Essex Boys, The New Generation (21 page)

Despite naming Percival, Alvin still hadn’t actually revealed anything of evidential value to the interviewing officers and so they pressed him further. DS Carter asked Alvin what, if any, incriminating evidence existed regarding Percival and the 60 kilos of cannabis. He also wanted to know how he knew for sure that Percival was involved with Strongholm. Alvin was unable to provide any link between Percival and the cannabis, but he claimed that Percival had discussed paying the corrupt detective with him.

‘I went to see Percival; he was doing community work at the time. He told me that he was going to leave the country. For some reason, he wanted to finish his community work off first. Percival said that he was going to put it to the corrupt officer that he would pay him substantial amounts of money if he lost the evidence. This offer was going to be made through Kim Webber, who was friends with the officer. As I was leaving, Webber was pulling in down the road to meet Percival. Webber said that the officer had advised him that the police had been checking where Percival had got his cars from, whether he had paid cash for them and stuff like that.

‘The police report detailing the results of these inquiries had ended up on the corrupt officer’s desk and when he read that Webber had been seen in Percival’s company, he had warned him to stay away from him.’

Alvin was asked if he was involved in any way with Percival. ‘He’s a friend,’ he replied. ‘I grew up down the same street as him.’

When asked if he was involved in any criminal activity with Percival, Alvin replied, ‘No, he is in a different league. He’s in with Kim Webber, Carlton Leach and the pikeys. He gets off on the fact that he thinks he’s for real.’

Asked if the 60 kilos of cannabis had anything to do with him, Alvin’s answer set the tone for many of the interviews that he was going to have with the police in the future: ‘No, nothing, 100 per cent. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if it was.’

This makes it crystal clear that there was no way he was going to give incriminating evidence relating to crimes he had been involved in personally.

Before ending the interview, the detectives reminded Alvin once more that the degree of assistance they could offer him depended entirely upon the quality of information he could give them. They told him to think about it and they would chat again at a later date. Alvin said that he would try to remember things, but he was having difficulty because ‘that shit [cocaine] has fucked my head up half the time’.

DS Carter concluded the intelligence interview by telling Alvin, ‘What might seem trivial to you might mean something important to us. It might be that we have a lot of intelligence about somebody, and something you say might make it all fall into place.

‘Whilst we wouldn’t use you in evidence – unless you actually come fully on board and say, “Right, I’m going to clear everything up that I have ever been involved in and I am going to name these people,” and then obviously you would go down the path of being what is commonly termed a supergrass – you would have to make statements and you would have to be prepared to stand up in court. Obviously, there are advantages to you that can be put in place. It’s been done many times.

‘I was involved with Darren Nicholls, who was the supergrass on the Rettendon murder job. He still went to prison for his involvement, but he became a protected witness. I’m not going to press you today because we now have something to work on and we need to check you are not spinning us a line to try to get something. There has to be a trust thing between us.’

Damon Alvin has never understood the word ‘trust’. His mind was already focused on how he was going to overcome the next hurdle between himself and the freedom he was prepared to do anything to secure. He knew he would have to start fabricating evidence to make the story he had given in mitigation plausible.

On Thursday, 3 April 2003, Alvin was remanded in custody to HMP Belmarsh in south-east London to await a hearing at Basildon Crown Court for sentencing. A few weeks later, he was taken from the prison to Gravesend police station in Kent, where he was formally arrested for the murder of Dean Boshell.

Alvin underwent two interviews, during which he refused to answer any questions other than his name, address and date of birth. In the break between the two ‘no comment’ interviews, the officers said to him, in the presence of his solicitor (who made notes on the subject), that they believed Ricky Percival was responsible for the murder of Dean Boshell. In a statement made later about this incident, Alvin recalled, ‘They called Percival the “shooter” as opposed to the murderer. They went on to say that if I was prepared to tell them what had happened the night Boshell died, protection would be offered to my family and me. My wife came to the police station and it was explained to her what assistance could be given if I was in a position to confirm what they suspected. I was then allowed time alone with my wife in a room divided by a screen.

‘My wife and I discussed our options. I told her I knew what had happened that night and that I was involved. She made it plain she did not want to be away from her family – she was pregnant at the time and was scared. She left it up to me, however, to make the final decision. I was allowed the night to think about it.

‘By the following morning I had decided to remain silent because I was concerned for my safety, the safety of my wife, her family and mine.’

I do not believe that people facing an allegation of murder should be assisted or offered deals by the police. If that person is later convicted of murder, a judge can only pass one sentence and that is life imprisonment. It is non-negotiable under any circumstances and so I fail to see just how the police intended to assist Alvin if he agreed to assist them. This offer by the police suggests to me that, despite the evidence pointing towards Alvin being guilty of involvement in Boshell’s murder, officers were doing their utmost to encourage Alvin to implicate Percival. It was wholly inappropriate for the police to even suggest that they ‘knew’ Percival was the shooter. How could they possibly know such a thing unless they had been present during the murder? No gun had been found, no witness had made a statement saying that Percival was present at the scene and no telephone records or forensic evidence had linked him to Boshell. This assumption by the police and their offer to help Alvin has led to what I believe is the most blatant miscarriage of justice of recent times.

Just before Alvin was returned to HMP Belmarsh, he was asked ‘off the record’ why Boshell had been murdered. Without any hesitation, Alvin had replied, ‘Because he was a liability.’

Alvin says that whilst at Gravesend he was desperate to tell the police the full story regarding Boshell’s murder, but he was too scared. Of whom he does not say – Percival was in Spain and so one can only assume that Alvin feared the drug-dealing loan sharks whom he says he owed £15,000.

