Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (4 page)

However, now the true facts can be revealed. In an effort to track down the Stirlands, Colin had contacted a former BT worker, Stephen Poundall, in a bid to find the couple’s address. In turn, Poundall spoke with past colleagues, Anthony Kelly and Andrew Pickering, who ran a computer search. They found the address and passed it on to Poundall, although they had no idea why he wanted it. Kelly and Pickering later admitted computer misuse and were sacked by BT, as well as being handed down suspended jail sentences.

Aged just 19, Jamie Gunn never recovered from the shock of seeing his friend die and, a year later, on 2 August, just three weeks after O’Brien’s conviction, he was found dead in his mother’s bed by a younger brother and sister. Jamie had died of pneumonia. He had stopped eating and begun drinking heavily and his immune system was weakened. Jamie had died as surely as if O’Brien had killed him, too.

The Gunns decided to give Jamie a proper send off, and the funeral was as lavish as that of any Mafia family member. On Friday, 13 August 2004, 1,000 mourners descended on the hilltop surrounding the Arnold parish church of St Mary in Bulwell; 700 of them crammed into the 17th-century church, while another 300 stood in the drizzle outside. A horse-drawn, glass-sided hearse waited at the gate below, alongside two motor hearses bearing
flowers, including huge wreaths saying ‘Jamie’, ‘Brother’ and ‘Jim Bob’.

As crime writer James Cathcart reported for the
Nottingham Evening Post
, ‘There were three of the most stretched kind of stretch limousines, plus three big funeral Daimlers, a convoy of bulky, dark 4x4s and a conspicuous black Mercedes two-seater… Hard-looking men with stubble for hair stood smoking and chatting quietly in the churchyard, their jackets straining across their shoulders. The style, as well as the scale of the funeral, would have suited a Kray brother, rather than a teenage bouncer unknown to the world outside Nottingham before his death… just a mile away, on Hucknell Road, a demolition team was tearing down the last recognisable traces of The Sporting Chance.’

Colin Gunn is now serving life for conspiracy to murder the Stirlands. His fellow plotters, Michael McNee and John Russell, will serve 95 years before they are considered for parole. After being sentenced on Friday, 30 June 2006, the verdict went down very badly among Gunn’s supporters on the Bestwood Estate. That weekend, around 30 people started a mini-riot, setting fire to cars and causing
£
10,000 worth of damage.

Colin Gunn was also arrested in connection with the murder of Marian Bates, a 64-year-old Arnold parish jeweller, who was shot dead at point-blank range while shielding her daughter Xanthe from two crash-helmeted robbers at 1.30pm on Tuesday, 30 September 2003. Her bespectacled 67-year-old husband, Victor, picked up a fencing foil to try to protect his wife but was attacked with a crowbar. Wearing washing-up gloves, the men
escaped with a pathetic haul of two rings, one pendant and three pairs of earrings worth
£
1,120.00.

Although Colin Gunn was never charged with any involvement in the raid on the couple’s shop, his name has been linked to the investigation a number of times. It is thought that he feared he would be implicated immediately after the shooting and sought the services of corrupt trainee detective, Charles Fletcher, to find out what he could about the investigation less than 24 hours after Mrs Bates had been murdered.

Indeed, Gunn’s common-law wife, Victoria Garfoot, had previously been stopped by police driving a
maroon-coloured
Peugeot in July 2003. She told police that the car belonged to Colin Gunn. Three months after that incident, the
very same
Peugeot was used as the getaway car for two gang members – 19-year-old Craig Moran and Dean Betton, 23, who were known associates of the Gunn clan and who were accomplices in the bungled raid on the Time Centre jewellers on Front Street.

Betton, from Broxtowe, and Moran, a Bestwood resident, were jailed for 13 years each for conspiring to rob the jewellery shop. Peter Williams, the teenager who accompanied the gunman into the Time Centre, was convicted of murder and jailed for life, with a minimum tariff of 22 years. Then aged 19, Williams had a string of convictions and should have been electronically tagged at the time of the raid – he hadn’t been. Moran’s girlfriend, Lisa Unwin, 23, from Bestwood, Nottingham, was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, along with Moran, by providing him with a false alibi.

