Wannabe in My Gang? (14 page)

Weaker is not an insulting term. Reg was simply more understanding than Ron, reasonable even. Reggie used to ring me on a regular basis, and I used to go and visit him a couple of times each month, first at Blundestone Prison in Suffolk, then at Maidstone Prison in Kent.

The lucrative drug market created by the new rave culture had infected every part of the criminal fraternity like a cancer. From dodgy second-hand car dealers laundering drug money to nightclub bouncers taking rent from dealers, everyone appeared to be making something out of the illicit trade. Even Reg, who I believed epitomised the old school, was taking drugs and looking at the money that could be made in deals. Reggie was using Ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis and was always asking what was going on in the clubs regarding drugs. When I expressed my surprise, Reg laughed and said he was a villain not a vicar. ‘If there’s money in it,’ he said, ‘then we want to be a part of it.’

Reg said that he and his brothers had always taken money from the drug trade and he couldn’t understand why people refused to believe it because in
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they admitted the fact. When describing the murder of Jack McVitie, Reg had written:

McVitie did a crazy thing. He cheated Ron out of some money he owed on some purple hearts. It was only a hundred quid but it upset Ron. He felt that if you let one villain cheat you and get away with it, then others would start fancying their chances and start taking liberties.

Murdering somebody because that person owed money for drugs was something I was destined to learn a lot about in the near future. Reg asked me if I could arrange a meeting for him with Tucker. He said he had a man in Hull whom he thought we could do business with. I said I would speak to him and try to arrange it. When I did mention it to Tucker he said he had no interest in Reggie Kray’s plans. He said Reggie was a has-been. Tate, he said, had met far more useful people during his time inside. The firm was moving into the importation market and Tucker said we wouldn’t be needing the likes of Reggie Kray. However, he did say he would meet him, out of interest, but as far as business was concerned, Kray was to be excluded.

On Reggie’s birthday, Tucker decided to send him in a parcel of Ecstasy and cocaine. I’d often taken Reggie bottles of Napoleon brandy on visits. It was quite easy getting things into Maidstone, but they were tightening up. One of the firm’s dealers was appointed to come with me to smuggle in the drugs. He was quite nervous about being searched and so before going into the prison he went into the toilets of a pub opposite the main gate to ensure the parcel was securely secreted. He put the bag of Ecstasy and cocaine in his underpants and then joined me at the bar for a drink.

Just before it was time to go into the prison, he said he had to go to the toilet again. He went in, took down his trousers, sat on the toilet and when he had finished he pulled up his trousers and flushed the chain. When he returned to the bar he suddenly turned pale and dashed back into the toilets. I thought he was ill but when he returned he told me he had dropped his trousers as he went to sit down and the package had fallen out of his pants and into the toilet. He was unaware this had happened and when he had completed his ablutions he had flushed Reggie’s birthday present away. The parcel was worth approximately £350. That was probably the most expensive visit that man will ever make to a toilet.

Tucker, Tate and Craig Rolfe turned up at Raquels one evening with a man they introduced as ‘Nipper’. His real name was Steve Ellis. Nipper, from Southend, was a very likeable man and in time I got to know him well. He was inoffensive and very funny. Everybody seemed to like him and it wasn’t long before he became established on the scene. Everywhere the firm went, Nipper was there.

One evening Tate, Tucker, Rolfe and Nipper went into a 7-Eleven store in Southend. Nipper threw a bread roll at Tate and Tate retaliated by throwing a cake at Nipper. They were all high-spirited and were soon engaged in a full-blown food fight. The shop assistant kept telling them to stop, but they just got more and more carried away. Eventually the assistant said he was going to call the police. Tate ripped the phone out of the wall and told the man, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that.’ Tate said he would pay for the damage but as they were talking, the police arrived. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe walked off and Nipper was arrested. It was no big deal. In fact everyone thought it was rather funny.

