NF (2010) Hoods

by Carl Fellstrom

  One officer said, ‘Harrison was a Billy no-mates who only got friends by paying for high-class hookers. His phone became his best friend. That was his undoing. Even when he couldn’t get through he left a trail, he just couldn’t resist ringing up people who we could then link the trade to through the mapping of the phones. When he did get through he was often saying things that played right into our hands.’ Handley sensed danger and halted calls with Harrison. With his main contact suddenly unobtainable, Harrison turned for help to his old friend Donald James, an associate from his West Midlands days of petty crime and now an underworld figure in Birmingham. He agreed to arrange the next shipment and approached Michael Saward, a boat skipper with two previous convictions for drug importation. James paid around £5,000 towards the hire of Saward’s twenty-one-foot speedboat, Sundancer, which set off from Ramsgate in Kent in August 2003 to make a pick-up at the Military Yacht Club in Nieuwpoort, on the Belgian coast. Also on board was Steven Bower, an old acquaintance of Harrison, whose job was to keep an eye on the skipper and the drugs.

  At the same time, Harrison drove from his home in Breda with a Ford Focus filled with drugs, accompanied by his Dutch supplier Beikmans, Beikmans’ brother-in-law and another unnamed Dutchman in a separate vehicle. He met Saward and Bowers with Sundancer, while the three Dutchmen headed back to Holland. The National Crime Squad and their Dutch and Belgian colleagues knew all about it: not only did they have phone taps in place but they had infiltrated the gang. Belgian police arrested Harrison and his English accomplices, who were later extradited to the UK, while the Dutchmen were arrested back in Holland. In England, the National Crime Squad picked up Donald James. Beikmans, known as ‘the Tillerman’, would later receive a six-and-a-half year sentence and his brother-in-law three years for his involvement.

  After being spooked, a feeling which was proved correct by the arrest of his pal in Belgium, Handley went on the run, holing up in a £30,000 caravan in on a remote park in Scarborough, Yorkshire. For six months he watched and waited, with the National Crime Squad having little idea where he was. On phone taps, they then heard that Handley was about to get married, so detectives began ringing round register offices across the country. Nothing turned up locally so one officer joked that he was probably going to get married in Gretna Green, the Scottish border town famous for its quickie marriages. As Detective Inspector John Cudlipp, who led the investigation, recalled, ‘We had tried more obvious locations in Sutton-in-Ashfield and Nottingham. It was a process of elimination. Then someone had the inspiration of checking the most obvious location, Gretna Green, and lo and behold, they were right.’

  On the morning of 1 December 2003, at the Mill Hotel on the outskirts of Gretna Green, a party of eight gathered ready for a noon wedding ceremony in a chapel on the grounds. A few minutes before the start Handley, still nursing a bruiser of a hangover and feeling uncomfortably paranoid, was getting ready with his best man, who joked about any last requests. His bride was in another room alone, looking forward to a future with a man she felt could keep her in the material manner to which she had become accustomed over the past few years. But when officers moved in to make the arrest, it was all over within the space of minutes. Handley did not resist. The thirty-three-year-old later told police, ‘I knew the game was up when I looked out through the window and saw a broad-shouldered man go past.’

  A delighted DI Cuddlip said, ‘He was surprised to see us. He didn’t say very much. He was trying to keep his dad at bay.’

  The gang was dealt with at Birmingham Crown Court in April 2005. Keith Winston Eugene Harrison, originally from Coventry, was sentenced to eight years in prison, while Handley was jailed for five-and-a-half years. Other members of the Hucknall trafficking ring were jailed for a combined total of more than twenty years. These foot soldiers, all employed by Handley, included Mark Ford, a thirty-two-year-old from Bulwell, who was known as ‘Joe 90’ or ‘Goggles’ because he wore spectacles. Ford was jailed for three years. He had been arrested with two other defendants in July 2003 with a consignment of drugs on the M1 near Northampton. Ford also received an extra six months for producing cannabis at a property he owned in Nottingham. Alan ‘Ostrich Man’ Walker, a sixty-two-year-old from Cotgrave, near Nottingham, received an eighteen-month sentence. He had been involved in a huge ostrich farm fraud in Nottinghamshire which had made more than £20 million in less than seventeen months by duping people into buying shares. He became involved in the gang as a result of his time at North Sea Camp prison and agreed to fly over to Britain from his home in Nice, France, in 2003 to transport drugs for Handley. He was arrested in Newmarket driving a van containing eighty-five kilos of cannabis.