In describing the robbery to a jury, Victor Bates
explained that two men came into the shop, pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. At first, the pistol failed to fire, but a few moments later his wife was lying on the floor with a bullet in her chest.

‘My wife moved forward quickly and stepped in between the gunman and my daughter, Xanthe, and the swine shot her in cold blood. He just shot her from about three feet – and she went down heavily… like a lump of bricks.’

Victor said that he tried to kill the intruder with a fencing foil he had hidden in the shop, but he failed. ‘I was intent on killing him but he started whirling around like a Dervish and I couldn’t get a clear shot at him. I would have made justice very summary if I could have. The other guy, who was small, whacked me on the wrist with the crowbar and then hit me in the head – and missed my eye by about an inch. I was dazed and went down stunned – he fractured my cheekbone and cut my face.’

Clearly now upset, Mr Bates added, ‘I feel like a fool – when you are faced with a gun, you don’t think about a prearranged act like falling on the floor and feigning a heart-attack. You blame yourself for not taking strict security provisions. I wanted to help my wife but I couldn’t – I think I knew she was dead. She was a very well-known girl and very popular and hadn’t got an enemy in the world – it makes it all the more frustrating that it should happen to her.’

The actual shooter of Marion Bates is widely believed to be young Gunn associate James Brodie, who has never been traced. He disappeared the day after the murder and is presumed dead, according to police. One theory is that Brodie, a heroin addict, was executed on the orders of
Colin Gunn within 48 hours of the murder for fear of him implicating those higher up the pecking order. Rumours abound as to how he met his grisly end, including tales of his body being dumped in sewage works or his remains fed to pigs on a north Nottinghamshire farm.

Police intelligence led a team of body-searchers to the Willows Fish Farm, Wanlip Road, Syston, Leicestershire, where divers and forensic specialists looked for clues. Police divers dredged a stretch of water, while a team of forensic archaeologists surveyed a pit of quicksand.

Barrie Simpson and his colleagues, who are more used to excavating mass graves in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, used ‘non-invasive methods’ so that they didn’t disturb the ground. Simpson, an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and part of a national network of academics called the Forensic Search Advisory Group, said, ‘It [the ground] is like an underground room. Just as a fingerprint officer searches a room for fingerprints, we search for evidence like this. We specialise in the search, location and recovery of buried items. It could be a weapon, body or ransom money.’

Such ground-probing radar searches are so non-evasive they could even have uncovered part-buried footprints left at the time Brodie went missing, so Barrie Simpson and his team carefully made shallow probe holes on a bank surrounding the quicksand which were sniffed in turn by the dogs.

When nothing was found by lunchtime, the team moved to an area of woodland next to the fish farm entrance, where they looked for changes in the vegetation which would have indicated unnatural disturbance, and
so might have suggested that something could have been buried underneath.

‘A burial will affect how vegetation grows,’ said Mr Simpson. ‘Sometimes it increases, sometimes it decreases.’

The police found nothing, and today a
£
10,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of James Brodie remains uncollected. The reward, however, does not specify ‘dead or alive’. Anyone with any information was (and at the time of writing, is) asked to contact police on 0115 844 6994, or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

By now, a joint investigation between the National Crime Squad and police professional standards department were tracking the Gunn gang’s movements. Even PC Charles Fletcher and PC Phil Parr were being watched by a covert team.

When Colin Gunn was arrested, police found two A4 pieces of paper which he had absent-mindedly dumped in his mother’s waste bin in Raymede Drive on the Bestwood Estate. They contained police intelligence about Gunn himself and cars he was linked to. The paperwork had to be secretly removed from the bin by DCI Ian Waterfield to keep the inquiry under wraps. The items were a direct link between Gunn and his
middleman
, 33-year-old Jason Grocock. Crooked PC Fletcher had faxed intelligence reports from Radford Road Police Station to Grocock, then manager of Limeys discount clothes shop in Bridlesmith Gate, Nottingham. He then passed the inside intelligence to Gunn and others.

