Article published or unpublished - 20/01/99

On the 23th January, in the High Court, the legal representatives of Jack Whomes and Michael Steele will apply for leave to appeal the convictions imposed on their clients at the Old Bailey on the 20th January 1998.

In seeking leave to appeal they will contest all the convictions against them including the 'Conspiracy to evade the Prohibition on the Importation of Cannabis' but their greatest concern will centre on gaining leave to appeal the conviction for the murders, in Essex, of three men on the 6th December 1995.

Michael Steele and Jack Whomes were, jointly, found guilty of murder and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment each. The killings became known as The Rettendon Murders. The victims were Anthony Tucker, Craig Rolfe and Patrick Tate, three ruthless and powerful gangland figures who controlled a drugs and protection empire in Essex. They had forged a reputation which moved police to describe them as underworld figures comparable with the Krays and their criminal dynasty of the sixties.

The three had even taken to describing themselves as "The Firm", a sobriquet favoured by the notorious East End hoodlums when they were at the pinnacle of their infamy.

The case against Whomes and Steele relied entirely on the evidence of a known police informant, Darren Nicholls, who at the time of co-operating with the police was in custody and facing a very severe sentence for a major drugs offence. There was no forensic, scientific or direct evidence against them other than a very frail and confused case built around a series of mobile phone calls which their defence claimed pointed to their client's innocence rather than the interpretation placed on it by the judge and subsequently, the jury.

There was no identified motive for Whomes and Steele to murder the victims. Indeed a pointer to the tenuous nature of the case against the accused was underlined when an undercover police officer tried to manufacture a motive by posing as an IRA gangster trying to entrap Steele into saying that he owed a large sum of money to the victims and the IRA had bought the debt. Evidence of this laughable ploy was captured on a tape in the possession of the defence counsel of the convicted men.

The officer was later prosecuted for corruption and was the same officer who had been responsible for 'running' Darren Nicholls. as an informant when he gave evidence against Whomes and Steele.

Motives Galore

Interwoven into the murky world of drugs and violence inhabited by the three victims was a history which produced a plethora of people who had clear motives for the gangland assassination. Those who had been knifed, shot or tortured by them or their henchmen were manifold.

One victim actually shot Pat Tate. Steve 'Nipper' Ellis was so persecuted by the three that in a moment of blind panic he shot one of his tormentors.

A contract was put out on Ellis by them and the plan was to lure Ellis to Tate's bedside at the hospital to discuss their grievances, where it was planned Tate would shoot him, arguing that Ellis had come there to finish Tate off.

Somebody who worked with Tucker and Tate had tipped Ellis off and the shooting never took place. Tucker knew who had told Ellis, and, they suspected, the police and it was another score they would settle when the moment was right especially when Tate was found in possession of the gun and was returned to prison.

That man was Bernard O'Mahoney, a friend of Ellis and a prominent figure in the drugs and violence empire controlled by the three murdered men. O'Mahoney, a crack marksman who had been in the army and served in Northern Ireland and had worked in South Africa in a so called mercenary police force, where he had been jailed for attempted murder and illegal possession of firearms, ran the security operation at Raquels at the time of the Leah Betts Ecstasy death scandal and was high on the police list of suspects as the supplier of the fatal tablet.

O'Mahoney was a prime suspect in the Rettendon murders at one time but his profile waned in this investigation when he co-operated with the police in providing evidence against a suspect in the Leah Betts case. It was later learned that the suspect had been threatened by O'Mahoney with his life and the 'torching' of his home if he did not say the right things at his trial.

O'Mahoney wanted the whole of the security and drugs operation in the Basildon area for himself and he frequently clashed with Tucker challenging his powerful hold on the illicit empire. Tucker had threatened to kill O'Mahoney on several occasions and actually acquired a machine gun with which to commit the crime shortly before the gruesome assassination at Rettendon. A man was charged with supplying the weapon.

O'Mahoney was embarrassingly deposed as security head at Raquels by Tucker just before his death and ten days after the murders O'Mahoney regained his grasp on what for him was a very lucrative operation and a flattering power base.

The macabre death of known drug dealer Kevin Whittaker was widely ascribed to Tucker and Rolfe. Tate was in hospital at the time of his death having been shot by Ellis. Tucker and Rolfe were questioned by police along with Rolfe's girlfriend Donna Jagger. Whittaker had supplied 'The firm' with a large quantity of drugs and they had decided they were big enough not to pay him for them.

