Peter Williams would later tell police that Gunn continued to outline the plan, ordering Brodie to park his scooter up an alleyway and to make sure there were no customers in the shop when they entered. Brodie nodded, listening almost reverently. Gunn, said Williams, was adamant that he did not want any shooting, but Brodie was a loose cannon; who knew what he might do?
On the morning of 30 September, Victor and Marian Bates made their way into Arnold, taking the road from the village of Ravenshead. Victor was sixty-five and Marian sixty-four. Their jewellery store had a bit of early trade but by 11am only a handful of customers had come into the shop: a woman looking for a watch for her husband, a couple who browse through the engagement rings before leaving empty-handed, another man looking for a some special earrings for a girlfriend. The shop was empty when, at about 1.30pm, two young men wearing motorcycle crash helmets with the visors up and rucksacks on their backs burst in. Xanthe Bates, Victor and Marian’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, was helping out in the shop and happened to be on the telephone to her husband. She was startled by the noisy entrance of the two men storming in. One of them opened his jacket, took out a crowbar out and walked towards one of the glass cabinets, which he tried to jemmy open. The other man, slightly older, looked Xanthe in the eye.
‘This is an armed robbery. Put the fucking phone down now.’
It seemed unreal, like a scene from a movie. Xanthe was rooted to the spot, phone still in her hand. Marian and Victor heard the shouting from the back of the shop and rushed to the front counter. Marian saw the two young men and walked towards her daughter to take charge of the situation. One of the men levelled a gun at Xanthe, who still had the phone in her hand, and took a couple of steps forward. Marian rushed in front of Xanthe. Trying to protect her daughter, she stretched out her arms instinctively and screamed, ‘No!’ There was a roar of gunfire from three feet away and Marian collapsed on the ground. The shooter shouted at Marian, now slumped on the shop floor, ‘You stupid cow.’ All hell broke loose. Victor had managed to press a silent alarm button underneath the counter and now had an old fencing foil which he grabbed from the back of the shop. He rushed towards the gunman, later identified in court as James Brodie. Brodie aimed the gun at him and pulled the trigger but this time the weapon misfired. Then Xanthe jumped on Brodie’s back, screaming and grabbing his arms so that he couldn’t raise the weapon again at her father.
Peter Williams, who had been grabbing jewellery from the cabinet and throwing it into his rucksack, saw his accomplice in trouble and swung his metal bar at Victor, slamming it into the side of his face. Reeling in pain with a fractured cheekbone, Victor remained undaunted and attacked Brodie with the foil once again. Williams raised the iron bar and aimed several more blows at Victor’s arm as the shopkeeper tried to stab Brodie. Finally Brodie threw Xanthe off his back, cutting her lip badly with the handle of his gun in the process. He made for the exit, quickly followed by Williams.
They headed for a nearby alleyway where they had left a scooter with the engine running, but the gunshot and commotion attracted the attention of several shoppers, who were trying to see what was going on. Brodie brandished his gun menacingly and screamed, ‘Get out the fucking way.’ The startled shoppers parted and the raiders make their escape. At a petrol station about a mile away, their getaway car is waiting with Craig Moran driving and Dean Betton in the passenger seat. Betton’s job was be to get rid of the scooter, while Moran drove Brodie and Williams back to a safe house to check their spoils. They found two rings, three pairs of earrings and a pendant worth just £1,100 in the rucksack. It was the price of Marian Bates’s life.
The death of Marian Bates again trained the eyes of the nation on Nottingham. The fears of the white Middle Englander were concentrated in that one brutal murder: the Bates were grandparents, middle class, owned their own small business and lived in a village. Chief Constable Steve Green wondered what he had done to deserve such pressures. It was a far cry from the blueprint for success that he had devised and envisaged for Nottinghamshire some three years earlier, when he had taken over the force of 2,500 officers and a budget of some £170 million per year. Now it was attracting a reputation for being the worst policed county in England and Wales, despite the setting up a ‘reputation unit’, costing council taxpayers more than £400,000 a year, to tackle the media portrayal of the city. By then it was too late: the adverse headlines had sunk into the public consciousness.
