NF (2010) Hoods

by Carl Fellstrom

  By 2001, such was Colin Gunn’s reputation as a provider of good information that he was trailed by a police officer with a National Crime Squad background. The officer wanted him to become a registered informant, but questions were asked when the application went in. One officer said, ‘With all the information that was coming in from the army of people who were effectively working for him, he must have begun to think he could become invincible. Certainly by 2001 he was approaching a better network of intelligence than the police had. There had been rule changes in the use of informants, particularly after the Eaton Green case, and at the same time as it was becoming more complicated and difficult for us to get informants on board, Gunn and his crew were recruiting like there was a war about to happen.’

  By this time Colin, who had been on steroids for more than a decade, was also using cocaine regularly. The combination of the two drugs was a timebomb. Colin’s propensity for violence was itself becoming like a drug. He craved seeing fear in his victim’s faces and took pleasure in inflicting extreme pain upon men or women. Incidents began to filter through to the police about tortures being used on people. There was the man who Colin thought was going to grass him up. He was taken to a remote area outside Bestwood and his hand nailed to a wooden bench. Then he was saturated in petrol while Colin toyed with a flame. It was almost as if he was playing out a role in a gangster movie. While he enjoyed putting a smile on to the faces of elderly people on the Bestwood estate, who received him warmly like a regal visitor to their homes, he seemed to get a bigger kick out of seeing dread in people’s eyes. And if they expected to get a beating, or worse, then who was he to disagree with the penalty?

  ‘His favourite punishment for those that displeased him – and sometimes it was over a hundred quid or less – was to have the person kidnapped and then taken somewhere quiet out the way,’ said a former associate. ‘Colin would then turn up and that person would then have their hands held down while Colin got a hammer or a baseball bat out the boot of the car and start smashing the person’s knuckles. Colin would smash one knuckle and then get someone to hold the other one and he would say, “Don’t flinch. If you flinch you get it on the other one. Nobody rips me off, understand?” This happened on a regular basis and believe me they never displeased him ever again. Colin also used to get really paranoid about people looking at him when he went in the pubs. Some unfortunate would get a right pasting and sometimes they never knew why. As far as Colin was concerned they always looked guilty when he eyeballed them and saw how scared they were, so he took that as a sign.’

  People who were on the receiving end of his almost psychopathic violence would rarely go to the police and if they did they soon got a visit from a member of the Cartel, who told them what would happen if they testified. A police officer who dealt with the Bestwood Cartel said, ‘By the late nineties, they were running protection rackets all over Bestwood. The fact that shopkeepers and businessmen don’t talk about that to this day is a testament to the fear that was being created. Their modus operandi was to visit a business and ask to see the gaffer. Colin would point out to the boss that his security was not very good and for a hundred quid or more a week, Colin pledged to make sure they were safe. Often the businessmen would just shrug off the initial visit and send them packing. The same evening something would happen to the business – it was either burgled or the windows would be shot up or it would be attacked by arsonists. Most of the businessmen paid, those that didn’t received a second visit and Colin would drive up past the business, call out to the gaffer and feign a gun pointed at the boss with his hand. It usually achieved the desired effect.’

  One scam that Colin masterminded was the kidnap of a criminal associate, which was to bring the Cartel more than £200,000. The associate, who dealt in a little cocaine and cannabis but mainly made his money from large-scale cigarette smuggling, owed Colin and David some money which had been lent out on a property he was buying. He was already paying them £1,000 a week protection money to allow him to trade in various criminal enterprises on their patch and call on their henchmen for any ‘business problems’. Colin took the house as part payment on the debt, which was worth close to £200,000, and then, with the agreement of the associate himself, had him kidnapped by a gang of gypsies, who drugged him and obeyed the order to ‘rough him up a little’ with some relish. The businessman’s Spanish-based father and some of his criminal associates put up the ransom money, which was then split various ways, with some of it going back to the ‘kidnap victim’ himself.

  According to former associates, Colin Gunn also had a penchant for teenage girls. If he took a fancy to someone on a night out, and they were with their boyfriend, Gunn would go up to the young man and simply tell him he had two choices: either the girl went home with him or he had to take a beating. He was also fiercely protective of anyone who had relationship problems, relatives and those considered to be part of the Cartel. Anyone finishing a relationship with one of the junior members of the extended family would be looking over their shoulder if they chose to move on to someone new. Most learned not to incur Colin Gunn’s wrath but if he found out and they were still living on the estate they would be hounded out or would get a visit threatening violence if their new relationship carried on. One woman, who fears for her life to this day, told me how she was sought out by Gunn. ‘I was out with a girlfriend of one of his top men at a pub where he was and he just wouldn’t let me leave when she went. And the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning. He’d obviously drugged me. So I haven’t got a clue what happened to me. It could have been anything. I knew who he was and wouldn’t have gone anywhere near him, so he had to drug me.’ Despite this, she had a brief relationship with Gunn – she says out of fear.

