PROFESSIONAL KILLERS (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Moody and his cellmates, Provisional IRA bomb-maker Gerard Tuite and an armed robber called Stanley Thompson, worked away at the bricks that made up the cell wall; it was just like a World War Two prisoner-of-war film as they got rid of the bits of rubble in their chamber pots at slopping-out every morning. On 16 December 1980 they removed the bricks they had loosened and squeezed out on to the flat roof beyond the wall. A ladder had been left there by a gang of roofers and that was all they needed.

  Moody disappeared. His fingerprints were discovered in a raid on a flat in West London, but that was all they ever found of him.

  Strangely, given his associates, he had not been a regular in court. His only conviction was in 1967, when he and his brother Richard were convicted of the manslaughter of a young ship’s steward named William Day at a party in South London. They were each sentenced to six years in prison.

  It wasn’t that he had not already been involved in criminal activity, however. In March 1966 he was working with the Richardsons and was present on the night that a crook called Dickie Hart was killed in a fight at Mr Smith’s club. He drove the badly injured hood, Harry Rawlings, to Dulwich Hospital in Eddie Richardson’s Jaguar, dumping him there and disappearing. He was arrested and charged with affray as a result of that night, but the jury failed to agree on a verdict and he was acquitted. He was acquitted again when he was charged along with the Richardson brothers and Mad Frankie Fraser in the so-called ‘torture trial’ in 1967 in which Charlie was sentenced to 25 years and Eddie had ten years added to an existing five-year stretch. The Richardson gang was finished.

  There were various theories as to why someone wanted to take out a contract on Jimmy Moody. One suggested that he had been having a fling with a married woman and the husband had found out and paid someone to kill him. It is true that Moody had a reputation as a bit of a ladies’ man. They said that he required the services of a different woman every night.

  Frankie Fraser believes, however, that he was hit in revenge for his killing of a man called David Brindle in the Bell public house in Walworth in 1991. The Brindles had been engaged in a war with another family, the Dalys, and Moody was working behind the bar of a pub owned by the Dalys. He had reportedly beaten Brindle with a baseball bat and later shot him to prevent reprisals for the beating.

  What is certain is that during those 13 years in which he was a fugitive from the law, he worked as a hitman and a number of deaths have been allocated to him.

  Gwenda and Peter Jackson, who disappeared during a walking tour in Pembrokeshire in 1989, for instance, and 32-year-old Maxine Arnold and her boyfriend Terry Gooderham. Gooderham worked as a stocktaker for a number of pubs and clubs in London and Hertfordshire. He is believed, in the course of his work, to have ‘redirected’ not inconsiderable sums of money and, understandably, made enemies. Or, as another theory puts it, he was involved in the monies from the Brinks-Mat robbery at Heathrow in 1983 when robbers got away with £26 million of gold bullion. Or perhaps, as the press suggested, he had been trying to become a player in the lucrative Spanish ice cream market and had upset a few people. Or maybe it was a crime of passion? Gooderham had several women on the go, apart from the unfortunate Maxine; one of them could have organised the hit, having found out about his two- or three-timing.

  Whatever the reason, he and Maxine, who was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and certainly with the wrong person, were gunned down in their black Mercedes in Epping Forest in December 1989.

  Moody is also thought to have been involved in the killing of a 47-year-old dealer in antiques and cocaine. Peter Raisini was shot dead in the garden of his home in Palmers Green in London in March 1991 when a gunman approached him from behind and pumped four bullets into his back.

  Attractive 42-year-old Patricia Parsons was found dead in her Volkswagen Cabriolet in Epping Forest on 24 June 1990. Parsons owned a sauna in Camden Town and, on 23 June, was due to help in the restaurant owned by her Turkish boyfriend in Harlow, north of London. She failed to arrive at the restaurant, and next day the car containing her body was discovered in the forest. At first police thought she had been killed by a spear-gun, but it turned out to be a bolt from a crossbow. She had been made to drive, it was presumed, from her home to Epping where she was killed. Why was she killed? Perhaps because she possessed a little black book that contained the names of over 200 men who had made use of the services at her sauna parlour. The list was thought to contain at least one judge, as well as the names of barristers and celebrities. It was never found and her death brought a sudden end to a deal she had done with a British Sunday newspaper to name names.

