On 9 December 2000, an incident occurred which had major consequences. The detective constable had been involved in an investigation into a shooting at CJ’s Bakery on Alfreton Road, Radford: a man had been shot in the groin during a black-on-black ‘disrespect’ argument. The suspect, Christopher ‘Prince’ Llewellyn, had been arrested during a police chase and a firearm believed to be linked to him was booked into the Carlton Police Station storeroom, where exhibits were securely kept until they were needed for court. But when Llewellyn’s defence team asked to see the firearm, it could not be found. Llewellyn’s defence team, sensing something was up, or perhaps having been tipped off, were champing at the bit. Although the case was not ready for trial, the judge was not happy about the situation and was demanding answers. The weapon had been placed in the store by the detective constable some weeks earlier and now he was frenetically trying to find out where it had gone. He spoke to everybody who could have come into contact with it. There was no doubt that it had gone into the secure store, because it was there on the log in black and white. The supervisor responsible for the storeroom also remembered the detective booking the weapon in, because it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill item. Yet a series of searches at various police locations all proved fruitless. The detective constable, along with the exhibits officer responsible for logging the items, was served with a disciplinary notice for ‘property issues’. But while the exhibits officer carried on his job as normal, the detective constable was told he would be put on restricted duties and moved to a police station in the sticks until the matter could be resolved.
By the time the CJ’s Bakery case came up for trial in March 2002, the gun has mysteriously turned up again – in the very store cupboard which had previously been searched from top to bottom several times. The detective constable was understandably relieved but also bemused. Weeks and then months passed, during which time Christopher Llewellyn was found not guilty of attempted murder and possession of a firearm. But the officer was still under PSU suspicion. On 8 November 2002, he received a call telling him to see his boss in the office for a chat about informants. When he arrived, his boss, Detective Superintendent Michael Ward, was standing next to Superintendent Michael Leyton and another officer, Chief Inspector Vince Treece, from the PSU. They informed the detective that he was under arrest on suspicion of malfeasance in public office: in short, corruption. He was ushered to a police car by two more senior officers who had been waiting to take him to Worksop Police Station. They even tried to handcuff him before he got in the car but he refused to be humiliated in front of fellow officers and they relented.
The detective constable could not believe what was happening. He felt the PSU officers were deliberately trying to humiliate him and it soon became clear that the PSU had been running a fine-toothed comb through his life. Such was the depth of the investigation that they had accessed his bank records and telephone calls. He had clearly been the target of a long and protracted enquiry which had raised questions about his informant handling. As he languished in a cell for several hours, his home was searched without anyone being present. Dumbfounded, he then faced a barrage of questions, culminating in the assertion from the interviewing officers that he was a ‘corrupt and dishonest officer’. With the interrogation over, he was allowed to go but not before being told that he was suspended from duty pending further enquiries, though on full pay. The detective constable knew from the line of questioning that the PSU had spent the preceding months tracing and interviewing his informants. It seemed to him nothing more than a fishing expedition and, as far as he was concerned, the PSU hadn’t hooked any fish at all. For a while the PSU officers had also felt that way – until they had approached one of the detective’s most prolific informants, whose information had led to dozens of arrests.
This informant, a heroin dealer, claimed among other things that the officer had pocketed money which should have been paid to her. That specific allegation had been the grounds for arresting the detective constable, he was to learn later. However there was no prima facie evidence that the allegation was true. The informant was someone who had recently been jailed for dealing large quantities of heroin; not the most credible witness, by any rule of thumb, but particularly when it was a case of the officer’s word against hers. Still, despite the protestations of the detective’s solicitor, it would take another year before the officer heard that the Crown Prosecution Service was not going to recommend any charges against him. Even after that, he was kept suspended from duty ‘pending further investigations into possible misconduct issues’. It was not until January 2004 that he was told that not only would he face no criminal charges, he would not have to face any disciplinary charges. He was free to return to work. The PSU had spent more than two years turning his life inside out and it nearly broke him. He had colleagues pointing the finger at him and the stress of a two-year investigation had nearly ended his marriage. He was understandably angry and, after another six months in the job, still suffering from the stress and depression resulting from the investigation, he took the option of retiring on ill-health grounds. Not only had the force lost an excellent officer who had given his life to them for the past twenty-six years, the PSU had targeted the wrong man.
A few miles from the Major Crime Unit offices at Century House on Carlton Hill, where the officer had been based, another man was busy helping out the Bestwood Cartel. He was their clean skin. Shop assistant-turned-trainee detective Charles Fletcher had been in the job since autumn 2000 and was based at the busy Radford Road Police Station. In the two years the PSU had been investigating their red herring, there had been a real double agent operating under the radar. Fletcher had already been able to pass on a wealth of useful material to Colin Gunn and his associates. It would be 2003 before an operation was mounted to look at information going to Gunn via corrupt officers. Operation Salt was to be one of the most secret investigations mounted by Nottinghamshire Police. In the meantime a war was about to be unleashed on the city’s streets.
