I heard nothing else of Mark until May 2001 when he and several other people were arrested for importing drugs onto a Suffolk beach by boat. Mark was named as the leader of the drugs gang, which aimed to import high-grade herbal cannabis and amphetamine from Holland. The plan was foiled when customs and excise officers, backed by armed police, intercepted the gang. Customs officers had observed Mark over a period of months carrying out checks on remote beaches on the east coast. Maps and notes giving marks out of ten for good landing spots were later found.
The notes, written in Mark’s handwriting, gave Bawdsey Quay in Suffolk ten out of ten as the ideal site for landing drugs. Mark and another man had travelled from Dover to Zeebrugge and then on to the Netherlands, where they acquired 3.3 kilos of amphetamine and 40 kilos of ‘skunk’ cannabis with a street value of around £60,000. They loaded the drugs into a specially designed motorboat, which had arrived from Point Clear near Clacton. They then travelled back to the UK via the Channel Tunnel to await the return of the boat at Bawdsey Bay beach. A reception party of almost 100 customs officers, firearms officers from Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent police forces and a Suffolk police helicopter swooped as the boat landed at 8 a.m.
The trial was held at Woolwich Crown Court in south London. Alongside Mark in the dock stood Brian Richardson, a man I knew well from Dagenham; John McCann, another man I had met on the Essex scene; and Guy Clements, a doorman at a nightclub called The Venue in Ilford. I had heard of Clements – he had been involved with an Essex chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Another man, Matthew Howes, had also worked as a nightclub doorman. Two females had also been arrested: Denise Smith, the manager of The Venue, and Bonnie Simon, who was a lap dancer at Stringfellows nightclub and tabloid topless model. Both females were acquitted. Richardson was sentenced to three-and-a-half years, Clements and Howes to three and Mark Rothermel was given five.
I had written to the Crown Prosecution Service after the first two court hearings concerning the knife incident with Gaffer and asked them to drop the charges, as there was little or no evidence to disprove my version of events and only a little to support theirs, but they refused. Changing tack, I made a lot of the fact that the detective had mistakenly recorded my reply to the charge, a point which would prove extremely embarrassing for Essex Police should it be aired in open court. Eventually, after a lot of haggling and mind-numbing games, they dropped both the charges.
The case had attracted publicity locally when the management at the Festival Leisure Park announced that they had decided to ban me from the complex for life. This meant I couldn’t take my children to the cinema, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, bowling or any of the other normal activities children enjoy. To ensure I got the point, they even sent me an official certificate which carried my punishment of being cast out into the wilderness for life in fancy bold type. Choosing to ignore their petulance, I took my children into the drive-through at McDonald’s a few weeks later. Within minutes, four police cars arrived and we were asked to leave. When I pointed out I hadn’t been convicted of any wrongdoing, I was told it was not me the management were concerned about, it was other people having a go at me. ‘You are being banned for your own safety,’ the officer said with a wry smile. When I stopped laughing, I drove off.
I had been banned from working as a doorman for seven years, banned for life from setting foot in Bas Vegas and was being attacked by dope heads when I went for a drink with my girlfriend. For what? Apart from giving evidence in the Betts case, what had I done to warrant such treatment? I didn’t need to be told it was time to move on.
I had expanded considerably the haulage business I managed in Cambridgeshire and it was now taking up more and more of my time. My working day was growing longer and this was affecting my relationship with Emma. Her mother had recently been killed in a tragic accident and Emma was feeling isolated and lonely when I wasn’t there. The answer was staring me in the face, I had to leave Essex. Emma and I moved to a place called Stanground in Peterborough and soon settled in. It’s hard to describe how I felt – it was as if the troubles of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in years, I felt free.
As a parting shot, I had decided that I would make a complaint against the police officers who had not taken me for medical treatment and the officer who had written down ‘guilty’ on my charge sheet when, in actual fact, the tape-recording of my response to the charge clearly proved that I had made no reply whatsoever. I made these complaints against Essex Police on 9 June 1999. Two years and eight months after the incident with Gaffer, Essex Police finally managed to complete their investigation into my complaint. They had only spent six months investigating the murders of Tucker, Tate and Rolfe so why it took almost three years to investigate a simple complaint, which only involved myself and officers from the same force, I shall never know.
