Two Faced (Harry Tyler Book 2) (12 page)

When he finally stopped talking, Andy Martin asked the obvious question. Where did he – ferret-faced, loose-lipped Lenny – fit in on the crime firm of the decade?

Richards swelled with pride. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here’s the deal. I nick the motors and clean ’em up, y’know, ring ’em. Then I deliver ’em and take a nice drink for me time and effort.’

‘So you must have, what, a yard, a garage, workshop?’

‘Fuck off. I give you that and you spin it and I’m buried forever. This is the deal I’m after, drop the charges for the jam-jar I’ve been nicked in, lose the evidence and I will put them all on the pavement for you. They’re gonna do a million-pound van in a couple of weeks, East London, near a block of flats. A security wagon goes down a quiet one-way street and they’re gonna run a plated-up tipper lorry in front of it and block it in. Then a lorry with a steel girder welded on is gonna ram into the bag and burst it open. They’re putting a sniper on one of the floors of the flats in case it comes on top. They’ve got stun grenades, Russian machine guns. They ain’t taking prisoners.’

‘Who’s on the job?’

‘The bruvvas, Whaley, some bod from up North, a couple of Paddies and the shooter on the balcony.’

‘Who’s the shooter?’

‘Pass. Not me, that’s for sure.’

‘Any others?’

‘I’m a distance away on the other side of a railway line with a plated ambulance. Three of them are jumping in the back and I run them away. Plus they’ve got a couple of motors from me that some tarts are driving the rest away in. I just know my corner and what the motors are.’

‘And the location?’

‘Of course.’

‘No, I mean, what is the location?’

‘Have we got a deal?’

‘I’ve gotta ring my guv’nor for participating informant authority, but I don’t see any problems.’

‘And the motor I was in tonight?’

‘What motor?’

‘So no charges?’

‘You’ll be bailed out to us. If this is genuine, it goes nowhere. But God help you if it’s bollocks.’

Lenny Richards stuck his hands across the table.

‘It’s a deal then,’ he said.

Andy Martin shook his hand. ‘After we’ve shown you home and those front door keys in your property bag twirl in the right lock then I’d say so. Yeah.’

Lenny laughed. ‘Sweet. Your mate don’t say much, do he?’

‘No, but he’s a fucking good listener.’

A massive covert surveillance operation swung into action. All officers on the op, code-named Goliath, were briefed on a need-to-know basis and threatened with suspension and dismissal if a word leaked out, even to other police colleagues. Surveillance was conducted mainly from fixed observation posts from empty flats and factory offices. Unbeknown to Lenny Richards, Martin had put an OP on his home address. For added security most OPs were unaware of the existence of other OPs. The only change from the way Richards had said that the heist would go was that the sniper on the flats fell through as the Nelsons honed their plans.

December 11, 1987. It was 8.15am on the button when the Secure U Ltd mobile money box rolled slowly along Radnor Road in Leytonstone, East London. It was a fairly quiet one-way street, one of the few that were not yet all Bangladeshi. There were terraced houses on the right and a railway line with a high wooden fence surround to the left. Cars were parked nose to tail along the length of the right side of the road, except, the driver noted, for a gap about one hundred yards ahead where yellow pyramid-shaped cones and roadwork signs tapered to a large articulated tipper lorry with an aluminium body. He drove slowly to avoid clipping the no-parking cones. Rumbling along about twenty yards behind the security van was a Mercedes lorry tractor unit. Up ahead, the articulated tipper began to pull out. As it slewed across the road, it began to swing back to straighten up. The security van driver had no choice but to stop and wait. There was a guard in the front with him and another in the rear. None of them were concerned by the unexpected delay.

Widower John Puttock, a retired painter, took in the scene as he strolled back to his house, clutching a copy of that morning’s
Today
in one hand and a bottle of cheap wine in the other. He watched a fellow in a white builder’s hat and a luminous green plastic jerkin step into the road and wave as if to thank the van for stopping. The artic reversed slowly then juddered to a halt, completely sealing off the road about fifty yards short of the junction. John Puttock stopped to watch. It was a miserable day, overcast with heavy dark clouds, but he had nothing else to do. What happened next made him drop his drink in shock. Suddenly the Mercedes tractor accelerated to ramming speed and hurtled towards the rear of the security van. The pensioner noticed the metal girder protruding five feet in front of the tractor. It was welded on at exactly the same height as the square entry portal at the rear of the van. As it smashed into the back, the building-site worker pulled out an automatic handgun from his boiler suit and aimed four rounds into the bullet-proof windscreen in front of the driver. The four lugs held as if in suspended animation in the screen directly in front of his chest. John Puttock clutched his own chest and collapsed, dying of a cardiac arrest as the rammed security van skewed across the road into the back of the articulated tipper. The tractor and van were locked together like rutting stags. The steel girder was imbedded into the rear but the doors remained intact. The driver and passenger jumped from the tractor and ran at the van, loosing off shots from automatic handguns. It was as if the Wild West had come to East London.

