‘There was a view in the top corridor that we would be frittering away valuable resources on targeting individuals and as such taking out one or two top villains was not going to affect that many people,’ said another officer involved with Operation Opal. ‘They saw the major players as just one crime number, which of course it is but that was the only way they gauged it. You had to measure the impact that taking the top man out had on other crimes and the reputation you reaped from that. The feeling was that those valuable resources would be more wisely used to tackle volume crime, problems such as street robberies, burglaries and car crime. But if you look at what is causing all that volume crime, well it’s the gangsters. You need to take a holistic view of things if you are going to solve the problem and that means taking out the top players. Yes they will inevitably get replaced by others once you have taken them out, but by disrupting them continually you don’t give them a chance to settle and dominate the situation. We ended up going from a position of having an enviable reputation in the 1990s for taking out top criminals to a poor reputation where major league criminals from outside the city thought Nottinghamshire was a soft touch in 2001-2002.
‘There were some strange decisions being made around that time which basically came about as a result of the new Chief Constable wanting to put his stamp on things, so you had the disbandment of the drugs squad, the Major Crime Unit’s resources were being halved and on top of all that some of us were aware that there was a storm about to hit us in the form of gun crime – although we didn’t predict it would come on two fronts and be as acute as it was, all the signs were there to be read. The problem was some of the decision makers were just not au fait with the challenges that were facing them. Detectives from the Major Crime Unit were being sent back to their geographical divisions and there seemed to be a view that the specialist units were elitist. Well I suppose they were in a way because they had expert knowledge, but that is the way to meet the challenges facing you – you invest in the expertise available on the problem.’
It meant when the decision was made to draw detectives from whoever was available in the divisions, instead of from a pool of experts within the Major Crime Unit, senior officers ended up with a hotch-potch of a team which was not unified in the way that they had been before. Sometimes the teams contained detectives who were not even on speaking terms. ‘Sometimes we had divisional superintendents who wouldn’t let people out on major jobs because they wanted to keep their own staffing levels up to optimum levels,’ said a senior detective involved in Opal. ‘So senior investigating officers were often left understaffed, scraping around for detectives and without the expertise they needed or knitted team they needed. As a result of the specialist units being disbanded, we were losing large rafts of our intelligence system. The disbanding of the drugs squad had a major knock-on effect – there were areas where we simply didn’t know what was going on any more. The drugs squad had been very good in giving us an early warning system. It told us who was doing what and who the new players were coming through, and what the knock-on effects might be. We had seen firearms used but mainly connected with armed robberies or being discharged into cars or buildings as a scare tactic. By 2000 we started to see firearms being used regularly on the person, being used in an almost nonchalant, everyday way by very young street dealers who were shooting each other, particularly in terms of young black men shooting other young black men – all of it was connected to the illegal drugs market. That was of course where we took our eye off the ball; we were concentrating so much on dealing with the black-on-black shootings that we ignored what was going on in Bestwood and what Colin and David Gunn were up to. Until it was too late as far as some people were concerned. Had Opal been taken to its logical conclusion many of those people who were murdered would still be alive today.’
Some observers even suggested the disbanding of the drugs squad (which Steve Green reversed years later by creating a Drugs Directorate) was a misguided way of minimising the drugs problem, although this was strongly rejected by senior officers. Former CID boss Peter Coles said, ‘There is a school of thought, not mine I have to say, which would say if you don’t have a drugs squad – by that I mean an institution which is recording activity in the illegal drugs market – then you can almost say you don’t have a drugs problem. If you don’t have something dedicated to tackling a problem you can never measure it and know just how bad the problem actually is that faces you.’
As it would later prove, the decision to bring Opal to a shuddering halt was more than a missed opportunity; it was a decision that was to have tragic consequences. By the time the Gunn brothers were targeted again they had grown stronger and more powerful. A new operation would have to start from scratch and the force would have to dig far deeper to find the resources needed for a successful outcome than they would have in 2001. It would be another two years before it got underway and would be called Operation Starburst, a multi-faceted, top secret project which would be likened to a Russian doll, containing operations within operations, and which would at last attack the very core of organised crime.
In the meantime, the city’s reputation would be shot, literally, to pieces.
CHAPTER 7
ommy Lau is philosophical, considering he knows he will never walk again. His life was wrecked one November evening in 2001 as a friend helped him out with some Spanish translation. Tommy was at a house in the quiet hamlet of East Stoke, near Newark, and was on the phone to his wife of just eight weeks, who was preparing to make her way over to England from South America. Halfway through their conversation, he heard the sharp crack of glass shattering and felt a sensation like a burning poker in his back. As he turned to look over his shoulder, he could see small wisps of smoke, as if his back was on fire. Guy Fawkes Night had been just a few days earlier, and he thought he had been hit by a firework.
