NF (2010) Hoods

by Carl Fellstrom

  It was later also discovered that Williams had been on an electronic tag and, on the day of the killing, should have been being monitored by a private security company, Premier, but had removed his tag a week before after being released on licence from Olney Young Offender Institution three weeks earlier. He also missed seven out of eleven scheduled meetings with Nottingham Youth Offending Team. This breach of bail conditions was not picked up by the company, which should have checked that Williams was at his home address under curfew.

  Later, at the trial of Williams, Dean Betton and Craig Moran, DI Webster revealed his failings in an emotionally charged moment at Wolverhampton Crown Court. ‘I don’t think I have been good enough in my job,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t expect any sympathy from anyone. I have let the Bates family down, the CPS down and the barristers,’ he said. ‘Williams did make those admissions. He did say that, but how I have recorded it wasn’t correct. The gist of what he’s saying was correct, but having considered it for months, I believe it was a vast error of judgment on my part in going anywhere near him that night. In the last probably five or six years I have suffered ill health. It’s not an excuse for this but I don’t think my judgment has been correct. I came here today very agitated and it’s because I don’t think I have done the right thing. And I don’t want to drag the force into any further disrepute by trying to defend a position that I’ve looked at for a long time now and think I cannot defend in court properly.’

  Discussions took place before the trial commenced, including applications from the defence that could have scuppered any trial had they been accepted. However, the Judge Mr Justice Goldring ruled that the trial should go ahead. Williams was convicted and received a life sentence with a twenty-two-year tariff; Dean Betton, twenty-four, and Craig Moran, twenty-three, both received fourteen years.

  DI Webster broke down completely shortly after his admissions and left the witness box in tears, with the judge declaring him unfit to give evidence. He subsequently suffered a breakdown and was off work for nine months, though he later returned to duty. An Independent Police Complaints Commission enquiry into the police investigation of the Marian Bates murder found that there was no evidence of any misconduct by Webster or any other officers involved, though it did say there were ‘lessons for Nottinghamshire force to learn in relation to best practice with regard to the timely completion of pocket notebooks’. Inspector Sam Wilson, vice chairman of Nottinghamshire Police Federation, pointed out that Webster had been commended five times for his work and had an exemplary record: ‘Tony is highly respected by his colleagues and has never lost his focus on what this job is about: catching criminals and protecting the public,’ he said. ‘We are heartened he has been completely exonerated by the totally independent IPCC.’

  Police had intelligence at the time that the car linked to the Bates robbery, a maroon Peugeot, had been pulled over three months before the raid, when it was driven by Colin Gunn’s common-law wife, Victoria Garfoot, and by February 2004 they had information about Gunn sponsoring the raid. But it took until January 2005 for him to be arrested. Officers were rewarded with a few nuggets when they went to Gunn’s mother’s home in Raymede Drive on 7 January 2005. Gunn was not there (though his solicitor later made arrangements for him to attend the police station). As police carried out searches at the property, they discovered various pieces of torn paper which were clearly the remnants of faxed documents. The bundle of evidence was bagged up and then the relevant pieces removed by one of the senior officers, who realised its significance and the need to ensure the corruption investigation, Operation Salt, remained hidden from rank and file officers. Forensic examination of the paper found that it had been sent by fax from Radford Road Police Station to Limey’s clothes store in Bridlesmith Gate, Nottingham. The piece of paper had the fingerprints of Jason Grocock, manager of Limey’s, on it, and the fingerprints of Colin Gunn. The connection between the two was trainee detective Charles Fletcher, based at Radford Road Police Station.

  IN DECEMBER 2003, one of Colin Gunn’s runners went on an unsanctioned cocaine run into Lincolnshire. Gunn found out about it, and began to suspect the runner might be a weak link in the organisation. A bullet was fired through the letterbox of his home. Patrick Marshall, known as ‘Celtic Pat’ because of his passion for the Scottish football team, had become a loose canon as far as Gunn was concerned and needed sorting. Gunn also heard Marshall was trying to get a gun to settle a dispute with another man called ‘Scotch Al’, and decided to intervene. He sought out his deadliest gunman, John McSally, to deal with it. A junior member of the Cartel organised a car, while McSally told Marshall he would be able to provide him with a gun. A meeting was arranged in the car park of the Park Tavern, Basford, for 8pm on 8 February 2004. McSally was late and Marshall was on the point of giving up and going home when the pony-tailed enforcer turned up. As the father-of-one walked with McSally to where he said the gun was stored, McSally shot him in the head. He then made his escape in the getaway car, careering through a bollard as he made his way out of the pub car park. Patrick Marshall, forty-six, lay dying with a bullet wound to his head.

