Bonded by Blood (16 page)

With the drugs safely stored, Nicholls booked the tickets to travel to Amsterdam and then telephoned Steele to say he was ready to leave. The pair travelled from Harwich to the Hook of Holland on a ferry and then caught a train to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they made their way to Stone’s Café and met the dealer. Nicholls discussed the money and how it was going to be paid back. He said he wanted it repaid in sterling. The dealer said it would take a bit of time although he could pay it in guilders straight away. Nicholls declined and said he would wait.

Nicholls and Steele went for a walk around Amsterdam before Nicholls returned to the bar alone later on that day, where he collected about £30–£35,000 in sterling. The dealer asked Nicholls where the drugs were that he was supposed to have returned. Nicholls assured him that once all of the money had been reimbursed, he would get the drugs back. ‘I’m hardly going to run off with a load of dud cannabis, am I?’ he told the dealer.

Nicholls was told that there was no more sterling available that day and he would have to return the following morning. When Nicholls left the café, he met Steele and took him to the Delta Hotel, where he had stayed previously. Nicholls booked one twin room in his name and paid in cash.

The next day, Nicholls returned to Stone’s Café but was told there was still no sterling available and he should return later. That evening, Nicholls was given a further £40–45,000, but a similar amount remained outstanding. When he returned to the café the following morning, Nicholls was told that the balance would be available within the hour. The dealer then unwittingly delivered a hammer blow to Nicholls. ‘I asked you yesterday when you are going to return the drugs.’

‘And I told you,’ Nicholls replied, ‘when I get the money. I’m hardly going to rip you off. It was dud cannabis anyway.’

The dealer glared at Nicholls. ‘Two thirds of it was shit, one third of it was good. We require you to return it.’

Nicholls realised that he had been double-crossed. The Dutch villains had intentionally supplied him with dud drugs. How else would they know what percentage of the batch was good or bad? Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had also ripped him off: they had kept and sold the good third of the haul. They had then insisted that all of the drugs were worthless. Nicholls now realised why the drugs had been broken into small pieces before being returned. He had no idea how many bars of cannabis were in the bag they had given back to him. Nicholls went back to the hotel, told Steele to get his things together, then returned to the café. Shortly afterwards, Nicholls returned with a sports bag into which he put all of the cash before telling Steele they were going home immediately.

Nicholls was becoming paranoid after realising the Dutch dealers had deliberately duped him. He told Steele he believed they were going to have him set up to be robbed. ‘He sold me dud drugs,’ he told Steele. ‘Why wouldn’t he have me attacked now I’ve got a big bag of fucking money?’

Steele tried to calm Nicholls down, but he wasn’t having any of it. When they reached the railway station, Nicholls leapt out into the road and hailed a taxi. ‘Take us to Ostend,’ he pleaded.

‘But that’s miles away,’ the driver replied.

‘I don’t care, just take us,’ said Nicholls. When the taxi pulled up outside the ferry terminal, the total fare was £400. Nicholls paid it without blinking. He had escaped from one dangerous situation, but he knew he wasn’t safe just yet.

He told himself all he had to do was hand over the money as agreed with Tate and that would be the end of the matter. There was no ‘end of the matter’ if you crossed the firm. Kevin Whitaker and Nipper Ellis had been given similar worthless assurances. They had been taught a hard lesson which Nicholls himself was about to learn.

When Nicholls and Steele arrived in Ostend, Tate was pacing up and down outside the railway station with Rolfe. They had wanted Tucker to travel with them too, but he had told them that he had made ‘prior arrangements’. The truth was, Tucker second-guessed that Tate was going to pull some sort of stroke and didn’t relish upsetting any Dutch gangsters on their home soil. When Tate saw Nicholls swaggering towards him, he turned and walked away. Rolfe sneered at Nicholls before he too turned and followed Tate into a nearby café. Nicholls looked nervously at Steele and asked him if everything was going to be OK.

‘Stay here,’ said Steele. ‘It’s obvious Tate is not in the mood for talking to you.’

