Shortly afterwards, Tucker’s teenage mistress, Donna Garwood, was trying to get in touch with him, but she couldn’t ring Tucker at home in case his wife answered the phone. Garwood rang Nipper to ask him if he could locate Tucker and speak to him on her behalf. True to form, Nipper made a joke of things and said rather sarcastically, ‘He’s probably at home giving his old woman one.’ Nipper hadn’t said it maliciously. You could never get a straight answer out of him as he was always joking. Garwood, though, later told Tucker what Nipper had said and made it sound as though Nipper had spoken with some venom. The next time I saw Tate and Tucker, they didn’t mention the phone call. However, they did say that Nipper had grassed them up to the police about the 7-Eleven incident and they were going to make him pay. Usually friends were allowed in the club for nothing, but Tucker instructed us that when Nipper turned up, we should charge him, but make sure he went in. Once he was inside the club, we were to ring Tucker, who would come down to get hold of Nipper. Fortunately, he never showed up. The following day Tucker and Rolfe turned up at Nipper’s house with one or two henchmen in tow.
Tucker, high on crack cocaine, stuck a loaded handgun into Nipper’s temple and said he was going to kill him. He was threatened with a machete and Tucker said he was going to hack off one of Nipper’s hands and one of his feet. Gangsters always like to think of themselves as having manners so Tucker gave Nipper a choice: ‘Which limbs do you want to lose, your left or right?’ Before he could start hacking lumps out of Nipper, Rolfe and others grabbed Tucker and managed to get him out of the room. Nipper’s house was looted before they plastered their excrement over everything they left behind. Nipper fled, understandably terrified.
The following Friday night, Tate and Rolfe came down to Raquels, saying they were looking for Nipper.
I said he wasn’t in the club, but they insisted on looking to check to see if any of his friends were. They had a walk around for about 15 minutes and then left. Tate rang back later that night, obviously out of his head, to ask me if Nipper had turned up; I said no. I could hear him banging as if he was punching a wall. He was shouting, saying that he was going to kill Nipper. He said if he couldn’t get hold of Nipper, he would ‘do his family’. He said Nipper’s sister, who was only 15 at the time, would be abducted, and he would cut her fingers off one by one, until Nipper was man enough to show his face. There wasn’t a lot I could say to Tate, so I just replied ‘OK’ and put the phone down.
On Friday, 18 November 1994, I had arranged to visit Reg with Tucker. When it was time to leave I rang his home number and mobile, but I couldn’t get an answer.
Reg had been promised a percentage of takings from a person who wanted to install fruit machines and video games in pubs and clubs. Reg thought Tucker might be able to help him out by putting machines in venues where he worked and that is why he had asked Tucker to visit him. I didn’t think Tucker would want to get involved with fruit machines, so taking him on the visit didn’t seem that important. I couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to visit Reggie alone. I decided to tell him that Tucker had been unable to make the visit because a family matter had arisen which he had to attend to.
On the way home from Maidstone Prison, I heard on the radio that a man had been found dead in a ditch in Basildon. I didn’t think anything of it as stranger things were happening in Basildon all the time. When I got home, I continued to try and contact Tucker, but he wasn’t answering his phone.
On Monday, 21 November, a detective based at Basildon police station telephoned me, saying he needed to see me urgently. Everything was fucking urgent with the police so I guessed it was something trivial, but I was wrong. When we met, the detective said he wanted to know if I had heard anything about Pat Tate being shot. I said I hadn’t. He also asked me if Craig Rolfe had been up to anything in the past few days. I said I didn’t know what he was on about. I wasn’t being very helpful and so he said I could go, but he would be back in touch, adding, ‘You’ll know what Rolfe has done before too long.’
I contacted Tucker and he was very keen to hear what the police had to say. He asked me to meet him in the car park at Pitsea Cemetery as soon as possible. Tucker had a thing about meeting out in the open in public places, whatever the weather. We usually met outside the casualty department at Basildon Hospital, but I soon realised why he had decided to change the location.
