Epping Country Club started playing rave and house music on Sunday nights and it was soon ‘the place’ to be seen in Essex. Crowds queued for hours to get in and extra staff were taken on to meet the demand. David Done and I were asked to work there on Sundays and we both accepted the offer. Doormen, drug dealers and all ‘club people’ who had worked Friday and Saturday used to go there, as it was the only night they had off.
It was not long before I got to know many people on the London club circuit. I became friendly with two men in particular: Darren Pearman and Tony Tucker. Darren was a member of a firm from the Canning Town area of east London – a fearless and powerful team, despite the fact the majority of the members were in their 20s.
Darren radiated innocence, was always dressed smartly, always generous and polite, but when there was trouble he would be in the thick of it. He feared nobody, but had respect for everybody.
Tony Tucker was in his mid-30s and a mountain of a man. He ran a very big and well-respected door firm which supplied security at clubs in Essex, Suffolk and London. Tucker was strange in many ways; he spoke to few people and could be quite abrupt. He had a very dry sense of humour and could be quite aggressive towards those who tried to mix in his circle of friends without having been invited.
David Done’s obsession with bodybuilding resulted in him having a serious problem with steroids. David’s addiction to these performance-enhancing drugs in turn led to problems with money. He even resorted to being a pizza-delivery boy to help finance his drug craving. He refused to listen to reason and his addiction began to affect his judgment. One Monday morning, David rang me up and told me that he had been sacked from Epping Country Club for allegedly selling drugs. I knew this was false. David had nothing to do with drug dealing. I told him that if he was being sacked, then all of the door staff should walk out in support of him. I told him I would pick him up and we would go and see Joe, the head doorman, together to see if we could get to the bottom of it. When we arrived I asked Joe who had said that David was dealing. He said that the club had received an anonymous telephone call.
I got quite irritated and reasoned that if the person who alleged David was a dealer didn’t do it openly and with some form of corroboration, then he or she shouldn’t be believed. Eventually Joe relented and said that David could have his job back and we both went home. That evening, I received a phone call from Dave Venables who told me that the management at Epping had said I was to be sacked instead of David Done. No reason was given.
What particularly annoyed me was that now I had been sacked, David Done refused to stand by me. He said that he needed the money and the fact that I’d lost my job was unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do. I was fucking livid and my friendship with David became, at best, strained.
David Done worked at the Ministry of Sound occasionally, and in an effort to patch up our friendship he got me a job there to replace the nights I had lost at Epping. The Ministry door team were a powerful firm – nearly every man on the team could have ‘a row’. One man I got on particularly well with was Ronnie Fuller. I had first met Ronnie through his girlfriend Larissa, who lived in Grays, Essex. Larissa and I got to know each other when I worked at Epping. Ronnie had been a professional wrestler, but he had given it up as he said the sport was corrupt. ‘It’s full of villains,’ he told me, ‘they want you to throw nearly every match so they can gamble on the fight and win.’ Larissa constantly nagged Ronnie to give up working the door because she feared for his safety, but he wouldn’t have any of it. ‘I’m OK,’ he would say, ‘I’ve got to know most of the villains who come in here and they get on all right with me.’ The trouble with door work is, the longer you do it, the more involved you become in the shit it creates and incidents you consider trivial fester in people’s minds.
David Done was a good friend of Carlton Leach’s, who had been the head doorman at the Ministry of Sound but had recently been sacked and had his door team removed from the club. Two brothers from south London – Tony and Peter Simms – took over the door and there was immediate conflict between Leach and the Simms brothers.
I asked David if Leach minded us working for the Simms brothers. I felt our loyalty lay with Leach, who was after all David’s friend. David told me that he had discussed it with Leach and he had said that it was fine for us to continue working there. A few days later, I learned that David Done had lied to me. When he had approached Leach about working at the Ministry of Sound, he had been told that it would be appreciated if he didn’t work for Tony and Peter Simms. When David had explained that he needed the money, Leach told him that he would pay him his wages not to work there. David decided that he would take money from both the Simms brothers and Leach. I said I wanted nothing more to do with it and so David and I ended up falling out again.
