Читать книгу Rise of the Footsoldier - In My Game, The Choice is a Jail or a Grave - Carlton Leach - Страница 13

Anna’s screams will haunt me ’til the day I die. Long agonised howls of despair as she learned the terrible truth about the savage murder of her lover, and my best pal, Tony Tucker. In those few minutes, on a bitterly cold December day in 1995, I became embroiled in one of the most notorious gangland killings in criminal history. Initially, I became the number-one suspect. I was under constant police surveillance for weeks. And I went on my own quest for revenge, intent on wiping out the bastards who’d taken Tony’s life.

The first I knew that something was wrong was a phone call at about 10.30 in the morning from a mate saying, ‘I think something’s happened to Tony and the boys.’

I said, ‘What do you mean? What sort of thing?’

‘Something bad,’ he said.

He’d heard something on the grapevine but wasn’t saying much in case it was wrong. I switched on the radio to catch the news. It was there on the 11.00am bulletin. ‘The bodies of three men have been found in a Range Rover on a farm at Rettendon in Essex…’

I shuddered. I knew Tony, Pat and Craig used a Range Rover. I even remembered the number – F424 NPE. I knew they’d been planning a bit of secret business in Essex. But surely, they couldn’t be dead. The Essex Boys were invincible, weren’t they?

I rang Andy who worked for Tony in one of his health shops. ‘Have you heard anything?’ I asked.

‘No, mate,’ he said.

I was getting really really bad vibes by now. ‘Can you go round and see Tony’s missus to see if she knows anything?’ I asked.

‘Sure, mate,’ he said.

He phoned half-an-hour later. He was with Anna. She hadn’t seen Tony since the previous night but that wasn’t unusual and she had no reason to worry.

‘Oh, Christ, mate, the police have just arrived,’ he told me on the mobile. ‘They’re at the door. They are talking to Anna now.’

Then I heard the awful screams in the background as Anna’s world collapsed around her. I slumped on to my bed sobbing like a baby, confused, distraught, fearful. This, I knew, was just the start of a dreadful nightmare. And the police quickly made it clear that they thought this could be the onset of a vicious gangland war with more bloodshed to be expected.

I’d been a close pal of Tony Tucker’s for five years so it was no surprise that Old Bill were on my doorstep within a matter of hours. We were both from the back streets of East London and vaguely knew each other as kids. We met up again at his shop in Ilford where he sold bodybuilding gear, sports equipment and health foods and had a security outfit in the back offices supplying doormen for nightclubs. He was doing really well. He was shrewd in business and highly successful with his turnover from providing club doormen, earning in excess of £5,000 a week.

There was instant mutual respect when we met up in the early Nineties. We were both fit, both bodybuilders and shared the same interests in life – birds, booze and parties. He was shrewd with people, too. He didn’t tolerate fools gladly and was quick to make judgements about people he had only just met. I thought he was often too harsh with people, but he wasn’t often wrong.

‘Be careful, Carl,’ he said, ‘most people are only using you. Don’t trust anyone.’

It was ironic that, on the night he was killed, he’d gone down a lonely country lane in the dead of night. He had clearly trusted someone and they had blown him to kingdom come. That’s what brought the cops to my doorstep. It didn’t take them long to find out that we were best mates and Tony had obviously been double-crossed by someone he’d believed to be a good pal.

‘We need to talk to you to eliminate you from our enquiries,’ which really means, ‘We think you might have done it.’

‘Where were you last night?’

I was in deep shock. I was worried. I was angry and I didn’t want to tell them anything. Quite frankly, my first thoughts were that the Old Bill themselves had killed the boys. The tragic death of policeman’s daughter Leah Betts from Ecstasy a few months earlier triggered rumours that this was a brutal revenge, shot down a dark lane to try to make it look like some sort of drugs war. I was horrified that they were now considering me as a suspect.

‘Why the fuck would I murder my best mate?’ I asked them.