Tucker told me that he and Rolfe had gone to Nipper’s house because Nipper had grassed them up over the 7-Eleven incident. He said they had been trying to get him all week. He had also gone there on separate occasions with Tate. Nipper had confronted Tucker and Rolfe with a pump-action shotgun and they had been forced to flee. Tucker said that on Sunday Tate had been at home, getting ready to go out. He was in the bathroom when somebody threw a brick through the window. Tate peered outside and a rather irate Nipper had opened fire from close range with a revolver. Tate raised his right arm to shield his face. A bullet hit him in the wrist, travelled up his arm and smashed the bone as it exited through his elbow. Nipper fled and Tate was taken to hospital. Tucker said that when Tate got out, Nipper was going to die.
This incident was not our firm’s main problem. Kevin Whitaker, from Basildon, had been a friend of Craig Rolfe’s for some time. He had introduced Whitaker to Tucker and he had started using Whitaker as a courier for drug deals. Whitaker had been involved in a £60,000 cannabis deal with a firm from Romford which had gone wrong and Tucker had lost out.
As Whitaker had been the go-between, the debt was down to him and Tucker wanted to know how he was going to pay. Whitaker, who knew what was coming, tried to stay out of the way. A wise man would have left Essex because Tucker and Rolfe devoted their days to trying to get hold of Whitaker. Eventually Rolfe contacted him via his pager and assured him there was no problem, he just wanted to congratulate him on the birth of his new-born son. Surprised by Rolfe’s friendly manner, Whitaker agreed to meet Rolfe so that they could have a celebratory drink together to ‘wet the baby’s head’. Whitaker was picked up in Tate’s BMW and greeted by a smiling Tucker when he climbed into the back seat.
Once the car had picked up speed, the mood changed. Tucker demanded to know how Whitaker was going to repay him for the drugs lost in his care. Whitaker blamed the loss of the cannabis on the firm from Romford, so Tucker and Rolfe said they would take him to confront the people concerned. Tucker and Rolfe were getting increasingly annoyed. It was dawning on them that they were not going to get their money or drugs back. They pulled over and grabbed hold of Whitaker and kept saying to him, ‘If you like drugs that much, have some of ours.’ They were forcing him to take cocaine and Special K. Whitaker was becoming more and more terrified. Tucker was laughing. He said Whitaker was pleading with them to let him go. Tucker used a syringe and needle he had been using himself for steroids to inject Whitaker three times with massive amounts of mind-bending drugs. Whitaker, who was shaking with fear, eventually passed out.
They left Basildon and travelled along the A127 towards Romford. Tucker said that as they reached the Laindon/Dunton turn-off Whitaker was drifting in and out of consciousness. They drove up the slip road as there didn’t seem much point in taking him to Romford. They turned left to go towards Laindon and then pulled up before telling Whitaker to get out of the car. There was no response. They grabbed the motionless Whitaker and dragged him from the car, all the time ordering him to ‘get up’.
But Whitaker was never going to get up. Like Kray victim Jack McVitie, Kevin Whitaker had been lured out on a pretence by a friend and murdered by two power-crazed thugs because he owed them money for drugs. They got in the car and drove off but Rolfe suddenly pulled up and ran back towards his ‘friend’. ‘Fucking leave him,’ Tucker ordered.
‘You can’t leave him here,’ Rolfe replied, ‘everyone’s coming out of work and they’ll see him.’
Reluctantly, Tucker agreed and so they returned to where Whitaker’s body lay and put it in the car. They then drove back over the A127 to Dunton
Road. Tucker said they looked at Whitaker and they knew he was dead. They dragged him out of the car and dumped his body in a ditch. I asked Tucker what he was going to do. He just laughed, and said, ‘Fuck all,’ but I knew he was concerned. He said the police would not treat Whitaker’s death as murder. They would just think that he had overdosed on drugs round somebody’s house and died. Nobody would want the body of a junkie in their home and so it would be reasonable to assume Whitaker would have been dumped anyway. He kept laughing, saying: ‘We certainly won’t be having any more trouble with Mr Whitaker.’