I was still seeing a fair bit of Tony Tucker, the man I had met at Epping Country Club. He asked me what was going on between David Done and me and I told him. Tucker, who was also a good friend of Leach, told him that David Done had been taking money from him and the Simms brothers. When confronted, David denied it and slagged me off, telling Leach I was a liar and had been trying to cause trouble. I rang up David and taped the conversation to prove that not only had he taken the money from Leach and the Simms brothers, but the things he had said about me to cause trouble were untrue. Around the same time, an article appeared in the News of the World about two of the Ministry of Sound doormen – Mark Rothermel and a South African named Chris Raal.
Rothermel had left before I had started work at the club but Chris Raal was still there, working alongside David Done and me. Chris was in this country on the run from the South African police after it was alleged that he had shot dead a nightclub manager in Johannesburg. I had never met Rothermel and until I had read the News of the World article, I had never heard of him.
The Ministry of Sound had recently won one of its many awards and the article was making a big issue about men with violent pasts being employed there. In November 1989, Mark Rothermel had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for assisting in the disposal of a body. Mark had been working at Hollywood’s in Romford – one of Tony Tucker’s doors – with another man, Pierre St Ange. Pierre and Mark had got into a dispute with a DJ there named Bernie Burns. They had lured him to a flat in Ilford, where he had been strangled. His body was wrapped in a blanket, put in the boot of a car and taken to a quiet wood near Chelmsford. The head and both hands were hacked off so it would be difficult to identify the body. Mark was reported to have told a friend: ‘The hands came off easily but the head was more of a problem because of the veins in his neck.’ The DJ was buried in a shallow woodland grave; his head and his hands have never been recovered. Police found the mutilated corpse after a tip-off and arrested Rothermel at the same time – he was hiding in a pond near the grave, up to his neck in water. Mark was found not guilty of murder and not guilty of manslaughter, but he received six years’ imprisonment for the disposal of the body. Pierre was found not guilty of murder but was sentenced to ten years for manslaughter.
At first, people blamed Carlton Leach for tipping off the newspaper about Rothermel and Raal’s association with the Ministry of Sound. The Simms brothers thought that Leach might have been trying to discredit their door team. David Done told people that it ‘must have’ been me; it would have been easy to believe as I made no secret of the fact that I had many newspaper contacts which I had made during my time spent working on the James Fallon fundraising event. It was the Kray brothers who had taught me the usefulness and importance of a relationship with the media.
It was a childish and dangerous thing for David Done to assume and then voice; Mark Rothermel and Chris Raal were no fools and obviously extremely dangerous men. I was initially unaware of what David Done had been saying, but the next time I worked at the Ministry of Sound it was apparent something was not quite right and it concerned Raal, who was unusually abrupt with me. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife but it s
oon became clear that it wasn’t the atmosphere that certain people wanted to cut. I guessed I was under suspicion concerning the News of the World article and I was pretty sure who had planted the seeds of uncertainty in people’s minds. I went out to the front door and said to David Done, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ He looked at me rather sheepishly, but said nothing. I could tell by his manner that whatever was going on, he was behind it. Despite the atmosphere nobody accused me of anything, so I decided to sit it out and see what developed. I remained working until the end of the night and then left as normal.
Since starting work at the Ministry of Sound I had met a man named Dave Courtney. To be honest, he looked the part, seemed all right and I quite liked him and those he hung about with. These days Courtney tells people he was a ‘gangland boss’ or a major player but nobody thought of him as such back then.
