Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (16 page)

Back in the Sixties, Walter Norval’s XYY Gang had terrorised almost every bank, warehouse and factory on wages day up and down the country and, when he and his sidekicks were eventually arrested, those still at liberty blew up the High Court in an effort to destroy all of the case paperwork. They were deemed so dangerous that the judges – four in all, as the gang were to face separate trials – top police officers and the jury were placed under armed guard. The trial, due to start in 1977, had to be delayed, and a leading prosecution witness in prison at the time was provided with a constant police escort and kept in solitary confinement. In spite of these precautions, he was scalded with boiling water.

The crew was called the XYY Gang, not by the mobsters themselves but by the police; for years, the cops didn’t know who they were chasing so they referred to them by the radio code, which was determined by how dangerous an unknown suspect or culprit was – the more dangerous, the further through the alphabet the code would be.

Norval’s daughter, Rita Gunn (no relation to the Gunn brothers from Nottinghamshire), was charged with conspiring to damage the famous North Court but was acquitted. Her husband, William Gunn, wasn’t so lucky, getting a five-year prison term for threatening to murder one of the leading witnesses.

For a while, it looked as if Norval and his crew were going to beat the rap. Eventually, six were acquitted and
seven found guilty of the armed robbery of a bank and a hospital payroll. Out of all of the major robberies, the Crown could only make two of the jobs stick. The police were livid, and they became even angrier when Norval received a mere 14 years.

While their cronies served their time, the remaining members of the gang went on to commit more robberies, many becoming major players in Scottish organised crime. Meanwhile, Norval served his sentence quietly. A popular man in prison, he often organised concerts for the cons’ entertainment and was never slow to get up on the stage himself.

The world had all but forgotten about Walter Norval until June 1999, when a 71-year-old man limped into the dock at Glasgow’s Sheriff Court and pleaded ‘not guilty’ to possessing cannabis. Norval’s lawyer said the old man used it relieve the pain of arthritis – the Crown believed him and dismissed the case.

O
ne of the most horrific gangland killings of recent years took place along a remote farm track on Whitehouse Farm, Rettendon, Essex, during the early evening of Wednesday, 6 December 1995. Around 8.00am the following morning, farmer Peter Theobald and a colleague had driven down the snowy track in their Land Rover and found a metallic blue Range Rover, index number F424 NPE, blocking a gate which led into a field. Upon closer inspection, the two men saw three bodies inside. The interior of the vehicle was splattered with blood and brain material, so they dialled 999 and waited for the police.

The dead men were 38-year-old Anthony Tucker, Patrick ‘The Enforcer’ Tate, 37, and Craig Rolfe, 26.
Rolfe, the crew’s gopher, had been blasted to death at point-blank range as he sat in the driver’s seat. Tucker was in the front passenger seat, while Tate was slumped over on the nearside rear passenger seat. The murder weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. All three were well known to Essex Police as drug-dealers and extremely violent individuals – wholly admirable characters they were not.

Prior to the murders, business had been especially hectic. In August, Darren Kerr, a friend of Tucker’s, had been abducted and then had had acid thrown in his face, blinding him in one eye and completely disfiguring him to the extent that he had to wear a plastic mask, such as those worn by ice-hockey goalkeepers. While in Billericay Hospital, he was shot by a man disguised as a clown with a huge wig, red nose, Dracula teeth, and carrying a bunch of flowers. The shotgun wound was so extensive, a doctor said, that it looked as if an artillery shell had caused the almost fatal injury.

The once handsome 26-year-old, with a wife and young son, later remarked, ‘Even in the criminal fraternity, there are certain rules. What happened to me broke all those rules. Throwing acid into my face was a horrible, evil thing to do.’

Police soon learned that a few days before his death, Tate, a 6ft body-builder –a reputed gentle giant – had smashed up a pizza parlour in what was called a ‘trivial dispute’. It was claimed that his girlfriend had called the London Pizza Company in Basildon and had ordered from the young manager a pizza with different toppings on each quarter. Roger Ryall explained that this was an order he couldn’t complete, then Tate, high on cocaine,
grabbed the phone. ‘You will deliver the pizza I want or I’ll come over there and rip your fucking head off!’

‘I wasn’t going to take that’, Ryall said later, ‘So I said to him, “Get rid of the bolshy attitude and I’ll send you a pizza.”’

Tate then demanded his name and drove straight to the pizza parlour. He stormed into the pizzeria, shouting, ‘Which one of you is Roger Ryall?’ When Ryall put his hand up, Tate picked up the cash register and threw it at him. Ryall quickly backed up and pushed the panic button as Tate vaulted the counter and rushed towards him. ‘He punched me in the face and then smashed my head up and down on the glass plate on the draining board,’ said Ryall. ‘The man was insane.’