As soon as the tractor had hit ramming speed DI Andy Martin, in flats overlooking Radnor Road, screamed into the radio, ‘All units standby, standby, ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK.’

High-powered squad cars, manned by uniformed blue-beret firearms officers disgorged their hidden ambushers. Cops burst from houses surrounding the robbery scene just as the gunfire began in earnest. And an articulated lorry, borrowed by the police from a nearby supermarket, came speeding up the one-way street the wrong way. Now screams of ‘Armed police!’ filled the air. The blaggers’ instinct was to target them. Stevey Whale raised his automatic in the direction of two officers armed with H&K machine guns. ‘DIE, YOU COWSONS,’ he hollered defiantly, but half a dozen bullets ripped into his torso before he could pull the trigger. Outgunned, out-numbered and surrounded, the Nelson gang had no option but to follow instructions and lay their weapons on the floor.

On August 25, 1988, Nicky, Charles, Georgie, David and Richard Nelson, along with Patrick Secker and David Tierney, appeared at the Central Criminal Court, The Old Bailey. They were sentenced to between eighteen and twenty years for attempted murder, robbery and firearms offences. Nominal amounts of money were recovered from the accounts of the brothers; nothing from those of Secker and Tierney.

For Nicky Nelson, the loss of face was crippling. As he received his twenty stretch, he glared at DI Martin who sat behind the prosecuting lawyer. Martin was smiling –
the no-good shit-cunt filth!
Nicky Nelson was on his feet. ‘You’re fucking laughing now, Martin, but you won’t be fucking laughing when that cunting grass Richards gets his scrawny throat cut.’ There was uproar in the court. Nicky was trying to get out of the dock to get at Martin. Three officers restrained him. Purplefaced, Nicky Nelson let loose a mighty gob in Martin’s direction. It hit the prosecuting lawyer squarely between the eyes.

Epsom races, spring meeting, 1955. In the immediate postwar days, this was where London’s top criminals made their biggest killing. The gaffers, the men who controlled the prime bookmakers’ patches, took a cut of every bet made at the track. Up until 1955 two very different men, Jack ‘Spot’ Comer and Billy Hill, had carved up the London crime scene. Working in tandem, they had taken a handsome slice of the capital’s gambling, prostitution and protection trade. Naturally, they also ran Epsom. And when the two men fell out, due, said Billy Hill, to Jack Spot’s ‘insecurity and persecution complex’, the London underworld shuddered on the brink of bloody gang war.

Spot – his face already slashed in the battle of Frith Street the previous August – brought two new and fearless friends to the Epsom meet: Reginald and Ronald Kray. Billy Hill, who controlled the number-one pitch up by the winning post, had also come firmhanded. Among others in his company were ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Billy Blythe – notorious for having cut the face of a Flying Squad officer – and Buck Nelson, a tough ex-boxer from Islington, North London, who had served time for house-breaking. This could have meant Armageddon, but in the event the cocky Kray Twins showed equal disrespect to both Billy Hill and Jack Comer. They had come to demonstrate that they meant business, that London, and London crime, would shortly belong to them. In the immediate aftermath, word reached the twins that Fraser, Blythe and Nelson wanted to fight it out with them. An Islington pub, the Queen’s Arms, was nominated for the battle. The Krays mobilised their toughest supporters. But when they reached the pub, the opposition didn’t show. Billy Hill had heard about it and called off the showdown.

The war between Spot and Hill spluttered on, until Jack Spot was cut again outside his Bayswater flat by Fraser and Alfie Warren. The Krays visited him in hospital and told him they could finish off Hill’s gang within 24 hours, and would take great pleasure in doing so. Spot declined their offer. The price tag was too high. London was spared a bloodbath and the Krays were denied the chance to inherit Jack Spot’s West End concerns.

