NF (2010) Hoods

by Carl Fellstrom

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah, that’s always that possibility that’s a tactic.’

  Grocock: ‘Yeah, just leave it, just leave it, that’s a tactic.’

  Fletcher: ‘It’s a tactic that you could do.’

  Grocock: ‘Will you check them two out then for me?’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah.’

  Grocock: ‘The big fella [Colin Gunn] and, er, the Baz [David Barrett].’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah.’

  Grocock: ‘And just give us a tinkle on, um...’

  Fletcher: ‘Will do...’

  On 4 March 2005, at 14.05pm, video surveillance picked up footage of DC Fletcher putting pieces of paper into his pocket at Radford Road Police Station. Then he made a phone call to Jason Grocock.

  Fletcher: ‘I’ve just done a few things, nothing new on er, [Darren] Peters, er, [Jamie] Neil, there’s a couple of bits on, er and there’s a few bits on the, the fella, so I’ve printed that off so’

  Grocock: ‘Right.’

  Fletcher: ‘So what are you doing tomorrow?’

  Grocock: ‘Er, what day is tomorrow, Saturday?’

  Fletcher: ‘Mmm, are you working?’

  Grocock: ‘We’re in the shop all day.’

  Fletcher: ‘Right I’ll probably pop in and come, come and say hello. I’m working an eight, four.’

  Grocock: ‘Alright, and what’s that, you’ve got one, one on Neil and, and the big lad’s not, he’s back on is he?’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah, there’s a few bits on there now, nothing fucking remarkable.’

  Grocock: ‘And Peters is zero, yeah?’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah I suppose he is, he’s just erm, the last one that was talked about erm, what was the last one that you talked to me about.’

  Grocock: Inaudible.

  Fletcher: ‘Oh there is more, there’s more, there is a couple on there, sorry.’

  Grocock: ‘Right, okay, well that’s cool then, that’s, that’s brilliant then, well I’ll...’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah there is, I think there’s one it’s on about him fucking in hospital or summit and buggering off back to Spain or something.’

  Grocock: ‘He what, in hospital then went to Spain?’

  Fletcher: ‘Yeah I think that was the one.’

  Grocock: ‘Right okay.’

  Operation Salt had by then been underway for a year and DC Fletcher’s computer at Radford Road Police Station had been cloned so that all the keystrokes used by the officer on his keyboard could be replicated, showing what he had written and searches he had made or attempted to make on the Force’s intelligence database. From December 2003, Operation Salt logged searches Fletcher made on the Police National Computer for the names Dean Betton and later Craig Moran. Fletcher also searched for Colin Gunn’s name on a regular basis to see whether it was coming up on the Marian Bates murder investigation and on other shootings, including the attempted murder of Joan and John Stirland in September 2003.

  Between December 2002 and September 2004, DC Fletcher searched for Gunn’s name on the computer thirty times. He printed out sheets of intelligence at least twenty-five times between those dates. In the wake of Marvyn Bradshaw’s murder and the arrest of Michael O’Brien, Fletcher passed on information on the home of Joan and John Stirland at South View Road, Carlton. Information provided by Fletcher to Colin Gunn included a report about a man who had gone to police saying he had been threatened by Gunn over his domestic situation. Gunn had allegedly told the man, ‘You are a dead man if anything happens to this woman.’ Another report given to Gunn mentioned how he had threatened a police officer with ‘I know where you live’ when he was being questioned. Fletcher also gathered intelligence on Gunn’s connection to a dark-coloured BMW, about houses he owned or was linked to, and details of the pubs police believed that he had financial interests in. There was a report about Gunn smashing a man’s hands with a hammer after the man had lied to him.