I didn’t tell them how close me and Tony were. At that moment in time, I wasn’t saying anything to anybody because I didn’t trust anybody. If they’d dug around they’d have found out the obvious, that me and Tony did a bit of security work together, that we partied a lot together and were the best of mates. There had been a lot of mutual favours; Tony would give me moody invoices for security jobs to keep the tax man happy and I’d helped him out with a club he was minding in Wandsworth and needed to sort some bother with a little team of local villains. I took some of my boys up there and dealt with it. We stood beside Tony like Mafia hoodlums. The locals thought I’d taken over the door, but I told them, ‘No, I’m just a friend, but, if you take on Tony, you take on us as well.’

We were both doing well out of the muscle business. I’d got my own company – Renaquest – doing club doors, concerts, sports events, that sort of thing, and made enough to live well. Tony rented me an office next to his premises in Ilford and we sort of worked side by side for a few years. I was doing OK but what I made I spent. If I made £10,000, £20,000 or £30,000 I’d spunk it all away. But Tony had the style and the business brain. He knew how to turn over real money and make it work for him; he knew how to run a company for a year, then liquidate it, and swap the directors about so no one knew where the cash was going, least of all the tax man. He was really on the ball, fit, sharp, going places. A real professional. He was the one with the big house, the smart accountant, the flash cars and serious money in the bank.

We used to joke that he was like a Mafia Godfather character and I’d call him Tony Mancino for a laugh and he loved it.

I was in his office one day when Nigel Benn phoned and asked him to do the security for his next fight. I’d already met Nigel’s brother Danny when we were training in the same gym in Forest Gate when we were teenagers. Later on, when Nigel had just come out of the Army and was getting ready for his first pro fight, Danny introduced me to him at the Room at the Top in Ilford, so we had met briefly. We’d chatted a few times since, while I was doing the door at clubs like Astair’s and Echoes, so we were on chatting terms and now Nigel was really making the big time as a fighter with world-title ambitions. He’d said a couple of times that if I needed a bit of work to give him a ring. But I’d never been someone to jump on the bandwagon and hadn’t taken him up on it.

Tony didn’t know I knew Nigel and Nigel didn’t know I knew Tony, and Nigel didn’t know anything about our criminal activities. He’d bought his vitamins, iron tablets and other similar legal supplements off him when he was in training.

Tony was more than happy to do the security for the next fight. It was the needle-match return fight against Chris Eubank in 1993, the one the entire British public were waiting for. Tony said, ‘Oh, I’ve got my mate Carlton here with me,’ and Nigel said, ‘I know Carlton. Bring him along for the fight.’

That was the start of a three-way friendship that lasted through Nigel’s career up ’til Tony’s murder. Tony respected Nigel as a boxer but also liked him as a person. Once, Nigel was having some minor trouble with his wife Sharron, and Tony was having woman trouble as well and Nigel went to Tony’s house and they sat and had a good moan and a few tears. They really gelled together. Then there was me, totally different again, but we all really bonded and became great mates. They were good times.

We’d do the fight security together, I’d go with Nigel when he took the pre-fight blood tests or when he went to the toilet or changing rooms and we’d walk him into the ring. There was a young handicapped boy called Tim whom Nigel had befriended and whatever happened in a fight the first thing Nigel would do was see him and give him a kiss and he liked us to help Tim get backstage. He’s a great human being, Nigel. He loved that kid and the boy loved him.

On the night of the Gerald McClellan fight at the London Arena in 1995, Tim was there as usual, and Nigel’s second wife, Carolyne, but there was trouble brewing early. I needed to make sure everyone was going to be safe. We walked Nigel to his corner. When the fight started, I went to keep Carolyne and Tim company because you can’t see much from behind the corner. There was this big black security guard barring my way. Then Nigel hit the deck in round one and looked in trouble. Carolyne jumped up worried and leaned forward. Natural enough. This black geezer started pushing her back. I said, ‘Hey, don’t do that, it’s his missus.’ She sat down and held my hand. It was a vicious war going on in the ring. With every punch I could feel her squeezing me, taking the pain for Nigel. The black security guy stood right in front of Tim. Then Nigel turned the fight round and knocked McClellan out with some brilliant punches. We were all cheering and yelling and got up at the ringside cuddling Nigel. There were 13,000 people in there all going mad.