Out of eight separate complaints surrounding the incident, only one was found in my favour. This complaint had been that a detective had incorrectly recorded the reply I gave to him when charged. Fortunately, he could not dispute this as the written record and tape-recording of the interview had not been ‘lost’, as so many important items are these days in police stations.
In a letter to me, the Police Complaints Authority concluded:
The officer did record an incorrect reply to the caution following charge. It is the intention of the Force to have the officer seen by his Divisional Commander and advised with regard to the importance of accurately recording information. Advice is a form of police discipline, similar to an oral warning, and is neither given nor received lightly.
The officer had told his superiors that he had made an error because he was writing his reply from memory.
When a suspect makes no comment whatsoever and a police officer writes down the suspect has said he is guilty, I would suggest that the officer needs more than advice. With such a poor memory he certainly shouldn’t be gathering evidence.
In October 1999, I heard that my good friend Darren Pearman (from the Epping Forest Country Club and a member of the Canning Town firm) had been having a bit of trouble with Ronnie Fuller, one of the doormen I had worked with at the Ministry of Sound. Ronnie was working on the door one evening at a venue in north London. Darren was in the club with the rest of the Canning Town firm and they had got into a row with somebody. It was said that Darren hit a man in the face with a beer bottle so Ronnie had no choice but to ask Darren to leave. Once outside, the threats started. People were telling each other they ‘were dead’, saying, ‘We’ll be back’, and all the usual threats that are made outside nightclubs up and down the country every weekend.
Ronnie thought nothing of it as he’d heard these threats a thousand times. The only problem was, he hadn’t heard them from Darren Pearman and the Canning Town firm. If they tell you they’re coming back, be sure to expect them.
Not long afterwards, Darren, his brother and the rest of their firm were in the Epping Forest Country Club where I had worked and first met Darren and Ronnie. The Canning Town firm were in the Casino Bar enjoying themselves. Ronnie was working where I used to work – in the Atlantic Bar, where they played jungle music, and where most of the revellers went to dance. Later on in the evening, the Canning Town firm left the Casino Bar and went over to the bar where Ronnie was on the door.
Nobody was quite sure what happened next, but a scuffle turned into a massive brawl. During the chaos that ensued, Darren and his brother were both stabbed. Under no circumstances would members of the Canning Town firm call the police and calling an ambulance always results in alerting the police, so Darren was put into a taxi and rushed to hospital.
Sadly, Darren never made it. He died en route. He was 27 years old. Ronnie and two other men were arrested in connection with his murder but when the police sought witnesses, members of the Canning Town firm and others refused to assist. They told police they would sort out matters themselves. Eventually, because of lack of evidence, Ronnie and the other two men were released
. If I had been Ronnie, I would have left the country, but Ronnie underestimated the friends of Darren Pearman. The Canning Town firm are without doubt, the real deal. You fuck with them at your peril. Ronnie did take some precautions – he moved approximately 20 miles from Loughton in Essex to Grays, also in Essex. It was never going to be far enough.
Throughout his endless years in prison, death was always going to be Reg Kray’s biggest enemy. Release would have left Reg free to enjoy his notoriety and make the most of his celebrity status, but fame had rigged the odds in death’s favour. With every book he published and every year that passed, the chance of him ever gaining freedom lessened.
Reg knew deep down that so long as he promoted the name Kray he would never be free, but he could never sit in prison and not enjoy his celebrity status. It was his name that kept him going, but time was closing in on him.