When Whittaker made noises about their non-payment he was invited to a flat to talk about what looked like something which could escalate into a gang war.

It was there that Whittaker was attacked and injected in the testicles with a large shot of heroin from which he died. In a book, "So This Is Ecstasy" later written by O'Mahoney as a result of the Betts tragedy, he talks of a visit to Tate in hospital by Tucker when Darren Nichols, the police informant in the Wholmes and Steele murder trial, was visiting Tate, where Tucker tells Tate "We wont be getting any more trouble from Mr Whittaker". These were exactly the words used by Nicholls when he described at the trial what Steele had said after the Rettendon shootings.

Doubtless Whittaker had acquired the drugs from somebody else who would be extremely unhappy that their paymaster had been wiped out. Rumour was rife that it was a very high profile London crime syndicate and the matter was not to end there.

Among the flotsam and jetsam of depraved humanity which permeated the grotesque world of the three hoodlums there were a myriad of wronged victims who would have taken great satisfaction from gaining revenge.

Cruelty

Such was the level of savagery they were capable of stooping to that a friend of Tate's girlfriend who went to pick her up from their home at the time of a domestic split was tortured by the trio, stripped naked and burned all over his body with lighted cigarettes until he was a complete physical and mental wreck in need of psychiatric counselling.

It was acts of barbarity like this which had established their reputation for a level of ruthlessness which, they believed, had made them virtually untouchable. Such were their feelings of invincibility that they cockily snubbed an invitation from London gangsters, still linked to the Kray empire, to combine their operations retorting that
they were burnt out has-beens who belonged to a bygone age. Perhaps this was the moment they put the final signatures to their own death warrants.

It is possible their enmity towards O'Mahoney stemmed from the knowledge that Reggie Kray was a personal friend of his and had asked O'Mahoney to make sure Tate looked after one of his friends who had been moved to Whitemoor Prison where Tate was serving his sentence.

What the three thugs didn't realise was that their constant practice of robbing other criminal gangs of large drug consignments was building to an inevitable moment of retribution which could only have one possible outcome. It was just a matter of who got there first!

Certainly, in a lot of people's minds after the Rettendon murders, was the possibility that Leah Bett's father, an ex-policeman and himself a crack shot with a gun had been involved in their demise. It was a mouth watering vigilante scenario which many prayed would become a reality. It was clear with the passing of time that it was to remain a romantic notion. There were too many hideous and menacing candidates forming in a very long queue. The Betts theory gained credence because the three thugs had been blasted to death a month after Leahs tragic death and just four days before her funeral.

Relationships between O' Mahoney and the three thugs had been fraught for a considerable time with threats made by Tucker that he would kill O' Mahoney but they reached an all-time low when O'Mahoney co-operated in articles for national newspapers which implicated Tucker and Tate in the Leah Betts affair.

Before the murders; towards the end of November '95, O'Mahoney had become so worried about the dangers posed by the three gangsters that he had moved out of his house and into the Thomas Kemble Hotel in Rettendon, less than one mile from the murder scene, under a false name.

Strangely, around this time O'Mahoney claims the trio had invited him to become involved in a major robbery where they would steal a consignment of drugs. He claimed that he refused to become involved. It is not known whether he declined or not nor whether the three men went through with their plan.

One thing is for sure. O'Mahoney knew they were going to do it and new the value of the hoist. It would be true to form for the three to involve O'Mahoney and then not to give him his share. It may well have been the straw that broke the camel's back in the exacerbation of their already poisonous relationships.

Leah Bett's death had brought to a climax, the hostility between them which had been festering for more than a year as the battle to control the security at Raquels and other clubs in the Essex area had intensified. It was about this time that Tucker had wrested control of the door from O'Mahoney and an armed confrontation had taken place between them at Rachels.

O'Mahoney's Card Is Marked

On the day of the murders O'Mahoney was in the Rettendon area. He spent two hours at Woodham Ferres police station. What that meeting was about, nobody but the police and O'Mahoney knows except that he told colleagues he had, again, been warned that Tucker was out to kill him, having "Been warned by the police some four days earlier.

