The following morning I turned up at court and saw Ryan, who I could only describe as a young boy, sitting in the dock.
The proceedings got under way and very soon afterwards he was walking past me out of the door having being granted bail without any surety being required. When I went outside, he and his solicitor had gone. It’s hard to describe how I felt – mugged-off, disappointed and fucking angry all spring to mind. I had travelled over a hundred miles to gamble a house on a stranger and he did not even have the decency to say ‘Hello’, let alone ‘Thank you’.
When the case was finally heard Ryan was sentenced to a term of imprisonment. During that sentence it was revealed in the press that Reg Kray had taken an Aids test. Ryan, Reggie and their sexual relationship were soon linked by probing reporters. Reg, who had heard Ryan had been talking about going to the press upon his release, wanted him silenced. Reg told me about the nature of his relationship with Ryan and said because he was under the age of consent he feared he would be branded not only homosexual, but a sex offender. As bold as brass, he sat facing me and said not only would this affect him publicly but it could cause problems for him in prison. Reg said he had received two official warnings to stay away from young offenders in prison and any publicity concerning young men below the age of consent could result in him losing privileges or being segregated. Therefore Ryan needed to be advised to keep his mouth shut or else. It takes a lot to shock me, but here was a man saying to me that if it ever got out that he was sexually abusing a boy it could prove embarrassing, so would I silence his victim? I told Reg I didn’t want anything else to do with Ryan or matters that involved under-age sex. Reg started to rant about his name being rubbished in the papers, friendship, loyalty and being let down, but I wouldn’t change my mind. He made me feel sick.
I couldn’t threaten a young boy who was going to allege he had been sexually abused. Dress it up any way you want, but this was child abuse. Reg turned instead to Dave Courtney and Gary Piper, the man Allardyce claimed was not only finished but eternally unforgiven by the Kray circle.
Together they travelled to Ranby Prison in the Midlands where Ryan was being held. During the visit they produced a pre-written affidavit which stated any information Ryan may give to the press now or in the future regarding sexual abuse by Reg Kray was made up for financial benefit only and was wholly untrue. Gary Piper told Ryan, ‘If anything gets in the press, you will get hurt, really hurt.’ The trembling youngster was then encouraged to sign the affidavit, which he did. Feeling pleased he had forced a young boy to stay silent about his abuser, Piper wrote to Reg: ‘It’s all off, the chap is not going to go through with it, neither ever will he. It will not come up again, you will not hear another thing of, or about, the nonce, he’s been taken care of.’
No doubt these men of respect were pleased with themselves. No doubt they have never actually thought who the nonce in this matter really was or about what they actually did. I really had to get away from these villains – everything they did contradicted every word they uttered.
8
FOUR FUNERALS AND A DEATH THREAT
Roger Mellin was a really nice kid. Young and impressionable, he had never been in trouble in his life and lived with his girlfriend Tracy, who had a disabled child. Roger was desperate for money and had often asked about selling Ecstasy for Murray in Raquels. I told Roger not to get involved in that shit, that he was not cut out for it and ought to forget it. Murray, however, told Roger that he would pay him £50 a week just to store drugs at his home. I told Roger not to do it, but he had made his mind up.
One morning Murray asked Roger if he would count out the pills and put them in bags for the various dealers. Roger didn’t like the idea of the dealers coming to his house, so he booked a room in a local hotel. He sat on the bed and set about counting the pills into different bags. There was a knock on the door, and when he opened it police officers poured into the room. On the bed there were 1,500 Ecstasy tablets and quantities of cocaine and amphetamines. Roger had been caught red-handed. The police had been watching Murray’s dealers and had followed them to the hotel. When they were quite sure that drugs were being distributed, they moved in.
Roger was devastated. He knew he was going to serve a lengthy prison sentence despite the fact it was his first offence. Roger pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He refused to name Mark Murray or any of the other dealers. In return for his loyalty, Roger’s partner and her disabled child received nothing from the firm or Mark Murray whilst he was away.