Tate warned him not to call the police or he would return to beat up all his staff and torch the place, but it was too late – the panic button brought police officers to the scene and Tate was traced to his home. A badly concussed Ryall was determined to have Tate arrested but, as friends told him more about Tate’s reputation, his resolve softened. By the following morning, he had withdrawn his complaint and decided not to press charges.

Tate controlled a club in Southend. A one-time physical trainer for Kenneth Noye, prior to this incident he had served six years and, in December 1998, had escaped from Billericay Magistrates’ Court when he leapt from the dock and disappeared on a conveniently parked motorcycle. Within days, he was in Spain, where he remained until he foolishly went to Gibraltar for the day and was arrested.

The beating up of Roger Ryall was an incident that swiftly spread around gangland Essex. For his followers,
it was a testimony to Tate’s increasing arrogance and influence that he could commit such a public crime and get away with it. However, other local villains saw him as a man who had once been an asset to their illegal trade but was now a major liability.

Anthony Tucker was no shrinking violet either. During the 1980s, he had served prison time with his now dead colleagues. Together with Michael Steele, Jack Whomes and a Darren Nicholls, they formed a close bond and started a ‘firm’ together when they were released.

Tucker, from the quiet village of Fobbing, Essex, had acted as a minder for boxer Nigel Benn, leading him into the ring before bouts. However, more importantly, he controlled the doormen of no less than 16 nightclubs from Southend to East London. As James Morton says in his book
East End Gangland
, ‘Control of nightclub doors is essential in the drug-dealing world. Only those favoured by the management or the bouncers are let in, and rival organisations have their salesmen excluded.’ So Tucker was a very powerful man, ideally placed and who, without doubt, had connections with south London criminals and probably with the Triads and Yardies.

Mick John Steele owned a specially adapted fast motor launch and was an expert at smuggling drugs from Holland, Belgium and France to remote areas of the Kent, Sussex and Essex coastlines. He was also a pilot, highly-skilled at flying aircraft loaded with drugs in and out of small landing strips. Because of his criminal antecedents, HM Revenue & Customs were well acquainted with Steele and his activities, but were rarely able to nab him. He had been imprisoned for dealing in cannabis and handling counterfeit money and
eventually proved to be a pivotal character in the events that would follow.

For his part, Craig Rolfe was a small, bit-part player who had been born on the wrong side of the tracks – in Holloway Prison to be precise. His mother, Lorraine, was serving an 18-month term for impeding the arrest of John Kennedy, who received life for murdering her husband, Brian, on Christmas Eve 1968. In this case, the murder weapon had been a ten-pin bowling skittle. The body had been driven to the A31, near Vange, Basildon, where the death was made to look like a botched robbery.

The fifth person in the unfolding drama was fitness fanatic Jack Arthur Whomes, another gopher, or ‘Joey’, who was totally dedicated to working for Michael Steele. Describing himself as a ‘commercial engineer’, he ran a small business at Unit 3, Haulage Yard, Norwich Road, Barham.

It transpired that while the brains of the outfit, Steele, handled the smuggling operations, Tate, Rolfe and Tucker managed the distribution of cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy pills. Tucker ran a company that provided bouncers and bodyguards for celebrities. The company enabled Tucker and Rolfe to control all drug-dealing activities in the clubs, and outsiders who wanted to sell the drugs to youngsters had to pay them a hefty fee in cash. Anyone who bucked the system was beaten up by the Tate gang, which comprised of well-suited hard men who believed that their fists could always be relied on to resolve any disagreement.

As might well be imagined, things went well for the firm for quite a while. Money poured in and Steele and Tucker grew rich from the profits. They bought large
houses, drove expensive cars, enjoyed exotic holidays abroad and dressed their women in designer clothes and jewellery. Yet, as experience has shown time and again, it would only be a matter of time before the individuals became over-greedy. A falling-out was inevitable.

At the trial of Steele and Whomes, the Prosecution claimed that a consignment of bad cannabis had been supplied to Tate by Steele who had brought in the consignment along with Whomes and a Peter Thomas Corry. One of the cargoes in November 1995 had been of such poor quality that refunds were demanded and paid.

It was Tucker, though, who was the front man in the sales chain, so it was Tucker who would be seen to be the rip-off merchant. It was his reputation as a good supplier that was at stake.

The Prosecution also had it that Tucker, whom they claimed was mentally unstable, had a number of heated arguments with Steele, who, in turn, blamed his suppliers in Belgium. Muscle prevailed over Steele, who ordered a Darren Nicholls to dump the narcotics into a lake near his Braintree home. Thereafter, Steele tried to recoup his losses from his supplier abroad. He was partially successful, receiving some of his cash back before the dealer went into hiding.