I told Tucker what the police had been asking me. He did seem rather concerned that they had been linked to Whitaker’s murder so quickly. However, he kept saying, and I think he was trying to convince himself, that they could never prove that he and Rolfe had murdered Whitaker. Tucker was later proved right – detectives could find no evidence to support any murder claims. Whitaker was written off as a junkie who had overdosed.
At the inquest, coroner Dr Malcolm Weir called the death ‘most inexplicable’. Friends told how Whitaker had made no secret of the fact that he was heading for a rendezvous with Rolfe on the night he died.
A message asking him to contact Rolfe was also logged on his radio pager. Rolfe was called as a witness at the inquest and asked to explain his rendezvous with Whitaker. He denied meeting him and said he only spoke to him on the phone to enquire about his baby son. Tucker also attended the inquest, but did not give evidence. An open verdict was recorded.
Tate was laid up in Basildon Hospital after the shooting at his home. He had lost a lot of flesh from his upper arm, but he seemed in good spirits. Tucker was making sure of that. Despite being in a hospital bed under medication, Tate was supplied with a steady stream of drugs. A side effect of his heavy drug habit was that Tate suffered from extreme paranoia. He had convinced himself that Nipper was coming back to finish him off, so he asked Tucker to give him a firearm to keep in his bed. He was immediately supplied with a revolver. Within a couple of days a nurse discovered the gun while making up Tate’s bed. The shocked nurse immediately contacted the police and Tate was arrested. Because he was still out on licence from his six-year robbery sentence, Tate was automatically returned to prison for being in possession of a firearm, a breach of his parole-licence conditions.
Nipper remained off the scene. I did ring him to say I would stand by him but he has since told me that he didn’t trust me because of my association with Tucker. Little did he know that I was growing tired of Tucker’s irrational behaviour myself. Fearing a reprisal attack, Nipper bought a Smith & Wesson for £600 and a bullet-proof vest for £400.
When Nipper was finally arrested for the shootings, the case against him was never pursued because the judge ruled that the gun that he had on him at the time of his arrest was not the gun that was used to shoot Tate. Nipper did, however, serve seven-and-a-half months in prison for illegally possessing a firearm.
I could see the writing was on the wall for the firm and myself. The drug-taking and the violence were completely out of control. As soon as somebody put a foot wrong his loyalty was questioned and once that happened his popularity quickly diminished until he was deemed an enemy. Once deemed an enemy, that person became the subject of some sort of violent attack.
On a morbid high because he had literally got away with murder, Tucker started to rant about killing one of the firm’s doormen, whom he thought was a grass. J.J. was a good, decent man who lived in Chelmsford and had known Tucker for years. However, Tucker’s drug-induced paranoia had turned him against J.J. Unsure he could take on J.J. alone, Tucker turned Carlton Leach and a number of other friends and associates against J.J. by saying he knew for sure he had been giving information to the police. One drug-crazed night, Tucker, Tate, Rolfe and a fourth man went to Epping Forest Country Club with the intention of carrying out Tucker’s murderous plan. They filled two syringes with a cocktail of drugs they called ‘champagne’. A third was plunged into Rolfe’s vein so blood could be extracted. This was then topped up with pure heroin and shaken so it resembled the contents of the other two syringes. The plan was to get J.J. in the car, let him see Tucker and Tate injecting the ‘champagne’ and then offer him the syringe containing the heroin. If he refused, they intended to ‘jab’ him with it and if that failed the fourth man, who was sitting in the back of the car, had agreed he would shoot J.J. through the head.
When they arrived at Epping they found out Carlton Leach, who knew nothing of the murder plot, had arrived there earlier with his firm and J.J. had decided it would be best to leave. Back in Basildon that night, Tate was so drugged out of his mind and hyped-up at the thought of killing somebody, that he had tried to shoot Craig Rolfe. The following day Tucker and Tate were laughing about Rolfe, who had been so terrified he had climbed out of a window to escape. They told him it wasn’t personal, Tate was just hallucinating. Everybody knew it wasn’t right, whatever Tate’s excuse. Deep down, we all knew the way things were going somebody else was sure to get murdered soon.