  Adrian Haywood, a thirty-six-year-old from Underwood, got six years for supplying mobile phones and transport for the traffickers. He was a motor trader with a workshop in Somercotes, Derbyshire. Officers found 37,500 ecstasy tablets in a search of the premises. Dale Wright, thirty-one, of Skegby, who was the security man for batches of drugs held in various locations, received three years, while Michael ‘The Geezer’ Saward, fifty-seven, who lived on a houseboat in Kent, got six years after being hired to take his speedboat to Belgium to collect drugs from Harrison. Steven ‘Little Baz’ Bower, thirty-five, of Grantham, received four years. He acted as a runner and a security man, holding drugs and going on trips to Belgium with Bower and, after becoming seasick, had unwittingly ensured the entire group decided to prolong their stay at Nieuwpoort until he recovered. They were there when police swooped the next morning. Subsequent drug seizures included £1.9 million of cannabis in Felixstowe and 1.2 million ecstasy tablets, worth £4.8 million, in Holland.

  By the end of the Operation Shearson, police had dealt another big blow to the drug shipments being managed from Nottinghamshire. Large amounts of Class A drugs were seized in Holland, Germany, Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp and Birmingham. With the help of Customs and Excise, the operation seized 870 kilos of cannabis, worth over £1.9 million, and sixteen kilos of cocaine with a street value of £848,000. Officers were ecstatic with the results. ‘Dismantling this well-established network is a major achievement and is down to the hard work and dedication of all the officers involved,’ said DI John Cudlipp afterwards. ‘Harrison and his cohorts have paid the heavy price of their freedom for thinking they could make easy money through drugs-trafficking and we hope this sends out a strong message to others who are tempted to do the same.’

  ANOTHER OF THE Gunns’ associates, Donny Quinn, had been building up a massive drugs operation of his own. Quinn was no stranger to police and customs, having been lifted several times in large-scale cigarette and cannabis smuggling busts, but nothing had stuck. He had based himself in the Bilborough area of Nottingham, where in Cockington Road he had a large house which had been pimped up to make him the laird of the council estate. Such was the cheek of the man that he even had several former police officers from Nottinghamshire, who had branched out into gardening services on their retirement, willing to tend his expansive garden for him. He had already managed to wriggle out of a major bust in October 1999, when 120 kilos of cannabis was found in a lorry in Huthwaite. One of the gang’s main men was a thirty-one-year-old tetraplegic called Nathan Graham who had suffered his massive disability as a result of a diving accident. Graham would later die of a fatal asthma attack six days after being remanded to Nottingham Prison; an inquest into his death recommended health care for disabled prisoners be improved. The cannabis case had been dealt with by National Crime Squad officers from Derby and Nottingham, some of whom were later embroiled in the cocaine-snorting scandal of 2001 (see Chapter Six). When it came to court in September 2000, legal submissions were heard in chambers by the judge and the trial was abandoned, though no reason was given publicly.

  Quinn still faced a trial over a spectacular bust by Customs and Excise at a warehouse on the banks of the River Trent in August 1999. Investigators kept watch on the disused warehouse for several months as cigarettes were shipped in in their mi
llions. Then, as a consignment worth more than £2 million came in, they swooped, some in high-powered rubber dinghy boats. By the end of a four-week trial at Nottingham Crown Court in March 2001, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. A retrial was sought but never materialised.

