His mother, Janice Collins, would become a tireless campaigner for Mothers Against Guns, a group set up to try to stamp out gun crime. ‘We buried him in black jeans and a black polo-neck he had just bought from Next that week,’ she later told reporters. ‘His friends were pallbearers, and they looked so young, so little. They were only kids. When Brendon died they kept him eight weeks in the mortuary. I couldn’t bear to think of him so cold like that. I hated it that we couldn’t bury him. Every week, Calvin, his twin brother, would take me down there to see him, and they would pull him out, cold, so I could see him, see he was all right. No mother should have to go through that. Someone must know something.’
Brendon was not known to be involved in criminality but intelligence came through to the police that half a kilo of cocaine had been stashed under one of the car seats, which indicated a robbery motive, as the drugs were missing. The killers, who clearly had information that there was a substantial amount of drugs in the car, had driven off in the Ford Fiesta XR2 which was later found burnt out in Westville Gardens, St Ann’s. Some DNA was extracted from the partially burnt wreckage but little headway was made by the police in terms of getting witnesses to come forward. And so it dragged on year after year, despite there being a £20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. Every February, Brendon’s distraught parents, Janice Collins and Roy Lawrence, have made an annual appeal for information which they hope will lead to the identification of the killer. In the years that passed since Brendon’s death, police arrested more than twenty suspects but without a breakthrough. In January 2009, two defendants went on trial for his murder and a third for assisting an offender. The jury acquitted one defendant of murder but failed to reach a verdict on the other two. A retrial was rescheduled.
A list of some of the incidents police were called out to in July 2002 showed how indiscriminate the use of firearms was becoming:
July 1: Ten-year-old Lorrell Akim Warner is shot and wounded at his grandmother’s home in Wilford Crescent West, the Meadows. A seventeen-year-old youth was later arrested.
July 5: A would-be robber walks into a newsagent in Old Basford, asks for cigarettes and then fires a shot from a handgun, narrowly missing the fifty-seven-year-old store owner behind the counter.
July 9: A taxi driver who picks up two men outside the Commodore pub in Nuthall Road at 6.20am is robbed with a handgun to his head and is forced to drive the men to Brockhurst Gardens, St Ann’s. The taxi driver later tells the local paper, ‘I served in the Gulf War but left the Army for a quieter life. It’s not really turned out how I imagined.’
July 16: A two-year-old boy is shot in the right arm with an airgun pellet as he plays in Cotmanhay Park, off Beauvale Drive, Cotmanhay, at 6pm. Surgeons remove the pellet.
July 17: Two robbers enter an unlocked house in Noel Street, Forest Fields, and hold a thirty-seven-year-old woman and her young children at gunpoint in their own living room.
July 18: A seventeen-year-old boy is shot in the leg in Fenton Road, Old Basford, as he and two friends drive down the road. A gun is pulled out among a group of youths as the car passes and three shots are fired.
July 22: Thirty-six-year-old Mohammed Yousaf Hussain is shot in the chest by a masked gunman in Berridge Road, Forest Fields.
July 22: An armed robber shoves a handgun into the faces of two staff in a raid on the Mansfield Road Spa in Sherwood at 12.20am. Witnesses then report hearing a gunshot as the raider runs from the store with the takings.
July 26: A thirty-three-year-old man is shot and wounded outside the Drum nightclub, off Ilkeston Road, Lenton.
July 26: Courtney Graham, twenty-three, is shot in the groin and stomach as he cycles along Alfreton Road, Radford, after becoming involved in an argument with the occupants of a passing white saloon car.
July 27: A man is seen brandishing a handgun and a shot is reported to have been fired in George Street, Hockley, in the city centre.
July 29: A young couple in Long Eaton are attacked by three men wielding a gun and a knife after they spot them acting suspiciously. The man, a twenty-three-year-old sales manager, has a gun pressed to his forehead and his teeth smashed in with the butt of the pistol. He is told, ‘That’s what you get for interfering.’
July 30: A wounded, twenty-year-old man is dumped in Wolsey Avenue, Radford, from a white van. Police say he has been shot in the thigh with a handgun. The van is soon found burned out in Johnstone’s Paints car park in St Ann’s.