Shortly afterwards, Tucker’s teenage mistress, Donna Garwood, was trying to get in touch with him, but she couldn’t ring Tucker at home in case his wife answered the phone. Garwood rang Nipper to ask him if he could locate Tucker and speak to him on her behalf. True to form, Nipper made a joke of things and said rather sarcastically, ‘He’s probably at home giving his old woman one.’ Nipper hadn’t said it maliciously. You could never get a straight answer out of him as he was always joking. Garwood, though, later told Tucker what Nipper had said and made it sound as though Nipper had spoken with some venom. The next time I saw Tate and Tucker, they didn’t mention the phone call. However, they did say that Nipper had grassed them up to the police about the 7-Eleven incident and they were going to make him pay. Usually friends were allowed in the club for nothing, but Tucker instructed us that when Nipper turned up, we should charge him, but make sure he went in. Once he was inside the club, we were to ring Tucker, who would come down to get hold of Nipper. Fortunately, he never showed up. The following day Tucker and Rolfe turned up at Nipper’s house with one or two henchmen in tow.

Tucker, high on crack cocaine, stuck a loaded handgun into Nipper’s temple and said he was going to kill him. He was threatened with a machete and Tucker said he was going to hack off one of Nipper’s hands and one of his feet. Gangsters always like to think of themselves as having manners so Tucker gave Nipper a choice: ‘Which limbs do you want to lose, your left or right?’ Before he could start hacking lumps out of Nipper, Rolfe and others grabbed Tucker and managed to get him out of the room. Nipper’s house was looted before they plastered their excrement over everything they left behind. Nipper fled, understandably terrified.

The following Friday night, Tate and Rolfe came down to Raquels, saying they were looking for Nipper.

I said he wasn’t in the club, but they insisted on looking to check to see if any of his friends were. They had a walk around for about 15 minutes and then left. Tate rang back later that night, obviously out of his head, to ask me if Nipper had turned up; I said no. I could hear him banging as if he was punching a wall. He was shouting, saying that he was going to kill Nipper. He said if he couldn’t get hold of Nipper, he would ‘do his family’. He said Nipper’s sister, who was only 15 at the time, would be abducted, and he would cut her fingers off one by one, until Nipper was man enough to show his face. There wasn’t a lot I could say to Tate, so I just replied ‘OK’ and put the phone down.

On Friday, 18 November 1994, I had arranged to visit Reg with Tucker. When it was time to leave I rang his home number and mobile, but I couldn’t get an answer.

Reg had been promised a percentage of takings from a person who wanted to install fruit machines and video games in pubs and clubs. Reg thought Tucker might be able to help him out by putting machines in venues where he worked and that is why he had asked Tucker to visit him. I didn’t think Tucker would want to get involved with fruit machines, so taking him on the visit didn’t seem that important. I couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to visit Reggie alone. I decided to tell him that Tucker had been unable to make the visit because a family matter had arisen which he had to attend to.

On the way home from Maidstone Prison, I heard on the radio that a man had been found dead in a ditch in Basildon. I didn’t think anything of it as stranger things were happening in Basildon all the time. When I got home, I continued to try and contact Tucker, but he wasn’t answering his phone.

On Monday, 21 November, a detective based at Basildon police station telephoned me, saying he needed to see me urgently. Everything was fucking urgent with the police so I guessed it was something trivial, but I was wrong. When we met, the detective said he wanted to know if I had heard anything about Pat Tate being shot. I said I hadn’t. He also asked me if Craig Rolfe had been up to anything in the past few days. I said I didn’t know what he was on about. I wasn’t being very helpful and so he said I could go, but he would be back in touch, adding, ‘You’ll know what Rolfe has done before too long.’

I contacted Tucker and he was very keen to hear what the police had to say. He asked me to meet him in the car park at Pitsea Cemetery as soon as possible. Tucker had a thing about meeting out in the open in public places, whatever the weather. We usually met outside the casualty department at Basildon Hospital, but I soon realised why he had decided to change the location.

Tucker told me that he and Rolfe had gone to Nipper’s house because Nipper had grassed them up over the 7-Eleven incident. He said they had been trying to get him all week. He had also gone there on separate occasions with Tate. Nipper had confronted Tucker and Rolfe with a pump-action shotgun and they had been forced to flee. Tucker said that on Sunday Tate had been at home, getting ready to go out. He was in the bathroom when somebody threw a brick through the window. Tate peered outside and a rather irate Nipper had opened fire from close range with a revolver. Tate raised his right arm to shield his face. A bullet hit him in the wrist, travelled up his arm and smashed the bone as it exited through his elbow. Nipper fled and Tate was taken to hospital. Tucker said that when Tate got out, Nipper was going to die.