  John McSally was born in Nottingham in 1956. His criminal career began when he was eleven and his first spell in custody came in September 1971, when he went to borstal for burglary. In 2002, he was jailed after visiting Nottingham pubs with a shotgun searching for a person he wanted to kill. He received a ludicrously short sentence of two-and-a-half years for making threats to kill, possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life and breaching a suspended sentence. A wild-looking man with tattoos on his neck and a greying goatee, his weakness was his penchant for getting drunk and letting his loose tongue wag. During boozy late-night chats, he even told the landlady of his local pub in Basford about some of the shootings he had carried out done, saying he got sexually aroused by it. ‘Yeah, I did the Mansfield one [David Draycott] and Patrick Marshall and the black guy from the Heathfield Estate. It’s just business,’ he said.

  The black guy from the Heathfield Estate was Derrick Senior, a social worker. In September 2003, he and a friend arranged to meet a colleague in a pub. They went to the wrong one and ended up in the Lord Nelson in Bulwell by mistake. Dreadlocked Mr Senior was chatting to his friend Esther Robinson when one of five young white men playing pool kicked her on the buttock as he walked past the table. Derrick asked them to apologise but instead they grabbed him by his dreadlocks and dragged him into the corner of the pub, where they began to kick, punch and beat him with their pool cues. He suffered a fractured eye socket and rib and Esther suffered bruises after being attacked when she went to his aid. His attackers even danced around the pub laughing and joking, holding his dreadlocks in the air. The incident, just after 10pm, was caught on CCTV.

  The five men were all members of the Bestwood Cartel. They had been celebrating a birthday and also the arrest of Michael O’Brien for the murder of Marvyn Bradshaw. The men were twenty-year-old James Brodie, a young man who had just carried out a series of robberies; John McNee, twenty-four, who had a history of violence in virtually every pub he had been into; Joseph Graham, twenty-three; Lee Marshall, twenty-four, and Robert Watson, twenty-five, whose birthday it was. By the time the case came to court in May 2004, Brodie had disappeared; he was wanted in connection with the shooting of Marian Bates.

  One of the Bestwood Cartel contacted a drugs worker they knew and asked him if he would approach Mr Senior and offer him some money to withdraw his complaint, but the fifty-year-old had already given police a witness statement. Colin Gunn wasn’t happy that his crew would have to face court, particularly as the incident would spark more questions about what had happened to James Brodie. Mr Senior, who had started growing his dreadlocks thirty-three years earlier, told the police, ‘It was the greatest insult I could suffer. I am a Rastafarian. It encompasses my life and religion. I have been more deeply affected than I can possibly imagine. The physical scars and injuries have healed, but the mental scars are never like
ly to heal.’

  His attackers received sentences of between six-and-a-half years and two-and-a-half years at Nottingham Crown Court on 14 May 2004. Three days later, Derrick Senior was feeling more vulnerable than ever. He knew how these people might react, having gone to court to see them sentenced. He had taken to driving his car to the shops even though it was just down the road. As he got into his car that evening, he didn’t take much notice of the motorcycle revving up nearby. It looked like a pizza delivery man – he had a cardboard box in his hand. He didn’t see another man with a motorcycle helmet get off the bike and approach his car. John McSally thrust his handgun through the car window and pumped three bullets into Senior, shouting, ‘You grassing bastard.’ Senior sat in his car, his hands still on the steering wheel, trying to play dead as he battled to stay calm with bullet wounds in both legs and his armpit. He later told a courtroom, ‘I was trying to play possum, play dead as it were. [Then] I got up and hit the horn and screamed, “I’ve been shot.”’

  Derrick Senior survived but was forced to enter the witness protection programme. He has not been back to Nottingham since.