  Quinn, perhaps becoming over-confident, launched himself into large-scale Class A drug shipments and firearms. Using connections he had built up over the years, he began assembling a formidable gang with some twenty trusted lieutenants spanning Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire. Operation Myope was started in response by the National Crime Squad’s Rugby branch in October 2003 and focused initially on the drug-trafficking activities of Quinn, two of his lieutenants – Michael McDonald, then aged thirty-five, from Aspley, and Jason Wesley, thirty-five, from Beeston – and the network of couriers working in Nottinghamshire. It soon became apparent that the gang was involved in the supply and distribution of drugs between London, Nottingham and West Yorkshire and had international links, with Quinn regularly visiting Malaga in Spain. Initial surveillance showed that Quinn was in regular contact over supplies with the Dawes Cartel as well as the Gunns. He also had strong links with underworld armourers across the country and had access to large caches of firearms, something he would later attempt to use to his advantage.

  Among his gang was a real-life Robin Hood. Actor Mark Dickinson, who played the famous outlaw at the city’s Tales of Robin Hood attraction during the early 1990s and would later appear in a film version of Macbeth with Jason Connery and Brian Blessed, had fallen on hard times. After getting to know Quinn – Dickinson also lived in Bilborough – he was offered a job doing runs for him and soon became one of his most trusted cocaine couriers. The thirty-nine-year-old was one of the first to be arrested during the three-year operation. Officers swooped on Dickinson after watching him drive into the Broad Oak pub in the village of Strelley on 2 July 2004, where he met a lorry driver. As he left, they pulled him over and discovered a kilo of cocaine in his car. He would later be jailed for three years and nine months. Another gang member was a Gulf War veteran from the Meadows who had served with the First Battalion Grenadier Guards in 1991. Dean Cumberpatch, thirty-four, was arrested after being caught driving a lorry with 150 kilos of cannabis resin for Quinn, and would later receive a two-year sentence.

  By May 2004, Quinn had also become adept at money laundering. He entered into a deal with a group of Liverpool businessmen who ripped off the NatWest bank to the tune of £15 million in an elaborate fraud. Quinn became their banker. The idea for the sophisticated get-rich-quick scheme came from a genuine letter sent to all customers in the wake of NatWest’s takeover of the Royal Bank of Scotland. It was a warning that while cheque funds would be shown as cleared on the third working day after being paid in, they could still end up bouncing if the cheque was bad. This was a signpost to the Merseyside villains that it was possible to take money that didn’t actually exist from accounts. On the Wednesday before the May Bank Holiday, one of the Merseyside group went into a St Helens branch of the NatWest and placed £20 million in bogus cheques into an account. On the surface it was a legitimate deal for 38,000 Nokia mobile phones. By the Friday, well before the cheques would show up as having bounced, the funds were weaving their way through a number of other companies to disguise the origins and make it look like a legitimate financial transaction, before arriving in a bank account in Riga, Latvia. It was an account Quinn had opened in the name of Alverton Finance Ltd. Fortunately for NatWest, Latvia had just joined the European Union and been warned to be on the lookout for money laundering activities. Realising what was going on, the banking authorities in Latvia informed the City of London Police. The account was then frozen, preventing the conspirators transferring much of the cash to Dubai, though altogether £14 million of funds were cleared in Latvia before the game was up. Quinn would later receive a three-year prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court for fraud, to be added to his drug crimes.

  Meanwhile his drug smuggling operations were being dealt a severe blow as police took out the middle tier of his gang, leaving Quinn exposed. Although the gang was surveillance savvy, regularly changing phones and using phone boxes, it did not bank on the National Crime Squad bugging its hire cars when they went in for a valet service. Every order Quinn gave was picked up by the surveillance team. Throughout 2004 the main players in his gang were relentlessly targeted until Quinn himself was eventually arrested. Once he was presented with all the bugged material, he threw in the towel and pleaded guilty. Altogether twenty-one members of the gang received combined prison sentences totalling 117 years. In 2006, Quinn himself received an eighteen-year stretch for conspiracy to supply cocaine, cannabis and amphetamines and a twelve-and-a-half year sentence, to run concurrently, for supply of ecstasy. More than £2 million of drugs had been discovered during Operation Myope, including six kilos of cocaine, six kilos of ecstasy, 160 kilos of cannabis and twenty-five kilos of amphetamines.