BY THE BEGINNING of 2001, Colin Gunn and his associates had assembled a band of middle-tier dealers to supply the markets in St Ann’s, Meadows, Radford and areas of nearby Derby. Two of these dealers, Dion Griffin and Carl Rose, were about to be targeted by Nottinghamshire Police’s Major Crime Unit. Intelligence suggested that Griffin and Rose were dealing with a Derby heroin dealer named Daniel Walsh and that Colin and David Gunn – David was now out of prison – were using Griffin to supply Nottingham’s estates outside of Bestwood and even to inmates within the prison system. Intelligence revealed that several prison officers from different prisons had been corrupted by the Bestwood Cartel to allow heroin inside. Operation Opal was set up specifically to target the middle-tier dealers used by the Cartel. Bugs were placed in Griffin’s hire car, and at thirty-year-old Rose’s home in Aspley, Nottingham, mobile phones were also bugged. The material gained from bugs in the car headrests revealed twenty-eight-year-old Griffin to have a big ego. He bragged to customers sitting in the car: ‘Look, I’m the only one who can get away with dealing in St Ann’s, the Meadows and Radford, no one else has got the contacts to get past the territorial problems, I can even get stuff into the prison. I’m the top man.’
During the weeks of surveillance, officers discovered that Griffin was overseeing up to ten kilos of heroin per week, as well as large amounts of cocaine and amphetamines. The heroin was coming in from the Bestwood Cartel’s links to the Liverpool underworld and was high quality. The cocaine, however, at wholesale level, was less than twenty-five per cent pure. By the time it had been cut to go out on to the streets, there would be less than five per cent cocaine in the grams people were buying for £30 to £50. It was cut with all sorts of other agents, including an anaesthetic which duped the user into thinking the numbness they were feeling came from the drug. Such was the demand for cocaine, poor quality or not, that people were still buying it.
Having gathered a large amount of information on what the Bestwood Cartel was up to, in
autumn 2001 police decided to arrest Griffin and Rose. They watched Griffin meeting two other men in Radford and knew drugs had arrived at the premises. On 18 October, at around 12.30pm, the Operation Opal team burst into the property on Croydon Road. Griffin and the others tried to escape through a window but were not quick enough. Police found half a kilo of cocaine and more than £10,000 in cash. At another bust in Derby, police found more than £650,000 of cocaine and heroin belonging to Griffin and another £7,000 of amphetamines. Griffin was buying his heroin at £18,000 per kilo and selling at £21,000. Police estimated that his profits in the limited time they had looked at him were in the region of £100,000. He had properties in Ruddington, Nottinghamshire and Beaumont Leys, Leicester, a Porsche, Lexus and VW Golf, and sent his two children to private school. Next they arrested Rose, who had made at least £40,000 in just a few months. They found live ammunition and a Brocock gun which had been converted to fire live rounds. Griffin was jailed for five years at Derby Crown Court in December 2002 and Rose for eight years after initially pleading not guilty. Daniel Walsh, twenty-one, from Derby, who had been supplied with heroin by both Rose and Griffin after police had disrupted his own heroin network, was jailed for eight years.
When he eventually came out of prison, Griffin, who had more ego than sense, would make more headlines after filming himself on his mobile phone camera driving one-handed at speeds in excess of 130mph in his Mini Cooper on the busy A614 into Nottingham. He planned to put the film on a website but police found the footage after he was arrested in connection with a £14 million heroin haul in Ruddington in October 2007. They were astonished by the footage and chose to prosecute him. Griffin, much to his consternation, was sent back to prison for eight months in May 2008.
The taking down of Griffin and Rose had been only the first phase of Operation Opal and the detectives on the ground were eager to begin the second phase, which would see Colin and David Gunn targeted. In autumn 2001, over beers in the Carlton Police Station bar, some of the team discussed how long it would take to get to the heart of the Gunn’s operation. The general consensus was that, with the infrastructure for the investigation in place, including bugs and informants, it could be done in less than five months. It was a goer and, better still, they had the ear and the support of the head of CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Phil Davies, who had decided that the Gunn brothers were a threat that needed dealing with before they became any bigger. Some time during the mid-1990s, DCS Davies, along with the previous head of CID, Peter Coles, whom he succeeded in 1996, drew up a list of significant organised crime targets. The Major Crime Unit was the jewel in Nottinghamshire Police’s crown and had a track record which was the envy of many – so successful had it been in taking down major targets that a number of police forces used it as a blueprint. The list of targets Phil Davies and Peter Coles drew up was based around the intelligence they had on which villains were the biggest threat at the time. These included Wayne and Dean Hardy, David Francis, Robert Briggs-Price, and Colin and David Gunn.
Full of expectation that Opal would carry on to its conclusion, the team had a bombshell dropped on it: the top corridor at Nottinghamshire Police had decided that it was time to wrap up the operation.
STEVE GREEN JOINED Nottinghamshire Police as Chief Constable in June 2000 from Staffordshire. He was a surprise choice for many and a departure from the old-school, detective-influenced style of his predecessor, Colin Bailey. He told his officers that there would have to be radical changes at the force – that was what the Home Office wanted and he was there to see it implemented. Green believed that Nottinghamshire Police as an institution was riddled with problems. If it was a house, it would be condemned and demolished, he thought. He was going to stamp his authority on the force and breathe twenty-first-century change into it. The Home Office was behind him; it specifically wanted him to sort out the ‘volume crime’ problem and changes were needed in the force to achieve that.