Steele went into the café, while Nicholls hung around outside to try and see what was going on. Through the window, he could see Barry Dorman, the car dealer, sitting with Tate, Rolfe and Steele. There were also four women present: Donna Garwood, Lizzie Fletcher and her friend, and Dorman’s girlfriend. Dorman and his girlfriend were present because Dorman had unwittingly loaned Tate £10,000, thinking it was intended for a car deal. Tate, of course, had invested the money in the drug shipment. Fearing one person may be stopped by Customs with such a large amount of money, Tate had recruited Dorman, his girlfriend and the teenage girls to travel to Ostend, where the money would be divided into smaller amounts and carried through Customs by several people rather than just one.

When Steele came out of the café, he told Nicholls that everything was going to be OK. ‘You upset him. He wanted the money back. We have it and so he says this is the end of the matter. But be careful, you can’t trust him, his mind is messed up with all of the drugs he takes.’

Steele took the sports bag from Nicholls and began to walk up the road slowly. Tate came out of the café, caught him up and took the bag from him. Tate walked back into the café and as soon as he did so, Rolfe and the others got up and left. Nicholls said he needed a drink, so he and Steele went into a nearby bar.

Tate, Rolfe and their entourage booked into the nearby Burlington Hotel where the money was divided into smaller amounts. Barry Dorman took the money he was owed and returned to England immediately with his girlfriend. Tate, Rolfe and the three girls started to celebrate their windfall. During the night their smoke alarm went off and a hotel porter rushed to their room. When he arrived, Tate was drugged out of his mind. The room was wrecked and the smoke detector was hanging out of the ceiling. Rolfe promised the porter that the damage would be paid for, so he went away. The following morning, before leaving, Tate peeled £100 from a huge roll of banknotes and told the manageress they were sorry.

By the time Tate and Rolfe had crawled out of bed, Steele and Nicholls had returned to England. The swagger was back, the attitude had returned: Nicholls thought the matter was closed. All he had to do now was dispose of the poor quality cannabis, which was still in the boot of his car. He drove to a disused gravel pit in Church Lane, Bocking, which is known locally as the ARC pit, and threw the haul into the deep water. He had never intended to risk returning it to the Dutch.

The day Tate, Rolfe and the others returned, I was out of town. I had a court case in Birmingham I had to attend, various driving offences, nothing serious. I was banned for 12 months and fined £330. Driving back down from the court case, I heard nothing on the radio but reports about Leah’s condition and the police inquiry.

Four addresses were raided that morning in Basildon. One of them was Tate’s flat, where Donna Garwood was living. A quantity of amphetamine was found, not a lot, just a bit of personal, but the fact that they’d raided Tate’s flat indicated the police knew the firm was involved in the supply chain. Donna was a regular in the club; Tate was a member of the firm and had only been out of prison for two weeks. It seemed the net was closing in. My big concern was that all the main players were running a mile, leaving me to face the music. So much for loyalty. I didn’t think it would be too long before they rounded us all up for questioning.

I finally managed to speak to Tucker about Leah Betts collapsing and Raquels being named as the source for the Ecstasy that she had taken. Tucker made it quite clear that he wanted his name kept out of any police inquiry; in fact, he told me that he didn’t even wish to hear his name mentioned in the same sentence as Betts. He said he’d got the hump over Donna Garwood being arrested for the amphetamines that had been found at the flat, even though she had not been charged. Tucker said Garwood was claiming a doorman from Raquels had grassed her up. At that time, though, the police hadn’t talked to any of them. The pressure was getting to Tucker: if he was arrested over the Betts incident, he knew he would be ruined. He could see his empire crumbling and now he was panicking. A menace fuelled by paranoia was growing. Everyone was putting his or her back against the wall and somebody else’s name in the frame.

The Piano Bar had been closed since the weekend when Leah had collapsed, but reopened that Wednesday night. I went into work at about eight-thirty. There was an eerie atmosphere in there. It was as if everyone had their eyes on me, half-looking for a reaction, I think. I felt like a condemned man. What made it even stranger was the fact that in the bar there were four television screens. Every time there was a news item, images of Leah lying in bed with tubes coming out of her were coming up on these screens. We had this dark room full of kids Leah’s age – some on drugs, some not – loud music and pictures of Leah lying in hospital as a result of what went on in this very building. Strange, very strange, and unnerving really.

There were the usual fools, who were coming up asking for my opinions on Leah. A couple of reporters were in there trying to buy drugs. So obvious: long raincoats; short, tidy hair; middle-class accents; going up to people asking if they could ‘score’. I was just glad to get out of work that night.