July 31: Three masked robbers, one brandishing a gun, beat a Securicor guard to the floor and steal two cash boxes outside a Barclays Bank in Old Basford at midday.
Analysis by Operation Stealth in the central city area revealed the following: around seventy-three per cent of the shooters were black and British-born; educationally they were almost always underachievers, living in areas where there were limited employment opportunities; the majority were from single-parent families; their family, or brethren, were the gangs to which they belonged; they were territorially protective and their role models were drawn from gangsta rap, with lots of ‘bling’ or jewellery, designer labels on clothes, cash in pocket, firearm in one hand, doll on the other. Their career paths were firmly rooted in criminality and particularly drug dealing, progressing from street runner at the age of twelve, eleven or sometimes younger. Their job would be to deliver small amounts of drugs, sometimes on a pushbike, sometimes on foot between people or addresses. For this they would be given a few pounds, or perhaps a rock of crack or wrap of heroin to sell themselves. By the time they were thirteen or fourteen they might be babysitting a firearm for one of the brethren or a larger amount of drugs at their home, and by the time they arrived in their late teens they might be street dealing themselves or have a pack of runners working for them, just as they had done themselves.
Other black-on-black shootings demonstrated the cheapness with which life was perceived by those living in the ghetto. Two resulted in murders and both had the fingerprints of Yardie gunmen on them, though both failed to result in convictions. On 9 November 2002, thirty-three-year-old Theresa Jacobs, a female crack cocaine dealer, was shot in the back of the head outside the Drum nightclub, off Ilkeston Road. Jamaican national Aston Bola faced trial over her murder but the case collapsed when the CPS offered no evidence, though Bola was deported. Almost a year later, at 1pm on 7 November 2003, twenty-four-year-old father-of-two Omar Watson walked into his local barber shop to have his hair cut, but almost as soon as he sat in his chair a gunman walked in and shot him dead. It was believed his killers had lookouts who had phoned to say he was on his way to the hairdressers shortly before the murder. Two Jamaicans were subsequently cleared of his murder.
ON A COLD February morning, a young man waits in a telephone box on St Matthias Road on the St Ann’s estate to hear from his dealer. It is a phone box well used for the purpose. The man, though, is disturbed by a youth banging on the glass partition. He is saying something. Gradually the man can make out his words.
‘Hey mate, mate. What do you want, rock or brown? I can do you anything,’ the youth says, nodding knowingly.
The man has not seen the youth before and is intrigued enough to abandon the wait for his dealer’s call. He steps out of the kiosk to talk to the thirteen-year-old. Soon he learns what he can buy from the youngster: heroin, crack cocaine, weed. The teenager gives his street name, pointing to an emblem sewn into his jacket: ‘Yeah that’s me, just ask for ABC.’ He gives the man a mobile phone number to call and within a few days a drug deal is arranged.
The next time the man sees the youth is to arrest him: he is an undercover police officer. When the youth is searched he has almost £1,000 of drugs on him, including ninety-four wraps of heroin, and crack cocaine. ABC’s tale is a familiar one. He has been smoking cannabis from the age of twelve, buying it on his way home from school as he walked through the St Ann’s estate. Pretty soon he started buying it on tick or credit. He built up a debt he could not pay off and the dealers began
to threaten him. Then they told him he could settle it by selling some of their drugs. Within a few months, he was pushing crack and heroin. The courts do a deal with ABC: he is given an anti-social behaviour order which bans him from the St Ann’s area. But for every ABC there are now thousands of others doing the same on the built-up estates of the UK’s cities.
