In one of his first missives from Long Lartin, he was clearly in a cheery mood: ‘Good news from seeing the security governor, he said he had no problem with me blogging and its [sic] not illegal to do. I have provided him with all the up to date laws on it. Unlike Whitemoor it does not concern them here.’ By early December 2009, friends of Colin had set up a Facebook page and messages began to fly back and forth at such a rate it was hard to believe he was not responding on a mobile himself. The bulk of the material however was undoubtedly being exchanged on prison visits and through the normal mail channels, including further letters which were posted onto the website. On January 10, he posted a new letter on Facebook which revealed he had spent some time over Christmas brooding over the matters that had left him sat in a cell and feeling bitter about his predicament.
‘I was blamed for most things that went on in Nottingham and of course without evidence. I have never had a drug charge against me and my criminal convictions before this conviction was in my younger years. I am no angel but I had fuck all to do with the murders and I aim to show fresh evidence this year. Cannot comment too much or the letter will be delayed or not sent at all. I’ll admit I’m up against it but I will never give in ... others out there who I thought was friends have already given up on me and I do not hear a thing from people who I honestly thought was friends. It turns out those people have no balls and was mere cowards who sought protection. Rats, they know who they are. I will bump into those people again I know that.’
He also had strong words to say about this book and its author. ‘What a joke, shows what an idiot [Carl] Fellstrom is ... my Gracie could have wrote a better book. Worst of all though, than Fellstrom himself, was all the gossipers, the people who believed it. Anyone who knows me knows I would never have done any of the shit Fellstrom wrote about ... Anyone who believed it, fuck ’em, rats, I’d love anyone to have the balls to say it to my face. Cowards all chatting shit with a hooter full of Columbian ha ha. Still I suppose it gave the mugs something to chat about.’
In the later years of his criminal life, it was true that Colin Gunn played less of a direct role in the terror that was visited upon his enemies; instead he directed others to do it. But as the judge at the Stirlands’ murder trial, Mr Justice Treacy, put it, ‘To your gang, your word was law. You would, I am sure, do the same thing all over again if it suited your book.’
Gunn was particularly incensed by the implication that he had been helpful to some police officers and he published letters from Nottinghamshire Police that stated categorically that he had never been registered as an informant with them. He failed to mention the informal and covert meetings he had had with police officers, stretching over a number of years, in which he had sought to manipulate the criminal justice system to his own advantage, with some degree of success. During 2002, a detective constable under surveillance by Nottinghamshire’s anti-corruption unit was seen meeting with Colin Gunn several times. The officer was subsequently questioned under caution but was never charged with any offence.
By Christmas 2009, Gunn’s Facebook page was live and would become, in the opinion of the authorities, dangerous. He accumulated more than five hundred Facebook ‘friends’ in just a few weeks and posted on a regular basis. This was achieved by receiving the hard copy of messages sent to his Facebook page from friends on visits or through the post. He would then write out the messages to be copied back onto the site as replies. However, it did appear the speed of the replies indicated in some cases he was replying directly back onto the site and not using intermediaries. In one case he was replying to Michael McNee, who was at HMP Frankland in Durham and, at this point, certainly had access to a mobile phone to send out messages on Facebook. In one exchange between the two men on 13 December 2009, McNee, who was using the name Riley McNee, wrote to Colin, ‘Yes my pal ... hope ur cool chin up chest out. U just remember who the best lukin 1 from Bestwood is (ur the second one bro lol) love ya mate tricky xx.’ McNee even used Facebook to end a relationship with one girl and begin a new one with a young woman who changed her surname to his within the space of a few weeks.
Gunn was also using Facebook to communicate with the ‘friends of ours’ network from Mansfield, the Dawes Cartel, with whom he had been pally since the 1970s. One posting, from Helen Dawes, wife of Dawes Cartel general John, said, ‘Hi hun ... just a little something to make you chuckle ... Hezza took out five screws [prison officers] yesterday and Johnny received your letters yesterday. He doing ok. Luv lots H x.’ Colin also made contact with Darren Peters, convicted for his part in the police corruption case against Charles Fletcher, who was now free and eager to visit Gunn at Long Lartin prison.
