis and amphetamines from a French HGV all the way off a ferry at Dover. Part of the shipment had been destined to go to the Gunns and their Bestwood Cartel. Customs men trailed a van which came off the ferry from Calais and watched closely as it made its way to Quarry Farm, off the A46 near Newark. There several men began to load the forty-tonne lorry and place items into a transit van. With the players seemingly caught red-handed, the call sign for the strike was given.
Six men were arrested at the scene and the customs officers then moved in to survey the smuggled goods. At first they believed they had a 300-kilo haul of cocaine and cannabis. Only later, after analysis, were the drugs properly identified. Altogether there were 156 packages of cannabis and 258 packages of amphetamine sulphate with a street value of around £4.3 million. The trial was eventually scheduled to take place in Manchester the following year. All the paperwork was completed and in due course it would be for a jury to decide the defendants’ guilt or innocence. The defendants included a former Nottingham police officer who, according to evidence given in court, was seen unloading the lorry and helping to load up the transit along with another local man. Four others from Liverpool, Manchester, West Yorkshire and Blackburn were also in the dock.
The case opened at Manchester Crown Court in September 2000, and all seemed to go well until, on the third day, the prosecution and defence teams asked to see Judge Michael Henshell in chambers. Two days of legal discussions then began behind closed doors. Then the judge called the jury back into court and explained that they would not have to sit through the trial any further or be called upon to make a judgement on any evidence they had so far heard. The prosecutors were throwing in the towel. It was a further day before the Customs investigators had anything to say in public and when they did no one was any the wiser as to what lay behind it all. Peter Hollier, a senior Customs and Excise investigations officer, defended the decision as best he could but some felt there was a hollow ring to his words. ‘This is an internal Customs and Excise decision,’ he told reporters. ‘We have stayed proceedings – this means they will not stand trial. It was a major boost seizing the drugs before they got onto the streets and we put a lot of effort into the case but we are sure this is the right decision.’
Clearly there must have been a good reason why the case of Kevin Musgrove had gone ahead, despite there being no evidence of a business partnership between Hibbert and Musgrove other than through the tenancy of 1 High Street. If any suspicions had been raised about a participating informant then it is unlikely Musgrove would have stood trial. And clearly there was a good reason why Customs chose to stay the prosecution in the case of the Newark drugs trial, but no one seemed able or willing to explain to the general public. The likelihood is that it was also connected in some way with another case or an informant whose position could have been jeopardised by the Newark case going ahead. But there was one other common thread running through this, aside from the likelihood of informants being used. In both cases, the drugs were destined for Colin Gunn, and yet in neither of the cases was anyone from the Bestwood Cartel in the dock. This was to be a story which would be repeated a number of times in the future. When Robert Briggs-Price was under surveillance during 1999 and 2000, a number of calls were intercepted from a phone linked to Colin Gunn, but National Crime Squad operatives, who were responsible for monitoring all the calls going in and out to Briggs-Price, wrote off the material, saying it had not been possible to decipher what was contained in the conversations.
By 2000, there appeared to be some kind of force field around Colin Gunn that prevented the law enforcement agencies getting anywhere near him. The police in Nottingham were also fighting a second front in the form of another outbreak of black-on-black gun crime in the city centre and had set up a specialist team, as Scotland Yard had done with Operation Trident, to tackle the problem. It was called Operation Stealth, and while manpower was concentrated on Stealth, there were few eyes watching what was going on in Bestwood.
DAVID AND COLIN Gunn grew up initially in Eastwood, just outside Nottingham. David was born first, in 1965, and Colin followed on 29 March 1967. In part they were clichéd by-products of a single-parent family, along with another brother, Andy, and a sister, Julie. Their father had left the family home when they were young and they lacked a stable male role model. When the opportunity arose to move to Bestwood, their mother, Carol Mills – who later married a man called Stephen Hudson, grabbed the chance. She had friends on the estate and it was nearer to the city centre. Bestwood, once a mining village but now a sprawling post-war estate of red brick semi-detached homes properties on the northern edge of Nottingham, would become their fiefdom. Colin, in particular, would come to dislike migrating anywhere outside of it.