  Fletcher was also able to tell Gunn the extent of police knowledge about security at Gunn’s home in Revelstoke Way, Rise Park. Fletcher told him that officers were aware of CCTV coverage in the house and that it was relayed to a utility room. Slowly but surely, Fletcher began compromising police investigations into members of the Bestwood Cartel. One prosecution against Darren Peters, a racehorse-owning associate of Colin Gunn, involving a road rage incident in Netherfield, collapsed after Fletcher gave out the name and address of a witness, who was subsequently visited and threatened, leading to him withdrawing his statement. ‘I want to know how the fuck they got my address,’ complained the witness. One of Colin Gunn’s more sociopathic henchmen, who seemed incapable of going out of his home for more than a few minutes without attacking someone, assaulted a man on the estate in 2005. So severe was the beating the man received that it was almost classed as attempted murder: he suffered broken legs and arms. DC Fletcher carried out ‘MOT’ checks on the status of the investigation and the man was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Fletcher told Grocock that no one would be charged unless they could get a statement off the victim; the victim was saying nothing.

  DESPITE THE ENORMOUS police pressure on the Bestwood Cartel that winter, they continued to wreak mayhem. It was as though they were untouchable. On the afternoon of 18 December, a gunman walked into the family-run Aspley Pawnbrokers in Aspley Lane in search of thirty-four-year-old Lawrence Aitken. ‘This man wearing a balaclava just came into the shop with a shotgun and shot straight at my leg,’ related Aitken. ‘I fell to the floor in complete agony. I don’t have any idea who may have done this.’ In fact Aitken knew who had ordered the shooting but was so scared he dare not even utter the name of Colin Gunn. His crime was to owe a small debt to Gunn and the shooting was a warning to settle it. His father, Reg, who ran the shop, said they didn’t know whether his son would be able to walk again: ‘Lawrence just said he was off when this bloke came into the shop with a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. He pointed it at his ankle and then there was just a bang. It was all over in a few seconds. He was a stocky chap and had a balaclava and dark clothing.’ Aitken underwent seven-and-a-half hours of surgery and two blood transfusions to save the lower half of his right leg.

  The gunman was John McSally. After accomplishing his mission, he jumped into a white Vauxhall Astra with two other men inside and drove off. Within a few days, DC Fletcher was passing on details of the police investigation to Gunn via the usual intermediary. ‘Tell your big mate not to worry,’ he told Jason Grocock. ‘The bloke knows who did it but he’s not talking.’ It was another vital tip-off for Gunn. Fletcher was also compromising informants. He gave away details on one file about a woman who Gunn had been with briefly and who said Gunn had told her he was involved in the shootings of Joan and John Stirland. DC Fletcher put Gunn’s mind at rest, texting Grocock that there could never be a prosecution as the evidence was ‘purely circumstantial’.

  He passed on more information in January 2005 about a sickening assault involving the Bestwood Cartel in the Lizard Lounge nightclub, when a man had lost part of his ear. Fletcher was on holiday at the time but when texted that ‘the Big Man’ needed to know about it, went straight into Radford Road Police Station and gathered all the intelligence on the attack. He also made checks on behalf of Gunn about an assault on a man in a pub in Nottingham in March 2005 and on a near-fatal assault on another man carried out by one of his henchmen. Fletcher even falsified records in a road traffic accident to prevent the prosecution of two other members of the Cartel who had been pulled over without insurance.

  On one occasion Fletcher’s own mistakes on the computer backfired on Colin Gunn’s girlfriend. Victoria Garfoot had received a parking ticket and Gunn rang through to try to get Fletcher to get it cancelled. He went into the computer and punched in the name but he misspelled it and came up with an entry of another woman who had a conviction for prostitution. Fletcher passed on the information to Gunn, with disastrous consequences. ‘Gunn went absolutely ballistic and confronted Victoria, accusing her of being a whore,�
�� said one officer. ‘Then he gave her a severe beating.’ Victoria would remain loyal to Colin despite numerous police attempts to turn her and described her man in relatively glowing terms to the Nottingham Evening Post: ‘No one says Colin has been an angel. He sells a few bent cars and that sort of thing. He’s being blamed but where is the evidence? The police just don’t like him. But everyone round here likes him. We’re not scum like everyone makes out.’

