Bonded by Blood (7 page)

‘What’s your problem, mate?’ said Gavin.

‘You, you Paki cunt,’ said the skinhead. ‘You’re going to get this.’ He took out an axe from the inside of his jacket, but before he could use it, I’d squirted him in the face with ammonia and Gavin had slashed him across the head with a blade. We threw him outside amid a flurry of kicks and punches, then slammed the door shut. The skinhead lay howling outside in the gutter. Eventually, he got up and skulked off. We received regular death threats and warnings on the grapevine, but the skinheads never came back.

Not all of the customers were violent villains. Many were just amusing freaks. One character I grew to like was an awesomely thin creature in his late teens. Around six foot and with lizard-like features, he’d gulp and stutter violently when he tried to talk. We named him Disco Dave. On Mondays, we used to hold an under-18s night, which attracted 300 potential and actual juvenile delinquents from the local estates. We wouldn’t sell them alcohol, but that didn’t make any difference: they’d just get pissed beforehand. Like their sociopathic parents, these kids would then indulge in brawls, beatings and drunken gropes.

One night, we got called to a disturbance on the dance floor. As I approached, I noticed a heap of around ten writhing, spitting kids. They appeared to be attacking someone who lay on the floor beneath them. We dragged the kids off one by one to find a bleeding man at the bottom. This was my first meeting with Disco Dave. Apparently, he’d taken off his shirt to expose his gruesomely underdeveloped body. A group of youths objected. Disco told them to fuck off and they’d steamed him.

I cleaned him up and suggested he go home and instead come to the adult nights, as it was now a few years since he’d been under 18. He said he didn’t have enough money to attend the adult nights or to get home. I agreed to give him a lift when the club closed. He waited for me patiently. Every time I tried talking to him he became engulfed in violent gulping and stuttering. In the end, I decided silence was the best policy. I told him to sit in the back of my car to prevent idle chat.

On the way to his house, I was stopped by the police. This wasn’t unusual: they were always on my case. When I saw the flashing blue light, I told Disco to let me do the talking because I wanted to get home at a reasonable hour. The policeman walked up to the driver’s door and asked me the usual questions. I said, ‘I’ve been to work and I’m going home, and – before you ask – he’s fuck-all to do with me. I’m just giving him a lift home.’

The officer then asked Disco for his details. Disco was so nervous that he gulped, stuttered, spat and blinked for so long that in the end the policeman said, ‘It’s all right, mate. Forget it. Off you go.’

I suppose I adopted Disco Dave as a sort of club mascot. I knew he had no money, so I used to let him in free. I could see this made him feel important. One day, I told him that in the future he should ignore the long queues, march straight to the front, walk past the door staff, cashier and those searching and, if
anybody
said
anything
, he had to say, ‘My name’s Disco Dave. I don’t pay. And I don’t give a fuck.’ Nothing more. Nothing less.

One evening, the company directors and other VIPs visited the club. They were all standing around the reception area when Disco walked in wearing trainers. One of the directors looked at Disco, then looked at me, and stood waiting for me to say something. I just shrugged. The director decided to intervene. He said to Disco, ‘I’m afraid you can’t come in wearing trainers, sir.’

Disco looked straight at him, gulped and, with the pride and arrogance of a bullfighter, stuttered out the words ‘My name’s Disco Dave. I don’t pay. And I don’t give a fuck.’ He then marched past the director and all the door staff and disappeared upstairs.

‘Who on earth is that?’ the director said.

‘Don’t ask,’ I replied. ‘He’s a fucking nightmare.’

When we went upstairs later, Disco was dancing on a raised podium with his shirt off, looking like a complete fool. Indirectly, he’d helped us rebuff the charge that we’d become too violent to customers. Indeed, the director thought we ought to impose our authority a bit more firmly. He hadn’t liked our completely hands-off approach to a stuttering, skeletal representative of the undead who’d pushed his way into the club without paying.

Since our partnership began, I had seen a lot more of Tony Tucker socially. He invited me and all the other doormen from Raquels to his birthday party at the Prince of Wales pub in South Ockendon. He also asked me to take Steve, Nathan and Thomkins along from Bristol, so that there would be a supply of drugs for him and his guests. Tucker was in a very good mood. The party was a real success. Doormen from everywhere were there. Most were out of their faces on cocaine, Special K or Ecstasy, or a cocktail of all three and more.