Right in the middle of it, the black bloke tells me I’ve got to get off the ringside. I said, ‘Don’t you put your hands on me…’ Tempers were flaring and Nigel could see what was happening. Even with all the pandemonium going on he came across and told the bloke, ‘Hey, lay off, he’s security.’ The bloke wouldn’t take no for answer and he was trying to push me off the ring. He said something, I can’t really remember what it was, so – Bang! I headbutted him and splattered his nose. Tony was also on the outside edge of the stage holding on to the ropes and I shouted, ‘Oh fuck, I’ve nutted him.’

The bloke tried to have another go and push me off. There were TV cameramen trying to film it for millions of Sky viewers to see, so we ducked out of their way because we didn’t want the bad publicity. Then the teamwork snapped into action. As the bloke reeled back, trying to keep a foothold, Tony hit him – Crack! – and he took off, right up in the air and where has he landed? Right on the judges’ table. This huge fucking lump had splattered right down in front of them. And they were all in their bow-ties looking up to see what’s happening.

We were busy now trying to do a damage-limitation job. I was holding a bloody great gash on my forehead. Frank Bruno had seen what was happening and he came over to see if he could help. It was fucking mayhem. I was bleeding, the black guy was bleeding from a busted nose and lying on the judges’ table, McClellan was still unconscious in the ring, so we needed to get Nigel out to safety.

Then, through the commotion, Nigel’s cuts man, Dennie Mancini, clocked what had happened and came across to give me first aid treatment and stop the bleeding. I mean, the claret was just gushing down my face. It was like I’d headbutted a brick wall. The atmosphere was evil and getting worse. Then, as Nigel was doing a TV interview, the black geezer was there again, staggering up in front of me, his face all busted up, and he’s standing there, arms folded, threatening me, challenging me. By now I was really pissed off. So I said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll let you do me from behind,’ and turned my back. The tension was unbelievable. I could hear someone in the crowd shouting, ‘Carl, Carl…’ There were a lot of geezers there who would have known me so I wasn’t too surprised. Then someone, or something, was tapping the back of my hands. I looked down and someone was pushing a knife my way. It had been passed down through the crowd, past the security boys, by somebody who obviously thought I was in serious trouble. I looked at the blade, pushed it away and said, ‘No, I don’t need that.’ It vanished back into the crowd. I thought, Thank fuck for that, I don’t want to be seen on prime-time TV cutting a bloke up. That’s a sure recipe for a five stretch.

Things were calming down a bit and McClellan was taken off to hospital and Nigel was walking from the ring. He was a proud man and wanted to do it on his own, head held high. Every bit of him was hurting. He whispered to me, ‘Carl, don’t let go of me.’ He was like jelly, his legs were buckling under him. We walked him out through the crowd and he’d gone. I thought he was dying.

Me and Tony carried him into the ambulance and he flinched in agony every time we touched him. My job was done and Nigel was on his way to the doctor’s. By now, everyone was looking for me and Tony over the fight we’d had with the black guy. We rushed upstairs to Nigel’s changing room and Dennie Mancini did a full cuts job on my injuries, cleaned me up, put some plasters on and slipped us out through a side door.

‘There’s fucking uproar going on over you two,’ he said, ‘get out before they find you.’

We didn’t need a second invitation. We were in our motor and away.

* * *

All those memories of Tony and our wild times came flooding back as I tried to come to terms with the fact that he was dead. My best mate, my soulmate, blasted to death in cold blood. Never given a chance. Shot down like a rabid dog. I couldn’t believe it. I cried for a week. I drank for a week. And I got angry for a week. Then I was ready to go looking for some answers.

I’d no idea Tony and the boys had been in such danger. Yes, we lived a risky life, took chances, pulled a few scams, but it was all a game to me. It was like being on the outside of a gangster movie looking in. Now I was hearing hardened coppers telling me I fitted the profile of the sort of bloke that could do this terrible thing. I was, they said, regarded as a hardened gangster with big-time crime connections. Was this really me?

What sort of world had I got myself into?

