A senior Nottinghamshire detective involved in Operation Utah told me, ‘When we heard about the material going missing it was like a “Jesus Christ” moment. We thought, what the hell are we dealing with here? Very few people knew what that car was carrying that day. The fact that the theft took place in the car park of a pub in Derbyshire, the fact that someone from Nottingham was the thief and had been in a pub twenty miles away, the fact that that person knew Colin Gunn’s mobile phone number, the fact that Colin Gunn was contacted within a couple of hours of the theft, it was like, well, you have got more chance of winning the lottery than of this being pure coincidence. Someone, somewhere, had told Colin Gunn that that vehicle contained important information and the vehicle was targeted as a result. Something was wrong and we passed on our grave concerns to the relevant people. I’m extremely surprised that SOCA say they didn’t even conduct an inquiry because the National Crime Squad were certainly aware of it and once SOCA took over the National Crime Squad’s responsibilities it would have been passed over to them.’
DAVID GUNN WAS arrested by Nottinghamshire Police involved in Operation Utah that February. The bugs they had placed in the headrest of his BMW had nailed him and he had been caught talking too loosely on the phone. After a few drug shipments were intercepted, Gunn told his associates, ‘They’ve got another load, hope it’s not the whole lot. It’s just a poxy bust really. They are trying to take out the little sergeants, but they can’t get to us, the colonels or captains.’ Gunn was also caught talking to associates on the phone about where he could launder some of his money in South Africa. Police moved in and arrested his forty-one-year-old right-hand man, Terry Witts, who had recently married a schoolteacher. They also moved in on Gunn and arrested him. The pair, along with their friend Kevin Warsop, were linked to small shipment of more than £20,000. Gunn had been watched seeing off a taxi carrying some of the drugs. The Bestwood Cartel was even ripping off its own customers by recutting large amounts of vacuum-packed drugs and then resealing them as if the stuff had come in wholesale. It was just another way to keep profits high, even if the customers were not going to get as high as they were led to believe.
But if there was any relief at the arrest of David Gunn, and the impending arrest of Colin, it would be blown away the following month when I was to personally experience how Chief Constable Steve Green handled the media. I suggested an article for the Sunday Telegraph on the troubles facing Nottinghamshire Police after a number of officers from both the front line and a senior level approached me to voice their concerns about the state of the force. Many claimed it was on the brink of collapse. I had also been told of some of the details of Operation Starburst and I knew there was an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation underway into the shooting of the Stirlands which was indicating there had been serious failings on the part of the force. Nottinghamshire Police were also refusing to give investigators any access to material from the bugging of the Bestwood Cartel, citing legal complications over the ownership of the material. After raising the issue with Daniel Foggo, who worked as a reporter at the Sunday Telegraph, we decided we would first try to contact the person we assumed was head of Operation Starburst. We approached Detective Chief Superintendent Phil Davies and he initially agreed to meet and have a chat about it the following week, but then Davies told me he had spoken to his boss, Steve Green, about our approach and had told him we seemed very well briefed about the challenges facing the force. He said Green had decided he would talk to us if we approached him. Daniel then rang Green, told him what we knew about Starburst and said we were considering running a story about the issues being investigated by the IPCC. Green was clearly unhappy about this, claiming we might compromise covert operations, a dubious claim to make when we were approaching the subject in a responsible manner and would be under legal constraints about what we could print anyway. On Friday, 10 March 2005, Green agreed to an interview over the phone but Operation Starburst was off the agenda.
Daniel Foggo is an experienced reporter and someone who does not pull any punches, so he began to question the Chief Constable about various problems facing the force, based on what we knew. We were both staggered as he began to admit all the failings and pressures the force was under. The interview was completed before the end of Friday afternoon and was tape recorded. When the story emerged on Sunday morning, neither of myself nor Daniel realised the impact it would have. The story made the front page lead of the Sunday Telegraph on 13 March.