The next time I met Dave Courtney was in a place I had never expected to see him. He was in Maidstone Prison visiting Reggie Kray. Going to see Reggie was totally unlike visiting his brother in Broadmoor. Reggie, in an effort to see as many people as possible, used to ask fellow inmates who didn’t receive many visits if they could send their visiting orders to his friends. The end result would be that you could end up sitting at a table with a person you had never even met. On average, Reg would send out about four or five of other people’s visiting orders, so there would be five or six tables full of his visitors on any particular day. Reg would move from table to table, thanking his ‘fans’ for coming, spending a few moments with each of them and then moving on. On this particular visit, I spotted Courtney at a table and assumed he was there visiting an inmate he knew, so I was surprised when he came over, said hello and told me he was there visiting Reg Kray.
I asked Courtney about the night I had thrown his friend from Coventry out of my car. He laughed and said that it was a genuine party and I was just being paranoid. Because he was denying anything untoward had been planned, there was little point in debating the matter further.
Courtney did not know the Kray brothers – like so many of their fans he had written to them in the hope that his heroes would write back. Reg had fulfilled Courtney’s wish and invited him to visit. To be honest, my heart sank when Courtney said who he was there to visit. I took comfort in the fact that visits only lasted about an hour and so I wouldn’t have to put up with too much bullshit from my would-be ‘killer’.
Thankfully Courtney was sitting at a different table to me and so the visit passed off without me having to converse with him too much. Over the next few weeks, Courtney appeared at Maidstone more and more often. He was very keen to visit Ronnie Kray but Broadmoor had tightened up on who was allowed to visit patients, so Courtney’s wish was never granted.
7
AN INDECENT PROPOSAL
On the morning of 17 March 1995, a reporter rang me on my mobile phone and told me that Ronnie Kray had died of a massive heart attack. Ronnie had passed away at 9.07 a.m. at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. He was 61 years of age. I tried ringing Maidstone to offer my condolences to Reg, but the prison had been inundated with calls and none were being accepted.
That evening I got a call from Reggie. Naturally he was upset about his twin brother, but his grief, he said, was a private matter.
Over the next few days Reg rang me regularly. He told me that Dave Courtney ‘and his men’ were guarding Ron’s body at a funeral parlour in Bethnal Green. He asked me if I would go to the parlour to do a shift as Reg wanted to ensure ghouls or publicity seekers didn’t pull a stunt. I said I would get in touch with Courtney and sort it out. I had no intention of doing so. I thought this type of gangster theatre was a step too far. What harm could anybody possibly do to a dead man? Hard men who employ minders have always puzzled me, but a dead man needing protection was beyond comprehe
nsion.
On the morning of Ron’s funeral I arrived at the funeral directors at around 9 a.m. and made my way inside. Crowds had already begun lining the street and some teenagers had scaled lamp-posts and buildings where they hung precariously, waiting for a glimpse of Reg, Charlie, Ron’s coffin and other ex-members of the Kray firm, who were to be united on their turf for the last time. Bouncers in dark glasses stood all around, gloved hands clasped in front of them. There was no air of sombreness or sense of mourning, but more of a carnival atmosphere.
I was surprised to see Kate Howard outside the undertakers; she was talking to a journalist. Kate had been divorced by Ronnie after she had published her tacky book about her brief spell as ‘Mrs Kray’. In the book she had described having an extramarital affair in lurid detail.
Ronnie, for whom pride and self-respect meant everything, was understandably upset that not only was somebody having sex with his wife, but she was letting everybody know about it. To add insult to injury, Kate revealed that whilst married to Ronnie she had been charged and convicted of using a stolen credit card in an attempt to try to obtain goods from shops at the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex and she had spent time at her friend’s sleazy phone-sex call-centre listening in on perverts.
Ronnie was also upset that Kate had graphically described her own appalling manic behaviour in the book. Sounding more like an East End fishwife than a Kentish housewife, Kate described kicking her lover in the face, stabbing him with car keys and attempting to run him over because he had thrown her sunglasses out of the car. Apparently, her lover had not suffered enough for his misdemeanour – Kate said she turned around and drove at him again. ‘Then I went really mad,’ she wrote.
Wannabe in My Gang? Page 11