The following day, Debra and I were due to move. I could see the firm was on the brink of self destructing and I was preparing to leave before I too was destroyed. We’d bought a house on the Essex coast in a village called Mayland. It was a beautiful house, surrounded by woodland and a stone’s throw from the sea. We both hoped it would be our sanctuary from the madness we had endured over the past decade. I had my doubts. A fresh start, a new beginning and no more trouble were all the things I’d hoped for on my train journey to Essex from prison almost a decade earlier. Debra had gone to the house to wait for the removal van and I took the children to school. I was driving back to Mayland when I heard on the car radio that Leah had died in the early hours of the morning. I felt saddened when I heard her family sobbing with grief and pleading for people to name the drug dealer responsible for supplying her.

When I arrived, Debra was standing at the front door. ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’ she asked. I told her I had. Debra was very upset by Leah’s death. She had no idea of the firm’s involvement and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

Around lunchtime, Tucker rang me. He was going mental. He was saying he wanted the ‘fucking mess’ sorted out and he wanted it sorted out ‘today’. There was too much police attention both on him and on the firm in general, he said. Now Leah had died, the shit was going to hit the fan. Tucker was stressed out because he feared the police attention from the Betts inquiry would unearth the dud cannabis deal with Nicholls and jeopardise the robbery he was planning at Rettendon.

After Tate and Rolfe had returned from Ostend with the syndicate’s £120,000, they were still feeling mugged off by Nicholls’s incompetence. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe discussed the matter and decided to seek revenge on Nicholls for embarrassing them and making them look like amateurs. They told the members of the syndicate that Nicholls had not only delivered dud cannabis in an attempt to con them but he had also failed to reimburse any of their money. Some members of the syndicate were hardened criminals who said they were going to kill Nicholls; others, not so violent, still wanted some sort of vicious penalty imposed. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe were quietly confident that Nicholls would soon be dead or at least in hiding, and they could keep the syndicate’s money as well as the £80,000 they had made selling the third of the haul that had been of good quality.

Now holding enough ready cash to convince any drug dealers they were serious players, the trio once more approached the Canning Town firm who were waiting for the replacement drop at Rettendon. They were told that a shipment was due any day now and they would be the first to know when it was available. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe knew that they weren’t dealing with fools, so they decided to invest in some firepower for the robbery.

One afternoon, Rolfe told his partner, Diane, that he was going to pick up a machine gun with a silencer and ammunition for the firm and asked her to accompany him. Rolfe explained that the gun was coming from a man known as ‘Mad’ Mick Bowman, who lived in south London. When Diane asked Rolfe how much such a gun was going to cost, Rolfe told her that he was borrowing it and would return it to Bowman when they had done the job. Rolfe said that he had to meet Bowman at Thurrock Services on the M25 to collect the gun. Diane travelled with Rolfe in the blue Range Rover that had been purchased from Dorman. When they arrived, they went into the restaurant for something to eat while they waited for Bowman. When he eventually arrived, Rolfe walked outside alone and returned shortly afterwards. He told Diane to leave her drink and join them outside.

When Diane walked out into the car park, she saw that Bowman was there in a white Volkswagen Corado and there was another male with him in an old green Vauxhall Cavalier. Bowman was behaving like he was paranoid. Diane assumed that he had taken cocaine and was acting that way because of the machine gun. Bowman was concerned he was being followed and was unhappy about driving off to a different location. Rolfe suggested that he would lead, the Cavalier would go in the middle and then Bowman could follow on at the rear. After scouring the car park for the 100th time, Bowman finally agreed. Rolfe drove the Range Rover to the A13 and along to the Five Bells roundabout. He drove around it once and stopped at Barry Dorman’s car lot. The Cavalier pulled up behind Rolfe and Bowman parked behind that. They all got out and Diane walked away in order to appear discreet. A blue/grey holdall was taken out of the boot of the Cavalier and was placed in the boot of the Range Rover. Rolfe called Diane back to the car and the pair then drove off to Tate’s bungalow on Gordon Road, Basildon. When they arrived there, Tate and Tucker were sitting in a Suzuki Vitara. Rolfe took the holdall from the boot, and Tucker and Tate followed him into the house.