  One night he tried to suffocate her, so she went to the police. It would result in her eventually going into witness protection and being unable to see her young daughter for more than a year: ‘They put me into police protection, saying I was in danger, but what they were obviously doing was trying to get me to give evidence against him. I wouldn’t sign anything because I was too scared, then they said they’d got enough evidence so they didn’t need my statement. At the same time I was getting messages passed to me saying that my family was in danger if I didn’t come out of witness protection – and that I shouldn’t be a naughty girl and say anything. So I had no choice. What can you do when your family’s being threatened? I came out and went to stay with a friend in London, but the police tracked me down there and told me how worried they were about me.

  ‘I know there’s a bullet with my name on it. Sometimes I think I should just go back and take what’s coming because I know they will find me. I know he’s got people all over the country looking for me. Colin used to brag about how he had cops in his pockets and it’s true. During the few weeks I spent with him, he used to tell me things that made me shudder. He even told me about this guy who’d been fed to the pigs and when he talked about the people who’d been killed by his gang it was as if he was just ticking off a things-to-do list. He’d say, “He’s gone and he’s gone,” as casually as if they were away on holiday, but these were people he’d had killed.’

  At the same time, both Colin and David were capable of grandiose acts of compassion, particularly to families on the estate who had been the victims of crime or who were struggling financially, such as the elderly. A number of people told me about regular incidents where Colin would pop cash into an envelope and card, sometimes up to £100, and post it to old people who were celebrating birthdays. One year the brothers paid for a huge firework display on Guy Fawkes Night for all the community to enjoy. One woman didn’t have enough money for a cake for her five-year-old’s birthday and David popped round and sorted it out. Another elderly woman who had lost her husband and was fearful of being burgled talked about the time Colin came round to put her mind at rest. He told her not to worry and that he would be looking out for her. And he did, as far as she was concerned, because as soon
as he was jailed, her house was burgled for the first time. Then there was the couple who had been burgled and lost their jewellery: ‘David came around to see us and he was so polite,’ said the woman. ‘He took his shoes off at the door and he listened intently to what had happened and the fact we would probably never see the jewellery and stuff back again and he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out for you. We’ll get your stuff back.” And he was true to his word. A few days later we had most of the stuff back. He’s a good lad.’

  The fact was that the Cartel’s tentacles stretched so far within the criminal world that even if the burglary hadn’t been done by their own people, they knew who it had been done by and could trace them quickly. The tales of returned plunder were not propagated by people who were part of the Cartel, these were genuine, law-abiding citizens who could see little wrong in the Gunn brothers and felt they were looking after the local community. When Colin walked into his local chemists on the estate to get his regular prescriptions, the queue in the shop would part to let him to the front, such was the respect he commanded. More than that, people felt the Gunn brothers were doing the job the police should have been doing.

  This had two consequences. Firstly, it made it difficult for those people to believe the stories they might have heard about the darker side of the Gunn brothers, particularly if they came from the police. Secondly, it bolstered the support that the Gunn brothers were getting so that, as every day passed, the police found it more and more difficult to get a foothold in the estate. If it was an intentional strategy then it was an act of criminal genius, because it ensured that the Bestwood Cartel was perceived by residents to be the true police force on the estate, the real authority in the community, and a significant number of people stopped ringing the police as a result. In turn that meant the crime figures were also giving a false picture of what was going on in Bestwood. ‘If you had a beef about anything or with anyone you went to Colin and David before you went anywhere else – that was the rule and that included any police officers who wanted a quiet life,’ one resident told me. ‘Those that didn’t follow the rules didn’t get any help, simple as that, and quite often would be targeted under the assumption that they were grasses for the police. In return for what Colin or David did for you, they demanded total loyalty and often, though not always, would ask for the favour to be returned. God help you if you refused.’

  At the same time as they were instilling some sense of community, however warped, into the area, they were branching out into areas such as money-lending, targeting poor families who needed some extra money for things like Christmas or birthdays – and if the borrower couldn’t pay up then they could come to some other arrangement. Some people’s houses were taken over so that drugs could be dealt from them, or hydroponic cannabis farms set up. Some were asked to commit crime. A former officer who worked at nearby Oxclose Lane Police Station, where the Gunn brothers had a relative working as a cleaner, conceded that by the time police started to realise what was happening on the estate, it was too late. ‘We let the area down and then when we realised the impact that was having it was too late,’ he said. ‘It had almost become a no-go zone for us. No one wanted to work up there because of the intimidation so it was nigh on impossible to get a regular beat officer up there who would do the work and get in with the community. It was like going into a paramilitary area in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles. I remember one time the bosses were getting so much grief about the lack of bobbies on the estate that they offered us double time to do patrols but there were no takers at all.’

  Officers brave enough to take up the crusade against them soon learned the consequences of their actions. ‘Colin and David Gunn had the means to know where we all lived, make no mistake about that,’ the ex-officer said. ‘One time there was a detective who had pissed them off being a bit too good at the job and not checking in with them. They sent someone up there to shoot out his windows. I mean people wanted to do their jobs properly but what was the cost going to be to them and their families?’