I was introduced to him through a mutual friend called Eric Lloyd. Eric lived in the Basildon area and had worked alongside me at Raquels as a doorman. All of the villains in the area, and beyond, knew Eric because he and his family had always been involved in nightclub security. When the Ministry of Sound would close on Sunday morning, the die-hard ravers would go to the nearby Elephant and Castle pub, and then onto The Park nightclub in Kensington. They were good times; everyone was in high spirits and there was rarely a hint of trouble. When The Park closed early on Sunday evening, those still standing would go to The Gas nightclub in the West End or Epping Forest Country Club. Looking back, I don’t know how people did it. Most of them were fuelled by drugs so didn’t really feel the effects of fatigue until they ‘came down’ from their drug-induced high.
Courtney and his friends would stand by the huge speakers on the left-hand side of the bar in the Ministry of Sound. They all used to dance about and generally have a good time. The majority of my friends would meet up in the back ‘Dark Room’ so other than saying hello when we passed, we didn’t have that much to do with Courtney or his friends.
Every Sunday evening there was a house and garage night held on a boat which was permanently moored on the Thames at the Embankment. I went there one night and bumped into Dave Courtney, who said hello, then stood drinking with me at the bar. I noticed again that my presence was creating an atmosphere, so much so that everyone around me began to move away – a sure sign that trouble was brewing. I asked Courtney what was going on and he said that he wasn’t aware of anything going on; he laughed and said I was just being paranoid.
As I was leaving the boat, I saw Courtney arguing with a man with a ponytail who had a knife in his hand. Courtney was saying to him: ‘Not here, not here!’
I am not stupid. It was obvious to me that the man wielding the knife, whom I had never even seen before, was planning to attack me. I went over to Courtney and said, ‘What the fuck’s he doing with a knife?’ Courtney looked embarrassed and denied the man had a knife. I said, ‘I’m not fucking stupid, Dave, I saw it.’ Once more Courtney said I was mistaken, so I walked off.
As we left the boat, Courtney asked me if I could give a friend of his a lift to a party. I thought that if something was going to happen, it would have happened on the boat, so I agreed to give his friend a lift. The person who got into my car was in his 20s; he told me he was from Coventry. He looked a bit of a mug; I certainly wasn’t concerned about him. He told me the party was being held in a house in north London.
It may sound odd, but you can actually sense fear or the coming of violence. The atmosphere in that car was very, very tense. He asked me about David Done and if I got on with Chris Raal. He also asked me if I knew Carlton Leach, in fact, he asked me too many questions. I kept a First World War bayonet down the side of my seat in the car and I decided that the first wrong move this man made, he was going to get it stuffed into his head. The party, he told me, was in a house on a main road heading towards the A1. Every few hundred yards my passenger kept saying: ‘This looks like it, this looks like it.’ By ‘coincidence’, every place that ‘looked like it’ happened to be an unlit, uninhabited area. He told me the number of the house the party was meant to be at, and unsurprisingly, we were unable to find it. He kept saying: ‘Pull over here and I’ll knock a door.’ Each time I ignored him and pulled onto a brightly lit garage forecourt or similar spot. As we were driving up a dual carriageway, I noticed two cars following us.
As we slowed to negotiate a roundabout, I saw that Dave Courtney was driving one of them, and the tall man with the ponytail was in the other. It was apparent to me that this was an amateurish attempt to corner me. My confidence grew when I realised the type of mugs I was dealing with. These ‘gangsters’ had been watching too many Jimmy Cagney movies. If someone really wanted to harm me, they could have done so on the boat. I couldn’t understand why they were bothering with all this theatrical manoeuvring. I stopped the car, grabbed my passenger, shoved him onto the street and slammed the door shut. As I drove away, I noticed he had left a lock-knife on the seat.
The following day, I rang Tony Tucker, who knew all of the characters involved as both Rothermel and Raal had worked for him. I told him what had gone on. I said there was only one way to sort this out – ring Leach, Rothermel, Raal and David Done and arrange a meeting. A ‘meeting’ is not a democratic discussion; each person says his piece and whoever is not believed does not get to leave the room under his own steam. Later that day, Tucker rang me and said the meeting was on for the following morning in a Portakabin at a car front in Essex. As I was getting ready to leave for the meeting, Tucker rang and said it had been called off, as they had been unable to get hold of David Done. Another meeting was arranged; this time they were able to reach him but he said he didn’t want to go. The matter, I was told, was therefore closed. I found it hard to contain my anger.