All decent police officers dislike nothing more than the suggestion that one of their colleagues is corrupt. Such allegations impact not only on each and every officer who has dealings with the individual concerned but also upon the police service as a whole. The detectives who interviewed Alvin were extremely keen, therefore, to research and discover the facts behind the alleged antics of Detective Strongholm, but all their inquiries had been fruitless. The reason they had been unable to find Strongholm was simple: he did not exist.

Alvin was aware that Kim Webber dealt in drugs and he had heard that one of Webber’s colleagues at a football club he helped to run was a detective. Creating a story involving both men was quite easy for a man as devious as Alvin. However, in the heat of the moment, he had made three major errors. The intelligence that Alvin had given the police regarding the officer’s name being Strongholm and the name of the football club that he ran being Brentwood both proved to be false. The video evidence that Percival had allegedly been trying to purchase from Strongholm was proven to have never existed.

In an effort to get his story back on track, Alvin claims that he employed the services of a friend, Tony Staunton. According to Alvin, Staunton was a major player in the Essex underworld who also had connections with the Provisional IRA (PIRA). Alvin received regular prison visits from Staunton, who happened to be in regular contact with Kim Webber. There was nothing sinister in this: Webber and Staunton simply shared the same circle of friends. Alvin claims that it was during a prison visit that he had asked Staunton to help him. He said he wanted Staunton to find out who the policeman was that Percival had been talking to so that he could give the name to the intelligence officers.

Acting upon Alvin’s instructions, Staunton apparently found out that Webber was the vice-chairman of Basildon United Football Club and the chairman was Detective Sergeant John Moran. Staunton then visited DS Moran’s home, which happened to be just a few hundred yards from Alvin’s, and wrote down the make, model and registration number of his car, along with distinguishing features, such as the car’s headlight being cracked. Staunton passed this on to Alvin on his next prison visit and it was eventually presented to the police as information that Alvin knew personally.

I say ‘eventually’ because Alvin’s first attempt to divulge DS Moran’s name was a total debacle. During intelligence interviews at HMP Belmarsh, Alvin told the police that the corrupt officer was a man named John Weaver. When asked if he was sure, Alvin had replied, ‘No, no, it’s John Moran. I knew a guy called John Weaver and so I made a mistake; it just threw me. I was trying to remember what name Staunton had told me.’

Having polished his story, to a certain extent, Alvin told the police that it had been towards the end of 2002 or the beginning of 2003 that Percival had begun to associate with DS Moran. He said Percival hadn’t told him DS Moran’s name at first; he just claimed that he had ‘a tame old bill’ who was a high-ranking officer on the murder investigation team. Alvin said that Percival had been warned by Webber that he was being investigated for very serious matters. DS Moran had initially tipped Webber off because Webber had been seen in Percival’s company, and so he had subsequently also been flagged by the police as a man worth watching. DS Moran’s advice had been that Webber should distance himself from Percival or risk being arrested with him. According to Alvin, Percival had asked Webber if he could set up a meeting with DS Moran to discuss this and Webber had said that he would see what he could do to arrange it.

‘Initially,’ Alvin said, ‘DS Moran refused to meet Percival, but eventually a meeting did take place in a café.’

Alvin said that as soon as the meeting with DS Moran was over, Percival had arrived at his house. He had boasted that if Alvin was unsure about anybody he sold drugs to Percival now had a policeman in his pocket who would be willing to find out if they were registered informants. All Alvin had to provide was the person’s date of birth and name.

Despite stating that he had never seen DS Moran or known his name in his initial intelligence interviews, Alvin told detectives, ‘One afternoon Percival was around my house and asked me to give him a lift home. On the way, he said he needed to stop off at a place called Hadleigh. I pulled into a car park at the back of the Iceland store and he got out of the car. He walked up to a blue Carlton Omega and got in. I could see that a broad male was sitting in the driver’s seat.

‘I remember looking over, and I could just see his head and shoulders. He had grey hair. When Percival came back to my car, he told me that he had just met with DS Moran and paid him £4,000. He said he had been advised to leave the country. He also told me that surveillance was being moved from him to me, as I had become the prime suspect for Boshell’s murder. Apparently Percival was difficult to monitor because he was a single man who had no routine, and his friends and associates lived a similar lifestyle. Because I was married with a settled home life surveillance on me would be easier.

‘Percival was particularly good to me after that. He would sell me large quantities of cocaine at a very cheap rate. He also sold me designer clothing and a pair of Rockport boots very cheaply and gave me a £300 speed-trap detector as a present. I believe he only did all of this to retain my friendship. In January 2003, I gave up dealing in drugs because of all the attention on me.’

Alvin’s explanation as to why he says Essex police switched surveillance from Percival to himself is laughable. If the police are watching two suspects and one goes home to his wife and kids every evening after work and the other is dashing about meeting people and committing crime, why on earth would they put any resources into sitting outside the family man’s house? It might be easier to watch the family man, but the police wouldn’t solve many crimes. Regardless of the criticisms from some sections of the public, I believe the police are a little wiser than that.

Alvin was correct in describing DS Moran as having grey hair, but, as he lived just a few hundred yards from the detective’s home, he may have known this for some time. It’s more than probable that Alvin had been advised at some stage by one of his countless criminal associates that he had ‘old bill’ living on his doorstep. He might not have been told the officer’s name, but he would have been told roughly where he lived and what he looked like.

I have spoken to Tony Staunton, who Alvin claims assisted him, and he has asked me to remind Alvin that the year these fictitious events allegedly occurred was 2003 – the PIRA called a ceasefire in 1997 that has remained intact ever since, so how Staunton could have possibly been involved with them six years later remains a mystery to him. He assured me that he has had no involvement whatsoever with the PIRA ‘before, since or ever’.