BY 23 SEPTEMBER 2003 John and Joan Stirland had moved to a council flat in Goole on the Humberside coast. The place was not the dream home by the seaside that they had hoped for; in fact it was barely big enough for the two of them. They had received some help from the police in getting the tenancy of a one-bedroom flat but they felt increasingly isolated. Both were taking sleeping pills and anti-depressants and Joan was suffering from severe depression. Her son had been charged with a brutal murder and now they were living in a tiny flat in a place they hated, constantly looking over their shoulders. As the months ticked by the depression got worse. By November 2003 Joan had had enough. She wrote in her diary:
Tuesday the 2nd of Sept 03 police came to our house said they wanted to speak to my son JJ about a murder. After that they came every day for over a week. Then he was caught. Then the next Sunday at 10pm two men on a motorbike came to our house and fired six shots. They tried to kill me and John, my husband. The next day police told us to leave Nottingham. We didn’t know where to go so we just drove. We ended up in Bridlington, we went to the council there and the manager Karen Jordan said why land on our doorstep why Bridlington. We were in such a state we didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. She told us to come back Monday which we did. She took us to a single person’s flat in a house with a man living upstairs. We were told to sign a tenancy, we were told we had no choice, so, desperate, we did it. We are on anti-depressants plus sleeping pills. The GP Dr Moran wrote us a letter to get us moved, so did the psychiatrist, but the CID in Nottingham put a stop to it. They said it is dangerous for us to go back. We have done nothing wrong. We are decent innocent people we have worked all our lives and now we have nothing. We are desperate to get out of Goole. So desperate that, if we are not out by Xmas you will be taking us out in a box. We just need you to know we want to be buried in Nottingham, Wilford cemetery. This is just because the police in Nottingham can’t control the Gunn family who run the Bestwood estate and everyone in it. It is disgraceful the police can’t do anything about them they used me three times and now they don’t want to know. Our lives are non existent. We haven’t been out of this bedsit since the day we moved in on September 22 2003. We are at the end now, all we wanted was to come back home.
During a phone call to her daughter Rosie in early November 2003, Joan said both she and John had talked about taking an overdose of sleeping pills and ending it all. Rosie tried to cheer up her mum and told her to get the police to do something. A few days later, Rosie rang her mum back and told her she had looked through a newspaper and seen some adverts for retirement bungalows on the Lincolnshire coast. She gave Joan the phone number and a few days later got a call back from her mum, who was ecstatic. ‘Rosie, it’s fantastic!’ she gushed. ‘This place in Trusthorpe is right next to the beach and it’s quiet but there is plenty to do. It’s the perfect place for us, it’s out of the way. We are going to take it. Everything is going to be all right.’
ON 11 DECEMBER 2003, police officers were watching Colin Gunn. Operation Starburst had made him and his brother David its number one target. Colin had driven over to Lincolnshire from Bestwood and was at a caravan site on Sutton Road, on the way to Trusthorpe. He was having a dispute with one of his crew who had displeased him. The man had fled Bestwood for the East Coast after bodging a kidnapping for Colin in Calverton village. Instead of taking the man away from the house in Calverton and giving him a hiding, the man had been persuaded to let his victim go free for the £200 he had in his pocket. Colin was furious when he found out and demanded that
the kidnappers be dealt with using the most severe tactics. One of them had also bodged a previous shooting, almost killing a child. He had been warned at the time that any more failures to carry out Colin’s orders would have fatal consequences for him.
Colin called John McSally, his favoured enforcer, over to Sutton to brief him on the job. He made it clear he wanted the man dead with no mistakes or messy leftovers. McSally was staying nearby in a caravan owned by Colin’s mum while he planned the job. McSally approached his target but ended up shooting him through the shoulder instead of the head. Shocked and badly injured the man lived and made his way to safety. McSally was later arrested for the shooting but walked straight back out of the police station without being charged.
