Billy Blundell walked into the gym knowing exactly who would be waiting for him. Patsy Adams had been busy, spreading word that he wanted a piece of him, and Billy had been warned to stay away. He didn’t hide. Adams came at him with a crowd behind him and threw a punch that Billy slipped under easily.
He grabbed Adams by the head, held it down, and kept punching while others tried to jump on his back. He lashed out at them too, hitting more people than he could count. The next day, Billy sent a message through Ricky Curley: if Adams really wanted a row, they could put on gloves and spar properly. Adams sent back word that it was all over.
Billy knew it would be, because the man was frightened of his own shadow. Billy Blundell and his brother Eddie were the most feared villains in Essex, deemed more dangerous than the Kray twins. They had a cousin named Peppi who ran with them full-time. Peppi got involved with a woman connected by marriage to a man from a rival crew.
Peppi had cleared it with him because they weren’t together, but the man was as nice as pie to his face and violent when drunk. One day, he decided to spank Peppi. Eddie decided to spank him back. Then it kicked off.
They went after Peppi one night, firing a hand pistol through the front door of the brothers’ headquarters on Seventh Avenue. They didn’t hit him. A few days later, Eddie had an argument with them across the road after coming back from the pub drunk. He told them Peppi had made a statement, knowing full well he hadn’t.
“Fuck off. Piss off out of it. ” The tension simmered. One night at the Volunteer pub, the Blundells were there with five or six of their lads.
The rival firm came in, four or five handed. The Blundells weren’t worried about them. Just drunks. One of them, Wilshire, came over and asked about the statement Peppi had supposedly made.
Eddie said, “Listen, Peppi’s made no statement, all right? No statement at all. ” The man kept pushing. Billy reacted before Eddie could, smashing a glass in his face and cutting his neck.
He bounced the man all around the floor. When the man got up, he didn’t know who had hit him. “Did you do that, Eddie boy? ” Eddie said, “No, mate.
The little one done that. ”
About a month later, they were doing the books in their office when there was a knock at the door. It was the drunk from across the road. He took his coat off and threw it on the floor.
Eddie kicked him in the bollocks. As he went out the door, Wilshire was there with a knife, along with three others. Billy started smashing things, put a window through trying to hit one of them. They backed off, realizing they couldn’t handle it.
Bare-knuckle boxer Donny “The Bull” Adams was known as the king of the gypsies, but he lost his crown when he fought Kray associate Roy “Pretty Boy” Shaw in a bout lasting under twenty seconds. He was to lose a lot more when he took on the Blundells. The Blundells had a spy in the rival camp who told them a team was being put together. Donny Adams was one of them.
Billy went to the mini cab office in Ilford himself. They sent a couple of soldiers who came back armed with guns. As their van pulled up outside, the other van pulled up at the same time. The other two got out of their car without the guns, not realizing the Blundells had been tipped off.
One of them took off up the pavement with a big hamburger in his hand, while the other lay across the bonnet, holding on to get away from the shooting. Inside the office, they couldn’t go out the front because the rivals were armed. So they went out the back. Eddie was too fat to get over the fence, as was Johnny Ferry.
They lifted Billy over, and he went and got his shotgun. He came in through the back. Johnny Ferry went at him with a big ashtray. Billy shot.
He got one in the leg, and Johnny Ferry got a ricochet in the arm. Then Eddie heard shooting outside. He didn’t even know his brother had been shot. Eddie confronted Donny Adams.
He cracked him with the butt of the rifle, holding it like a club by the end of the barrel. Adams just shook his head. Eddie turned the rifle around to shoot him. Adams dove into the cab office, and Eddie shot him in the back as he went through.
They used ammonia to blind him afterward, leaving scars on his face. Billy was charged with attempted murder. During his Old Bailey trial, he told the jury he had acted in self-defense and was found not guilty. While incarcerated, Billy fell out with a fellow inmate named Dougie Weaver, a close friend of Patsy Adams.
Everyone was supposed to keep clear of him. Weaver started mouthing off, so Billy hit him. His eye came up like an egg. Billy got arrested again and put in the block.
Then Patsy Adams made himself busy. Billy had lived with him for four years and knew exactly what kind of man he was. “He’s a complete liar,” Billy said. Adams ran around arm in arm with someone who had grassed on Billy, calling other people grasses all the while.
Next time Billy saw him was at Chelmsford Prison. Billy said, “I promised you I’d get you if I had a problem with you here. ” Adams said, “Yeah, if you want it. ” Billy kicked him, held his head down, and punched him until his hands went out in a claw.
“You didn’t do that. You got that experience,” Adams said. Billy said, “Liar. ”
Lew Yates arrived in London during the seventies to fight bare-knuckle legend Roy Shaw, but the bout never got sorted out.
He started working the doors in Essex. One night, there was a bit of a do at the end of the night. Billy’s lot was there, the ice cream van crowd. Yates ended up fighting Billy.
Billy laid down. Then someone split Yates’s head down to the skull with a double mug. He saw blood and went loopy. He fought Billy and about seven others.
Even in the lift, he went after the big fellows with a knife, their eyes wide as they pulled back. Another club Yates worked at was L’Trix in Dagenham. A young guy came up to the door asking for work. Yates said, “I’ll try you out.
Give you a couple of weeks. ” The guy was Carlton Leach. One night, a big crowd was rowing with a bouncer, and Carlton duster’d him, splitting him like he had two mouths. Carlton kept walking toward him.
Yates stepped in between them. “Now fuck off,” he said. “You’re spitting blood on me. ” He hit the man, and he was gone.
