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Gangland Double Cross

Three villains were shot dead in a Range Rover in Essex

By David Cocksedge

WHEN THE news broke, it made banner headlines all over the UK . Three villains had been brutally executed. They had been blasted in the head at very close range with shotguns as they sat in a Range Rover, parked in a lonely lane near the village of Rettendon , Essex on the night of 6 December 1995.

The three men were Patrick Tate, Craig Rolfe & Anthony Tucker. They were well known to Essex Police as drug dealers & extremely violent people. A few days before his sudden death, Tate, a hulking man of 2.03m/6'8”, had wrecked a pizza palour in a trivial dispute.

His girlfriend had called the London Pizza Company in Basildon & asked the young manager, Roger Ryall, for a pizza with different toppings on each quarter. Ryall told her that would not be possible. Tate, high on cocaine, then seized the telephone. “You will deliver the pizza I want or I'll come over there & rip your f****** head off!” he shouted.

“I wasn't going to take that”, Ryall said later. “So I said to him, ‘Get rid of the bolshy attitude & I'll send you a pizza.'” Tate then demanded his name & drove straight over to the parlor. He stormed into the building, shouting, “Which one of you is Roger Ryall?” When Ryall put his hand up, Tate picked up the till & threw it at him.

Ryall quickly backed out of the office & pushed the panic button as Tate vaulted the counter & rushed towards him. “He punched me in the face & then smashed my head up & down on the glass plate on the draining board,” said Ryall. “The man was insane!”

Tate warned him not to call the police or he would return to beat up all his staff & torch the place. But it was too late – the panic button brought police officers to the scene & Tate was traced to his home. A badly concussed Ryall was determined to have the man who had assaulted him brought to justice, but as friends told him more about Pat Tate's reputation, his resolve softened. By the following morning, he had withdrawn his statement & decided not to press charges.

The incident quickly became legend across gangland Essex . For his followers, it was a testimony to Tate's increasing arrogance & influence that he could commit such a public crime & get away with it. Other local villains saw him as a man who had once been as asset to their illegal trade but was now a major liability. Days later, he was dead.

During the 80's Tate, Tucker & Rolfe had been in prison together in Suffolk . Together with Michael Steele, Jack Whomes & Darren Nicholls, they formed a close bond & started a ‘firm' together when they got out. Steele owned a specially adapted fast motor launch, & was expert at smuggling drugs from Holland , Belgium & France to remote areas of the Kent , Sussex & Essex coastlines. He was also a pilot, highly skilled at flying light aircraft loaded with illegal drugs in & out of small landing strips. Because of his past criminal record, HM Customs & Excise men were well aware of Mick Steele & his activities, but were rarely able to catch him. Nicholls was the firm's driver. He had been imprisoned for dealing in cannabis & handling counterfeit money & eventually proved to be a pivotal character in this drama. Fitness fanatic Jack Whomes was a ‘gofer', totally dedicated to working for Michael Steele.

Whilst Steele handled the smuggling operations, Tate, Rolfe & Tucker ran the distribution of cannabis, cocaine & ecstasy pills. Tucker managed a company that provided bodyguards for celebrities & ‘bouncers' for nightclubs all over Essex . The company enabled Tucker & Rolfe to control all drug-dealing concessions in the clubs. Outsiders who wanted to sell “puff' (cannabis) or ecstasy pills to youngsters in the clubs had to pay them a hefty fee in cash. Anyone who bucked the system was swiftly beaten up by Tate & a gang of suited bouncers. For bullies, there is always a violent solution to any problem.

Things went well for the firm for quite a while. The illegal funds poured in from successful operations, & Steele & Tucker grew rich from the profits. They bought large houses, drove around in expensive cars, enjoyed exotic holidays abroad & set their wives & molls up in designer clothes & jewellery.

Inevitably, Steele shipped in a consignment of unusable cannabis, & the closely-knit firm started to break into fractions. Steele blamed his supplier in Belgium , & Tucker & Tate blamed Steele. Tucker's users & dealers returned the “duff puff' & demanded their money back, & it was eventually up to Nicholls to dump the narcotics into a lake near his home in Braintree . Steele tried to recoup his losses from his contact abroad, & was only partially successful - the man went into hiding after repaying only some of the drug money.

Tate had been a gentle giant in his younger years, but was now breaking rule number 1 of drug dealers: ‘Never get high on your own supply'. He snorted increasingly large amounts of cocaine that made him feel invincible. Combined with his steroid pills (he worked out daily in a gym) to bulk up his already huge build, Patrick Tate turned into a fearsome coke-head, liable at any time to fly into irrational rages. The incident at the pizza parlor was a classic example of his dangerous psyche.