In the early hours of the morning, I was sitting on the floor of an upstairs room with Steve, Nathan and Debra. A man in his early 20s pushed open a door, which struck me. I looked at him, waiting for him to apologise, but he just smirked and asked me what the matter was.

‘You’ve just knocked the fucking door into me,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re a doorman, aren’t you?’ he replied.

It was a stupid thing to say because it was obviously intended to cause trouble. I got up and walked towards him. He walked out to the kitchen and I followed him. Friends of Tucker’s followed us, but before the fight could start, we were separated. It was only later I learned he was Craig Rolfe, Tucker’s closest friend. I discovered that Rolfe was possessive of his friendship. I told him that, out of respect for Tucker, he shouldn’t cause trouble at his birthday party. Rolfe seemed all right afterwards, but he still had an attitude. When I was explaining to Tucker a few days later what had gone on, he told me why Rolfe had this chip on his shoulder. On Christmas Eve 1968, a man was found dead in a van that was parked in a lay-by at the side of the A13 between Stanford le Hope and Vange in Basildon. The dead man had been found slumped in the seat of a grey Austin van. His name was Brian Rolfe, a market trader from Basildon. At the post-mortem later that day, the cause of death was determined as a fractured skull.

In less than 24 hours, the case had been solved. On Boxing Day, a 19-year-old motor fitter, John Kennedy from Basildon, was charged with the murder together with 23-year-old Lorraine Rolfe, the wife of the murdered man.

A few weeks earlier, the couple had run away together to start a new life in Birmingham, but Lorraine discovered she was expecting her husband’s child and opted to return to him rather than live with the jobless Kennedy. The affair continued, however, and Kennedy became increasingly frustrated at Lorraine’s refusal to end her marriage.

He decided he had had enough. He broke into the couple’s Linford Drive home, crept up to the main bedroom and as Brian lay asleep next to his wife, smashed his skull to pieces with three blows from a ten-pin bowling skittle that weighed nearly four pounds. Brian’s skull was crushed like an eggshell.

When Lorraine Rolfe was charged, it is reported she replied, ‘I never touched him, honest, on my baby’s life.’

Lorraine was at that time the mother of three children and was expecting a fourth – Craig. When the case came to trial at Maidstone in March 1969, the prosecution alleged that Lorraine and Kennedy murdered Brian Rolfe and tried to fake a roadside robbery. Both pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. Kennedy was found guilty of murder and jailed for life. He was also given a concurrent sentence of seven years for breaking and entering the Rolfe family home and stealing £597. During this episode, Lorraine gave birth to Craig in Holloway Prison. Not surprising, then, that he had a chip on his shoulder, or that he’d chosen a life of crime.

By the age of 16, Rolfe had grown into a classic juvenile delinquent: at odds with everything that society had to offer and accumulating several minor criminal convictions along the way. He worked for a short time as a tyre fitter and then as a plasterer, but the only trade in which he ever excelled himself was drugs. Whatever was on offer, Rolfe would sample or sell it.

Rolfe met Diane Evans after her family had moved to the Basildon area. The couple started seeing each other on a casual basis when Diane was 18. The relationship went from strength to strength and shortly after Diane’s 19th birthday the couple moved into Rolfe’s mother’s home. Keen to impress his attractive girlfriend, Rolfe stepped up his drug-dealing operation in nightclubs around Essex to fund a better lifestyle for them both. The relationship was turbulent, to say the least, but regardless of how much the couple fought and argued they remained hopelessly devoted to each other.

Rolfe was far from intelligent, but it didn’t take him long to realise that selling pills to nightclub revellers was never going to make him rich. If you wanted to make serious money, the quickest but most dangerous way was to order large amounts from suppliers and simply not pay them. Stupid or fearless, I’m not sure which, but Rolfe became very proficient at it.

Rolfe and Diane’s daughter, Georgie, was born in the autumn of 1990. A few weeks later, Rolfe made a drugs sale which would dictate the path the rest of his life was to follow. A man turned up at Rolfe’s home, having been told by friends that he had good quality cocaine for sale. As is the norm, a small test sample was given to the man to try. ‘This is fucking good gear,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it?’