‘It was all a dream in slow motion,’ Tommy recalled. ‘When I fell to the ground I could see my friends coming up to me and saying stuff but I didn’t know what was going on. At first I thought someone had thrown a firework through the window, especially when I saw the smoke coming out of my back. But then it dawned on me what it was and I was apparently screaming, though I don’t remember too much of that. The gunman had fired through the living room window. I don’t know whether he was aiming for me thinking I was Laurie, or whether the bullet ricocheted.’ As he writhed in pain he found that he couldn’t feel various parts of his body and finally realised he had been shot. He was paralysed from the waist down from that moment on.
Tommy had nothing to do with gangs, drug dealing or crime; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was just twenty-three when he became a mistaken assassination target, at 5.20pm on 8 November. He was nearing the end of a degree course in fashion at Nottingham Trent University and had a new wife he was head over heels in love with. Police, who ruled out Tommy as the target early in their investigation, had some obvious leads straight away. The woman in whose home he had been shot was a mistress of a local drug baron. She was having an affair with a young man, who I shall call Laurie, who according to police was the intended target. There was clearly a motive if one accepts that the drug baron, at that time on remand in Strangeways Prison in Manchester awaiting trial for cigarette smuggling and a heroin conspiracy, had sent the gunman, and from the outset the police certainly felt that he was their prime suspect. However, as time has moved on the less likely it seems to most of those who know anything about the case that he had anything to do with it.
Laurie had done a lot of work for the Gunn brothers at one time and it is possible that Colin may have become upset about something he had done or owed them. The gunman, who made his getaway on a motor cross bike, has never been caught and the people who hired him have never been identified. That, more than anything else, occupies Tommy’s thoughts every day. He mulls it all over in his mind, trying to make connections, trying to make some sense of why he ended up in a wheelchair. The police say they are still workin
g diligently to identify the shooter, but as each year passes it looks increasingly unlikely that Tommy will get closure. In all probability he will never get to see anyone in the dock for the shooting, though he remains optimistic that someone will tell him what it was all about. There has been very little information from the public to give a clue to the mystery and Tommy’s case, which followed an explosion of gun crime in the city, has been left on a shelf gathering dust. It is often the way that if a case has not been solved relatively quickly any leads start to peter out into nothing.
Tommy feels let down by the police – and with good reason. He has had to badger them on a regular basis just to try and put out an appeal about the case. It was left to him to organise an appeal on BBC’s Crimewatch programme in 2005 and even then the programme almost disguised where the shooting had taken place, such was Nottinghamshire Police’s paranoia about encouraging another gun crime tag to the city’s reputation. ‘I have been told lots of different names for the gunman but the trail just goes cold every time I follow it,’ he said. ‘There were rumours that the Bestwood lot might have had something to do with it, but no one seems to want to know. I just want to know why it happened and who was behind it, that’s all, and the police really have done nothing to help in that respect. I know they are under pressure but if they can’t help somebody like me, what is the point in them being there?’ Tommy is getting on with his life as best he can. He had to give up his college course after spending six months in a hospital bed, and cannot work, but he goes to the gym regularly for weight-training and to burn off the steam that builds up from the frustration of being in this situation. He does still try to live life to the full. He just wishes he could put the nightmares to bed.
It is hard to believe today that in 1990 Nottingham was voted the most desirable place in the UK to live after a Gallup poll carried out for Moneywise magazine. That same year, the Independent dispatched writer William Leith to find out about the city. The comments prove interesting when read with the passage of time. Leith asked a number of new residents what they liked most. ‘It is a great place to live,’ said Phil, a well-dressed engineer. ‘You want for nothing, things are not expensive, there’s plenty of work and it is a nice size too – quite big, but not too big.’ Helen, a young housewife recently moved from London, was bowled over too: ‘There’s no need to worry about bringing up children here. It’s so much safer.’ Leith himself wrote, ‘The nightclubs are friendly and fight-free because each one has a rigorous door policy – you can only go in if you are dressed exactly like everyone else in the nightclub. At 2am, punters from Rock City (short hair, flares) stand chatting in a group, ignoring the heavy metal tribe streaming out of New York, New York (long hair, drain-pipes). Policemen wander about grinning. It doesn’t seem quite real.’
It seemed a very different place nearly two decades later. I have lived in Nottingham since 1995 and no matter what the crime figures say, there has been a palpable change in the atmosphere of the city. In the darkness of night it has become colder, more cynical and more unfriendly in the city centre. There is a brooding, menacing air outside bars late on a Friday night, where once there was just exuberance. You certainly don’t see many policemen wandering about grinning anymore. New ‘community support officers’ are now stationed in the centre, ostensibly to make people feel safer, but as the public and criminals alike are well aware, they have no powers of arrest. The Home Office has effectively placed these volunteers in potentially hazardous situations without the powers or authority of regular police officers, but had the audacity to place them in police style uniforms.