  It is alleged that all of these hits, and more, were the work of Jimmy Moody.

  Gerard Tuite, Moody’s cellmate in Brixton, had shared many stories of British brutality and torture in Northern Ireland with Moody and, it is reported, Moody had come to sympathise with the aims of the terrorists. It is alleged by some sources that his particular skills were very much in demand in the Province and that he was recruited on a freelance basis by the Provisionals to put them to use. He became notorious for his hits which sent shudders through the government and the security services; victims were referred to as having been awarded an O.B.E. – One Behind the Ear. A three-man hit squad, made up of elite SAS men, is said to have been assembled, specifically to find Moody and eliminate him.

  By that time, though, he was gone, living in a flat in South London, with a completely new identity. But London was a different place to the one he had left a few years previously. Criminals were now far more interested in drugs – cocaine and ecstasy – than in the armed robberies of his day. Huge drug deals financed extravagant and lavish lifestyles; the stakes were higher, but then so were the profits.

  Moody had also, by this time, built a list of enemies as long as his arm – other criminals, the RUC, the Met, the British security services, they were all after him.

  It was only a matter of time before Jimmy Moody would be awarded his very own OBE.

  The Curse Of The Brinks Mat Millions

  They say that anyone wearing gold jewellery bought after 1983 is probably wearing the proceeds of the massive heist from the Brinks Mat warehouse at Heathrow on 26 November of that year.

  That night, at around 6.40 p.m., six armed South London men wearing balaclavas, broke into the warehouse, and beat up the security guards, hitting one over the head with a pistol and then pouring petrol over them, threatening to set them alight if they did not reveal the combinations to the locks. They had a man on the inside, security guard Anthony Black, brother-in-law of Brian Robinson whose idea the raid was. Black had provided them with a key to the main door and information about the security systems at the warehouse which, with his information, they were able to switch off.

  The robbers had been expecting to find £3 million in cash, a sizeable sum for any self-respecting thief. What they did find, however, staggered them. 6,800 gold bars – ten tonnes of the stuff – packed into 76 cardboard boxes. There were also two boxes of diamonds for good measure. The total value of their unexpected haul was £26 million, amounting to the biggest sum ever stolen in a robbery in Britain. The van they had arrived in was too small and they had to go and get a bigger one in which to haul the gold away. After the robbery, a £2 million reward was offered for information leading to their capture.

  Cash would have been easy to handle. They knew what to do with that and could dispose of it quickly without too much fuss. But this was gold, loads of it. They knew nothing about gold and how to turn it into cash. So they called in experts, men such as Kenneth Noye, who had the ideal contact in a man called John Palmer who owned a Bristol-based gold dealership called Scadlyn where the bullion could be melted down and recast so that it could be sold on. They were meticulous, even mixing less pure gold coins with the gold to reduce its purity and disguise its origins. However, before too long, large movements of cash through a Bristol bank came to the notice of the police. More than £10 million was d
eposited by Palmer, Noye and a man called Brian Perry, and £3 million was withdrawn at one point, requiring the Bank of England to supply the notes and the Treasury to be informed.

  Their suspicions raised, the police placed Noye under surveillance and in 1985 he discovered a police officer, John Fordham, in his garden and stabbed him to death. He was sensationally found not guilty of murder at the subsequent trial on the grounds of self-defence.

  In 1986, however, 11 gold bars were discovered at his house – the only gold ever retrieved from the robbery – and he was convicted of conspiracy to handle the proceeds of the robbery. He was fined £700,000 and sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he served eight.

  Others were also imprisoned. Micky McAvoy and Brian Robertson were picked up soon after the robbery and went to jail for 25 years each. McAvoy tried to do a deal in return for the return of some of the proceeds, but his share, given to friends to look after for him, was gone. McAvoy and Robertson had behaved particularly stupidly, moving from their council houses into huge mansions in Kent and paying for them with cash. McAvoy even bought two rottweilers, calling one Brink and the other, Mat. Anthony Black, the man on the inside, whose family connection to Robertson emerged after the raid and Robertson’s arrest, got six years.