One event in their formative years gives an early clue to the contradictions within them. As
teenagers they appeared in a local church magazine article which praised their crime-busting heroics. A street robber had attacked a woman and made off with her purse. Colin and David gave chase and apprehended the man before giving the thankful woman her purse back. How accurate the reported incident is must be open to conjecture, but at the same time as they were apparently battling crime on their streets they were known as bruisers in the playground at Henry Whipple Junior School, where David met his future (now estranged) wife Sandie. In those early days, the older David had the more fearsome reputation, though not as far as Sandie was concerned: ‘He and his family had moved from Eastwood and I was the gaffer, like the main girl at the school. He was a bit cheeky to me and we had a bit of a fight. I won and we decided that we quite liked each other,’ she told the Nottingham Evening Post. It was the beginning of what would later become a twenty-year marriage.
By the time they reached Padstow Comprehensive School, Colin was fast catching up. To fellow pupils, Colin Gunn was bully-in-chief, intimidating others with his cold, steely eyes. ‘If anyone stared at him too long he would come over and beat the living daylights out of them,’ said one ex-pupil. ‘Even then he seemed paranoid. If you got on with him then you became part of his gang and he would protect you. He never excelled at anything in school except bullying and fighting in the playground and having his mates around him to show he had a bit of power. I guess even though he came away without any academic qualifications he took some of the lessons he learned in the playground with him. One thing stands out and that is that none of the other kids would ever think to grass him up, not if they wanted to go home in a healthy condition anyway. Even then he knew how to use the power of fear over other people.’
By the time he was only just into his teens, Colin was already carrying out burglaries on the local estate and mixing with older people who were veterans of credit card and cheque fraud. It was his financial dealings that first got him into trouble. He was part of a gang run by another family, with whom he would remain in close contact in later years, who were kiting cheques around the city. The scam was run by one of the Dawes family, who later based themselves in Sutton-in-Ashfield, in north Nottinghamshire, and it ran into tens of thousands of pounds. Colin, then in his late teens, received his first custodial sentence of six months. One young officer who interviewed him at the time said there was nothing in his nature to mark him out from scores of other crim-inals doing the same thing: ‘He was just an average, run-of the-mill, petty criminal. He didn’t seem at all bothered that he had been arrested or that he was looking at prison time for the first time in his life. If anything he was probably looking forward to it in the sense of it being a badge of honour.’ At around the same age, David was arrested but no charges followed, though he was to later be convicted of other crimes including threats to kill and possession of offensive weapons.
By the early 1990s, with both in their mid-twenties, David and Colin were steadily clocking up convictions such as burglary, theft, handling stolen goods and violence. Like other fledgling criminal gangs, they built up their enterprise by banking on the people they had grown up with and who they could trust. Most were from the estate, though there were others from Sherwood and even further afield who had good drug supply connections in Leicestershire. Some were minions but would later rise to be lieutenants in the command tree of the criminal group, like Jamie Neil, who came from gypsy stock. Others were already well respected and trusted by Colin, men such as Dave ‘Baz’ Barrett and Kevin Warsop. All of them would play their part in helping to control various criminal activities on their patch and all would become members of the Bestwood Cartel – a name coined by the gang itself. For each person who swore loyalty to the brothers, there was an extended family in all sorts of jobs who could help them out.
‘It was mad, like you could find out anything,’ said one former associate. ‘Somebody had a relative in the council who had access to this or that, could find out where so-and-so had been moved to if they owed a debt and they needed to be tracked down, somebody else’s girlfriend worked for social services, so-and-so had a couple of mates working for British Telecom, all that kind of thing. If you wanted to find someone it was no bother, you could trace just about anybody and the beauty of it was that the people doing the favours never really knew they were ultimately doing it for a criminal enterprise. They were our friends.’