The cold war between the crime families had given Buck Nelson cause for concern. He was a hard man, scared of nobody, but he had tasted prison before and didn’t want to go back. He had also fallen in love with Jo Pearson, a showgirl from Hoxton. He had proposed to her that spring and wanted out of the frontline of organised crime. Billy Hill was understanding and helped set him up as manager of an Islington billiard hall, also a conduit for an entire black market of stolen goods. A crooked poker school brought Nelson into contact with a young impetuous Hatton Garden jeweller, Jack ‘Solly’ Soloman, and Buck exploited Solly’s debt by fencing stolen diamonds through his business. Years later, Buck’s second-eldest son Bernard was to become close pals with Solly’s son Ross and husband to his daughter Rachel. Both boys studied accountancy and got into the property business, avoiding a life of crime. But Soloman Senior was in hock to North London’s most notorious criminals for the rest of his days. Millions of pounds in stolen diamonds were fenced through his shops as drug gangs turned to the gem trade to launder their illicit cash. It was, and remains, one of the few places where large cash transactions can be carried out with complete anonymity. When the Brinks-Mat gold came to Hatton Garden, Solly Soloman was the middle man. He grew fat on the trade, helping to establish a drug-smuggling ring among diamond traders working between Tel Aviv, the Garden and Antwerp.

Buck’s five other sons weren’t so academic. Charles, Georgie, David and Richard would have been happy with the takings from their father’s thriving clubs and the odd fat tickle from dealing in soft drugs. It was Nicky, the hothead, the psycho, the
nutter
, who steered his father back into serious crime; and it was Nicky who eventually persuaded his brothers that rich pickings could be made faster from the new game of armed robbery.

June 2, 1989. As the orange sun set over the exclusive beachside restaurant of the Don Caesar in Fuengirola, a slim and attractive long-limbed blonde in her early twenties smiled at the bronzed man in Farah slacks and a polo shirt drinking a tall glass of Kir Royal at the bar and smoking a fat cigar. The man, who was about ten years her senior, smiled back and motioned for her to join him. She shimmered over gracefully on high heels, removing an orange designer sun dress as she walked to reveal a bright yellow Louis Vuitton bikini.

‘Drink?’ he asked.

‘Please,’ the woman replied in an East European accent.

‘The usual, Pablo,’ he said to the barman. ‘Shall we?’ he asked his new companion, indicating a deserted corner table. The woman nodded. As they sat in the corner, the barman appeared with a chilled bottle of Cristal champagne and two glasses. Feigning surprise, the woman kissed the man on both cheeks before taking his hand and clasping it to her bosom.

‘Where I come from I’d only get a thank you.’

They both smiled. He leaned over and whispered, ‘I would very much like to sniff cocaine from off your breasts, my dear.’

‘You want fuck me?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Four thousand pesetas, all night.’

‘It sounds like a bargain.’

‘I am Zarima.’

‘Bernard, my darling. Bernard Nelson.’

For years, Bernard Nelson the respectable businessman had laundered a steady stream of illicit cash for his crooked brothers. ‘Bernard the Brains’ they called him. When the others were sent down, he continued to keep their stolen readies out of the reach of investigating detectives. He converted large amounts into European currencies and stashed it away in banks at Malaga and Puerto Banus in Spain. Still more was salted away in Calais. What was left, Bernard spent on buying run-down houses near Ashford in Kent and in Milton Keynes. Even before they were sentenced the brothers had agreed that Bernard would continue to administer their bent estate so that when they were all out of the boob the handsome investment would be split evenly between them. Property prices were always climbing and Bernard began buying flats and houses in Benidorm on the Costa Blanca, using the European accounts. What his brothers didn’t know was that along the way he had developed a huge appetite for cocaine and high-priced hookers. When Rachel divorced him, he indulged himself even more freely. Those weekends he had with the £1,000-a-night Brazilian and Russian beauties at his private villa in Mijas, near Fuengirola, were the best time of his life. The finest sexual experience came when Pablo persuaded him to enjoy a ‘United Nations’ – three prostitutes simultaneously, one white, one black, one Asian. It had cost Bernard £4,000 and what they hadn’t done wasn’t worth doing. But not even the Nelsons’ stash could finance his lifestyle indefinitely.