Then in November 1995, Leah Betts died after taking an ecstasy tablet during her 18 th birthday party at her home in Latchingdon, Essex. Her father Paul Betts was a former policeman & he & his wife Janet insured that their daughter's painful death got maximum publicity in the British tabloid press. Essex Police clamped down, & it became increasingly difficult to sell drugs in any of the clubs to which Tucker's organization supplied security. Steele was now very worried about the heat that this teenage death was bringing down on their organization. The pill that Leah swallowed came from a batch of much stronger tablets that Tucker had purchased from a new supplier.

Steele told Tucker that he had just closed a big deal. For an outlay of £30,000, he was going to fly 30 kgs of top grade Colombian cocaine from Holland to a remote field in Essex . After off-loading the cargo, his co-pilot would fly the plane back to Holland . The street value of the drug was over one million pounds. This was the deal of the century for the Steele-Tucker firm. Except that now they did not trust each other.

Tate was excited about the deal, but wanted to cut Steele & his men out of the profits. He, Rolfe & Tucker planned to hijack the aircraft, & make off with all 30 kilos of the white powder themselves. They would be “tooled up” (armed) & if Steele & his co-pilot resisted, they would be dealt with. In November 1994, Tate & Rolfe had murdered a small-time dealer named Kevin Whittaker who had ripped off the firm, & they were quite prepared to kill again should it prove necessary.

Steele was no fool & was aware of their intentions. In fact, there was no ‘big deal', no shipment of Colombian cocaine. What he was planning was a classic double cross. He asked Tate, Rolf & Tucker to meet him at the Halfway House pub near Rettendon on 6 December, & they would then drive in Rolfe's Range Rover to the field where he planned to land the aircraft a few days later. He would instruct them on where to light fires to aid his landing on the appointed night. After fully discussing the plan, they would then drive him back to the Halfway House.

At 6.30pm on 6 December, Darren Nicholls drove Steele & Jack Whomes close to the rendezvous point. Steele left them & walked to Craig Rolfe's vehicle parked in the pub car park. Nicholls then drove Whomes back down the A130 & dropped him by Workhouse Lane , which led to the field.

Whomes told Nicholls to drive half a mile further on, & wait until he got a call on his cell phone to come back & pick Steele & himself up. Nicholls noticed that Whomes carried a large holdall as he stepped out of the car. Meantime, Steele, now sitting in the back of the Range Rover alongside Pat Tate, stealthily pulled on a pair of surgical gloves as Rolfe drove them to the field from the Halfway House.

As they turned into Workhouse Lane , Tate got a call on his mobile from his girlfriend. Steele tensed. It only needed Tate to say, “I'm here with Mick & the boys” for the hit to be abandoned. But he did not. Tate talked to Sarah Saunders briefly & then switched off. It was the last conversation he would ever have with her.

When they reached the end of the lane, they found the field barred by a gate. Steele got out. “I'll get it”, he said, “you boys stay in the warm.” He walked a few yards from the vehicle & was met by Whomes, who handed him a sawn-off double-barreled shotgun.

Craig Rolfe was the first to die. As soon as the rear passenger door had opened & Steele was clear, Jack Whomes leaned in with a pump-action shotgun. He pressed the barrel against the back of the driver's headrest & pulled the trigger. The pellets ripped through the fabric & straight through Rolfe's skull, leaving him dead where he sat. Both his hands were on the steering wheel, his foot on the brake.

Tony Tucker was next. With the blast ringing in his ears from just a split second before, he had no time to react. Whomes moved the gun, pumped in another round & shot him in the back of the head. Steele then appeared by the side of Whomes & trained his weapon on Tate, who was the only one of the three who would have known that he was about to die. He screamed & pushed himself back into the corner of the car in a futile escape. Steele fired both barrels into his stomach. Then Whomes shot him, finishing him off with a shot to the face & another to the stomach.

There was no doubt that the three were dead but this was more than an execution. Whomes pumped his weapon again & opened the front door of the car. He put the barrel up against what was left of Tucker's head & fired again. Then Whomes went around to Rolfe & did the same. Meantime Steele reloaded both barrels & shot Tate's corpse in the face. This time his gun fell apart as the stock came away from the barrels & trigger guard. Both men burst out laughing as Steele scrambled around on the floor of the vehicle to retrieve the parts of his broken gun.

