??/??/?? - The Firm, the agony and the ecstasy
by Margarette Driscoll

Bernie O'Mahoney lives in a modest flat in a small, non-descript block in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

It does not seem much return for a man who earned thousands of pounds providing protection for nightclubs and drug dealers' territories in London and Essex in the early 1990s, but considering that every one of his former associates is either in prison, in hiding or dead, the fact that O'Mahoney is around to tell his story is, as he might say, a bit of a result.

Ten years ago O'Mahoney, a former convict, became a £40-a-night doorman at Raquel's nightclub in Basildon, Essex a peroxide-and-stiletto disco notorious for fights.

It was to turn into the sophisticated hub of the local rave scene and become yet more notorious as the source of the ecstasy tablet that killed Leah Betts, a policeman's daughter, at her 18th birthday party.

We have heard much about the "summer of love" when ecstasy swept through Britain's nightclubs as that moment's most fashionable drug. But the clubbers who danced the night through on "E", hugging each other and talking love and peace, were able to do so only thanks to a ruthless gang that raked in vast profits and terrorised anyone who got in its way.

O'Mahoney's account of its operations is a chilling insight into the parallel universe of violent crime that exists on every high street; an unsavoury eye-opener for any parent who has wondered what their teenager is up to at a nightclub.

Only someone like O'Mahoney — privy to Essex's shady underworld — can know the truth about the events that led to Betts's death. O'Mahoney rose to be head doorman at Raquels and, in partnership with Tony Tucker, a local hard man who ran a security company, and Pat Tate, another former convict and bodybuilder, formed the Firm, which branched out from security into debt collecting and punishment beatings.

For a time the three were the best known — and feared — faces in Basildon. O'Mahoney (once described by a trembling witness as scarier than Mike Tyson) was friendly with the Kray twins and knew villains throughout London and beyond.

Drug dealers would pay £1,000 per weekend, or £1 for every ecstasy tablet sold, for the exclusive right to deal drugs in the Firm's clubs. O'Mahoney, although he did not deal in or take drugs himself, was the muscle who saw that the right people got paid.

The profits may have been phenomenal but they were shortlived. When O'Mahoney first met Tucker he was living in a small house and driving a G-reg Ford Granada. Three years later Tucker was ensconced in a £250,000 house, paid for in cash, and driving a Porsche.

However, drunk on their own notoriety, Tucker and Tate got careless. They cheated and robbed villains tougher than themselves, finally planning a heist on a consignment of drugs. In December 1995, five months after Betts's death, Tucker, Tate and Craig Rolfe, an associate, were found dead in a Range Rover at the end of a lonely farm track in Rettendon, Essex.

They had been shot through the head, victims of a bloody gangland execution. Today O'Mahoney lives on the right side of the law and has a day job, running a fleet of tipper lorries. He has written a book about the ecstasy years, called Essex Boys, and a film of the same name, starring Sean Bean and based on the Firm's activities, will open later this year.

For a man who spent much of his working life threatening people, O'Mahoney is surprisingly affable, with a quick, black humour and a sardonic turn of phrase. The rules he lived by for so many years now seem distant, absurd: "At the time you're so wrapped up in it you don't realise.

The criminal 'code' sounds all right in the pub. I wouldn't harm a woman or a kid. If I had a grievance with someone I wouldn't go to his home. But one guy, we were plotting to shoot him, and we knew he visited his mother, so we thought we'd. wait in her road. It was all right to shoot him in his mum's road, but not on her doorstep.

You think there's some honour, but you look at your kid and think, 'I don't want him to grow up like me'. So, underneath, you know what you really are." O'Mahoney comes from Wolverhampton and the pattern of his life was set early on.

"My father was the most violent man I have ever met," he says. "He had this thing, 'If someone hurts you, you hurt them'. He'd beat me senseless, so I'd go off to school with a hammer or scissors like a bomb waiting to go off". He first got into trouble with the police when he was 14 he and a friend — on their way to support Manchester United at a match - started shouting abuse out of a train window at two Manchester City fans.

He moved to Basildon in the mid-1980s to be near a girlfriend after spending six months in prison for wounding with intent He spent those six months in six different prisons due to his "reluctance to conform."