By February 2010, my own investigation was coming to the startling conclusion that there were hundreds of inmates now using Facebook through mobiles smuggled into prison. Other ‘faces’ mentioned earlier in this book were using the network to chat to people on the outside, including Ashley Graham, serving life for a brutal murder of Roy Henry, who was going under the names Jheezy De Niro and Mista J. Darren Kirby, a Bestwood Cartel runners caught with a huge shipment of ecstasy, went under the name Daz Kirby. Gavin Dawes, jailed for fourteen years for the biggest heroin seizure ever in Nottinghamshire. Dawes joined the Free Colin Gunn Facebook page and in his own posts boasted that life was ‘cool’ inside HMP Lowdham, where he joked he had his own ‘en suite cell, Sky television and an xbox’. Shortly after this posting, he adopted the surname Beeton, his mother’s name, presumably to avoid detection.
The Ministry of Justice was not blind to the problem of prisoners using mobile phones. Years of poor wages for prison staff had led some officers to ‘go native’, taking bribes from prisoners in order to bring in phones, drugs and other contraband. During Nottinghamshire Police’s Operation Utah into the Gunns, a number of prison officers had been identified as having taken bribes from the Bestwood Cartel to provide favours, though none was ever charged. Corruption has been a problem which has grown in the prison system in parallel with the pernicious black economy. Dealers could expect to get up to ten times more for drugs inside a prison than on the outside. The introduction of mandatory drug tests had led to more prisoners turning away from cannabis towards class A drugs, which could be flushed from the system more quickly, cannabis sometimes showing up on a test more than thirty days after last being used. Some prisoners were building up large debts from their addiction to drugs and would be subjected to bullying and threats which might even extend to their families on the outside. The nature of the relationship between prisoner and keeper places staff in a potentially vulnerable position whereby the tail can wag the dog, resulting in some prison officers being compromised. All these ingredients provided for a flourishing organised crime network within the system, where gang leaders could take over the wings of some prisons and not only continue to run their outside empires but also expand their networks to take in the prison community.
The upshot of all this is a prison system which is not only unfit for purpose but also creating more criminality. Over the past five years I have come across numerous examples of people sent to prison who had minor drug issues before they went in but left at the end of their sentence with full blown class A drug addictions. Often those people will be back in the system within a few months as they drift back into a life of crime in order to pay for addictions which first claimed them inside prison. In one case, a young woman who had been sent to prison for continual shoplifting walked out after twelve months with a substantial heroin habit. Before her fall from grace, ‘Helen’ had held a steady job. Then her marriage broke down and she began to drink too much, eventually getting sacked. Unable to pay her bills or look after her family, she resorted to shoplifting. After her prison sentence, she was desperate to kick her habit but it had such a grip on her that she not only sank from shoplifting to prostitution but also began to corrupt other young women, some barely sixteen, into her business, and they also became heroin users. Sitting in the squalor of a terraced hous
e in Normanton, Derby, it was profoundly sad listening to her among these teenagers, as she confidently jacked up her veins and tried to kid herself that the following week she was ‘going straight, getting off the smack and getting a proper job’. It was a pipe dream and she was soon back in prison.