On 14 December, Joan and John Stirland gathered up their small bundle of belongings and made the journey down to Radio St Peter’s, their new street (its distinctive name derived from its role as a wartime RAF station) in Trusthorpe. They were looking forward to life again, a new start, and could put some of the past behind them. Joan thought she would phone the police, just to let them know where they were. They had done little for her, but she felt she ought to call in case the Gunns were up to anything she needed to know about.
On 15 December, she rang her contact at Nottinghamshire Police to tell him about their move to Trusthorpe. He warned her about the Gunns’ connections with the area but she was adamant that this was where they were going to start a new life. The officer would later be asked in a courtroom whether police had subsequently examined the security issues surrounding the Stirlands’ move to Trusthorpe. ‘I had satisfied myself that they were not vulnerable at that location, yes,’ he replied.
CHAPTER 9
he Bestwood cartel now exercised control over a number of pubs in the Bestwood and Bulwell area, extorting protection money and laundering cash through its books. Colin and David Gunn were now masters at creating fear to suit their ends. Both played football for their favourite pub, the Scots Grey, and during one Sunday league match in March 2003, at Bulwell Hall Farm, the visiting team received a reminder of the Gunn brothers’ intimidation skills. The Jolly Farmers football team walked into their dressing room ahead of the match to find a severed pig’s head in a plastic bag with a message scrawled in blood: ‘Welcome to Hell.’ Someone had acquired it from a local butcher. The opposition team lost their spark, suffering a 3-2 defeat after extra time. Jolly Farmers team secretary Geoff Best was urged to make an official complaint to the FA but was less than enthusiastic. ‘We have got nothing to say,’ was his only comment after the match.
The Scots Grey pub had been frequently used by the Gunn brothers. Any trouble which flared up on the premises was rarely dealt with by the police. In February 1999, a thirty-five-year-old man was stabbed several times outside the pub in a Friday night fracas. When police went to see him, he told them from his hospital bed that he had no idea who his attacker was and he did not want them to take it any further. He was, as he pointed out, already in poor shape and talking would be bad for his health.
The rundown pubs they operated, which would otherwise have been boarded up and shut down, were given at least some lease of life with the Bestwood Cartel behind them. The Cartel was also branching out. Colin had renewed his association with a family-run gang in north Nottinghamshire who were equally brutal in their methods, and with Jonathan Quinn, another Nottingham criminal from the Bilborough area, who had branched out significantly from cigarette and cannabis smuggling into Class A drugs importation and firearms to service the north of England.
John and Rob Dawes were the generals of the Dawes Cartel, based in the Mansfield and Sutton-in-Ashfield areas of Nottinghamshire. By 2001, they had come under investigation by law enforcement agencies, who were surprised by the magnitude of their operation. They ran a multi-million-pound drugs empire from a small house in Tudor Street, Sutton-in-Ashfield. Their modus operandi was almost a blueprint of the Bestwood Cartel, with whom they enjoyed extensive links, not least through John Dawes, who had worked with Colin Gunn some years earlier. The Dawes Cartel would recruit young street dealers, who usually had addictions of their own, to act as runners for them and enforce their rule of law. Their number one rule was that fear brought great loyalty: if you could grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds would follow.
Like his pal Colin Gunn, John Dawes eschewed life within the legitimate working world and preferred the black economy where no taxes were paid, other than to those higher up the drugs business ladder who could ‘tax’ you. From 1991 until his arrest in 2005, there is no evidence that John Dawes did a single day’s legitimate work. He lived almost exclusively, according to his own accounts, as a jobless man claiming benefits. His hot-headed brother Rob, who had a penchant for ordering the shootings of anyone who displeased him, was operating from Spain from 2002 onwards, organising shipments of cannabis resin and cocaine, while the rest of the gang organised wholesale deliveries of amphetamines and heroin, mainly from Liverpool and Runcorn. Until 2001, they operated almost undetected by any meaningful probe by law enforcement.