  Two things emerged from the probe into Charles Fletcher. One was positive and the other negative. Several officers were caught in the dragnet that had been set up to catch him. One was a constable called Phil Parr, who worked in the vice section. Parr had a passion for scooters and was friendly with Javade Rashid, who worked at Icon Scooters, which was owned by one of Colin Gunn’s lieutenants, David Barrett. After Fletcher came up with the false information about Gunn’s girlfriend being involved in prostitution, Gunn had become increasingly obsessed with checking out the information. He got Barrett to ask Rashid to ask DC Parr about it because he worked in vice and would probably know. In November 2004 DC Parr received a text on his mobile from Rashid. Parr made the check and then went to the scooter shop to tell Rashid about it. Barrett was there and Gunn was waiting parked up in his BMW nearby, unknown to DC Parr. National Crime Squad officers had the shop under surveillance, something that Barrett later became aware of after being tipped off by someone within the police. PC Parr had no idea Gunn was the final recipient of the information and a promising career was ended as a result, all for ‘doing a favour for a mate’. He admits he failed the highest standards set by the police force by doing the check but he was in no way linked to the criminal gang operated by Gunn, as DC Fletcher had been. ‘I can’t deny I did something that was wrong but I was tarnished with the same brush as Fletcher and there is no way I am a corrupt officer,’ Parr later told me. ‘I did something that I shouldn’t have done but it was a favour for someone I thought was a mate.’ Parr would be jailed for twelve months at Birmingham Crown Court after pleading guilty to misconduct in public office. As he has pointed out, he will have to come to terms with the shame of what he did, but some paedophiles and violent offenders have received lesser jail terms. His career was over and he lost much of any pension he could claim from an otherwise unblemished ten-year career.

  A number of other officers were even more hard done by in the fallout that came from the surveillance of Fletcher. Detective Constable John Thorley, a highly respected officer, worked at Radford Road Police Station, near Fletcher’s desk. The probes that had been in place for Fletcher caught him talking in colourful terms about some Yardies who planned to murder an officer outside Oxclose Lane Police Station. Thorley explained what happened to him and another colleague who had been caught on the bugs chatting inappropriately:

  ‘On June 21, 2005, the phone rang at my home. Charles Fletcher had been arrested. Fletcher was a young trainee detective I’d worked with for several months. He was brash, overconfident and had a tendency to engage mouth before brain. I sighed. An hour or so later my colleagues and I sat and listened to a horror story. We were told Fletcher was a criminal, in league with some of the most violent criminals in the city; he was selling information to criminals who operated extortion rackets and ran Class A drugs. We all knew them well and had seen their handiwork. I’d stood at the foot of a bed in the Queen’s Medical Centre while a man who had had most of a foot removed by a shotgun at point blank range refused to speak. We knew it was a punishment shooting for a debt. The chances of anyone talking to us were nil and so it proved. Through Fletcher, these people had access to everything about us: where we lived, where we socialised, even where my daughter goes to school. How safe were we? He’d betrayed us. That afternoon, two of us were summoned to HQ. Naively, I imagined we were going to be offered support and help in coming to terms with these devastating revelations.

  ‘To my astonishment, I was served with notices stating I was to be the subject of a disciplinary investigation. For eight months our office had been bugged. Unconnected to any criminal investigation and out of hundreds of hours of recordings, I had been overheard on four occasions making “inappropriate and unprofessional comments”. More seriously and with tedious predictability, the allegation of using racist language also appeared. I’m the first to admit that the language in a CID office can be, at best, irreverent. We’ve attended the post mortems of gunshot victims, cut hanged bodies down from coat hooks and sat across tables from paedophiles that have raped four-year-olds and had to pretend to be sympathetic. Gallows humour is and has always been necessary to remain sane, but always in private.

  ‘To all intents and purposes my career ended at that moment. I was placed on restricted duties. I was to sit behind a desk doing nothing of value. I was never to do any meaningful work again. Neither I, nor my colleagues, are racist or homophobic. One of us is openly gay. From that moment I was airbrushed from history. It was as if my thirty years had never happened. When one comes near the service’s obsession with racism, an unblemished twenty-nine-year service counts for nothing. I always thought that if ever I was faced with difficulties, I would receive help and guidance. Wrong! Most senior officers were almost behind barricades if I went too close.