In the 'Mirror' two days after the three were murdered a CID source was quoted as saying. "It was a brilliantly executed assassination. The victims were lured to the lane to discuss having someone else 'hit' but the tables were turned on them. We had excellent information that Rolfe and Tate had been trying to hire a killer to "rub out" a rival drug dealer but it seems the intended victim got his shot in first. Their intended victim pushed Ecstasy at Raquels night club in Basildon".

In the Daily Express of the same date similar information had been received. "The gangster allegedly ordered their assassination after he was tipped off that they were planning to kill him for being a police informant. The man, who has links with the Krays, and another gangland family, was accused of revealing the trios drug dealing activities".

There had been a confrontation just a week before the murders when Tucker had obtained the machine gun from a Michael Bowman who was arrested for supplying the weapon. Police learned the weapon was wanted by Tucker and Tate who needed it to kill "someone".

One hour after leaving the meeting with the police on the 6th December O'Mahoney called on his partner's mother in Pitsea. An hour and a half later he was back in Rettendon. It was 6-30 PM.

This was the same time as the police informant Darren Nicholls who gave evidence against Whomes and Steele said he was twenty minutes down the road from Rettendon. The two men knew each other well having first met in prison some years earlier.

Conveniently, Jack Whomes was asked by Nicholls to pick his car up from a pub car park in Rettendon at the same time. It was an ideal way of establishing telephone links between them in that area at that time. It is hard to believe that a man who has just assassinated three dangerous thugs, or was about to do so, would concern himself with the role of becoming an automobile rescue service.

After The Extermination

Six days after the murders O'Mahoney returned to Raquels and threatened the door staff with a knife ordering them to give the 'door' up. They did. By the next day he was re-installed as chief security man at the club.

The day after the murders O'Mahoney turned up at his solicitors in London. He says he had phoned home and there had been a message to ring the police, which he did.They told him about the murders. That was at 11 oc yet he had made a call to a ladyfriend who says he rang her that same morning at 10 oc and told her about the shootings.

In his book "So This Is Ecstasy" O'Mahoney recounts a succession of feuds he has had with thugs who have threatened his power as the head of security at Raquels. He tells of an occasion when he sought to ambush a man by the name of Draper who he had heard was out to kill him. He describes the array of weapons he took with him when he decided he would kill Draper and the plot he hatched to lure Draper to his death.

In another part of the book he vividly recalls the occasion he decided to assassinate a 'grass' who was causing trouble for a good friend of his, who was on an attempted murder charge. The man, under threat of having his head blown away retracted his statement and earned a last minute reprieve as he lay, face down, on a grass bank, having been taken out of O'Mahoney's car so "the shit and blood wont ruin the interior".

Panic

Before the Rettendon killings O'Mahoney is keen to make it known to the police that he has had a meeting with Tucker and Tate at a Southend night-club where he states he leant against the outside of their Range Rover pointing out that his prints might be on the vehicle as a result of that encounter.

After the shootings the police asked local residents to note the numbers of any cars which visit the scene of the murders. On six occasions O'Mahoney's car was logged as attending the site.

On February 13 a report appeared in the Sun newspaper written by crime reporter lan Hepburn stating that police believed the weapons and ammunition had been hidden at the scene beforehand and picked up by the assassin, who had travelled with the ill-fated trio and had picked up the murder weapon after pretending to open a farm gate.

O'Mahoney panicked and contacted Hepburn telling him he had visited the site where his 'friends' had died and he had found a live cartridge. He had picked it up and then panicked when he realised he had put his prints on it before throwing it into a field full of high grass. He said he was reporting this to the police and would like Hepburn to accompany him when he met the police.

On Feb 16 O'Mahoney met DC Bob Chappel and DC Dean Sandfbrd, from Woodham Ferres police station, at the murder scene. Hepburn accompanied them to the meeting.

When they arrived it was getting dark and the police stated they would look for it the next day. The cartridge was never found. Why did O'Mahoney take this action?

Clearly, he believed there was a cartridge unaccounted for which, if found, might lead the police investigation to him.
No time of death was ever established at the inquest or the trial. It was another inexplicable case of bungling inefficiency between the police, the police surgeon and the pathologist. Nobody had asked anybody else to take responsibility for its establishment.

The general view was that the killings took place between six and seven in the evening. For Nicholls evidence to be believed it had to be at that time. This fact was challenged because the windows of the Range Rover the men were shot in were not frozen up. It had been a cold and frosty evening with early snow and the rest of the night not being so cold. Indeed, by the morning the iced puddles had thawed. The farmers who found the bodies stated that their vehicle's windows were frozen up when they went to start up in the morning. They had parked their vehicle at more or less the same time as Nicholls claimed the Range Rover would have arrived at the scene of the crime.