This incident was not our firm’s main problem. Kevin Whitaker, from Basildon, had been a friend of Craig Rolfe’s for some time. He had introduced Whitaker to Tucker and he had started using Whitaker as a courier for drug deals. Whitaker had been involved in a £60,000 cannabis deal with a firm from Romford which had gone wrong and Tucker had lost out.

As Whitaker had been the go-between, the debt was down to him and Tucker wanted to know how he was going to pay. Whitaker, who knew what was coming, tried to stay out of the way. A wise man would have left Essex because Tucker and Rolfe devoted their days to trying to get hold of Whitaker. Eventually Rolfe contacted him via his pager and assured him there was no problem, he just wanted to congratulate him on the birth of his new-born son. Surprised by Rolfe’s friendly manner, Whitaker agreed to meet Rolfe so that they could have a celebratory drink together to ‘wet the baby’s head’. Whitaker was picked up in Tate’s BMW and greeted by a smiling Tucker when he climbed into the back seat.

Once the car had picked up speed, the mood changed. Tucker demanded to know how Whitaker was going to repay him for the drugs lost in his care. Whitaker blamed the loss of the cannabis on the firm from Romford, so Tucker and Rolfe said they would take him to confront the people concerned. Tucker and Rolfe were getting increasingly annoyed. It was dawning on them that they were not going to get their money or drugs back. They pulled over and grabbed hold of Whitaker and kept saying to him, ‘If you like drugs that much, have some of ours.’ They were forcing him to take cocaine and Special K. Whitaker was becoming more and more terrified. Tucker was laughing. He said Whitaker was pleading with them to let him go. Tucker used a syringe and needle he had been using himself for steroids to inject Whitaker three times with massive amounts of mind-bending drugs. Whitaker, who was shaking with fear, eventually passed out.

They left Basildon and travelled along the A127 towards Romford. Tucker said that as they reached the Laindon/Dunton turn-off Whitaker was drifting in and out of consciousness. They drove up the slip road as there didn’t seem much point in taking him to Romford. They turned left to go towards Laindon and then pulled up before telling Whitaker to get out of the car. There was no response. They grabbed the motionless Whitaker and dragged him from the car, all the time ordering him to ‘get up’.

But Whitaker was never going to get up. Like Kray victim Jack McVitie, Kevin Whitaker had been lured out on a pretence by a friend and murdered by two power-crazed thugs because he owed them money for drugs. They got in the car and drove off but Rolfe suddenly pulled up and ran back towards his ‘friend’. ‘Fucking leave him,’ Tucker ordered.

‘You can’t leave him here,’ Rolfe replied, ‘everyone’s coming out of work and they’ll see him.’

Reluctantly, Tucker agreed and so they returned to where Whitaker’s body lay and put it in the car. They then drove back over the A127 to Dunton Road. Tucker said they looked at Whitaker and they knew he was dead. They dragged him out of the car and dumped his body in a ditch. I asked Tucker what he was going to do. He just laughed, and said, ‘Fuck all,’ but I knew he was concerned. He said the police would not treat Whitaker’s death as murder. They would just think that he had overdosed on drugs round somebody’s house and died. Nobody would want the body of a junkie in their home and so it would be reasonable to assume Whitaker would have been dumped anyway. He kept laughing, saying: ‘We certainly won’t be having any more trouble with Mr Whitaker.’

I told Tucker what the police had been asking me. He did seem rather concerned that they had been linked to Whitaker’s murder so quickly. However, he kept saying, and I think he was trying to convince himself, that they could never prove that he and Rolfe had murdered Whitaker. Tucker was later proved right – detectives could find no evidence to support any murder claims. Whitaker was written off as a junkie who had overdosed.

At the inquest, coroner Dr Malcolm Weir called the death ‘most inexplicable’. Friends told how Whitaker had made no secret of the fact that he was heading for a rendezvous with Rolfe on the night he died.

A message asking him to contact Rolfe was also logged on his radio pager. Rolfe was called as a witness at the inquest and asked to explain his rendezvous with Whitaker. He denied meeting him and said he only spoke to him on the phone to enquire about his baby son. Tucker also attended the inquest, but did not give evidence. An open verdict was recorded.