  ‘My despicable crimes by the way – behind closed doors and in private – were nasty remarks about, firstly, a Jamaican who was trying to recruit a ‘shooter’ to have one of us murdered outside Oxclose Lane Police Station as we left work, and secondly, about a woman who had invented a rape allegation that led to two innocent students being incarcerated for hours. I admit, on both occasions, it was quite likely I did make derogatory comments. To refer to a group of people as “Jamaican pond life” as I did could be considered rude. The group I referred to as this were killers and drug dealers. If I had said “Broxtowe pond life” or “St Ann’s pond life”, that is not a problem. What utter nonsense.

  ‘I retired a year later but was connected with corruption and tainted with racism. I always suspected, but it took me most of my thirty years to discover, that this organisation does not value any individual. Careers and reputations are ruined on a whim. We were treated like a newly-discovered coven of the Ku Klux Klan. Fletcher’s legacy wasn’t only to destroy himself.’

  On a positive note, though the fervour associated with the anti-corruption probe ended some unblemished careers, the force tightened up on their procedures for dealing with applications to join the police. Detective Superintendent Russ Foster ensured future applications to work for Nottinghamshire Police were thoroughly vetted in the wake of the Fletcher probe. In August 2007, Foster announced that a six-month investigation had discovered that at least six people, so-called ‘clean skins’ working on behalf of organised crime gangs, had applied for jobs in the force. ‘They were identified and groomed to infiltrate this force with the aim of providing intelligence to city organised crime leaders,’ he said. ‘There was nothing obvious on their applications to suggest who they were. It was only after exhaustive work by me and my team that we identified their associates and their links with some of the biggest crime groups in Nottingham.’

  ON 26 JANUARY 2005, Operation Utah, which had been investigating the Bestwood Cartel’s drug-dealing activities, suffered a serious breach of security which sent shockwaves through the team. Two detectives – a constable and a sergeant – from the National Crime Squad were taking tapes for examination to the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham. It was a routine job but given the sensitive nature of the material, only a handful of people knew about it. One part of the tapes had a police interview with Colin Gunn. The other was recorded material from the bugs which had been put in place by the Utah team. The detectives’ job was to process the tapes and, using voice recognition technology, see if the voices matched. On the way back from the job, the two detectives decided to stop off in the Crewe and Harpur pub in Swarkestone, Derbyshire, for a pint. They left all the material in the car, along with their notebooks and other material relating to Operation Utah. This
material identified senior officers involved in the job, including Detective Chief Superintendent Phil Davies, the head of Nottinghamshire CID. It also identified a house in Bestwood where police were listening in on conversations between members of the Cartel and a building at Epperstone which was being used as the secret headquarters of Starburst and Utah. The officers were in the pub less than an hour, but in that short time the locks on their car were sprung and all the material stolen. Within two hours, telephone intercepts picked up a call from Newark. A young man was calling Colin Gunn and telling him what was on the material he had stolen. Gunn told him to destroy it.

  The ramifications were huge. Once the theft was known, security at Epperstone was stepped up, with twenty-four-hour patrols around the perimeter. The house used for eavesdropping eventually had to be bought by Nottinghamshire Police at a cost of more than £100,000 and the people living in it had to be moved to a safe house and put under witness protection. Then, on 10 February, police received an anonymous letter. It said that there would be an attempt to assassinate two senior Nottinghamshire officers, including DCS Phil Davies. Threats had already been made against Detective Superintendent Ian Waterfield, then head of Operation Stealth, and the Chief Constable himself, Steve Green. The information resulted in Phil Davies having to move out of his house while security was upgraded and the threat diminished. It also led to a briefing for senior officers on how to exit their homes if there was an imminent threat to their life or their families. Two days after the threat was received, John McSally was arrested with five bullets in his pocket. Evidence suggested that McSally was on his way to a job, with a boiler suit in his car and a pair of wellington boots.

  To this day there has never been any public acknowledgement of any detailed investigation into the theft of the confidential material by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which later replaced the National Crime Squad, or by any other body. The thief, who has never been named, was quietly dealt with at court in Derby, where he asked for more than 100 other offences, mainly thefts and burglaries, to be taken into consideration. Derbyshire Police, who dealt with the matter, refused to release any information about him on the orders of its Chief Constable Mick Creedon, saying the offender’s life could be at risk.