A few weeks after Roger’s arrest, Reg rang me and asked if I would go to visit him as he was due to be interviewed by Mary Riddell from the Today newspaper and wanted me to be there. I don’t know why he wanted me there, but I decided to go as I had made my mind up that it would be the very last time I would see him.
I also told myself that once I had lost my door licence for possessing the gun and the CS gas, I was going to sever all links with my criminal associates and start living an uncomplicated, stress-free life. Even if I didn’t deserve it, my children did. I didn’t want them growing up surrounded by people like my friends and me, I wanted them to have a future. If I was to ever awake from the nightmare I was living in, now was the ideal opportunity to begin to stir. Sitting with Reg, surrounded by his half-wit wannabe entourage, confirmed to me that I was doing the right thing. When the visit was over, I shook Reggie’s hand and told him I’d see him soon, but I knew I would never see him again. When I walked out of Maidstone Prison after the visit, I felt nothing but relief, I just hoped shedding my associates in the Essex firm would be as easy.
In August 1995, a 19-year-old man from Essex came close to death at Club UK in south London after a mixture of cocaine, speed and Ecstasy brought on a fit. Tucker’s dealers had already caused the death of one young reveller in the club: 20-year-old Kevin Jones had died after taking Ecstasy supplied by the firm. This latest victim attracted a lot of publicity and there were demands for the club to be closed, so Tucker decided to withdraw all dealers from the premises for six to eight weeks until the dust had settled. He rang me and asked how Mark Murray and his dealers were performing in Raquels as he would need new faces when he started supplying drugs in Club UK again. I told him they were discreet and no problem. Murray ran exactly the kind of operation Tucker was looking for and so Tucker asked me to bring Murray over to his house for a meeting. Tucker told Murray that he wanted him to take over the sale of drugs in Club UK. Murray would have to buy all his drugs from Tucker and pay £1,200 rent each weekend, but in return, Tucker said, he could earn in excess of £12,000 a week.
Murray did not bother checking Tucker’s mathematics. He stuck out his hand without hesitation. The deal was struck. He was to start as soon as the recent bad publicity had subsided. Less than four weeks after Murray and his minions started dealing in Club UK, it was raided by the police.
Murray’s dealers threw all their pills and powders on the floor in order to avoid arrest. Murray lost 800 Ecstasy pills in total, pills he had not yet paid Tucker for. He had lost 468 pills a few weeks earlier when three of his dealers had been stopped in a car and searched by the police. He had also lost 1,500 pills when Roger Mellin had been arrested counting his drug stash in a Basildon hotel room. With the 800 pills his dealers had dropped in the Club UK raid, his crumbling drug business had lost a total of 2,768 Ecstasy pills with a street value of £41,520 in less than two months. Murray now owed Tucker about £20,000. Prison would have been a salvation for him; an early grave was more likely.
There are no financial advisers in the drugs world and there are certainly no overdraft facilities. Tucker wanted his money and he wanted it immediately. He came around my house with Rolfe and asked me where he could find Murray. We all got into my car and I took them around to Murray’s flat. His girlfriend answered the door. Rolfe barged his way into the front room and demanded to know where Murray was. The terrified girl said that she didn’t know. Rolfe asked if
he had taken his phone with him. The girl said he hadn’t, he had left it in the flat. Rolfe picked it up and began making calls to all the people whose numbers were stored in it. Tucker sat on the settee with me and was laughing.
‘Are you watching this programme?’ he asked Murray’s girlfriend.
When she replied, ‘No,’ Tucker ripped the plug out of the wall, wrapped it around the television and told Rolfe to go and load it and the stereo into the car, which he did. He then told Murray’s girlfriend she was coming with us. She was very frightened and said Mark would be home soon. He said, ‘Don’t worry about that, get in the car.’ We then drove around to my friend Mark Shinnick’s house. Shinnick had been a good friend of Murray’s, but of late he was having less and less to do with him. This was because his wife Carol was Roger Mellin’s sister and she had resented Murray ever since Roger had been locked up.