Trainee detective Charles Fletcher, 25, and Phillip Parr, 40, later admitted at Birmingham Crown Court to separately disclosing data on serious inquiries, including
the details of the murder investigation of Marian Bates, to the Gunns. Fletcher also admitted two charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Over a two-and-a-half year period, beginning in December 2002, Fletcher trawled police data bases to find information. He also sought information about the double murder of Joan and John Stirland. In return, the bent cop received discounts on designer suits from a Nottingham fashion store.

Grocock was convicted of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office and two further charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He received three years’ imprisonment.

40-year-old David Barrett was convicted of two charges of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office and was sentenced to three years. Darren Peters, 38, and Javade Rashid, aged 40, were convicted of the same charge and were sentenced to four years and six months respectively, and a fifth person cannot be named for legal reasons.

Chief Constable Green said, ‘When we put in place the operation to dismantle Gunn’s empire we wanted to get justice for every victim of the evil of Colin Gunn. We haven’t finished that quest for justice.’

And in March 2008 Colin Gunn’s legal advisor indicated that his client’s own quest for justice was not yet over. It was reported that Gunn intended to appeal against his convctions on the basis that his conversations with lawyers while in jail may have been bugged.

A Bestwood community leader, who does not want to be named, said, ‘A church article is where the Gunns got this
Robin Hood reputation. They were once good guys, genuinely. But as time went on, they chose their paths, although even today the perception around here is that they are nice guys because they don’t cause, or want, any trouble on their doorstep.’

As with the Krays in 1960s London, many residents say that the Gunns only hurt those who deserved it, but the truth is somewhat different. The reputation of Bestwood as a no-go for strangers has forced house prices down and it is populated by those who have been moved into council houses or cannot afford anywhere else.

The community leader said, ‘The fear factor remains. A lot of people say he [Colin] would look after them. It’s how the IRA operated. Gunn made sure crime was low so he could go about his business undetected and without police being around. A lot of people regarded him as a sort of Robin Hood character but then most of them had no idea he was involved in such serious stuff as murder. They will be shocked to find out and think his reputation will change.

‘There is no doubt that he [Colin] is a nasty piece of work. The way he worked was that so much of the fear is fuelled by rumour and urban myth. There are rumours of people going missing. There have been rumours that Colin is coming out, that David has already been seen out and about. David is a different kettle of fish. You can at least talk to him. Colin has had a reputation for being a nutter… he hits you first then talks to you.

‘Everyone is waiting to see what happens now there is a vacuum and there are a couple of families on the estate who people are looking at. But the Gunns have long arms and are still running the place through their
associates, fuelling the fear with rumours that they are coming out.’

It is a very remote possibility that Colin Gunn will ever be released from prison. Since he was jailed, there has only been one fatal shooting in Nottingham – a result that has seen the city slip down the gun crime league. ‘Undoubtedly, it’s a safer place,’ says Mr Green, adding, ‘from the day they were arrested and taken off the streets, the city of Nottingham was transformed, and long may it remain so. I would think a fool would say gun crime is dead, but what the figures show, and what the feel of the city shows, is that it’s a very different place to what it was a few years ago.’

So if we are to use any yardstick by which to measure the lives and crimes committed by the Gunn brothers, the ‘adventures’ of our legendary Robin Hood may be a good place to start, for most certainly the Gunns were not in the same league as their more ‘celebrated’ London counterparts, the Kray brothers.

For the most part, the Gunns are a pair of
intellectually
-challenged common thugs. From a sink-estate background, perhaps they glimpsed the opportunity to enter ‘the Big Time’, when it became obvious that the Sheriff of Nottingham (Chief Constable Steve Green) was well and truly committed to dealing with the
African-Caribbean
– or ‘Yardie’ – crime problem that was
overwhelming
his city.

There seems to be some confusion as to exactly when the Yardies arrived in the UK. The Yardie phenomenon was first noted in the late 1980s and their rise is linked to that of crack cocaine in which many trade. However, this pre-dates the event that gave them their name.