OPERATION STEALTH PROVED to be hugely successful in its first two years, particularly given its limited resources. It was set up in much the same way that the better-known Operation Trident had been set up by the Metropolitan Police four years earlier to tackle black-on-black gun crime. Nottinghamshire officers had a good working understanding of Trident because by the early part of the millennium they were getting regular visits from the Trident team, looking at drugs networks that had connections with Nottingham and safe houses in the city. Stealth had a team of just thirty officers compared with around 300 at Trident, yet between July 2002 and October 2004 the Stealth team seized 306 firearms compared to 333 by Trident, and 6,100 rounds of ammunition compared to 1,200 by Trident. The Stealth team also secured 263 convictions over a two-year period compared with fewer than 200 by Trident. While the success rates were something to be proud of, the intelligence coming through was worrying. There seemed to be easy access to firearms, particularly replicas which could be bought across the counter. These replicas could, with a bit of engineering know-how, easily be converted to fire live ammunition. The team was also discovering that these firearms were going into the hands of younger and younger offenders – they were becoming fashion accessories for wannabe gangstas as young as thirteen. The Stealth team could have been helped further if the Government had been braver with new legislation. A minimum five-year prison sentence for possession of a firearm was brought in during January 2003. It would do little to curb the youngsters’ taste for firearms, even after some of those close to the victims saw the impact that guns were having on lives. A minimum ten-year sentence would have been a far better deterrent, in the eyes of many police officers.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2003, one of Colin Gunn’s enforcers was involved in a reckless shooting incident which almost claimed three people’s lives. He turned up at a party being held at a house in Jedburgh Walk, St Ann’s, and within a short space of time had been ‘dissed’ by some of the partygoers, who took the mickey out of him over something. The man was known to have a short fuse but no one could have predicted what he did next. He pulled out a handgun and fired five times at a number of the party guests, leaving two writhing on the floor with injuries to their legs and groin. The man fled.
Nine days later, Darren Hayden, aged thirty-eight, was picked up by officers from Operation Stealth as he drove down Vernon Road, Highbury Vale, Basford, at 1pm on 10 January in his red Ford Mondeo. Hayden, who lived near the Gunns’ mother on Raymede Drive, had convictions for armed robbery and burglary and had recently returned from Tenerife. Police searched his car and found a two-ounce bag of crack cocaine and one ounce of heroin worth £4,000, along with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and ammunition. Hayden was charged with three counts of attempted murder at the party – a third person had been shot at but not hit – along with possession of a firearm, ammunition and controlled Class A drugs.
But as police attempted to get witness statements from those shot at the party, the message came back: ‘No one wants to talk about it anymore. We just want to get on with our lives.’ By June 2003, the CPS had dropped the attempted murder charges against Hayden. He then changed his plea to guilty on the firearms and drugs offences and was jailed for seven years in October 2003. An aggrieved Kate Carty, Chief Crown Prosecutor in Nottinghamshire, said, ‘The CPS decided that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with the three counts of attempted murder. The matter then progressed as far as it could in the Crown Court until notification was received that key prosecution witnesses had changed their minds about giving evidence in court. Disappointingly, other witnesses gave further statements that were at odds with previously stated positions. We reviewed the case and concluded that its success was dependent on the willingness of witnesses to attend court. In these circumstances it was agreed that no further progress could be made on the three counts of attempted murder. We believe that, unless victims and witnesses are prepared to report crimes and give evidence confidently and effectively in court, the public cannot be properly protected.’
Despite this disappointment, in June 2004 the Operation Stealth team was celebrating success when nine St Ann’s gang-bangers were taken off the streets for life after killing a man in Sheffield. The victim was another tragic case of mistaken identity. Some of the gang were in Sheffield’s Meadowhall Shopping Centre when they were ambushed outside a takeaway and robbed of their mobile phones. On 18 December 2002, the gang returned for revenge in a convoy of four cars. They pulled up outside an Afro-Caribbean Club in the Steel City’s Pitsmoor area, believing that the people who had robbed them earlier were there, and fired two shots from the lead car. An innocent bystander, Gerald Smith, aged forty-two, was fatally wounded in the head and leg.