Everyone thought Murray had pulled a shit trick on Roger when he had asked him to look after his drug supplies for £50 per week. The real kick in the teeth had been when Murray refused to give Roger’s partner and her disabled child one penny whilst he was imprisoned. We sat drinking and talking and when Tucker had calmed down he seemed to forget why – if he’d ever had a reason – he had taken Murray’s girlfriend around to Shinnick’s house. I think he did it to ensure she didn’t forewarn Murray about Tucker looking for him. Whatever, tired of waiting, we all went home, leaving Murray’s girlfriend stranded at Shinnick’s house. That night Tucker and Rolfe returned to Murray’s flat and grabbed him when he answered the door. Tucker pulled out a huge bowie knife, held Murray by the neck and pressed the point into his throat. He said, ‘I want my money, Murray, and for every week you owe me, you pay £500 on top. If I don’t get it, you’re dead.’
Murray, terrified in the knowledge Tucker was more than likely to carry out his threat, and equally concerned his debt now carried interest, contacted everybody he knew asking for financial assistance. When people learned that Tucker was Murray’s creditor, they didn’t want to know.
In desperation, Murray turned to a man he had recently met on the Essex club circuit.
John Rollinson was a small-time drug dealer whom I had met once or twice when he had visited Raquels with Murray. Rollinson was a mature, scruffy, short and overweight individual who worked during the day as a hairdresser. By night he gave himself the rather grand title of ‘Gaffer’. He peddled drugs and sat in the quieter pubs telling anybody who would listen that he was a face in the Essex underworld.
It was John, or Gaffer, who came to Murray’s aid, although he didn’t have the capital to settle his debt in full. Gaffer scraped together £2,000 for Murray, a generous amount by most hairdressers’ standards.
Murray, who still feared Tucker was going to damage him, or worse, asked me to arrange a meeting with him at Raquels so he could pay him the cash and ask for the interest agreement to be dropped. At the meeting, held upstairs in the diner, Murray pleaded with Tucker to give him more time and to drop the interest charge as he had only been able to raise two grand. ‘I will have what I owe you soon,’ he said, ‘if you don’t let me carry on, I won’t be able to get the money to pay you.’ Tucker reluctantly agreed and dropped the interest clause, but said Murray would have to purchase all of his drug supply from him and the cost would be inflated so that his debt could be paid off sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately for Murray there was another but. Tucker had recently acquired a batch of Ecstasy pills that were known as ‘apples’ because they had an apple motif imprinted on them. Tucker said that they were extremely strong and people who had taken them had complained of headaches. ‘The dealers can’t get rid of them once everyone knows what they’re like,’ he said. ‘Sell them.’ He took the £2,000 which Gaffer had given to Murray and handed the pills to him.
Breathing a sigh of relief as Tucker strode off, Murray felt safe for the moment. He was back in business; soon those extra-strong pills would be in the hands of his dealers and being distributed in Raquels. Soon, he thought, his troubles would all be over.
The following Friday night I was standing at the bar in Raquels talking to Tucker and Craig Rolfe. The assistant manager was also with us. One of the barmaids telephoned the assistant manager and asked him to go and see her as she had a problem. Tucker and I were asked to go with him to resolve whatever the problem was. We went to the bar near the main dance-floor area and the barmaid told us she knew that a girl in the club was under age, had refused to serve her and now the girl was getting stroppy.
We called the girl over. She looked distressed. I asked her if she had any ID on her to prove her age.
She said, ‘I haven’t. My purse has been stolen.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, if you have no ID, then you will have to leave. The barmaid says she knows you and you are under age.’
The girl became very irate. She said, ‘I have had my purse stolen. I showed you my ID on the way in, why are you asking for it now?’
I said, ‘You may appear to be 18, but the barmaid says you are not. Therefore you must show your ID or leave.’
‘I’ve had my purse stolen,’ she repeated. ‘There is £300 in it. My dad’s a policeman. I’m going to get him and you’ll all be in trouble.’