The Doncaster-born Yorkshireman was forty-four, an ex-officer with the Royal Signal Corps. He had joined the police in 1978 and rapidly worked his way up, become Assistant Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police in 1996. Crucially, however, he had never spent any significant period within a criminal investigation department, something his critics would later hold against him. In June 2000, he made the drive to Nottinghamshire Police headquarters at Sherwood Lodge to take up his new appointment. He had already told the local media what he thought the priorities would be: ‘I do not see my role in Notts as making the police so specialist they become totally remote from the public. Reducing crime has to be the priority, no matter how hard that may be.’ He was taking over a force which had the third highest crime figures in the country and tackling this volume crime would be one of the cornerstones of his approach. ‘I am aware of the high crime rates and, make no mistake, it is going to be a challenge. I need to understand why it is so high first before looking at how it can be reduced, but reducing it will be my priority. I want it known throughout the force that I am coming to the table wanting to know how our service is being delivered and what effect it is having. The public often look for words of reassurance from the police and that is fine, but the best way of reassuring and making them feel safe is to reduce crime. It is the same with crime detection. I put far more priority on crime reduction than just solving crimes. Detection is just one of the many ways of reducing crime, which is what we all want.’
Green’s priorities soon became apparent. Over the next few months, the drug squad was disbanded. The Major Crime Unit, perceived by many officers as the jewel in the crown, was halved in manpower and detectives were sent back to their divisions. Murder cases would now be dealt with by those divisions instead. Green spoke passionately about speed cameras during the early part of his tenure, and in 2001 Nottinghamshire became the pilot from eight police forces allowed to keep money gained from speeding fines to be used to buy hi-tech digital cameras which could catch three drivers every second. His philosophy was clear, as he stated in a regional BBC television interview looking back on his arrival in Nottinghamshire. ‘The force desperately needed to modernise,’ he said. ‘It had got out of date in a whole range of ways. Secondly, we had to address volume crime: burglaries, car crime, robberies. They were going up; they needed to come down. It would have been impossible to say to the Home Office and indeed the public, “Just forget about that ‘cause we’ve got something more important to do.”’
But by 2002, the battle against crime in Nottinghamshire was becoming affected by poor management of resources. Scene-of-crime officers were sent out to only seven out of ten house burglaries and two out of ten car crime cases – well below the national average. It meant these crimes were now less likely to be solved and would trigger higher insurance premiums for householders in certain NG postcodes. A new call system, introduced by the Chief Constable, failed calamitously within a few months of going live in December 2001. For at least two months, thousands of people trying to contact the police to report crimes over the call system were greeted with a message telling them to call back later. In June 2002 alone, the county’s police failed to deal with 14,000 phone calls, including 2,500 emergency calls.
‘It was total chaos,’ one senior officer told me. ‘We had been undergoing a massive reorganisation and it just wasn’t working. There were people who just didn’t know what they were doing any more. There were times when two different teams of officers would be sent out to a job and then arrive to find that neither knew the other one was covering it. If you got burgled you would be lucky to get SOCO (scene-of-crime officers) out at all, let alone within forty-eight hours of the crime being committed. Added to that, lots of areas had lost their beat officers, some of whom had been there for years and knew the community, and instead you had police cars doing the beats. The message it sent to the public of Nottingham was that we were afraid to do foot patrols in difficult areas and we didn’t give a toss any more, so much so that we couldn’t even be bothered to answer the phone �
�� we were only worried about targets.’
The changes meant that the Operation Opal drug investigation would not be progressing any further than the charges laid against Dion Griffin and Carl Rose. There was huge disappointment within the team at the decision. ‘We couldn’t understand it,’ said one officer. ‘We had been geared up to take on the Gunn brothers for a long time, they were definite major targets by any criteria you used to measure these things and this seemed the perfect opportunity – everything was in place at that time so we could step up a gear. There was no clear explanation other than the resources required did not merit the worth of the job, which was usually bosses speak for, “The Home Office are on our backs and we have got to spend the money in other areas so we hit our targets.” We were stunned and very disappointed. It was a missed opportunity. With hindsight, of course, I’m sure the top brass would have done things differently, had they known what would happen over the next few years.’
The Major Crime Unit had just successfully wrapped up Operation Long Island, which had led to the arrest of Robert Briggs-Price, but the view from the top corridor was that Long Island was to be the last major investigation of that type for the foreseeable future, unless an emergency cropped up. The cost of such operations was cited as a major factor in the decision, backing a view now held by the Chief Constable and several others at senior command level. It chimed well with the Home Office obsession with targets and, in a climate in which league table positions meant everything, it was a decision which the new Chief Constable Steve Green had wholly endorsed when he arrived in June 2000. Within months of his arrival he had brought in a raft of new measures, many of which did not strike a chord with either the public or junior ranks in the police force.
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