In 1990, the city was still seen as a quaint yet vibrant capital of middle England. If there were three legends outsiders connected to Nottingham they were Robin Hood, Brian Clough and three women to every man. Only one of the legends was true. Now the city has a fourth legend which has almost strangled it: crime. The city has been desperately trying to shrug off the label of crime capital of the UK, or more often than not, Shottingham – gun crime capital of the UK – since 2002. It is very difficult to get away from the label. The impact that the gun crime tag has had on the city’s image cannot be overstated. It has affected all walks of life, from employers struggling to get credible candidates to job interviews to the two universities: in 2002 alone, Nottingham and Trent suffered a fourteen per cent drop in applications from students. At the height of what became the troubles, in 2002-03, investors stayed away, tourists stayed away, revellers stayed away, even a crown green bowls team which had toured from Kent to Nottingham every year for more than a decade stayed away, fearing it might be caught in the firing line.
A few week earlier, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia made a reference to the city’s crime problems at a function which landed on the front page of The Times newspaper. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles told an audience of several hundred people in the eastern Saudi city of Al-Khobar an anecdote about a British expatriate worker visiting Nottingham. ‘The businessman was saying he felt completely ridiculous having to give British businessmen from Nottingham assurances about the security here in Saudi Arabia when Nottingham is the murder capital of the UK at the moment,’ he said. ‘It is far more dangerous, statistically, to be in Nottingham than to be in Al-Khobar, Dammam or Riyadh.’
The first indications of a massively negative media portrayal of Nottingham came in 2002 when the headline writers in London began their assault on the city, although the headline which probably did the most harm was ‘Assassination City’. That came from the Daily Star in 2004, but well before then the writing was on the wall – not least because of the high-profile murders of jewellery shop owner and grandmother Marian Bates and schoolgirl Danielle Beccan (see Chapters Eight and Eleven). But it was 2002 when things really got out of control. In that year alone there were more shootings than the previous seven years put together – and many of them were connected to the Bestwood Cartel.
When the number of shootings first began to rise dramatically in late 1999, Nottinghamshire Police unveiled their response: Operation Real Estate. It began in earnest in February 2000, after a spate of gang-related shootings in St Ann’s and the Meadows, and led to armed officers routinely patrolling the streets of a UK mainland city for the first time. This, in turn, led to a national debate about whether the police should be routinely armed. The then Assistant Chief Constable, Sean Price, who was in charge of the operation, was keen to play down any conclusions that the police’s response was an exaggerated one: ‘There is nothing exceptional in what we are doing,’ he said. ‘This is not a Genghis Khan approach. We’re only doing what the police have always done: deploying the level of force appropriate to the threat. With the shootings that took place in February I knew at the time this was the thin end of the wedge. If we hadn’t got a grip quickly, it would have got out of control.’ He admitted that the violence involving the gangs in the NG Triangle had prompted the move. ‘It’s fair to say that it was the escalation of that rivalry that led to Operation Real Estate. We had a situation where, because of disputes between these rival groups of criminals, shootings were happening. In that one week in February we had five incidents alone. We had to protect the public.’
For two years, six armed officers carrying Walther P990 pistols on their hips worked in pairs between dusk and midnight around the St Ann’s and Meadows estates. The patrols had a major impact during their first year. In the first six months, six shootings were recorded on the estates, compared with six in a fortnight just before Real Estate was launched. Police also made some 150 arrests connected to the gang violence and recovered fifteen firearms in the first year. But some community leaders felt the use of armed officers stigmatised their areas and encouraged the gangs to go underground. ‘We are being used as a laboratory for a bigger experiment,’ said Delroy Brown, community leader of the Afro-Caribbean National Artistic Centre in St Ann’s. ‘This marks the paramilitarisation of the police.’
By November 2001, Operation Real Estate had made 400 arrests and thwa
rted a number of assassination attempts. More than 100 firearms had been recovered and forty-seven Jamaican nationals were among those arrested for attempted murder, firearms and drug offences. Of those, the Jamaican authorities wanted to speak to forty-one in connection with serious criminal offences. Nevertheless, gun crime overall continued to escalate. In 2001, police in Nottinghamshire dealt with 685 firearms incidents; back in 1990, the year it was voted the most desirable city in the UK to live in, the figure had been just 282. By the beginning of 2002, police had decided a new approach was needed and in July 2002 set up a project which would be intelligence-led and tackle gun crime across the city. Operation Stealth would be more proactive than Real Estate. Its remit was to stamp out the black-on-black shootings by arresting offenders with firearms before they committed serious offences. But before the Stealth team had got stuck into their task, there was another brutal shooting.
At about 7pm on 19 February 2002, a young black teenager, Brendon Lawrence, was waiting in a friend’s Ford Fiesta XR2 near his home in Watkins Street on the St Ann’s estate. It had been pouring with rain and Brendon had accepted the offer of a lift from his friend, who had nipped inside a house on Watkins Street. Minutes later, a man in a dark blue, hooded Donnay top, wearing Nike Bohemian trainers, approached the car, pulled out a gun and told Brendon to get out. Then he shot him twice in the leg, pulled him out of the car and shot him again in the chest. The sixteen-year-old died on the street.
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