Had Reg played the game and served his sentence without the publicity, he would have been released in the spring of 1998, having served his full 30-year recommended sentence. He would also have been free to seek out whatever medical advice he needed and the cancer he didn’t yet know he had would almost certainly have been discovered in its early stages. Instead, during those last two years, while the prison doctors were dismissing his complaints of agonising pain and chronic constipation, and prescribing milk of magnesia and yet more milk of magnesia, the cancer had been advancing in Reggie’s body, moving from his bladder to his bowel. The crisis came in the second week of August 2000 when he suddenly vomited black bile and blood while in his cell. An ambulance rushed him from Wayland Prison to a hospital in Norwich.
There the doctors took his medical condition more seriously and investigations confirmed a major intestinal blockage needing immediate surgery. During the four-hour operation, doctors discovered a tumour the size of a man’s fist in his bowel and, at one point, thought he was dying from a heart attack. In fact, because of the loss of blood, Reggie’s heart had faltered. When he came round from the operation, hope continued for some sort of recovery, but tests carried out soon made it clear that he was going to die. The cancer was aggressive and the blockage total. Reg couldn’t eat or even drink. His only nourishment was through an intravenous drip. A drain was inserted in his kidneys; morphine controlled the pain.
Pressure grew on the Home Secretary to grant Reggie compassionate release. His lawyers had sent the Home Secretary a letter and then, after waiting year in and year out for the Home Secretary to recommend his release, it was granted so quickly that Reg found it hard to believe that he was finally free. The Home Office announced: ‘As an act of mercy, under Section 31 of the Criminal Justice Act, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs has seen fit to grant Reg Kray his liberty.’
Now that Reg could hardly walk and was unable to feed himself, he was, for what it was worth, ‘free’. Although he had the freedom he had craved for over 30 years, there was nowhere he could go. Despite the numerous books, newspaper articles and a film that had all helped him remain behind bars, Reggie Kray, king of the London underworld, was broke. The manager of the Town House Hotel on the outskirts of Norwich offered Reg his honeymoon suite with riverside views and a four-poster bed for £37.50 a night. Reggie accepted. Bill Curbishley, friend of the Kray family and wealthy manager of The Who, agreed to pay the hotel bill. The glamorous and celebrity-packed life Reg had talked about for decades was going to end in a low-budget room that he couldn’t even afford.
Ten months had passed since the murder of Darren Pearman. Rather foolishly, people started to believe that his death was not to be avenged. What they didn’t appreciate was that it takes time to organise an assassination. The assassins need to know where the target lives, works and when it is safest to carry out the hit. Darren Pearman’s murder had far from been forgotten. His friends were as angry ten months on as they had been on the night he died.
On Bank Holiday Monday, 29 August, violence once more erupted at Epping Forest Country Club. About 3,000 people were thought to have been at the venue when, at 3 a.m., around 30 started fighting in the car park. The doormen ran out to try and break up the fight, but as they did so, a man took out a gun and shot two of them. One doorman was hit in the back, the other took a bullet in the stomach. Rumour and speculation were rife and everybody was saying that the shootings were connected to Darren’s murder. Some thought this was the comeback everyone had been expecting, but they were wrong. This was just another Essex boy who didn’t like doormen interfering in his business. Another Essex boy who would probably end up suffering an undignified death like his East End hero Reg Kray, who at the time was wasting away in a hotel.
At 7.45 a.m., less than five hours after the shootings at the Country Club, Ronnie Fuller left his home at Parkside, in Grays. Ronnie was on his way to work and was only yards from his gate when a man got off a motorcycle parked nearby and approached him. As he walked up to Ronnie he pulled out a 9mm pistol and shot Ronnie twice in the head and twice in the chest. The gunman turned and calmly walked away before riding off. Ronnie’s wife Larissa ran screaming from the bungalow where they lived with their three-year-old son. Larissa held her blood-soaked husband until an ambulance came to take him away. Shortly after 8 a.m., Ronnie was pronounced dead at Basildon General Hospital. He was 30 years of age. Despite a huge police investigation, his killer has never been apprehended.