The ‘crunch time’ came on 16 November 1995. Just a few days before her 18th birthday, Leah Betts, the daughter of a former Essex police officer, was found dead, allegedly from an overdose of Ecstasy. There are various reports that she had been to Raquel’s nightclub in Basildon, a place renowned for its potential for violence, and a growing list of discontented customers who had been buying dodgy drugs through Tucker and Rolfe Inc.
The fact is that she died during her 18th birthday party at her home in Latchington. Leah’s father, Paul, and her mother, Janet, ensured that Leah’s death received maximum publicity.

Essex Police clamped down. It became increasingly difficult to sell drugs in any of the clubs to which Tucker and his crew governed security and the illegal substances. Steele was now very worried about the heat that Leah’s death was bringing down, and several unsubstantiated reports that the pill the young woman swallowed came from a batch of much stronger tablets that Tucker had purchased from a new supplier, and without the knowledge of Steele.

In the event, it has since been proven that Leah did not die as the result of Ecstasy ingestion. An inquest determined that her death was actually not directly due to Ecstasy consumption at all, but rather the large quantity of water she had consumed, apparently while observing the advice commonly given to ravers to drink water to avoid dehydration resulting from the exertion of dancing continuously for hours. Leah had been at home with friends and had not been dancing, yet consumed about 7 litres in less than 90 minutes, resulting in water intoxication and hyponatremia (low sodium levels; in this case due to the dilution of blood), which in turn led to serious swelling of the brain (cerebral edema), irreparably damaging it. However, SIADH – a condition in which a hormone is released, causing water retention – may have been directly related to the Ecstasy Leah had taken, leaving her unable to urinate, which would have allowed expulsion of the excess water and prevented hyponatremia. At the
inquest it was stated, ‘If Leah had taken the drug alone, she might well have survived. If she had drunk the amount of water alone, she would have survived.’

However, it is inconceivable that Leah obtained her Ecstasy pill from anywhere else than a batch from Messrs Tucker and Steele, so both men had every cause for concern. They had every reason to become paranoid, especially as Tucker, like Tate, was now consumed by drug addiction.

Around this time, Steele more or less fuelled the fire, telling his partner that he had just closed a deal – and it was a big one. For an outlay of
£
30,000, he was to fly 30kg of top-grade Colombian coke from Holland to a remote field in Essex. The load had a street value of
£
1 million… it was the deal of the century. Or would have been, had the two crooks trusted each other.

It would be right to say that Tate was excited about the offer. He and his side of the firm couldn’t pull this deal off on their own – they relied totally on Steele – and Tate reasoned that Steele and his guys should be cut out of the enterprise once the aircraft had landed. In 1994, Tate and Rolfe had killed a small-time dealer named Kevin Whittaker who had ripped them off, so they were quite prepared to kill again should it prove expedient.

Steele was no mug either. He knew the risks. In fact, there was no ‘big deal’ and no shipment of Colombian cocaine. What he was planning was a classic
double-cross
. He asked Tate, Rolfe and Tucker to meet him in the Halfway House pub near Rettendon during the evening of 6 December, and they would drive in Rolfe’s Range Rover to the field where he planned to land the aircraft a few days later. He would instruct them to light
fires to aid his landing. After fully discussing the plan, they would then drive back to the pub.

At 6.30pm on 6 December, Darren Nicholls drove Steele and Jack Whomes close to the rendezvous point. Steele left them and walked to Craig Rolfe’s Range Rover parked in the pub’s car park. Nicholls then drove Whomes back down the A130 and dropped him at the entrance to Workhouse Lane, which led down a slope, where it met a junction, then turned right to a field, barred by a gate.

Whomes told Nicholls to drive half-a-mile further on and wait until he received a call on his mobile phone to return and pick up Steele and himself. Nicholls noticed that Whomes carried a large holdall as he stepped out of the car. Steele, now sitting in the back of the Range Rover alongside Pat Tate, stealthily pulled on a pair of surgical gloves as Rolfe drove them to the soon-to-be-murder scene.

As the Range Rover turned into Workhouse Lane, Tate received a phone call from his girlfriend, Sarah Saunders. Had Tate mentioned to her that he was with Mick and the boys, the plot would have been scuttled there and then. Tate effectively sealed his own fate by saying nothing of importance at all – Steele breathed a deep sigh of relief.

When they reached the end of the lane, they found the so-called landing field barred by a gate. It was dark, a clear sky and stars illuminated the narrow, rutted track, bordered by thick hedgerow, all blanketed in snow. Steele climbed out and allegedly said, ‘You boys stay in the warm.’ He walked a few yards from the vehicle and was met by Whomes, who handed him a sawn-off,
double-barrelled
shotgun.

Rolfe was the first to die. As soon as the rear passenger door had opened and Steele was clear, Jack Wholmes leaned in with a pump-action shotgun. He pressed the barrel against the back of the driver’s headrest and pulled the trigger. The shot ripped through the fabric and straight through Rolfe’s skull, leaving him dead where he sat. When his body was found, both hands were on the steering wheel, his foot on the brake.