POLICE CHIEF: WE CANNOT COPE WITH VIOLENT CRIME
One of Britain’s most senior police officers has admitted that his force is being overwhelmed by violent crime and cannot cope.
Steve Green, the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, said that among the principal causes of the crisis were Government reforms that compelled him to use officers for clerical tasks instead of front-line duties.
Steve Green: ‘We are in a crisis situation.’
The situation was so bad that he was preparing to ‘farm out’ murder investigations to other police forces because his own detectives did not have time to tackle them.
Nottingham has been one of the worst affected areas for gun crime which hit record levels across England and Wales last year.
Mr Green said ministers had a ‘fixation’ with keeping officer numbers up – but had, in fact, been responsible for policies that had taken police away from front-line duties to do jobs that should be carried out by civilian staff, such as writing Home Office reports.
‘We are reeling with the murders,’ he said. ‘We are in a long-standing crisis situation with major crime and it won’t go away overnight. Having police doing back-office jobs is one of the factors [hampering us]. I want to increase the number of operational cops by reducing the numbers doing back-office jobs. It’s frustrating to know that I could make better use of the money I’ve got, but I’m constrained from doing it because officer numbers is a political football. All the parties have the same fixation.’
Mr Green said he was prevented from putting more police into front-line duties because if he reduced the number of officers doing clerical work he would lose a large amount of his funding from the Crime Fighting Fund, a Labour measure that gives extra money to forces that keep officer numbers high.
‘Our accountant has said that if there was a way out of it, he would tell me,’ he said.
Mr Green, whose comments will increase pressure on the Government over its law-and-order policies, said his force was heavily in debt. He regularly had to borrow detectives from other constabularies to tackle a spate of largely drugs-related murders.
‘We are now routinely going out to “foreign” forces to get additional officers.’ One option they were on the verge of adopting was to farm an entire murder inquiry to another force. ‘I’m not aware of any other force ever having done such a thing,’ he said.
Nottingham’s crisis has been prompted by a sharp rise in the number of murders and other violent crimes. Since 2001, the force has had to investigate 21 Category A murders – those classed as being high-profile with no immediate suspect. Before 2000, it was dealing with one Category A murder every 12 to 18 months on average. Its officers are currently running 30 murder investigations.
Nottinghamshire residents are also three times more likely than the national average to have their car broken into, four times as likely to be burgled, almost five times as likely to be robbed, and twice as likely to suffer sexual attack. Nottinghamshire was also among the bottom four of under-performing forces in official figures last year.
Mr Green’s decision to speak out follows another fatal shooting last week. Paul Thomas, 34, had left a pub in Radford, Nottingham, when he was gunned down just after 4.30pm on Thursday.
Firearms offences in England and Wales rose to a high of 24,094 last year with levels in Nottingham the fifth highest per head of population after London, Manchester, Liverpool and the West Midlands.
The Association of Chief Police Officers s
aid other forces were experiencing similar pressures to Nottinghamshire because of the need for officers to carry out bureaucratic tasks that should be done by civilians. ‘We’ve been raising it with the Government for some months,’ said a spokesman. ‘There is a fixation with police numbers, and an inflexibility over budgets, which is not producing effective policing. We can recruit officers, but not necessarily civilian staff.’
David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said Mr Green’s predicament was an example of the Government’s ring-fencing of money, together with forces being swamped with bureaucracy. He said: ‘We will do away with the national policing plan that creates these targets so those police they have can be properly used.’
The story broke as a General Election campaign was about to get underway and crime was top of the agenda. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis wasted no time in wading into the debate. Privately he was critical of Green but publicly he said the comments showed how Chief Constables’ hands were being tied up by red tape across the country by a Home Office which was not funding them adequately. The daily newspapers were champing at the bit to follow up the Sunday Telegraph’s story. For a Chief Constable to be so clearly unable to cope and speak about it publicly was almost unheard of. Green was in the soup as far as the Home Office was concerned, but he would find support from the media and fellow Chief Constables over his stance rather than criticism. Only those who knew what was really going on inside the force knew that many of the problems were linked to his handling of the resources at his disposal.