  Although a few of the robbers received jail sentences, most of those who played some part in the robbery got away with it and some three tonnes of gold, valued at around £10 million, was never recovered despite two decades of relentless police investigation. Some, such as Kenneth Noye, lived the high life. He was living in a luxury villa in Spain when he was arrested for a road rage murder in England in 1996, being jailed for that in 1998.

  But what has become known as ‘the Curse of Brinks Mat’ has accounted for a number of the participants. There have been some nine murders, many of them by hitmen. There has been no honour among these thieves.

  Brian Perry ran a minicab company in the East End of London. He was the one who had suggested bringing in Kenneth Noye. But, three years after the robbery, the authorities came after him for money-laundering in connection with it and he was arrested and sentenced to nine years. It emerged during his trial that he had received a threatening letter, but he probably felt safe as he had employed ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser as his bodyguard. Mickey McAvoy believed that Perry had stolen his share of the robbery cash, but Perry seems to have managed to convince McAvoy while he was in jail that this was not true. He did his time and when he came out of prison, worked at building up his cab business and making a few property investments. He seemed to be in the clear and did not feel the need for protection of any kind.

  On 16 November 2001, now 63 years old, he was climbing out of his car which he had parked outside the offices of his Blue Car cab firm. He had a bag of shopping in his hand.

  Suddenly, a man, his face hidden by a mask, appeared out of nowhere and fired three rapid shots into the back of Brian Perry’s head. Perry was dead before his bag of shopping spilled onto the pavement.

  It is presumed that Perry had been unable to account for large sums of money he had been given to look after. There was still a lingering doubt that he had not been completely honest about McAvoy’s money, something which no doubt irritated McAvoy as he had needed the money for the deal he wanted to cut with the authorities for a lesser sentence. An appearance on television by Perry, talking about McAvoy, had not helped.

  Two men, Joseph Pitkin and Bilal Akhtar, were arrested and charged with the murder. It was alleged in their Old Bailey trial that Pitkin was the gunman while Akhtar was the ‘quartermaster’ supplying the gun, the ammunition and the getaway car. However, the pair were cleared after the judge declared that the evidence was purely circumstantial.

  Then there was Saul ‘Solly’ Nahome. Solly was a jeweller who had emigrated to Britain from Burma in 1961 and had run a business in London’s Hatton Garden district. But he had got into some bad company and had done work for the north London crime syndicate, the Adams Family, laundering their profits from drug-dealing. He was an ideal choice to help sell on the smelted-down gold.

  Again, however, the curse of the Brinks Mat millions struck. On 27 November 1998, as he walked from his car to his home in Finchley, he was shot four times by a gunman who then sped off on a motorcycle. Solly’s money-laundering days were at an end.

  And we should not forget George Francis. Francis was a former associate of the Krays who is linked to at least 20 killings. He was a career criminal who rose to prominence in 1979 when he became a member of a drug-smuggling gang. Huge quantities of cannabis were imported in containers from a shoe factory in Pakistan, hidden by legitimate goods. All went well for a while and the gang members began to enjoy the fruits of their work with an ostentatious show of their new-found wealth, even down to lighting cigars with £20 notes in south London pubs.

  But the authorities were on to them and when one of the gang, Lennie ‘Teddy bear’ Watkins, spotted the team that was carrying out a surveillance operation on them, he panicked, shooting dead one of the customs officers. Watkins got life, and the others were also arrested. Francis is said to have offered £100,000 to anyone who could nobble the jury. The north London Adams Family picked up the contract and, following a trial in which the jury had failed to reach a verdict, Francis was acquitted in the retrial. Like Perry, he had been charged with the safekeeping of some of the money and he also laundered hundreds of thousands of pounds for the gang. However, also like Perry, he had not been terribly careful with the money and the robbers believed that a lot of it had gone into his own pocket.