  CHAPTER 11

  amie Gunn took his best mate Marvyn Bradshaw’s death very badly. He just wanted to get out of his head at every opportunity. He drank heavily and snorted lines of cocaine. His uncle Colin found out and had given him a beating, telling him to stay off the stuff – something other members of the family were not happy about. Colin had even been ‘sent to Coventry’ for a few weeks. Meanwhile Jamie continued on his mission to get as wasted as he could: nothing his mother Julie or stepfather Dave Shefford did seemed to have any effect.

  In July 2004, Michael O’Brien went on trial for Bradshaw’s murder. The Gunn family wondered how Jamie would cope with it all. He couldn’t bring himself to go to court and see O’Brien in the dock. Instead other relatives would go. Colin especially wanted to stare O’Brien in the face, the face of the man who had dared to try to kill his nephew. Gary Salmon, the other man police wanted in connection with the murder, was still missing. Colin was happy to hear rumours circulating that he had disposed of not only Gary Salmon but also James Brodie, the young man who had shot Marian Bates and had not been seen since thirty-six hours after the murder. It all added to his reputation, as far as he was concerned.

  On 7 July, tensions began to spill over within the courtroom at Nottingham Crown Court. During a break in proceedings, Colin approached the dock and O’Brien squared up to him, intimating to Gunn that there was a bullet waiting for him. ‘Hey Colin, I’ve got something for you,’ said O’Brien as Gunn walked away from the dock. ‘Tell fat Colin I’ve got something for him or perhaps something is coming his way.’ Gunn had to be restrained and ushered from the courtroom. He was advised not to return while the case was on.

  Six days later, the courtroom again descended into chaos. O’Brien had been found guilty and was being sentenced to a minimum of twenty-four years in jail when he launched a tirade of abuse at the family of Marvyn Bradshaw. He threw a tumbler of water over them and shouted as he received a twenty-four-year sentence, ‘Hey you, your son’s head looked like a doughnut. It had a big hole with red in the middle. I’m not bothered you know, I’m a bad boy. It means nothing to me. I can do that standing on my head. I know where you live as well.’

  Colin Gunn was incensed by the comments. Attempts had been made already to get to O’Brien while in prison but had come to nothing. Police had become aware that the Bestwood Cartel had even corrupted prison officers and they had taken precautions to ensure O’Brien was safe. Gunn began thinking about revenge from another angle. He was sure that they could track down O’Brien’s mother, Joan Stirland. He knew they were in Lincolnshire somewhere because he had traced a phone number for them. Word began to reach Joan’s daughter Rosie that the family could be in danger again as a result of O’Brien’s comments. After several months of quiet, just when they thought they were getting back to normal, the nightmare was back.

  On 13 July, shortly after her son was jailed for life, Mrs Stirland rang Rosie and told her she was really upset about what Michael had said. Crying, she said, ‘I can’t believe he said that to the family. I want to go and see them and apologise. He should never have said that to them.’

  ‘Mum, I really don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Rosie told her. ‘We are all at risk because of what he has said. Just leave it and stay away. Maybe you should ring the police and ask them what sort of risk there is after this.’

  Joan had last contacted Nottinghamshire Police on 19 April 2004 and spoken to a senior officer. She was keen to know how far police had got investigating the shooting at their home in September 2003. The answer was they had got almost nothing. Joan told the officer she had been worried because a few weeks earlier she had spotted one of the Gunn brothers, along with other members of the Bestwood Cartel, in Skegness. Following her son’s courtroom outburst, she rang the police the next day and told them she thought the Bestwood Cartel might be trying to get to the family after what her son had said. They told her not to worry; they were keeping an eye on things and would let the family know if anything happened. According to Phil Davies, Nottinghamshire Police also held a meeting and decided for the first time that they should inform their counterparts in Lincolnshire that Joan and John Stirland were living in their area.

  Six days later, officers monitoring the Bestwood Cartel became aware that a firearm was being moved into the Boston area of Lincolnshire so that a shooting could be carried out. They sat and waited, keeping tabs on the movements of Colin Gunn in particular. The Utah team had been busy making huge inroads into the Bestwood Cartel’s drug operations – bugs had been placed during the autumn of 2003 and they were now achieving the desired results. The biggest bust took place on the A52 just outside Nottingham in April 2005. Darren Kirby, one of the low-level runners for the gang, was on his way back from Liverpool, having picked up a huge consignment of drugs, when he was pulled over by police. They claimed he had a faulty light on his car but in fact electronic surveillance had indicated exactly who Kirby was, what he was carrying and where he was going well before he left Liverpool – the faulty light story was concocted to lay a false trail so as not to compromise the surveillance methods.