It was obvious that the police hadn’t got a clue who was behind the triple murder. Neither had I. Nor had any of the mates I spoke to. I was getting sick of people asking me. I felt they were pointing the finger – ‘You were his best mate, you must know.’ I wracked my brains day after day trying to remember people we’d met, places we’d been, deals we’d done, in the hope of a clue. I knew that, if I found the killers first, I would have no qualms about exacting my own retribution. But nothing came to me.

Somewhere in a distant memory, I recalled meeting a bloke known as Micky the Pilot. ‘Blinding geezer,’ I remember Tony saying, ‘but he’s paranoid as fuck and his house has got more security cameras than Fort Knox.’ It didn’t seem important. Not then, not yet.

After the Rettendon murders, I was doing a lot of thinking, wondering which people, which events, might be significant and I remembered how Tony had changed so much in the months before his death, how he had become a contradiction of everything he stood for. Health, fitness, reliability were out the window, and he was on the slippery slope of serious drug abuse.

Many incidents were swirling round in my head as I tried to fit the jigsaw together. I didn’t know what was important, what wasn’t. But I knew that somewhere there must be clues to this assassination of my pals. And I knew that I was in too deep for my own good. My name was hot in the gangland scene. I was into a lot of stuff inside the clubs and out. People were getting stabbed, people were getting killed on the doors. My name was being brought up too much for comfort.

Tony’s death was a wake-up call. I should have known where everything was leading but I was blind to the stupidity of it all. Now I’d got three mates in a mortuary. I had suspected in the few weeks before the murders that Tony and Pat were up to something. They’d become very secretive.

Two weeks before the shootings, it was Tony’s fortieth birthday and we’d all gone up to Hollywood’s nightclub in Romford for a piss-up. I had had a gut feeling that night, a bad feeling, that something wasn’t right. Pat seemed to be splitting up the friendship, the special bond between me and Tony. Right from the moment he came out, there was a spontaneous combustion between the two of them, a dangerous reaction you felt could explode at any minute. The trust between me and Tony was evaporating.

We’d made a pact one night that I would look after him and he would look after me and, if either of us went off for a bit of business on our own, we’d let the other know. If I got into a dodgy situation, I knew Tony would cover my arse and vice versa. If I disappeared, or he disappeared, we’d know where to start looking. But that was all changing. I asked him what was going on.

He said, ‘I’m on to something very, very big, but don’t worry, mate, I’ll look after you.’

I knew that was true. The previous Christmas I’d done a bit of business for Tony and taken him £2,800 in notes to his home. I’d hit a bit of a rough spot, because I was always silly with my spending, treated everyone, and he knew it. Tony put the £2,800 on the table and he said, ‘You’re skint, aren’t you?’

I said, ‘No, mate, I’m OK.’

But he knew. He said, ‘Here, take the twenty-eight hundred quid. You and the kids have a good Christmas on me.’

Now what sort of friend does that? I loved him for it. He knew I was struggling and I couldn’t hide it from him. There wasn’t anything we could hide from each other. Or so I thought.

It was only after the murders that the dangerous secrets he harboured finally emerged. He’d told Anna Whitehead, his girlfriend, that he was on to the ‘Big Job’, a drugs deal worth over a million. A light plane was supposed to be flying a consignment of puff over from Belgium and landing it on a field near Rettendon. Anna told me he kept saying, ‘I can’t wait for this to go off. I’m going to give Carlton 20 or 30 grand out of it.’ She said he seemed more excited about giving me 30 grand than making a nice few quid for himself. It all turned out to be a hoax. But it rang bells with me.

By then I’d met the mysterious Mick the Pilot, Micky Steele, at a party at a mate’s snooker hall in Dagenham. He was with his missus and didn’t have a lot to say to Tony or me. But later on, Tony said he’d got this big drugs deal on the boil and did I want to put some money in and get a share of the profits? I said I hadn’t got the dough and wasn’t interested anyway. It turned out that this time it was a genuine deal but the puff they bought turned out to be jank gear, a pile of rubbish. It went back to the dealers and they got their money back.

By now, almost on a daily basis, I could see Tony and Pat were on high-octane fuel, getting wild, doing the most ridiculous things. They were doing dangerous stuff like racing their Porsches up and down the A127 Southend arterial road at 140mph after a night spent mainlining on pure cocaine. They were also jacking up on ketamin, Nubane and shit like that. Tony wasn’t a womaniser but he was shagging other birds all the time, partying, drug-taking, and so on.