Police in Nottinghamshire launched Operation Normality in 2001 with the help of the National Crime Squad and customs investigators. By 2003, it would receive additional resources with the sanctioning of Operation Starburst by law enforcement agencies in London. It found that the Dawes Cartel was made up of three generals: John and Rob Dawes and Gary Hardy, another Mansfield man whose father had been the high up the command chain of a Midlands Hell’s Angels chapter. These three leaders would take a three-way split on each shipment, with Rob organising the smuggling of cocaine and cannabis from Spain and John organising its distribution across the Midlands, as well as the wholesale importation of amphetamines from Holland and heroin from within Britain. In addition, the Dawes Cartel was operating with Anthony Handley and Keith Harrison over cannabis shipments into the UK; these were handled by John and Rob’s father, Arthur. By 2001, this close-knit group was importing so many drugs into Nottinghamshire that they had a backlog, so they began to bury large amounts underground in coded locations in woodland in Sutton-in-Ashfield, at Sutton Lawn, Mapplewells Recreation Park and in woodland near Pleasley. Police would eventually find £500,000 buried in woodland hides near Sutton Parkway train station, together with a sawn-off shotgun and ammunition. Other burial grounds for the drugs remain hidden to this day.
On 1 June 2001, investigators made their first major inroad into the gang. Officers lay in wait as two Dawes Cartel lieutenants drove to Colwick industrial estate, on the outskirts of Nottingham. Police were staggered by the scale of drug-running they discovered. Inside the industrial unit was around 100 kilos of amphetamine, six kilos of cannabis resin and eleven kilos of paracetamol cutting agents – enough to make thirty kilos of heroin ready for sale on the street. Jonathan Guest, Ian Butler and Martin Smith were all taken out by police within a few days. All were linked to the production unit at Colwick, which was used to cut cocaine, heroin and amphetamines as well as manufacture ecstasy pills and store cannabis.
John Dawes decided it was time for a holiday. A break on the Costa del Crime would enable him to rethink strategies as well as link up with his brother Rob, who spent regular breaks in Spain and was laundering their money in two bars and a restaurant supply business near Fuengirola. He would be able to decide whether new recruits were needed and whether to put a scare into those arrested. Fear was needed to ensure that those who had been lifted by the police did not lead to his door. John and Rob Dawes flew out to Malaga with some haste in June 2001. John rented a villa for nine months, hoping the police interest would eventually dissipate. He flew back to the UK in September 2001 to test the water. Police just kept watching, knowing that if they bided their time more would be revealed. They had taken out a middle tier of the Dawes pyramid and the gang’s generals were running scared. Now John Dawes was relying on a twenty-three-year-old to be one of his lieutenants. Ryan Smith would take on the role. On the legal front, the arrested Guest, Butler and Martin S
mith were all beyond help, thought John Dawes. He just hoped the fear that he and Rob instilled in them would be enough to prevent them grassing for favourable sentences.
When their case eventually reached Nottingham Crown Court, in January 2002, Guest admitted conspiracy to supply amphetamines and cannabis and possessing £150,000 of heroin, and was imprisoned for fourteen years. Butler, who admitted possession of heroin with intent to supply, received eight years. Smith, whose fingerprints were all over the Colwick industrial unit and who was caught with a carrier bag stained with heroin and with £22,000 hidden in his pantry, received a four years.
At the same time as National Crime Squad officers were tackling this lower end of the Dawes Cartel, they had come across links with another gang smuggling large amounts of cannabis from Holland and Belgium via the North Sea. Keith ‘Red’ Harrison and Anthony ‘Nottingham Tone’ Handley, had come to the attention of Dutch police investigating the perplexing murder of a middle-aged schoolteacher. On 24 November 2002, fifty-two-year-old Gerard Meesters answered his front door in a quiet area of Groningen. He was surprised to find five men outside. One handed him a phone number on a torn-off packet of red Rizla cigarette papers. They spoke with English accents and the message was this: ‘You are Gerard Meesters. Your sister Janet [sic] has done something bad, she has stolen something from us. You must ring this number in Spain and tell the man who answers the phone where your sister is. Be aware that if you do not do this we will come back and if we have to come back it will not be for a chat.’
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