The principal souvenir he keeps from the old life is a portrait of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, signed by both and "with great respect" from Charlie Kray. the twins' elder brother who died last week, O'Mahoney got to know the twins when he organised a benefit evening for a disabled child that was attended by London's criminal fraternity.

He began visiting Ronnie in Broadmoor and would take bottles of whisky to Reg in Maidstone prison. He says the popular image of the Krays as criminal masterminds is misplaced. 'They were just silly old men, really. They wouldn't last five minutes today doing what they did, walking into pubs and cutting people, then walking out. The world's changed.

Some 16-year-old from Hackney would shoot 'em in the back of the head." As for the idea that they were involved in criminal rackets while in prison, "you couldn't run a hot dog stand inside prison. The Krays haven't got a pot to piss in. I used to take Reg phone cards.

The man's got nothing". The perverse glamour of the criminal world comes over powerfully in O'Mahoney's book. The Firm never paid to get into clubs and would be given free drinks; supplicants handed over complimentary bags of ecstasy or cocaine. You look around the dark room at friends, all faces (well-known figures)," he writes.

"Everyone in the place knows it, too. The music's so loud it lifts you: you're all one. You have total control. . . there is this feeling of power and evil." Just like the Krays, the Firm attracted its own group of hangers-on. "People don't believe me but kids would sell drugs for nothing, no return, just to be part of it. I'm not talking about kids from bad estates, either.

One boy's father owned a string of garages and drove a very nice car. Another guy got caught taking E to a club in London, for nothing. He had his own hairdressing business. He got five years." O'Mahoney did not take drugs.

He says he needed a clear head: "I was the head doorman, so everything focused on me. If there was a problem in the club I had to think quickly i had to take the shit from the police, the dealers, other villains." for a few years they lorded it over Essex and beyond, running the security at another rave venue, Club UK in Wandsworth South London.

They also ran an equally successful legitimate debt-collecting business: "So-called decent people employed us, including a big firm of solicitors. They came to us because they knew we would get results." However, drugs were affecting the Firm: Tucker turned "from a quiet, rational man into a f***ing lunatic".

They murdered one small-time dealer and almost murdered another who had been cheeky to Tucker's girlfriend. O'Mahoney could see the writing was on the wall: "They thought they were invincible.

They started crossing people in Canning Town (east London). They're real villains. You can't do that." He made arrangements to move. On the day he picked up the keys to his new house, Betts died. The police and reporters descended on Basildon.

The rest of the Firm vanished; O'Mahoney was left standing at the door of Raquels to take the flak. He first tried to tell his story two years ago, but was hampered by the outcry from the Betts family and legal restrictions from the then impending trial of Michael Steele and Jack Whomes for the Rettendon murders.

Now, he says, he is able to tell the full truth. The police, he claims, went after the easiest target possible in clearing up the Betts case. During the investigation a police officer handed him back an incriminating letter found during the search of a flat belonging to Mark Murray, a local dealer protected by the Firm, and told him to "get rid of it".

The letter detailed money that Murray owed Tucker for the right to sell drugs at Raquels and Club UK on a list of dates; it could potentially have put Murray and Tucker in the dock for conspiracy to supply drugs. Instead, a friend of Betts who had bought the tablets for her party at Raquels was prosecuted.

O'Mahoney was subpoenaed as a witness and gave evidence for the prosecution. He believes Steele and Whomes were wrongly imprisoned for the Rettendon murders.

The police relied on the evidence of supergrass Darren Nicholls, the supposed getaway driver whose evidence, O'Mahoney says, was "a pack of lies". O'Mahoney claims to have found a live cartridge on a visit he paid to the murder scene a few days after the killings potential evidence that was "ignored".

O'Mahoney's story must naturally be treated with caution. But his disillusionment with both the criminal world and the police is so complete that he says he has nothing to lose.

He left Basildon a year ago after being attacked as he walked along the street with his new girlfriend. His marriage had broken up in the wake of the Betts case and his wife and their children have moved to the countryside.

His 10-year-old daughter, of whom he is clearly extremely proud, is a promising showjumper. O'Mahoney is an intelligent man — the key to his survival, no doubt — and wants a different life for his children.

But he does not indulge in excuses or false regrets: "We used to say: if someone gets into the ring and gets hurt, that's their lookout. Nobody dragged them into that situation.

It was the same in the club. We didn't go looking for trouble, but if someone wanted trouble they could f***ing have it."