This had all started because I had suggested Done should show some loyalty to his friend Leach. As a result of that, people had been plotting to stab me for no reason and now I was being told to forget it. I decided I would forget it and carry on working for the Simms brothers and if people didn’t like it, that was their problem. I have not seen or spoken to David Done since.
The next time I saw Dave Courtney was in the Café de Paris. He was with the same people he had been with on the boat, and the same bad atmosphere soon descended around me. I wasn’t going to play their silly gangster games so I walked over to Courtney and asked him what was going on. Courtney, puffing on his cigar, said he had heard things about me and he didn’t like them. I was hardly flattered. ‘What have you heard and who fucking from? That wanker David Done?’ I asked him. I told him to get his facts right or keep his nose out of matters that didn’t involve him. In fairness to Courtney’s friend Ian Tucker, he agreed Courtney had only heard talk from people in clubs rather than facts from people who’d know, and so I walked off.
I did attend a party a few weeks later at the house where I was supposed to have been killed and our host was the knifeman with the ponytail – my would-be murderer. He did speak to me a couple of times, asking me who I knew and who I was associated with, but the earlier incident was never raised by either of us. I saw little point. Why ask someone why they were going to do something they clearly had no intention of doing?
One night, whilst working at the Ministry of Sound, I hit a man in the face with a lead cosh. He had been threatening Ronnie Fuller and me as we had refused him entry due to his drunkenness. We had politely asked him to go away several times, but our good-natured requests were only repaid with increased hostility and further abuse. Eventually the man was told to ‘Fuck off or else’. His response was to step forward with a raised fist. Smack!
The sound of the lead cosh making contact with his jaw and cheekbone echoed all around us. I knew something had broken in his face, I knew I had hurt him. He fell motionless to the ground and I was advised to disappear. The following day Peter Simms rang me and said the man had suffered a broken jaw and a fractured eye socket. ‘The management would prefer it if you didn’t return,’ he said. Peter
and his brother Tony are decent men and had been good to me. I didn’t want to repay them with grief, so I said I understood. Out of the Ministry meant out of circulation in London, so it was some time before Courtney and I were to meet again.
Paul Trehern, a Basildon doorman who used to work at Raquels, announced he was getting married and telephoned the club to say he would be popping in on his stag night for a drink with approximately 30 other men. It was expected that they would be rowdy – most stag nights are – but Paul had worked with us and had the courtesy to telephone and inform us of his intentions, so I said it shouldn’t be a problem. I advised Venables that he should go and see Paul and explain to him that there would only be four or five of us working that night. It would be inconceivable for us to control 30 men, so we would expect Paul to supervise his own friends. That way there wouldn’t be any problems and therefore they would be most welcome to come into the club. However, Dave discussed it with the management and together they decided that Paul Trehern and his friends would not be welcome. I thought it was ridiculous.
When the night came around, Paul and his friends turned up and were quite rightly disgusted to learn they were being refused admission. Paul ended up grappling on the floor with Venables and, despite Venables’ best efforts, he and his friends still entered the club.
Apart from the initial scuffle, they were well behaved and didn’t cause any problems whatsoever. I thought the situation had been handled badly and was extremely embarrassed as Paul was a friend and ex-work colleague. The following night Dave Venables didn’t come into work. He knew I had the serious hump with him. The next morning I received a phone call from the manager. He asked me to come in and see him as Dave Venables had resigned. He told me Venables had said he could no longer work with me. I was in total agreement: I could no longer work with him. The manager shook my hand and said security at the club was now mine to run. I decided there and then things would change dramatically. I would run the door my way and if the local villains wanted trouble, they could have it.
Wannabe in My Gang? Page 9