THE FACEBOOK SITE was a fascinating cauldron of information which showed just how Nottingham’s criminals and others further afield were connected to each other. Beefs or arguments regularly blew up over the pages of the site between rival gang members all over the country. Nottingham was no exception. On some pages, the colours and bandanas of the various gangs were displayed: red for St Ann’s, black for Radford, blue for Meadows and green for Sneinton. Gang members paraded their homespun philosophies, rapping lines from well known songs and often using their street names with acronyms attached to denote their area or stance on life. MPR stood for either Money + Power = Respect or Make Paper Regardless. GWOP stood for George Washington On Paper, as in the US dollar bill. TOPV denoted someone from the Top Valley area; RAD, a member from Radford or NG7; SV, a gang member with affiliations to the St Ann’s area or ‘Stannzville’; WFG, the Waterfront gang from the Meadows or NG2 area of the city. Snentz meant Sneinton and BPG meant Base Pound Gangster from the Basford area of the city. MOB was also a favourite abbreviation. Taken from a song by Tupac Shakur, the US rapper gunned down by an LA gang in 1996, the abbreviation denotes ‘Money Over Bitches’, meaning money was more important to these wannabe gangsters than the love of a woman; without money the street dealer would not be able to keep the ‘babe’ on his arm. A favourite oneliner also culled, though not exclusively, from Tupac was ‘only God can judge me’, furthering the idea that they were operating outside the normal rules of society. The avatars that these young men used on their Facebook pages included the usual suspects: John Wayne, John Gotti, Tony Montana, the Cuban gangster portrayed by Al Pacino in Scarface, Tony Soprano, and Don Corleone from The Godfather. These were fictional characters in the main, yet in the eyes of the young gangsters they portrayed the values they aspired to.
It was apparent that we now had a generation of drug dealers growing up who were so influenced by the gangsta rap scene and fictional characters from gangland dramas that they were importing a fake ghetto into their lives, a way of life which in reality existed only in a very limited way. This was a life they had, in part, decided to embrace because they found little of any meaning in the world. Secondly the young ‘gully’ or street drug dealers were not just following the money trail in a random way; ‘making paper’ was their ideal, their religion. They personified the purest form of street capitalism. The hoodies were the new entrepreneurs, aggressively taking over the drug dealing markets with their commercial, albeit illegal, products. Supply and demand was their mantra and if necessary they would use extreme force to dominate those markets. Money was their God and would lead them to power and ultimately the respect of their peers, something they believed they could only achieve otherwise as a rap artist or professional footballer. Anyone who got in their way in the pursuit of this dream or ‘dissed’ their beliefs was to be regarded as the enemy. Universally, the Facebook pages within this group of young people showed contempt for the police and rule of law, often backing groups such ‘I hate Police’ and such like. Street life was their world and there a different rule of law operated: dog eat dog. Often the commentary on their pages would include ‘shouts’ on the status updates, like ‘Free all my SV Niggas’, referring to criminals from the St Ann’s area who had been locked up. Elsewhere there would be a few lines about how ‘the Feds’ or ‘snitches’ were undermining their dealing activities. Homage was paid to firearms, often illustrated by pictures lifted off the Internet of an assortment of weapons. In many cases there were photographs taken on mobiles of young people in possession of firearms, whether real or replica, in locations in Nottingham.
The lingo deployed by many of these youths was often a mix of Jamaican patois and gangsta rap and sometimes bore little relation to the language of their own families in Nottingham; indeed some were from white European and even Asian backgrounds. Nevertheless they believed this was their voice. Video games like Grand Theft Auto and television dramas such as The Wire were also playing a powerful role in shaping this ‘lost generation’ in terms of how they perceived the world around them. In effect, the ghetto was now being defined by a fictional world and not a real one and the danger was that the more the young guns embraced that life, the more likely it was that someone would use a firearm or a blade to make the fictional life they were leading that much more real.
By January 2010, Colin Gunn’s Facebook presence was about to be terminated. Having seen him accumulate more than 550 ‘friends’ on his own page and another 2,000 on the Free Colin Gunn page, the authorities believed his continued use of the medium was a threat to their efforts to stymie his influence from within prison. On January 23, he wrote what would be the final letter posted onto the site. He was in a cheery mood and was keen to set the record straight on what had happened to his relationship with Victoria Garfoot, his long term common-law wife and mother of his children.
‘Everyone knows me and Victoria fell out and I got rid about a year ago. Had to and I believe Victoria’s mental state was suffering. I told her to go find someone else and she did. I have no problem with that at all, just so everyone knows. Nothing was done behind my back. I truly believe that Victoria deserves some happiness. Don’t get me wrong, it was a tough decision, but there was nothing there for me or from me. Just clearing that up in case people was wondering why I allowed it. I won’t comment on her new fellah, I think we all know the dance there, and all I’ll say is “what a guy” ha ha fuck em. They deserve each other. There’s certain rules that have to be kept and I’m happy for her then.’