I remember one weekend I was trying to contact him, but couldn’t get hold of him. He was off the phone. It was important so I went to his house in Chafford Hundred, and knocked on the door. I thought something had happened to him. The door opened and Craig Rolfe was there with Tony. Craig was out of it.

Tony was sitting on the edge of a chair laughing, hallucinating on something. I said, ‘What the fuck’s going on, Tony?’

He muttered, ‘Oh nothing, mate.’

I could see by his eyes he was on something heavy. He was pulling down his shirt sleeve to hide something. I grabbed it and pulled it up again. I was staggered. He had about 30 recent injection marks along his arm. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Tony?’

I think he was too ashamed to speak. He was on the precipice and hadn’t a clue just how close disaster was.

The first puff deal had left a nasty taste in the mouth and Tony, Pat and Craig had got the raging hump with Micky Steele. To make matters worse, from what I heard, Micky was having a relationship with Pat’s missus, Sarah. Pat and Micky had met in prison and had known each other a lot longer than Tony or Craig. So it was well out of order for Micky to be bedding Pat’s wife, even though Pat was always out on the town, always with other women.

Pat was awesome. He was a big old boy with a big reputation and he’d looked after a few people in prison and was well respected. He knew Reggie Kray well from Whitemoor and had minded a gay boyfriend for him. Yes, Reg was as queer as Ron. Pat was a character and I liked him.

Micky got to hear that Pat knew about his and Sarah’s affair and was gunning for him. So, according to what I heard after the murders, Micky and his pals decided to do Pat and the others before they did them. Micky was very clever, very manipulative. He told Pat and Tony that there was a big drugs deal going down and they would wait for a planeload of gear to arrive. When it landed, they would rob the people, take the drugs, grab the money and pull off a right old coup.

The night they died, I was told, my three mates had gone down that country lane on a dummy run to get the lie of the land. It was all a scam. Their trust, or perhaps it was their greed, was rewarded with that terrible massacre that shook the Essex gangland scene to the core. I wasn’t invited in on this deal, phoney or otherwise, thank God, because they knew I hadn’t got cash to invest. But that night at the party when I’d had that bad, bad feeling, and suspected something heavy was about to go off, I’d pulled big Pat to one side and told him, ‘Look, I love Tony like a brother. If anything happens to him, I’ll hold you responsible. Look after him. Don’t let me down.’

I saw them on the Friday before the murders when we had a drink at Berwick Manor, near Upminster. Their secretive attitude did nothing to lessen my fears for Tony’s safety. They were whispering, furtive, and not their usual selves at all.

The night of the massacre, Tony, Pat and Craig, three grown men, three dangerous men, all professional criminals, went out without a weapon between them. Their mobile phones were all switched off. They were driven to snowy Workhouse Lane in Rettendon where Micky Steele’s partner Jack Whomes was already hiding with a gun. Steele was in the back seat and got out, supposedly to have a piss. Once he was out, Whomes passed him a pump-action shotgun. He leaned in and opened fire. Rolfe died first, his skull blown away, his hands still gripping the steering wheel, his foot still on the brake. In a split-second, Tony, sitting beside Rolfe, also got it in the head. Then Pat was blasted in the chest, head and belly by both gunmen as he begged for his life.

When anyone you know dies suddenly, or violently, it sends a shockwave of nausea through your body that makes you physically sick. As the details of the triple murder emerged, as yet with the killers unknown, I was wracked with a mixture of dread, panic and anger that led to me shaking with rage.

The next morning, the police were round my house in Brentwood saying that I could be a suspect. I’d got a team of boys round me from my own firm looking after me and I was crying like a baby. No way, I said, not Tony. I told the cops, ‘Let’s get one thing clear. If you bad-mouth my pal, if you slag him off, you can fuck off out of here right now.’

One copper said, ‘We only want to eliminate you from our enquiries, Carlton.’

I fumed, ‘Eliminate me? He was the best fucking mate I ever had.’

He said, ‘Well, right now you are the top of our suspects list.’