Fellstrom - Hoods : the gangs of Nottingham : a study in organised crime

First published in hardback in December 2008 by Milo Books

This paperback edition published in September 2010

Copyright 2008 Carl Fellstrom

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 1 903854 94 5
eISBN 978 1 908479 13 6

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For Mum, Dad and CMS, without whom this would not have been possible

Hood1

a covering for the head and neck with an opening for the face.

Hood2

a gangster or violent criminal.

Hood3

a neighbourhood.

(source: Oxford English Dictionary)

Robin Hood:

Legendary outlaw, hero of a series of English ballads, some of which date from at least as early as the fourteenth century. Robin Hood was a rebel, and many of the most striking episodes in the tales about him show him and his companions robbing and killing representatives of authority and giving the gains to the poor.

(source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

his has been a long journey, for myself and for all of the people touched by this depressing, brutal saga. Though we have still not reached the end of a dark passage for the city of Nottingham, there are chinks of light to look forward to. Perhaps we are nearing the final chapter of a story that the people of this city will never wish to visit again.

It has been all too easy to forget that things were not always this way. In the eyes of the victims who have trusted me enough to be interviewed for this book, the first thing that always struck me was the look of fear. Could they trust me? How much could they safely say? What might be the repercussions for those who speak out? Few of these people are angels; many have been born from the underbelly of our city and have helped to propagate criminality themselves. But the brutality of the Bestwood Cartel, as it became known, has shocked even those criminals to the core.

Take one example. For safetys sake we shall call him Peter. He, his wife and two young children ended up travelling around Britain for two years, hopping from place to place in fear of their lives. They left their home in Nottingham because associates of Colin Gunn, a violent gangster later to be jailed for conspiracy to murder and who is one of the main characters in this saga, had made it clear their lives would be worthless if they continued to stay in the city. Gunns so-called Bestwood Cartel had discovered they were on the point of giving information to police about a robbery carried out in the city centre. Peter was also a witness to a murder which, six years on, no one had been charged with. Peter and his family uprooted themselves from their house when the police said they could not safely live in Nottingham any more. Then their rented home, under the care of the authorities who had told them to leave, was ransacked by the villains once they had left.

I met Peter and his family at a caravan parked in a desolate field on farmland in the north of England in 2007. The couples lives, and those of their two young children, aged ten and eight, had been turned upside down. They were living a subsistence life, just existing, with no roots. The children had not been to school for two years. They had slipped through the protective net of police, council and social services support were now in a Kafkaesque nightmare failing to meet the criteria needed for a new home because they had intentionally made themselves homeless even though they had tried to get help from all three agencies. They were living an utterly miserable existence, unable to return to see relatives or friends for fear of receiving a bullet from the Bestwood Cartel as a greeting.

We just need to be safe and stable, said Peter. Our kids need to get some schooling. What can you do to help?

They had no money, and it would be another day before a social worker could visit. I felt embarrassed that Peter was so grateful for the 20 I gave him to buy some food. Standing before me was an intensely proud man who felt ashamed that he had been reduced to this, helpless to protect and look after his own family. What had they done to deserve this? Of course, it would be easier to evoke sympathy for more deserving characters. Peter has a long history of petty criminality, and though his family entered protective custody for a time, they then threw it back in the face of the police. It hadnt helped that just a few months after trying to begin a new life in the north-east, bills from Nottingham began arriving at their supposedly secret address.

The police had wanted a full statement from Peter about the unsolved murder, but after the episode in Newcastle he became distrustful not without reason of the polices ability to protect the family. They told him they could not provide new identities for all the family. Peter told them he would find his own way out of the mess. In truth there was no way out. Above all Peter had tried to do the right thing; a very brave thing, from which there was no immediate return. He wanted to tell the truth, but the reality was that the authorities were not geared up to deal with the likes of Peter and his family. The city council maintained he had made his family intentionally homeless and the police would not vouch for him with the council unless he gave them his signed statement. The family were caught between a rock and hard place and eventually they split up. With Peters reluctant consent, his wife Mary took the two children away to her own relatives, in tears. They felt it was the only option to keep the children safe; extract them from any connection with Peters world.

Corruption and complacency within agencies like the police and local authorities are cancers that significantly blight the fight against crime and at the heart of the problem there is another unpalatable truth: we are now running out of people like Peter who are willing to stand up and speak out today, because they simply dont trust our public institutions any more, let alone believe they can protect them. They have all seen what happens when you grass on someone. There is no place to hide. Many choose not to risk it; some have no other option because they have already been tainted as grasses by the criminals who assume they are talking to police because they have fled their homes. A former police officer who knew the Bestwood Cartel well told me of one instance where a man suspected of grassing them up was taken to a remote area, where his hand was nailed to a wooden bench. He was then saturated in petrol while Colin Gunn tormented him with the promise of a naked flame. When the police found the victim he was barely able to speak his own name, let alone name his attackers.

What surprised me more than anything else while researching