  Colin became increasingly unstable and erratic. He would sometimes explode at the slightest thing and usually lashed out at the first person he saw, leaving others to pick up the pieces and wrap the broken bones. His psychotic alter-ego was beginning to surface more frequently than his community-spirited, Robin Hood persona, and he was starting to believe in his own myth as a type of real-life Tony Montana in Scarface – an all-seeing, all-powerful man who could control the lives of anybody around him. But like Tony Montana, and his fictional descent into hell, Colin was breaking the drug dealer’s number one rule: never get high on your own supply. He would gather his selected inner circle to a room in one of the pubs they controlled, depending on which was the favoured venue at the time, and preside over mafia-style boardroom meetings to plan various criminal enterprises and discuss any problems the Cartel was having with other criminals. His girlfriend, Victoria Garfoot, who had loyally stood by him since her teens, would regularly complain that they should go to live abroad in a nice house and get away from Bestwood. But Bestwood was everything to Colin – there he could be a big fish and everyone would look up to him with respect. The couple, who would have four children, would eventually move to a large bungalow in Revelstoke Way, in nearby Rise Park, with a high-tech security system, electric gates and a gold-plated mailbox and address plaque, but Bestwood was in Colin Gunn’s blood. He loved adorning his cars with personalised plates and had one vehicle fitted with the registration plate POWER; his favourite Porsche Carrera was fitted with the plate BIG UN, his nickname to all except his brother, who had by now taken to affectionately calling him Fats. The years of steroid abuse were beginning to manifest physical signs. Colin was overweight as well as being on a short fuse.

  COLIN GUNN MADE an ill-fated trip into the centre of Nottingham on a stag night in October 1998. He was to be best man at the wedding of a member of the Cartel who collected money for them. Some of the gang, including Colin, travelled into town for drinks. The group ended up at the Astoria (later the Ocean) nightclub, near the Broadmarsh Centre, and, worse for wear from a cocktail of drugs and drink, Colin got into his usual dispute with a reveller whose crime was not to know that you didn’t answer Colin Gunn back without the red mist descending. A huge fight erupted, ending with Colin and another Cartel member beating their victim senseless. The group made their way back to the safety of Bestwood but the reveller reported the incident to police. They arrested Gunn at a property in Radley Square, Bulwell, and another man, Kevin Warsop, at a house in Raymede Drive. The duo did not come quietly, fighting fiercely with several officers as they were arrested.

  This time, Gunn was in trouble. His victim was prepared to pursue GBH charges and apparently CCTV footage of the incident was held by the nightclub. Gunn skipped bail and decided to lay low in Skegness, where his mum had the family caravan, and also travelled out to Spain, where he had allies who would give him sanctuary. There he could wait out any possible prosecution, giving him time to do something about the witness statements if the worst came to the worst. He needed as much help as he could muster, as within a short space of time police had issued an arrest warrant for him. The favours included the help of another villain who had some access to the club. This man, who when he was not helping out the brothers was supplying cocaine around the city, got hold of the only CCTV tapes and ensured they were destroyed before the police could seize them. At a later date he was able to call on the aid of a doctor who provided Gunn with a statement that said he had been prescribed a number of pills for a variety of ailments and the cocktail of the drugs had such a side effect that this would explain the violence at the nightclub. It had the desired result. Colin Gunn returned back to Bestwood, faced court and was given a few hundred hours’ community service instead of a potential prison sentence of five years. Then he stuck his other two fingers up at the system by getting an impostor to complete the community service.

  The same year, Colin and David’s sister
Julie was involved in an incident which made national headlines and consolidated their reputation as a family you just didn’t get into an argument with. Julie Gunn went to Henry Whipple Junior School in Bestwood after her nine-year-old son, Sam, complained that a teacher had made him sit in front of the class for being naughty. She disputed teacher Jeanelle Brown’s account of how much time Sam had been punished for and lashed out, breaking the teacher’s nose. Jeanelle Brown later needed several operations to repair the damage. Julie Gunn was subsequently order to perform 240 hours’ community service. The story made the Daily Mail in July 1998, raising a debate about violence in the classroom and the lack of discipline in parents. Gunn apologised and said she had not known what had come over her. ‘I was annoyed, like any mum would be,’ she said. ‘I accept what I did was wrong and I know how close I came to a jail sentence.’

  Meanwhile David Gunn, who was living in Leybourne Drive in Bestwood with wife Sandie, bringing up three children with a fourth on the way, was facing problems of his own. Just a month after Colin’s nightclub fracas, he was about to face the courtroom himself on charges of assault and threats to kill. He had been accused of brutally attacking a man who had dared to get into a row with Sandie in a pub. In November 1997, Keith Copeland had ticked off a child in the Standard of England pub after he heard her make a racist remark. Then he started arguing with Sandie, who claimed he slapped her. David, who was drinking in the pub, exploded with rage – nobody took liberties with a Gunnie without consequences. He launched a sustained assault, knocking Copeland unconscious and kicking him repeatedly as he lay on the floor. Copeland, who lived in Bestwood, was left with a broken arm, nose and ribs and needed stitches to a head wound.