Ezra Taylor, twenty-six, of Collison Street, Radford; Craig Brooks, twenty-six, of Lorne Walk, St Ann’s; Roger Gordon, twenty-eight, of Hungerhill Road, St Ann’s; Gareth Lindsey, twenty, of Perlethorpe Drive, Carlton; Richard Powell, twenty-six, of Amesbury Circus, Cinderhill; Leon Bryan, twenty, of Limmer Gardens, St Ann’s; Gordon McPherson, twenty-six, of Curzon Gardens, St Ann’s; Dean Pinnock, twenty, of Melville Gardens, St Ann’s; and Christopher McKenzie, twenty, of Melville Gardens, St Ann’s, all received life sentences at Sheffield Crown Court in July 2004. It was the first time a group had been convicted of murder where no one except the killers knew who had fired the fatal shots. They were all, said trial judge Mr Justice Wakerley, as culpable as whoever pulled the trigger. ‘This conviction gets right to the heart of all the violent drug and gun crime in St Ann’s,’ said Superintendent Nick Holmes, deputy commander of Nottinghamshire Police City Division. ‘It smashes its infrastructure. The gang caused misery to all the people of Nottingham and have been well known to us for years. We have put a massive effort into tackling drug and gun crime in St Ann’s and all over the city and are starting to see the results.’
The level of urban terrorism being visited upon the community was becoming shocking, and while Stealth concentrated on the black-on-black gun crime in the city centre, another touch paper was about to be lit. All eyes would soon be turning to the north of the city, where a ferocious white gang held sway.
CHAPTER 8
avid Draycott was in trouble. He owed money and those he owed were running out of patience. He could feel it in the darkness as he pulled his black Mercedes into the driveway of his home in Woodlands Way, Sutton-in-Ashfield. It was 9.17pm on 7 October 2002. He had just been to his estranged wife’s home a short distance away and had received two phone calls while he was there, telling him to pay up or he would be in trouble. He had had to ask his wife, Andrea, if she could help him with a banker’s draft to help settle the debt. She had never seen him so worried. He had borrowed £10,000 from some unpleasant characters for a cocaine deal but had not been able to keep up the repayments and now the debt had escalated to more than £30,000, though he told his wife that he needed the money to pay off the VAT bill on the sheet metal business he was running.
‘Drakey’, a big bear of a man, always had a smile on his face. He could be a bit difficult to pin down – sometimes when asked what he was up to he would tell people he did ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’, and laugh. He had worked the doors of pubs and clubs in the Ashfield area, and had come into contact with a myriad of unsavoury people. Wanting to be his own boss, he had sunk money into a sheet metal business but found it was not easy to make an honest crust. His friends knew he had become involved with people who were selling Class A drugs in Nottinghamshire and they were heavy hitters but Drakey kept everything to himself. He never told his friends he was worried about the spot of bother he was in; he thought he could handle any
trouble himself.
Two major drug gangs were interested in the debt that Drakey owed: the Dawes family, who controlled the supply of drugs across the East Midlands from their base in Sutton-in-Ashfield, north Nottinghamshire, and the Bestwood Cartel. As he steered his Mercedes into the drive, Drakey was still thinking about trying to reconcile his marriage. Though he and his wife had been estranged for six months, things were getting better. He knew his daughter, aged eight, and son, aged eleven, wanted him to go back home and he and Andrea had become closer in recent weeks, thanks to a holiday in Devon and Cornwall and a break in Skegness. He had even told his mum that he reckoned he and Andrea would be back together by Christmas. If only he could get these people off his back he could start making plans.
Drakey was tired and didn’t see two men get out of the silver Peugeot 206 across the road. They had been waiting there for more than two hours. He didn’t hear them walk down his drive. He only saw them as he opened his door and before he knew it they were pumping bullets into him. Even with his body riddled with ten shots, Draycott managed to crawl to a neighbour’s house to raise the alarm. He was wheeled into an ambulance semi-conscious and fought hard to stay alive but ten bullets was too much even for Drakey. Four days later, he was dead at the age of forty.
Andrea, who had arrived at the scene of the shooting just as her husband was being carried away, issued an appeal that Christmas: ‘No child’s last memory of their father should be of him being wheeled into an ambulance riddled with bullets. They have had their childhood taken away. If anybody knows anything, but they are scared to come forward, I would just ask them to think about themselves in the same situation. How would they feel if their children had lost a father? I would ask them to be strong, because without their help David’s killers won’t be brought to justice.’
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