Mysteriously, properties linked to Victoria’s relatives and her ‘new fellah’ suffered a number of suspicious fires during 2009 and the early part of 2010. The fires were investigated and confirmed as arson attacks but there was no evidence that they were linked to Gunn.
Gunn carried on his missive, looking forward to the inquest into the Stirlands’ deaths and remarking that he hoped more information would come to light which could help him appeal against his conviction. He also joked that he wanted more letters from ‘the ladies’ and asked that they include photographs as he ‘needed something to work with’ while alone in his prison cell. But it was the final lines of his letter which were to land him once more on the front pages of a national newspaper. ‘I’m sound though, strong as fuck and plodding on,’ he wrote. ‘I will be home one day and I can’t wait to see the look in certain people’s eyes and see the fear of me being there, and those no good cunts who have done nothing for me. Of course I wouldn’t do anything to these people, I’m too nice a man. A look would do. Til next time then when I will enlighten you as to the behaviour of certain individuals to a little plan I executed a while back, suckers. Chin up Chest out. Thugz love, Colin.’
Whether his bitterness had got the better of him or whether he intended the words to be taken as a joke among Cartel members, they were seized upon as evidence that he was intending to take some sort of revenge. On January 31 the Sunday Times published a story about it. Justice Secretary Jack Straw quickly became involved and negotiated a rapid response from the owners of Facebook in the United States to get the pages shut down immediately, without any recourse to the complicated laws which govern such material over the Internet and which otherwise would have taken weeks to resolve. ‘We have made requests to Facebook to remove thirty prisoners’ sites and they have responded positively to that with no single refusal, within forty-eight hours,’ said Straw. ‘It’s unlawful and it’s against prison rules.’ Gunn was reportedly fuming, not least because, in the aftermath of the exposure of the story, the prison’s governor decided that he must also lose any privileges he had accumulated and should be placed in segregation without access to private phone calls. Michael McNee’s site was taken down too but within a
week he was back, having taken over the Facebook profile which had belonged to his mother.
The authorities had been considering the cellphone problem for some time, as well as other pieces of technology, such as gaming consoles, which provided a capability for communication with the outside world. In 2008 alone, prison staff in the UK seized more than 4,000 phones and SIM cards which had been smuggled in for prisoners. In August 2006, the power that such phones gave to prisoners became evident when nineteen-year-old Liverpool gang member Liam ‘Smigger’ Smith visited a friend at Altcourse prison on Merseyside. Smith, a member of the Strand gang from Norris Green, had a verbal spat with inmate Ryan Lloyd, a member of the rival Croxteth Crew, in the visiting area. When visiting time ended, Smith left the prison, but not before Lloyd, who was on remand for firearms offences, had made a call from an illicit phone to summon his crew to Altcourse. Within forty minutes, Smith had been shot in the back of the head at point blank range outside the prison gates. Lloyd, also nineteen, and four other young men were subsequently convicted for their part in the murder.
In May 2009, Bill Hughes, the director general of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, expressed concern that some gang leaders were also using games consoles to pass on coded messages in forums. Prisoners, he said, had also been using the consoles to charge up contraband mobile phones. An officer working at a prison in the north west of England told me that the contraband culture was ‘endemic’ where he was working. ‘On the wing I have been working on, the prisoners don’t even try to hide it,’ he said. ‘They can get pretty much anything in there and the officers just turn a blind eye to it even though there is also info about packages coming in. Some evenings when you are doing the rounds you can hear the mobile phones ringing and smell the weed they are smoking, it’s that obvious. But no-one says anything because they all want a quiet life.’ In May 2010, a Government study concluded that as many as one in every ten prison officers were corruptly accepting money to help gangsters flood prisons with drugs and mobile phones. The report, from the Policy Exchange thinktank, cited prisons in Nottingham, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, among others, as having acute corruption problems and said eighty-five per cent of inmates interviewed found it easy to get hold of drugs.
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