I was upset when I heard that Darren and Ronnnie had been murdered. My friend Chris Lombard had been murdered a few years earlier, and my friend Larry Johnston was serving a life sentence for murder. Four young men cut down in their prime and for what? A stupid argument in a tacky disco or pub. A stupid argument that had resulted in someone losing face, stupid arguments that had resulted in the waste of four young men’s lives. Tell their mothers gangsters are fucking chic.
Reggie Kray, a man whom many young men aspire to be and who was in part responsible for the birth of gangster chic, had settled into his hotel and agreed to give a final interview for a television programme. There were things he wanted to say, he said, things he wanted to share before he finally died. Paramount for him was the fact that he believed the road he had taken had been a terrible and painful one. He felt that if by speaking directly he could deter others from taking the same road, then perhaps something good could eventually come from it all. During the interview, Reg was extremely honest and extremely open. He did not want anybody to endure what he had been through. Reg knew only too well what he had lost and why he had lost it.
The majority of his life had been taken away and he knew it had been a tragic waste. His reputation and a place in history were not a fair exchange for 32 years in prison. He knew that respect was not more important than love. He knew that existing in legend did not make up for existing in real life. His brother Ronnie would disagree, because, for Ron, being a gangster was everything. Ron, however, had an excuse: he was mentally ill, his judgement clouded by paranoia.
Reg had learned too late that being a gangster meant nothing. Sadly, Reggie’s words came too late for many of my dead friends, who saw the Krays as something of a criminal benchmark to match or surpass.
Throughout their lives, the Krays had been driven by publicity. As young boxers, the press had bestowed some essential meaning on their mundane lives. It was the press who had lifted them from the East End and onto the front pages of another world. Through boxing, street fights and teenage court appearances, it was the newspapers that evoked an unexpected and gratifying local respect.
That misguided respect gave them confidence and this confidence gradually inspired a very different kind of ambition. Success at any cost became imperative. Infamy and fame were two sides of the same coin. Like resentful partners, the Krays and the press fed off each other, each needing something only the other could provide.
Reg Kray died a free man on 1 October 2000, five weeks short of his sixty-seventh birthday. He died as he lived, in the midst of controversy. When it was announced who was to carry Reggie’s coffin, Freddie Foreman
and Tony Lambrianou insisted that they were going to boycott his funeral. A few days later, Reggie Kray’s funeral took place. Unlike the earlier Kray funerals, Reggie’s was ridiculed by the press. One headline read: ‘He wanted a statesman’s funeral but all he got was a freak-show full of has-beens.’ The press seemed determined to bury the Kray myth along with the last family member.
Supposed ‘celebrity’ and underworld friends stayed away in droves after a row with Reggie’s widow Roberta over the pallbearers. A pitiful collection of has-beens, wannabes and never-will-bes, looking more like the Blues Brothers than Reservoir Dogs, came to mourn their hero. Crowds of 50,000 were predicted, but the turn-out was a fraction of that, although, true to form, there were a few old grannies banging on about how the East End was safer when the Kray twins were running it. In a sleazy, undignified end, Reggie’s coffin was carried out of the undertakers by six bearers, including boxer Adam Myhill, Kray solicitor Mark Goldstein, Bradley Allardyce and East 17 singer Tony Mortimer. The Kray firm must have misunderstood when they were told ‘this lad is big in East 17’. They obviously thought this meant Tony Mortimer controlled Dalston, not that he mimed to shitty ballads from the ’50s. The coffin was placed in a Victorian-style hearse, drawn by six black, plumed horses and driven by a Dickensian undertaker in a long black coat and top hat. The sides of the carriage bore the floral messages ‘free at last’ and ‘respect’.
Behind came 16 black Volvo limousines, carrying friends and relatives. As expected, the cortège slowed in Vallence Road by the Krays’ old house, then it drove to nearby St Matthew’s Church. The mourners spilled from cars like so many clichés from ancient gangster films. A regiment of bull-necked security men with shaven heads, tiny earpieces on wires snaking into the collars of their black shirts, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame. Despite the overcast weather they wore dark glasses to try and look the part.
Wannabe in My Gang? Page 21