  Quinn was not happy about his sentence, particularly as he had given National Crime Squad officers information about three arms caches he had knowledge of. He appealed on that basis but the judges pointed out that although the arms and ammunition had been discovered, and they had been important finds in the battle against organised crime, no one had been arrested. ‘It is significant that having been in custody for eighteen months, the defendant still retained the ability to locate these weapons,’ the Appeal Court judges said. The implication was clear: they were either his firearms or he was involved in their movement. Quinn was stuck with his eighteen-year sentence.

  With Donny Quinn locked up and the Dawes Cartel taken down, Colin and David Gunn were running out of friends.

  CHAPTER 10

  ne of the first targets of Operation Starburst was not the Gunns but a group of cocaine smugglers operating between Jamaica and the St Ann’s estate. The gang was led by Lindford Shepherd and Karl Guthrie, who used female mules to bring cocaine into the city in bulk from the West Indies. Guthrie, who was jobless and lived on the St Ann’s estate, and Shepherd had extensive links to Jamaica, were pouring millions of pounds worth of cocaine into the region. Operation Conduit was set up to target them and within a few months dealers working for them were being taken out – the base of the business pyramid was being chipped away. By the time the team got to Guthrie and Shepherd, they had taken out sixty-two of their foot soldiers and seized more than £3 million of coke. One twenty-nine-year-old smuggler, Sandra Cooke, who lived in Sneinton and worked as a cleaner at the Nottingham Evening Post, had made a number of mule runs to and from Jamaica, but was also ripping off local dealers. In February 2004, she made another trip, under the guise of visiting her ‘sick mother’ in Montego Bay. She was met off the plane, driven to a sugar cane field and executed with one shot to the back of the head.

  Eventually Shepherd and Guthrie, having run out of workers, were forced to get hands-on. Shepherd, the senior of the two, used his son Jonathan Levine to ferry coke into the UK. He was caught and jailed for ten years. On 11 January 2005, Pamela Fogo, a fifty-one-year-old mother-of-three from the St Ann’s estate, was met by Guthrie at Gatwick Airport. She had already been searched once after sniffer dogs marked her out but Customs officers had failed to find the coolbag stitched into the lining of her rucksack, containing uncut cocaine worth £320,000 on the street. Officers from Operation Conduit, who knew she was carrying cocaine somewhere, followed the two as they took a taxi back to Nottingham, stopping the car on the A453 coming into the city. Fogo received a six-and-half year prison sentence for her mule work and Guthrie received ten years for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. Shepherd, who had by now amassed substantial wealth including properties all over Jamaica, received a five-year sentence.

  It was a successful operation by any standards. Now the Starburst team was ready to take on the white gangs – starting first with the Dawes family.

  IN JANUARY 2004, Nottinghamshire Police arrested a young man on suspicion of burglary. Detective Sergeant Darren Mee began in
terviewing him at Oxclose Lane Police Station over a suspected break-in, but soon the youth, Peter Williams, stopped the interview and said he wanted to talk to a senior officer. He said he had some information about a murder which would interest them. The senior officer on duty, Detective Inspector Tony Webster, was called out to handle the matter. Gradually a story began to emerge.

  ‘I know something about the Marian Bates murder,’ Williams told him. ‘Those involved were Craig Moran, a lad called Betton or Bretton, and another lad I don’t know. Craig had the car, which was a dinger, to use on the job. There was also a scooter. I think they bought that. The lad – I don’t know his name – was the rider of the scooter and it’s him that did the shooting.’

  ‘So how do you know all this, Peter?’ Webster asked the young man.

  ‘I was there,’ the teenager told him. ‘I went into the jewellers with the other lad and I forced the lock off the cupboard with a crowbar and the next thing I heard was a shot. I didn’t know he was going to shoot anybody. And another thing...I also know who set the job up and where the gun came from – it was all Gunnie’s job, Colin Gunn. He said nobody should be shot.’

  Peter Williams was charged with the robbery at the Time Centre and the murder of Marian Bates, but crucially DI Webster working under a heavy load at the time, neglected to write up notes in his pocket book until two days after the event. A judge would later cite this as one reason for ruling Williams’s confession inadmissible in a court of law. DI Webster was also apparently unaware at the time of the arrest of police intelligence logs which stated that Williams was ‘strongly suspected’ of involvement in Marian Bates’s murder. .