Nevertheless he realised his job could be under threat and his press officer, Margaret Kirk, began to brief journalists that Green had been ‘blackmailed’ into agreeing to the interview. It was an extraordinary claim to make, effectively alleging we had forced him to tell the truth by committing a criminal offence. We weren’t the only ones who were angry. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Police was fuming. The comments from the Chief Constable about his force being in crisis had come only a few weeks after Denis O’Connor, a senior HMIC inspector, had given the force a clean bill of health. Sir Ronnie Flanagan, Chief Inspector for HMIC, soon had Home Secretary Charles Clarke knocking on his door demanding answers. Downing Street entered the fray too, with Tony Blair’s official spokesman making a veiled criticism of Green’s leadership. ‘Everyone recognises there are problems in Nottinghamshire but there are different views about the cause of these problems,’ the spokesman told reporters. Home Secretary Clarke demanded an urgent investigation into Green’s claims, which would be carried out by HMIC and, within a couple of days, HMIC investigators contacted the Sunday Telegraph’s editor, Dominic Lawson, to see whether they could get access to the tape recorded interview. He was happy to oblige but said HMIC would have to make a formal request by letter; otherwise, Lawson argued, it could set a precedent for the handing over of privileged material to a third party. In the end HMIC did not follow up its informal request with a letter.
Meanwhile, MP Graham Allen lodged a complaint against Green to the IPCC. ‘I believe he has been guilty of serious misjudgment, not just in giving the interview but in his original decision to take beat officers off the streets of Nottingham,’ Allen told the Observer newspaper. Green, perhaps sensing his job was in jeopardy, told reporters, who by this time were hoping for an all-out war between a Chief Constable and the Home Office, that the interview was a big mistake. ‘For whatever reasons I gave the interview I must concede that the interview itself was not my finest hour,’ he said. ‘With hindsight I was wrong to accept the word crisis during the interview but nevertheless investigating murders is a major challenge to us.’
Marian Bates’s widower, Victor, pulled no punches: ‘Nottingham has never been as lawless as it has been under this Chief Constable. The man is a menace to law and order,’ he told reporters. ‘The way the criminals in Nottingham have been allowed to flourish under his regime is ridiculous. It is frightening. There are less police officers on the street and we now have community wardens who have no powers. It must have cost the lives of over fifteen people over the last two years, including my wife. The criminals have been encouraged by the system that prevails. Crime is now a lively occupation because the chances of being caught are so little.’
Later Green, who would eventually leave Nottinghamshire Police in June 2008, was critical of Victor Bates’s stance, claiming he was being led by others with an agenda of their own. ‘I have listened to what Victor Bates has said and he is perfectly entitled to his opinion,’ he told the Nottingham Evening Post. ‘I have no problem with Victor. I respect what he’s been through too much. It’s the people who have been advising him that are beneath contempt. Their actions have meant that the opportunity Mr Bates had to exercise the power he had to do good was wasted.’ Steve Green also claimed he had fallen into a trap because his mind was preoccupied with the arrest of Colin Gunn. ‘I tried to give the journalist honest answers, as I always do, but I get paid not to fall into elephant traps. I recognise I fell into that one. All I can say is my attention was focused on operational matters and I just didn’t see it coming. On the day I did the interview, Colin Gunn was arrested for the Stirlands’ murder. We should have been in celebration mode; instead, we were fighting that off as best we could.’
Green’s memory was faulty: in fact Colin Gunn was not arrested until Thursday, 17 March 2005, almost a week after the interview was carried out. Nottinghamshire officers picked him up and when they started driving out on the A52 and passed into Lincolnshire, Gunn was surprised.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘Just a trip to the seaside, Colin,’ replied an officer. ‘Why, are you missing Nottingham already?’
Colin was interviewed at Skegness Police Station by Lincolnshire detectives. ‘I had no direct or indirect involvement with the murders,’ he claimed. ‘John Stirland was known to me as he used to drink with me and my friends. I have never had any bad feelings towards John and Joan Stirland.’ It was, of course, a blatant lie.
