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23-29 Jan 2004 GUNNED DOWN!
Nuts
Dave King - aka Rolex Dave - was a ruthless crime figure. Last October, he died in a hail of bullets outside a gym. In his own words, Bernard O'Mahoney describes the man he knew and the vicious world he lived in.
WHEN YOU are shot with an AK-47, it makes a mess of you. So when Dave King - Rolex Dave - was wiped out like that, at the age of 32, it was bound to cause a sensation.
He could have been killed in any other way - stabbed, shot with a pistol, run over. But that wouldn't have been so spectacular. Whoever did it wanted to send the message that they shouldn't be messed with. Dave lived and died by a new criminal code whereby villains will stop at nothing to stay out of jail. Gone are the unwritten rules of the '60s, when no-one would grass.
Over the years, Dave had built an empire around drugs, clubs, dodgy watches and violence. As his operation got bigger, he had to start doing deals with the law to stay out of prison. His last deal was grassing up a gang of blokes who'd been shipping drugs.
They got nicked and Dave didn't. That was why he was shot. Dave had always been greedy. That's how, in just three years, he went from a G-reg Granada and a poxy little house to Porsches and a huge hacienda-style bungalow with horses and stables.
But his head got f**ked up with loads of drugs - mainly cocaine and body-building steroids - and he thought he could get away with anything. He was bound to end up dead. When I met King at the start of the '90s, he was in his early twenties and I was in my thirtie We were both working on the door at Epping Forest Country Club.
There were lots of fights, guns were waved around all the time and, if you showed you were hard, almost every woman was available for sex. It was a big ego trip. On each Sunday, the club had a do called The Jungle. It was the only decent thing happening on that day, and lots of people who worked on Thursday, Friday and Saturday converged on it.
It attracted a lot of doormen, bit-part celebrities like EastEnders stars, bad footballers and B-list models. There were also a lot of wannabe gangsters, and one of them was King. He was a big, meaty bloke, a little over 6ft and he'd mullah you just for spilling his drink.
A key player on that scene was a man called Tony Tucker, an extremely large man who was into all this body-building s**t Tucker ran some clubs and he had a health-food shop in Ilford. Health and Tucker didn't really go together. He was part of the Essex Boys gang, running a huge drugs operation, with all the violence that went with that.
A few years later, he fell out with his suppliers and was shot dead with two other members of the gang in a Range Rover in the Essex countryside. Tucker's shop was really full of loads of s* *t for body-builders, which was how King first latched on to him. The two of them were even bodyguards for boxer Nigel Benn for a while, but he didn't know about their other activities.
King was a lunatic, a Rangers supporter from a tough Glasgow family. He'd strut around the nightclubs and if you ruffled his feathers, he'd burst into a fit of what we used to call "roid rage". He and a lot of the others were all pumped up with steroids - it was prehistoric. Tucker felt he was getting too old for fights with drunks, and he wanted to expand his drugs operation.
So when King came along, keen to make a name for himself, Tucker used him for bashing people who had displeased him. Dave had a very good reputation as a street fighter, going beyond fists to using weapons. The more violent he was, the more Tucker patted him on the head, and the more violent King became.
One night in the mid-'90s, Tucker was particularly impressed with what King did to a bloke called John Rollinson, nicknamed Gaffer. Some people called him the most dangerous man in the country. Gaffer was in a nightclub in Grays when he got into an argument with King, who gave him a hiding.
When Gaffer picked up a broken bottle, King stabbed him with a ten-inch bowie knife in front of a nightclub full of people. He wasn't killed, but the knifing greatly enhanced King's reputation. After that he didn't have to fight as much anymore because everyone knew that if they crossed him, they'd be f**ked. After the stabbing, King became more useful to Tucker, and a valuable friend to be seen with.
He started hanging around the Ministry Of Sound, running the door there as well as at his usual clubs. Doing that, you can get into anything because people come to you for all sorts of dodgy schemes. His violent fame gave him a way of making money and, rather than staying as Tucker's tool, he started to become his own man, using other people as his tools.
When raves started really getting organised in the '90s, it became easier to make serious money out of the drugs that went with them. All of us got involved in that. King began to use his brains more than his fists. Because he was so well known, he'd get offered four to five thousand Ecstasy tablets a week on credit - and they were worth about £15 per pill.
That's £75,000. He'd get some fool of 19 or 20 who thought he was a bit of a boy to sell them. King paid probably no more than £6 per tablet and would often not pay the person selling them because they'd be so keen to show they were in with the right man. King was good at controlling his dealers. Others weren't. One of Tucker's slip-ups led to the death of Leah Betts.
Once King really got going, he started importing his own drug supply by speedboat. Tucker used small aeroplanes landing at private airfields. It was big business and when Tucker was killed in 1995, the way was even more open for King. But he'd still have a go at anyone for anything.
At a Hippodrome awards do for doormen, he started a massive fight with a load of bouncers from Brixton because they gave him the wrong sort of look. He also did time after giving a bloke a good hiding and shutting him in a car boot.
Success hadn't changed King's attitude. He would mullah you for the slightest thing. Darren Pearman was a member of the Canning Town Firm, probably the best little outfit in London. It was all part of the same group of people as the Inter City Firm, which was centred on the West Ham fans' gang. They were all very violent. If someone stamped on their foot, they got murdered.
Darren was a space job. He wore cardigans and had his hair in a side parting. He looked like a boffin but he was a raging lunatic. He was friends with King and, a couple of years ago, they were in Charlie Chan's nightclub, underneath Walthamstow dog track. Some fool bumped into them or some other nothing thing and King glassed him in the face.
The glassing kicked off a big fight and the doormen got involved. One of them was an ex-wrestler called Ronnie Fuller. Ronnie didn't know the rules. If you're a doorman and you grab people like Pearman and King, you're going to get it as well, because they have to keep their front.
What you do is say to them, "Look, if you want to have a go at him, do it outside.
I'll kick him out and you can do as you like." Then you'd throw the other guy out of the fire exit for being drunk and King or whoever would kill them outside. That's the way this respect s**t works. King and Pearman wouldn't forget Ronnie's disrespect.
A few weeks later, they clashed with him again outside the Epping Forest Country Club. Pearman was stabbed and pronounced dead by the time he rolled up to Whipps Cross Hospital in the back of a cab. Later, a motorbike hitman shot Ronnie twice in the head and three times in the chest, killing him outside his home in Grays, Essex, in front of his wife.
King started this whole thing off. After a few years of making a fortune living like that you can see how King thought he could never be stopped, but he wanted more. He branched out into dealing in fake watches, buying them for a few quid each from Thailand and selling them to mugs here and to overseas gangsters, such as Russian crooks, making thousands.
That's why he was nicknamed Rolex Dave. He even ran his own nightclub. The stakes were getting higher and, inevitably, the police were taking greater interest in his activities. He tried to make deals with the police to keep himself out of prison, particularly once he'd had three children.
Dave wanted the money and the ego trip, but he got less able to deal with going inside. No-one wants to do time, so everyone stitches up everyone else to stay out of prison. But the police were demanding more and more from him and, in the end, he grassed the wrong group of men. That was why he ended up a bloody mess outside that health club.
Bernard O'Mahoney's book Wannabe In My Gang?: From The Krays To The Essex Boys is published in February (£8.99, Mainstream) |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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