Essex Boy (11 page)

They had been waiting for a man who lived in the street, who was wanted for non-payment of fines. Lady Luck must have shone on them because into their sights I waltzed, a man who was wanted for three attempted murders and numerous firearm offences. Merry bloody Christmas!

Unaware that the police were now watching me, I prepared myself for the long drive back to my place of exile. I put a castle on, turned the music up loud in order to keep me awake and headed for the motorway. Glancing occasionally in my mirrors, I noticed that a white police Range Rover was following three or four cars behind in the traffic. At first, I thought the vehicle was just heading the same way as me but when I pulled up at a set of traffic lights and it started racing towards me on the wrong side of the road I knew that I was about to be arrested. In desperation rather than hope, I pulled my seat belt across my chest just in case I was going to be spoken to about not wearing it, rather than attempting to blow away three of my former friends.

As I looked up I saw that the Range Rover had screeched to a halt beside me and at least ten armed officers were running towards the front of my car. It had obviously been a well-executed plan to snare me as I had no idea where the officers on foot had come from.

‘Keep your hands up high where we can see them,’ one of the officers barked at me.

His colleagues began shouting things at me too. I am told that this is a deliberate ploy to confuse and disorientate a person so that they cannot focus on aiming a weapon or committing any other heinous crime that they may have had in mind. It worked. However hard I tried, my trembling fingers could not put the seat belt clasp into the buckle. The loud music was adding to the chaos in my head and so I leaned forward to turn it down. This simple movement incited the mob outside my car and they began screaming even louder and hammering on the windows.

I was wearing the bullet-proof vest I had purchased for any meetings that I may have had with Tate, Tucker and Rolfe and this gave me a degree of confidence.

‘If you shoot me, you bastards, I will sue you,’ I shouted back at the growling faces at my window.

With the benefit of hindsight I am not sure how a bullet-proof vest would have protected my head, the obvious target to those outside my car, but I clearly was not thinking straight at that time. When the car door was eventually opened, I was thrown to the floor and a large boot placed firmly in the small of my back to keep me in position. I was wearing a bum bag but the bag, which contained a revolver, ammunition, forged banknotes and a forged driving licence, was hanging near my groin rather than the recommended bum area. As the officer’s boot pushed me in place against the tarmac the revolver dug deep into my reproductive organs and my eyes began to water.

When the police were satisfied that I posed no immediate threat to them, I was hauled to my feet and two officers began searching me. One patted down the right side of me, the other my left. When they reached the waistband of my trousers, one of the officers found the belt of my bum bag. He pulled it around to my hip, saw the butt of the revolver sticking out of the bag and began shouting, ‘Gun, gun, gun.’

Returned to the tarmac at lightning speed, I was shouted and screamed at once more and forced to stare down the barrels of several guns. After a second meticulous search, I was taken to Grays police station, where, I have to say, I was treated really well. The officers were more than aware what type of people Tate, Tucker and Rolfe were, so they seemed to understand but not condone why I had felt the need to arm myself. When I was interviewed, I was surprised to learn that the police knew every sordid detail of the attacks on me and my home. Only Tucker, Rolfe and Cuthbert had been present at the initial attack but the officers knew so much it was as if they had been there too. Somebody who had been in my flat that day had been feeding them information and it certainly was not me. At the conclusion of the interview I was charged with several firearm offences and three attempted murders.

The following day, I appeared in court and because of death threats being made by Tucker and his cronies, members of the public were excluded from attending. My father was allowed to sit in the public gallery, as was my friend Malcolm Walsh, but only because my father had lied and said that Malcolm was my brother. I had warned Malcolm, in a telephone conversation the night before, that evidence relating to Tucker and possibly the others being informants might be revealed during the hearing and so he had come prepared with a dictaphone to record it.

As the prosecution outlined the case against me to the magistrates, they said that Tate had said that I had been the man who had shot him, and Tucker and Rolfe were in no doubt that it was me who had opened fire on them. All three were willing to assist the police and attend identification parades if necessary and all three said that they were confident that they would be able to pick me out. After hearing such damning evidence the magistrate had no hesitation in remanding me to HMP Chelmsford to await trial.

I must admit, I was rather apprehensive about arriving in the prison where I had first met Tate, because he also happened to be incarcerated there, on the hospital wing. As soon as I entered the reception area I was separated from the other prisoners and led into an office.

‘You will have to be placed under close protection because we know that Tate will try to kill you,’ a stern-faced officer told me.

‘I am not being put in a cell next to sex cases and grasses, so you can forget protection,’ I replied.

The vast majority of inmates requiring protection were inevitably such ‘people’ and the very thought of living side by side with them horrified me. I would much rather have faced Tate than have a sex offender as my neighbour.

The officer could not force me to accept protection and so he said that I could be housed on D Wing where most of the trusties were housed. When I arrived on D Wing, I met a man I knew named Billy Archer.

I was telling Billy about the problems that I had involving Tate, Tucker and Rolfe and my attempts to shoot them, when suddenly Billy started to laugh and said, ‘Fucking hell, Nipper. That was me you were planning to kill at the Esso garage in Lakeside. Tucker contacted me and said that you had tried to shoot him. He was aware that you knew what car he drove and that you would probably try to target him in it, so he asked me to garage it. In an effort to outwit you, Tucker then started using another motor. On the day you saw his Porsche parked near the Sandmartin pub roundabout I had picked it up from his house and was in a mate’s house sorting out somewhere to store it. Thank fuck you never did blast the windscreen and shoot the driver.’

I apologised to Billy as I would never have done the guy any harm. My only excuse was that I had not been thinking straight. Fortunately for the trio, I had not been shooting straight that week either.