At this time Michael Steele had an alibi provided by a mother and her daughter who stated they were at his home with him and his partner until about 9.30 PM that evening.

Jack Whomes who claimed to have been invited to the area that evening to collect a car which Nicholls wanted disposing of said he would have been on his way home.

He had collected the car from The Wheatsheaf public house car park where it had broken down and had hoisted and secured it on his trailer. It was a Volkswagen Passatt and the same vehicle as Nicholl says he drove Whomes to the murder site in.

Nicholls states that when he collected Whomes in the car he pulled off surgical gloves which were speckled with blood.
Whomes claimed Nicholls had asked him to get rid of the car so he could claim insurance on it. Instead, Whomes gave the car to a friend who was involved in Stock-car racing. Whomes told the police where they could find the car and it was forensically tested. Hardly the actions of somebody who knew, if Nicholls was to be believed, that his blood samples would be in the car, which in fact, they were not.

Shots Destroy Nicholl's Story

Nobody heard the volley of shots at the time described by Nicholls and quite clearly they would have been audible for at least a mile around the scene of the crime. Simon Rogers, a man who lived in a detached property nearby which had stables stated that he heard, what he described as a "fusillade" of shots at around midnight on the night of the killings.

He had come out of his house to feed a young horse when he heard the shots, describing them as being in quick succession and within a duration of six to ten seconds. He had no doubts about what he had heard and no doubts about the direction from which they had come. He had reported the shots to the police when he heard gunfire three days later during the daytime. It was common for people to go shooting there in daylight as a sporting activity but never after darkness and certainly not at midnight. He knew both sets of shots had come from the same place, which was the farm where the men had been killed on the 6th December.

Strangely, as the result of a witness summons stemming from another police matter not linked with the Rettendon killings another witness came forward. He was William Jasper who was being held by London police on another charge. He had stated when questioned by the police that he had made a journey on or about the time of the killings, to Rettendon.

He did not then know it was Rettendon until he accompanied police, twice on journeys to the area he had visited around the time of the shootings.

He led the police back to Rettendon, they did not direct his route.
He did not know Steele or Whomes and stated he had never met them in his life. He had not known he would be required to give evidence at their trial until the day before he appeared before the court.

Jasper had been arrested on the 15 January 1996 on the other matter and stated he was the associate of major London criminals who were involved in very large drug deals and major robberies.

He stated he knew he was in the area of Rettendon when he made the drive back and he said he missed the Rettendon Turnpike on the journey and had to turn round. He described how he had looked in a holdall carried by his passenger on that journey and had seen a pump-action shotgun. He described the journey back and where he had dropped the man off. He said he had been paid £5,000 for the job.

Most importantly he described the time he had dropped his passenger off in Rettendon, as about midnight. Exactly the time that Simon Rogers, the man feeding his horse, had heard the fusillade of shots coming from the place where the trio were gunned down.

Jasper had known nothing of this evidence when he had told police of his involvement and he knew nothing of it when he gave his evidence.

Clearly, the trio's grim landscape of drugs, violence and robbery was peppered with people who had very good reason to dispose of Tate, Rolfe and Tucker. They were loathed and despised by so many. Outside of Essex they had overstepped their perceived power and had offended and robbed gangs who would regard their emergence as the Godfathers they thought they were, as little more than the immature flexing of muscles by a trio of mere upstarts. They would be tolerated, up to a point.

Their activities towards the end of their lives clearly overstepped those boundaries. Within their own territory they created enemies who were quite capable of exacting retribution. Men, perhaps more ruthless than themselves and certainly, a lot cleverer.

It will never, in all probability, be known who, cold-bloodedly possessed the blinding hatred that will allow a human being to blow the brains out of three relatively young men with the squeezing of a trigger. What is for certain is that the killer would need a very strong motive be it greed, power or revenge.

The two men serving prison sentences for this crime had none of those things. The removal of Tate, Tucker and Rolfe from this planet never changed their lives one iota, except for the worse. Indeed Whomes had never met Tucker and Rolfe and had never fallen out with Tate and there was no evidence that Steele's relationship with the trio had become soured. They now languish in prison for a crime they had no reason to commit.