Colin and David realised that for all the brawn needed to maintain the standing of their Bestwood Cartel, they also needed information. Information was power. The growing army proved to be useful in all sorts of ways and the brothers, too, were united. ‘You knew that you couldn’t upset either Colin or David if you wanted a quiet life,’ said another former associate. ‘They looked after each other; they were pretty close in those days. David would be the only one who could get away with taking the piss out of Colin. Colin had this kind of compulsive obsessive fear thing about dirty ashtrays and fag ends and one stunt David would pull would be to fill up Colin’s coat pockets in the pub with the contents of various ashtrays while he went off to the bog. When he came back in David would just sit there and watch as the touch paper was lit and Colin would go berserk until David calmed him back down. On the other hand I think it was Dave who got Colin into the coke big time and that was a big mistake.’
Colin was forging stronger links with the crime family he previously had been involved with in cheque fraud. It was run by brothers John and Rob Dawes and their friend Gary Hardy, the son of a Hell’s Angel leader in north Nottinghamshire. Colin was also talking deals with people like Robert Briggs-Price and John Paul Allen, a major dealer from Woodthorpe, Nottingham. Allen was eventually jailed following a drugs bust and went on to receive life sentences for ordering the shooting of a young associate, Ian Taylor, who, Allen wrongly believed, was about to grass him up. David Gunn, meanwhile, was cementing links with other major criminals like Wayne Hardy (no relation to Gary), who supplied amphetamines and cannabis wholesale to the Cartel, and Jonathan ‘Donny’ Quinn, who was trying to build up a drugs and tobacco smuggling operation with criminals in the Sheffield and Doncaster areas of South Yorkshire.
The Gunn brothers stepped up their criminal activities in Bestwood, nearby Bulwell and Arnold. On leaving school, Colin worked as a doorman and soon discovered this was a good way to supply recreational drugs to those who wanted them. He gave the job up though after he was on the receiving end of a beating, losing some teeth outside one venue in a fight with somebody who had no respect for any reputation that preceded the brothers. It wasn’t the only fight he lost. ‘After a few incidents when Colin and David got battered, though mainly Colin, they grew to hate the city centre,’ said one associate. ‘Colin in particular felt vulnerable when he went into town. He expected people to respect him but of course to other players in the city he was just a nobody from Bestwood. He was a big lad and had a short fuse and attracted trouble and he was inevitably a target for bruisers who were a bit more tasty than him. You had people like [the Taxman] and the Hardy brothers who already had a massive reputation for being able to look after themselves and their domain was Carlton, Sneinton and the city centre. I think it was about this time that Colin got sick of going into the city centre and ending the evening with a fight, and he started to get this attitude of, well fuck ’em then, I’ll show them what I can do on my own patch.’
And for the most part, Colin Gunn did stick to his own patch. By the late 1990s he was running a large operation which spanned money lending, burglaries, extortion, robbery, drugs, car ringing and fraud. He enforced his leadership with extreme violence. Colin was also beginning to use police officers extensively, something some knew and others didn’t. His corruption of officers had started in an innocent fashion. He would pass on information to a few well-chosen officers in return for favours. Many justified giving information back to him on the basis that they believed there were bigger fish to catch and the information he was giving them was grade A1. Some even felt that the Gunns were looking
after the estate in a perverse kind of way. The brothers even had one safe house where they stored drugs in the city ‘looked after’ by an officer who lived nearby. He would warn them if there was ever a potential raid coming up at the property.
The relationship with police officers was self-serving: it gave Colin Gunn the means by which he could take out competitors by passing on tip-offs about drug or cigarette shipments that were coming in. It also kept the police and other law enforcement agencies away from his own activities, to an extent. There were fringe benefits as well, since the closer that the Cartel got to some officers, the more they learned of police methods. They could then pinpoint flaws which could be exploited and used as leverage if they ever needed to get themselves out of a sticky situation. Police officers were also only human. It was only a matter of time before some of the more weak-willed might be compromised by something. They came in a variety of guises: some were tired detectives from the old school, waiting to clock up their ‘thirty service’ for the pension and had forgotten what they joined the police force for. Others were young men who were compromising themselves from the day they took their police oath. Their weaknesses also came in diverse forms; from greed to dependence to selfishness to naivety. The limitations of their standards meant they could easily succumb to a line of cocaine or a prostitute – at least that was the way the villains now saw it.
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