Just after 7pm, Whomes called Nicholls on his cell phone & told him to collect them. Nicholls drove back to Workhouse Lane & Whomes stepped into the back of his car. “Where's Mick?” asked Nicholls.

“He won't be long,” said Whomes. “He's dropped something. Doesn't want to leave it there.”

Nicholls later related, “Jack made this really weird sound, like a series of quiet little snorts. I could just make out his silhouette in the rear-view mirror & his big shoulders were bobbing up & down. It took me a while to work out what was going on. Jack was giggling.”

“I was still looking at Jack in the mirror when Mick Steele appeared & opened the front passenger door. The interior light came on, & that's when I saw his hands. He was wearing surgical gloves & they had been splashed with streaks of blood. I then realized what they had done. I felt like someone had sucked all the air out of me, & I could not speak. Mick told me to get going & I drove to Basildon on autopilot.”

As he drove, Nicholls listened with mounting horror as Whomes & Steele, still on an adrenlain high, discussed the triple murder. They told him that Pat Tate, the self-styled ‘hard man', had “squealed like a baby” just before he was shot.

The case was handled by Detective Superintendent Ivan Dibley of the Essex Police, who arrived at the grisly murder scene just before 9am on 7 December. Dibley regarded any gangland slaying on his patch as a personal challenge. And he had a good career record, having solved 23 of 25 homicides during 31 years in the force. This was a tough one, however. Fingerprints in the vehicle belonged only to the three victims, & an overnight frost on the ground had distorted footprints. There were few forensic clues, beyond seven expended cartridge cases on the floor of the Range Rover.

When the victims were identified, National & local press were all over the story. There was the link to Leah Betts, the attack on the pizza manager by Tate & even a celebrity angle, thanks to Tucker's friendship with Nigel Benn.

Mick Steele became a suspect, but there was no evidence to implicate him. Dibley even worked out how the hit was carried out – by two men, one of whom had been a passenger in the Range Rover. A third man had driven the two killers, & he was their best bet for a confession. Also cellular telephone network records indicated that the mobile phones belonging to the victims plus Steele, Whomes & Nicholls had all logged onto the satellite relay beacon nearest Workhouse Lane from 6.45 to 7.10pm on 6 December. This put them all close to the crime scene when the triple murder was committed. But with no firm evidence, the police investigation was stalled.

Nicholls became very scared when Whomes threatened him in January. He said, “What happened to Pat could easily happen to you, my old son. You can be replaced.” When Nicholls was arrested in May 1996 with 10 kilos of cannabis in his car, the police had a breakthrough. After being being charged as an accessory to the murders, he was persuaded to become a ‘supergrass' in exchange for going into the Witness Protection Program. He & his wife Sandra were placed in a safe house in February 1997 with the trial due to commence at The Old Bailey in London on 1 September.

Nicholls became ‘Bloggs 19', a star witness for the Crown in a major criminal case. During a trial that lasted five months the defense lawyers for Steele & Whomes challenged the grim story told by Nicholls in the witness box. But it was nothing less than the truth, & eventually, it was believed. Carefully prepared alibis provided by Steele and Whomes began to unravel under intense cross-examination. The star witness for the defense, William (Billy) George Jasper confessed under oath to driving two armed London gangsters to & from Workhouse Lane on 6 December 1995 for a fee of 5,000 pounds sterling. But the Crown proved that he was a ‘Walter Mitty': a habitual confessor to major crimes. Jasper was a heroin addict who simply loved all the publicity. The jury retired to consider its verdict on 15 January 1998 & 5 days later brought in a verdict of guilty.

“There is no other sentence I can pass on you for these horrifying murders of which you have been convicted than that of life imprisonment,” Mr. Justice Hidden told the pair in the dock. “You are both extremely dangerous men & you have not the slightest compunction for resorting to extreme violence.” They were sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years.

Darren Nicholls, the most famous ‘supergrass' in British criminal history since Bertie Smalls, began a new life on 2 March 1999. He was given a new name, a fresh passport & driving license & taken away to live somewhere far away from Essex . He & his family seem relatively happy in their new environment. Nicholls has given up his criminal past, but he still has nightmares about the night of 6 December 1995. Just before he officially ‘disappeared', he said: “I have this terrible guilt. I feel like I've been a right bastard, grassing up my mates. I know I shouldn't feel guilty, but I just can't help it. It's going to be a long time before I can feel good about myself again.”

(Research: ‘Bloggs 19' by Tony Thompson, Warner Books, 2000. A movie named ‘ Essex Boys' was based on this starring Sean Bean).

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