‘Look, any story you tell me, I’ve already heard,’ I replied. ‘If you haven’t any ID, you will have to leave.’
The girl began shouting: ‘My dad’s a policeman, I’ve had my purse stolen.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave. If your dad is a policeman, he will understand that if you haven’t got ID we cannot let you remain here.’
Eventually the girl left. To be honest, I couldn’t have cared less if the girl was 17 or 18. I have always judged people on the way they behave. Most 17-year-old girls who came in the club were trying to act older than they were and so were well behaved. It was the 30-year-old men who behaved like 12-year-old boys I objected to. If the barmaid hadn’t said anything, I certainly wouldn’t have asked the girl to leave.
At closing time, I was putting the chains on the fire doors and waiting for the staff to leave before going home myself when I heard shouting. I thought somebody was being attacked and so I went to see what the problem was. At the front door I found the barmaid who had told me the girl was under age.
She said she had just fought with the same girl, who, she claimed, had waited outside the club to have it out with her. I told the barmaid she had better wait inside until the girl had gone. Half an hour later, when I was satisfied the incident was over, I went home and thought no more about it. It wasn’t until some time later that I discovered the truth about what had happened. Somebody who had objected to the way the girl had been treated told me that the barmaid had stolen the girl’s purse from the toilets. The girl knew that the barmaid had her purse and had demanded that she return it immediately. The barmaid had then telephoned the assistant manager to say that the girl was under age so that we would eject her and the accusations would cease. Leah Betts, the girl who had her purse stolen, was rightfully upset. Leah had waited outside the club after being ejected and after confronting the barmaid, she had been assaulted.
Because of this incident, Leah was barred from coming into Raquels. I didn’t know at the time that she had been a victim of this theft. I knew she was 17, and that is why she had to be excluded. If the row about the purse had not happened, she wouldn’t have been barred. If she had been allowed in the club, would the tragedy that struck later ever have happened? If this, if that. I have turned it over a million times in my mind.
On 31 October 1995, Pat Tate was released from prison and Tucker organised what he thought would be a huge party to welcome him home. It was to be held at a snooker hall in Dagenham. Tucker rang me and said he wanted me to go to the party with all the doormen; he and Tate had something they wanted to discuss with me.
I rang Tucker back that night and said I would be unable to go because I had to go to my mother’s in the Midlands. It was a lie. I was
trying to get out of the situation I was in, not get more involved, and I wasn’t the only one who felt like this.
Only 15 people attended Tate’s coming-out party – a stark indication of his declining popularity. Tate and Tucker called me a few days later and we met in the car park at Basildon Hospital. They said they had a bit of work coming up in the next few weeks and they wanted me to go along with them. A bit of work meant robbing someone, usually drug dealers. I told them I wasn’t interested. Tate was agitated, as though unable to understand the words ‘no’ or ‘will not’. ‘This is fucking big,’ he said. ‘All we have to do is turn up, rob a couple of fucking idiots and we will all earn a fortune for a half hour’s work.’
I told him I still wasn’t interested. Tate and Tucker became hostile, telling me I was a waste of time and I wouldn’t be offered anything in the future. I still felt something for these people. Before mashing their brains with drugs, they had been my friends. Now they were blind to any danger, oblivious to reality. I warned Tucker to be careful, but as usual he just laughed and turned my advice into ridicule.
Leah Betts, the 17-year-old girl I had banned from Raquels six weeks earlier, was planning her 18th birthday party. Leah was looking forward to becoming an adult, as she hadn’t enjoyed the happiest of childhoods. Her parents had separated after her father Paul began a relationship with his current partner, Janet, who was married to one of his friends. Paul was in the police and his friend was a fellow officer based at the same station. When Leah’s mother Dorothy learned of Paul’s extra-marital activities she divorced him for adultery and he left the family home when Leah was just three years old. Dorothy met a man named Chris and together they moved into a house in Basildon with Leah.
Wannabe in My Gang? Page 13