  Added to that, Francis had, over the years, rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. He once sold a London crook a Rolls-Royce which turned out, in reality, to be a hire car. So it was no surprise when, in 1985, a hitman tried to shoot him at the pub he owned in Kent. Francis was lucky, turning away at the vital moment and the bullet hitting him in the shoulder. Some said that he was shot for not paying a chunk of the £100,000 jury-nobbling money.

  In August 1990 Francis was found guilty of smuggling cocaine with a value of a million pounds aboard a private yacht. He was sentenced to 16 years. When he was released, he started a courier firm and moved into a large house in Bromley. He did not, at that time, seem to have been involved in any criminal activity.

  But Francis lived by the sword and was pretty sure he would also die by it. Speaking to the Daily Mirror a few weeks before he was actually killed, he told the reporter that his old man had been a villain and he hoped that his kids would grow up to be villains. He talked about how he had lived by violence and was pretty sure he would also die by it. How right he was.

  Early in the morning of 14 May 2003 he was shot four times in the face, back, arm and finger as he opened the gates of his haulage company, Signed, Sealed and Delivered. The gunmen hit him as he leaned back into the car to pick up a newspaper. He was found behind the wheel of his brand-new Rover 75 in Bermondsey in East London and the CCTV camera that normally covered the spot where the shooting took place had been moved so that it pointed away from the gates. Witnesses reported seeing four men driving away from the scene.

  The following September, three men – Harold Richardson, John O’Flynn and Terence Conaghan – were arrested after it was claimed that Richardson had taken out a contract on Francis to avoid repaying a £70,000 debt that he owed him. O’Flynn and Conaghan, men with more than 60 convictions each, had carried it out, O’Flynn getting £30,000 and Conaghan £9,000. However, the jury rejected this theory, preferring the notion that Francis was killed purely and simply because he had not returned the £5 million from the Brinks Mat robbery that he had been given to look after. O’Flynn and Conaghan were sentenced to life and Richardson was acquitted.

  The Brinks Mat curse was not finished yet. In March 1994 Colin Hickman, a 55-year-old solicitor specialising in civil litigation, answered a particularly persistent ringing of his doorbell. On opening the door, he was viciously attacked by a man wielding a knife. Hickman was stabbed 16 times in the he
ad and chest and died as his attacker ran off, covered in Hickman’s blood.

  At the time, no one considered any connection with the Brinks Mat robbery. However, when, a year later, one of his business associates, Tim Caines, was charged with the murder, it emerged that Hickman had been about to go to the police to tell them about a series of fraudulent deals.

  Caines admitted being at the house on the night that Hickman had been killed, but said that he had been forced to go there at knifepoint by a mystery man. Curiously, Hickman’s partner Vera Phillips-Griffiths, who had run downstairs on hearing the commotion, described the attacker as six feet tall, blonde and white, while Tim Caines is five feet ten, dark-haired and black. Nonetheless, Caines was given life. In 2003 it emerged that Hickman and Caines had been involved in the laundering of large sums of money. That money had come from the Brinks Mat heist.

  There have been nine murders so far, but police are not convinced we have seen the last of them. The curse of the Brinks Mat millions looks set to continue.

  Desmond Noonan And The Noonan Family

  ‘They [the police] reckon I am behind most of the murders in Manchester. I’ve got a bigger army than the police. We’ve got more guns than the police. Silly bastards. I am down for 25 murders. What a load of bollocks.’

  Desmond Noonan is sipping at a bottle of beer in a pub in Manchester. He is a huge lad, six feet tall and weighing 20 stones, with a large round face and short, dark hair. The bottle seems tiny in his large hands. He is talking to film-maker and investigative journalist Donal Macintyre who is making a programme called The Trials of Mr Lattlay Fottfoy. Asked by Macintyre if he was indeed responsible for 25 killings, Noonan smiles, covers his mouth and says, ‘No.’ His brother Dominic – the Lattlay Fottfoy of the programme’s title – then says it is actually 24 before Desmond Noonan holds up seven fingers and thumbs, indicating 27.