Despite the countless intrusions into my life, I had remained a keen bodybuilder and so I applied for, and was given, a job as a gym orderly. After a game of baseball one day, I had been walking back across the sports field towards the wing with a baseball bat resting on my shoulder. I had hung a bag containing the ball, gloves and various other items we had been using to play on the end of the bat.

As we reached the door to the wing somebody had said, ‘I will see you later, Steve,’ and another voice behind me added, ‘Yes, and I will see you too, Steve.’

It sounded like a veiled threat to me, so I turned around and said to the person behind me, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m Mickey, Pat Tate’s mate,’ he replied. When I raised the baseball bat in readiness to launch Mickey’s head across the prison yard, the bag of accessories slid down the shaft of the bat and onto my wrist. Feeling somewhat foolish, I threw the bag onto the floor and swung the bat backwards in readiness to strike.

Billy Archer grabbed me and began shouting, ‘Whoa, whoa, Nipper. Leave it out. He’s all right.’

Mickey raised his open hands to indicate that there was no threat of violence and so I lowered the bat. Mickey introduced himself as ‘Mad Mickey’ Bowman from south London and said that he had only been joking about being a friend of Pat Tate.

‘Me and Billy Archer are in here because of a bit of business we were going to do with Tate and his mate Tucker. I don’t trust the geezers,’ Mickey said.

He told me that he and Billy had arranged to meet Tate and Tucker at the Happy Eater restaurant in Basildon, the fast-food outlet that Tate had robbed many years earlier. I have no idea what Billy and Mickey were planning to do that involved Tate and Tucker but Mickey did tell me that when they arrived for the meeting he instinctively smelt a rat.

‘Call it intuition, a sixth sense, whatever. It didn’t feel right and so I said to Billy, let’s get the fuck out of here.’ Billy thought that Mickey was just being paranoid and tried to reassure him that everything would be OK. Billy reversed his vehicle into a parking bay and the two men then waited for the arrival of Tucker and Tate.

When there was no sign of them after 30 minutes, Billy looked across at Mickey in the passenger seat and said, ‘You’re right, mate, something stinks. Let’s get out of here.’

As Billy started up the engine and prepared to drive out of the car park several armed police officers jumped out of the back of a nearby van and surrounded his car. I have no idea what – if anything – the police found in the vehicle, but Billy and Mickey found themselves on remand in HMP Chelmsford awaiting trial. They certainly didn’t need to employ the services of the security guard that had pursued me, aka Sherlock fucking Holmes, to work out that they had been set up and neither man was very happy about it.

While in HMP Chelmsford, Billy and Mickey were reliably informed by none other than Pat Tate that it had been Tucker who was responsible for their arrest. According to Tate, Tucker had heard that Billy and Mickey were intent on taking part of his business over and so decided to have them removed. I cannot say if Tate was simply blaming Tucker to deflect blame from himself. Alone and in prison it can be dangerous if the other inmates think you’re an informant. Billy and Mickey chose to believe Tate and good relations between the men were restored. When Tate found out that they had been talking to me, he offered them £10,000 to have me ‘done’ in my cell but, to their credit, they refused point-blank to get involved. ‘Watch your back. Tate is trying to get you murdered,’ Billy warned me. ‘If you do have any further problems with him or those other mugs, let me and Mickey know and we will back you. Tate’s an OK guy but he does need putting in his place occasionally.’

Apart from Tate’s effort to have a contract taken out on my life, nobody said anything offensive or threatening to me about my differences with the trio while I was in HMP Chelmsford. There was one minor incident. One morning the prison was locked down and specially trained dogs were brought in to search for a gun. This came about after the prison had received an anonymous tip-off about a firearm being smuggled in to shoot somebody. I was in no doubt that the story had been invented by my enemies to unnerve me but it hadn’t worked. I was angry, not afraid. The more I thought about what Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had done to me, and the fact that I now faced life imprisonment for defending myself against them, the more it made me want to kill them. I knew that if I did survive any attack from their associates while in prison, I still might have to face the prospect of a lifetime behind bars for trying to shoot them, so I began to think of a story that would minimise my sentence.

Being caught in possession of a loaded gun is a very serious offence, particularly when the authorities believe that it is your intention to endanger another person’s life with it. I decided, therefore, to say that I had no intention of shooting anybody but myself with the weapon. Nobody would disagree that if Tucker and his firm had caught me, I would have faced a slow and very painful death. I decided, therefore, to say that I had the gun in my possession so that I could shoot myself if I was captured rather than face being tortured.

To my surprise, the prosecution accepted my explanation and dropped the possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life charge. Around the same time, Tate, Tucker and Rolfe also withdrew their statements and told police that they were no longer prepared to attend court. They were not showing remorse or attempting to assist me in any way, as usual they were merely looking after themselves. Malcolm Walsh had made a copy of the tape of the court proceedings during which Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had been exposed as grasses. He had given a copy of the tape to one of Tucker’s firm and advised him to contact Tucker after he had listened to the contents.

‘Tell them to withdraw their statements, and only when they have done so will we give them the original tape. I am sure the matter can be forgotten, they wouldn’t want this tape finding its way onto the streets,’ Malcolm had said.

The very same day, Tate telephoned the police from prison and Rolfe drove Tucker to Grays police station and, after making brief statements withdrawing their evidence, the three attempted murder charges I faced were dropped. When I attended Chelmsford Crown Court for sentencing, I still thought that I would receive a five-year sentence for possessing a firearm and ammunition.

All prisoners who have been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment or more have to sign a document prior to being released stating that they will not have a firearm or ammunition in their possession for a period of five years after their release. If they are sentenced to three years’ imprisonment or more, then the ban is for life. The maximum sentence for breaking this law is five years; you then get an additional sentence for possessing the firearm. I prepared myself mentally for a very rough ride.