Rolfe, high on his own supply, replied, ‘Fuck knows, I ripped off some idiot for it in Southend.’

The pair fell about laughing and spent the day snorting the rest of the cocaine together. The man was Tony Tucker – Rolfe had found his kindred spirit.

Rolfe and I never really did see eye to eye after our first meeting. Our views clashed on most things. However my association with Tucker was business, Rolfe’s was personal, so like and dislike didn’t really come into it. Rolfe had a fairly serious cocaine problem and hanging around with Tucker helped because there was a constant supply at a discount price, if not for free.

Merging with anyone in business is always potentially hazardous, but particularly so if you’re involved in our line of work. When I had taken over Raquels from Venables I had, in the eyes of those concerned, become top of that particular heap. However, when I merged with Tucker, who ran a much larger door firm, I was seen as the new boy in his organisation. Long-standing members of his firm resented me. They felt threatened by a newcomer who had a degree of clout. The fact that I was also introducing people like Steve, Nathan and Thomkins to the mix caused further resentment. Tucker’s doormen had their own people who they were earning from. I didn’t know they had dealers and thought I was being helpful.

Shortly after Tucker’s birthday party, Steve and Thomkins began working at Club UK in Wandsworth, where Tucker ran the security. (Their position had been discussed at Tucker’s birthday party.) For the exclusive right to sell drugs in there, they paid Tucker £1,000 per weekend. On average, their return for Friday and Saturday nights was £12,000.

On Christmas Eve 1993, the firm celebrated in style. My brother, Michael, and his wife, Carol, came to a party we were attending in the West End. It was held at one of the most exclusive clubs in the UK at the time. There were long queues of people outside, which we ignored as a matter of course. These events where the firm got together were extraordinary. Because of our connections with door teams, nobody paid to get in anywhere, or for drinks or drugs. In some places, huge bags of cocaine, Special K and Ecstasy were made available to the firm and their associates.

When you looked around the dark room, you were surrounded by 40 or more friends, all ‘faces’. The music was so loud it lifted you; you were all one – we had total control. Those in the firm created an atmosphere that demanded respect from other villains. Straight people hardly noticed. On the surface, everyone was friendly, but there was this feeling of power and evil. Tucker felt it, too. Often he would look across a club and smile knowingly. Looking back, we revelled in the atmosphere we created wherever we went. We were living like kings but behaving like animals.

It was a memorable Christmas for me. After the party, we went back to Steve and Nathan’s flat in Denmark Court in Surrey Quays, an exclusive development in the south London Docklands. Strewn across the floor, spilling out of a carrier bag, lay more than £20,000, the proceeds of that weekend’s drug dealing. They earned so much money, they didn’t know how to spend it or where to put it. Unfortunately for Steve and Nathan, it was to be their last lucrative Christmas: their drug-dealing operation was about to come to an abrupt halt.

In March 1994, 20-year-old Kevin Jones collapsed and died in Club UK after taking Ecstasy he had purchased there. It didn’t take long before the names of Steve, Nathan and Thomkins were given to police as possible suppliers of the drug that killed Kevin. Instead of raiding their homes and arresting them, the police mounted a surveillance operation in the hope that they could arrest and convict those at the top end of the drug chain. On 6 May 1994, the police pounced and found 1,500 Ecstasy pills in a car parked beneath Steve and Nathan’s flat. The car was not registered to either man. Police checks revealed it had, in fact, been reported stolen in Bristol some weeks earlier.

At the same time as the police swooped in London, Dave Thomkins was arrested at his home in Bath. Steve and Nathan were placed under arrest and refused bail, while Thomkins was interviewed and granted bail pending further inquiries. Nathan’s girlfriend, an Asian princess named Yasmin, and Steve’s girlfriend, a stunning Swede named Ulrika, were also arrested. They told me later that they had refused to answer police questions and so had been granted bail pending further inquiries.

As soon as Dave Thomkins was released, he rang and told me what had happened. I said I would organise a solicitor for Steven and Nathan and that we should meet up for their appearance at Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court. Yasmin and Ulrika also attended the hearing. Steve and Nathan were granted bail on the condition they give a £20,000 surety. They were told they would have to remain in custody until it was paid.