  When officers asked to search the thirty-one-year old’s van, they found six holdalls crammed full of ecstasy – around 600,000 tablets. Tests later revealed the tablets, embossed with the Heineken and Playstation logos, had a very high active MDMA content of around 70 per cent. They had probably originated in the Netherlands. It was the second largest ecstasy haul by police in the UK, with a street value of some £3 million. Kirby said he had been paid just £500 for the driving job and needed the money to pay off gambling debts. He would receive a fifteen-year jail term, reduced to thirteen years on appeal, after admitting his guilt.

  Before that, in June 2004, police had intercepted a huge shipment of amphetamines and ecstasy near Runcorn which was on its way back to the Bestwood Cartel. The Cartel put pressure on one of the couriers involved: someone must have been talking to the police, they said. The courier wrongly assumed his girlfriend had stitched him up – in fact the information had come from police surveillance – and told the Cartel. Two men wearing boiler suits went to her home in Bestwood, claiming they had to deliver a pizza. She refused to answer the door. Two days later, the same two men in boiler suits strode up to the house and fired a number of shots through the window. The twenty-one-year-old was carrying her thirteen-month-old baby boy in her arms as the shots shattered the window. She was hit by two bullets, which narrowly missed her baby, but lived to tell the tale.

  Police intelligence indicated that one of the shooters was a twenty-six-year-old junior member of the Cartel who was himself shot for botching a kidnap job on behalf of the Cartel. He allowed the kidnap victim, who had been abducted because of a £200 debt, to go free, and in retribution Colin Gunn sent the terrifying John McSally to shoot him for his mistake. McSally was supposed to kill him bu
t was only able to wound him in the shoulder. The twenty-six-year-old was charged with the attempted murder of Katrina Hancock and two counts of possession of a firearm but the charges were later dropped on advice that there was ‘insufficient evidence’ against him.

  On 11 June, police busted forty-one-year-old Andrew Gascoine and thirty-three-year-old Jason Carroll, two Cartel foot soldiers. Both had large quantities of drugs in their houses and cars which were going to be cut up and distributed to smaller dealers. They searched Gascoine’s Rover car and found nearly a kilo of cocaine, worth £95,700, in the passenger foot well and a bag of cocaine worth £19,400 in the glove compartment, as well as sheets of paper with names and phone numbers. At Gascoine’s house they found £149,100 of cocaine in his washing machine, bringing his total stash to £264,200.

  The police then went to Carroll’s house in Gainsford Crescent, searched him and found he was carrying a few grams of cocaine and £1,440 in cash. He also had some paper with a list of names, phone numbers and amounts of money. Police found £74,100 of cocaine in a cupboard under the sink. There was £7,260 of amphetamines in his freezer, 181 ecstasy tablets worth £905 in a vase and a coffee tin with some cocaine and broken up ecstasy tablets. He had £800 stuffed into a jacket in a wardrobe, electronic scales and a chemical used to cut drugs. His total stash of drugs was worth £83,065. Both men pleaded guilty and were given ten-year sentences in December 2004.

  More members of the Bestwood Cartel were arrested after a bungled armed raid on a city centre casino on 11 November 2004. The gunman, Martin Hogan, was jailed for twelve years and his accomplice David Martin got ten years for the hold-up at the Victoria Club in Victoria Street. In passing the sentences, Judge Andrew Hamilton referred to the branding of Nottingham as the most dangerous city in England. ‘I visit a number of institutions to talk to students and one of the first questions they ask is, “Am I going to be safe in Nottingham?” and, “Am I going to be shot in Nottingham?” I can assure the public that judges will do everything to ensure that those who commit crime will be given corresponding sentences.’ Hogan, forty-nine, formerly of Birchfield Road, Arnold, was found guilty of robbery and possession of an imitation firearm after a trial at Nottingham Crown Court in April 2006. Martin, twenty-seven, of Kneeton Vale, Sherwood, admitted robbery, possession of an imitation firearm and a separate offence of affray. He received an extra eighteen months for that offence, to be served after the longer sentence.