By now the drains at his bungalow in Revelstoke Way were severely blocked with phones and SIM cards and other evidential debris. A plumber would be called out some two-and-a-half years later because of damp patches inside the three-bedroom property. He just built over the blocked drain to solve the problem. Who knows what secrets are held on the phones but, to my knowledge, they remain where they are to this day.
CHAPTER 13
huge armed presence ringed the courtroom at Nottingham in March 2005 for the trial of the drug-smuggling Dawes Cartel. Police spent more than £500,000 on the security operation not because they feared John Dawes would try to escape but for his protection because they thought he might turn and offer information on his brother Rob, who was still at large in Spain, his partner Gary Hardy and, not least, the Bestwood Cartel. ‘We believed there was a genuine risk to Dawes,’ said Detective Inspector Peter Jones. ‘Our thinking was that when convicted, he may want to mitigate and give his side of the story. If he is willing to give evidence on the others he is working alongside, he becomes valuable.’
Over nine weeks, a jury heard details of how John and Rob Dawes headed a ruthless organisation making more than £1 million a month from the illegal drugs trade. At the end of it all, John Dawes, his father Arthur, Rebecca Bridge and Ryan Smith were all convicted for their parts in the operation. John Dawes was jailed for twenty-four-years, Smith for fourteen years, Arthur Dawes for eight and Bridge for four. Operation Normality had been a huge success and while Rob Dawes and Gary Hardy remained at large, police felt sure it would only be a matter of time before they tripped up. The case had shown just how much power an organised crime group could achieve. In a short space of time the Dawes Cartel had managed to corrupt officials in various organisations and rule through fear.
DI Jones pointed out the similarities between the Dawes Cartel and that run by the Bestwood mob. ‘John Dawes thought he was untouchable. But no one is untouchable, no matter how violent and intimidating they are. There was information that s
uggested this organisation was able to penetrate the police, social services, the local authority and other organisations through intimidation or other means.’
WHEN THE TRUSTHORPE murder trial got underway, in March 2006 at Birmingham Crown Court, David Gunn sat in the dock alongside his brother Colin, with the jury unaware David had already pleaded guilty the previous year to conspiracy to supply amphetamine, a crime for which he would eventually be jailed for eight-and-a-half years and for which Terry Witts and Kevin Worsop were also jailed. Eight defendants now faced the jury. Colin and David Gunn, John Russell and Michael McNee were joined by Shane Bird, aged thirty-nine, of Carlton Hill, Nottingham, Kevin Holm, thirty-eight, of Cliff Road, Carlton, Andrew McKinnon, twenty-one, of no fixed address, and Lanelle Douglas, twenty, of no fixed address. All denied conspiracy to commit murder. In the public gallery was Victor Bates, who had decided to attend the trial to see the face of the Colin Gunn, who he knew had been implicated in his own wife’s death.
Opening for the prosecution, Timothy Spencer QC said the killers were ‘calculated, ruthless and merciless’. The murders ‘were carried out with clinical efficiency. No disturbance, no sign of haste; the targets were located quickly and shot just as quickly ... in other words, as part of a well organised, well planned gang operation.’ There was, he said, evidence of a ‘command structure’ in the way the couple’s murders had been organised. However, there was very little direct evidence. In fact the case was one of the most difficult ever handled by Lincolnshire Crown Prosecution Service. Eyewitnesses and forensics were distinctly lacking. It would take a jigsaw of circumstantial evidence to build up a picture of those responsible; in particular, the detailed mobile phone records that the prosecution claimed placed the defendants at the heart of the crime. The prosecution sought to show how each of the accused was implicated through the use of phones they had bought for the sole purpose of planning and organising the murders and had then thrown away afterwards. Specifically these included eleven ‘murder phones’ used over hundreds of miles in a ten-day period. Over 7,000 calls had been analysed and more than 100 statements about phone usage disclosed.
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