Yates turned to Carlton and said, “That’s how you do it, Carlton. ”
In the eighties, acid house music swept through Britain, fueled by ecstasy. A pioneer of the rave generation was Andy Swallow, formerly one of the leading members of West Ham United’s Inter City Firm. He moved from football into parties.
One of their first big parties was in Stratford, in a warehouse with big cages. They cleaned it up, made a little flyer with a car going over a bridge, and put on the party. Over 5,000 people showed up. His friend’s mom lived around the corner, and every half hour they’d go to her house with the money.
All night she heard the thud of money hitting the floor. In the morning she found stacks of envelopes full of cash. They moved to Southend, did parties in Rayleigh, the Pink Toothbrush, all over Essex. They formed Centreforce Radio, 88.
3, the biggest independent pirate radio station. They were the information. Around nine o’clock, they’d promote through the day, telling people to be at such-and-such service stations around the M25. South Mimms was a prime example.
They’d give out a number to ring. Then around ten, they’d say go to this venue or this area, and everybody would converge at the same time in the same place. It was a military operation. When they did Woodstock, they had up to 20,000 people.
As the momentum grew, and the drug side became obvious, the government took notice. It became political. Thatcher wanted to bring out legislation to stop it. For six or seven months, the station was on constantly, day and night.
They thought they were kings. What they didn’t know was the police were doing a seven-month surveillance operation on them. They wanted them there, wanted to see them in action. It became a big court case: racketeering, supplying drugs to all the clubs.
The trial was going really well. Then one of their people came in and said, “One of the jury keeps winking at me on the train. I think we’ve got this. ” Andy said, “Listen, whatever you do, don’t go near the jury.
We’re winning this trial. ” The next day, someone had tampered with a jury. It turned out a member of another jury had gone up to their jury and said, “Are you on the Swallow’s trial? If you get them off, you’ll get a nice few quid.
” That jury member ran off. Andy was put away for three days while they tried to find him. They disbanded the jury for a retrial, but they put half a million pounds worth of drugs on them, which wasn’t in the first trial. Their barrister stood up and said, “We can’t take this any further.
” It came to light there was a police informer among them, and they wouldn’t name him. The trial collapsed. Margaret Thatcher introduced a bill to push the raves into clubs. They legislated that if you were found, you’d be arrested and your equipment seized.
They went after Carl Cox, who was their light and sound man for 300 quid. They confiscated all the equipment, took all the DJs, took all the records. People didn’t want to do it anymore. They pushed them into night clubs.
Andy thought they’d had a result, but they lost their identity. They lost the right to party. Still, they broke down the doors that people today use to dance till six or eight in the morning. Billy Blundell had known Pat Tate in Spain when Tate was on the run.
Puerto Banús was the place. Everybody was there: the Golden Bullion mob, the Security Express mob, the Kray mob. Billy found him a nice kid and got on well with him. But Tate wasn’t on drugs then.
In 1987, Bernard O’Mahoney started working as a doorman at Raquel’s nightclub in Basildon. Within a year or two, he took over security, and Raquel’s began putting on raves. In 1993, he formed a partnership with a man named Tony Tucker. With the rave music came drugs, and with Tony Tucker came Pat Tate.
Tate was well known in the Essex underworld after making a dramatic escape from Billericay Magistrates Court. He assaulted the police guarding him, vaulted the dock, and ran outside to a waiting motorbike that whisked him away. He later surfaced in Spain. O’Mahoney met Pat Tate through a friend.
Pat had recently come out of prison and was starting a new venture that would make everyone involved a lot of money. O’Mahoney rang the number and got Pat’s mom, Marie, a lovely little lady. Pat came round the next day to interview him. He was about 6’2, 18 or 19 stone, the biggest bloke O’Mahoney had ever met, very bouncy.
He came in like a whirlwind. “Hello, I’m Pat. ”
O’Mahoney was actually there for a job as one of the girls, but he told Pat that wasn’t what he was after. He wanted a managerial or administrative position.
Pat laughed and tried to convince him to have his hair in pigtails, saying he’d earn a lot more money than other things. O’Mahoney said no. Pat then asked if he would work with his mom and help run things. It was a massage parlor.
Pat wanted to get quite a lot of girls together and become one of the biggest agencies in Essex. He had advertising lined up, a place where people would visit, and five or six girls already, recruiting daily. O’Mahoney was going to help run it with Pat’s mom. Within a week, Pat had a parlor opened in Southend.
The phones rang off the hook 24/7. Pat had a couple of friends. One was Tony Tucker. They were crazy people to go out with.
They took a lot of drugs. At first it was just pills, which seemed socially acceptable in ’94, ’95. Then it progressed to cocaine. They were party animals.
All of Tucker and Tate’s friendships followed the same pattern: embrace, use, then lose. If you had no use, no friendship was offered. The drugs made them think everyone and everything existed for their benefit. A young man in a pizza shop was beaten up because he didn’t sell the type of pizza Tate demanded.
Tucker beat up a family man who had fitted his kitchen, keeping him in a dog’s kennel for days because the work wasn’t satisfactory. Tate being asked to adhere to a dress code in a pub resulted in mindless violence. He had jeans on, and the doormen wouldn’t let him in. Pat got in anyway, and part of the door came off.
All hell set loose in Churchill’s. After a while, O’Mahoney was around them long enough that it became acceptable. Pat would keep a gun in the parlor. Most of the girls didn’t know, but O’Mahoney did.
There were always drugs in the parlor. They could have been raided at any point, but you just became aware of it being there. In November 1995, 18-year-old Leah Betts collapsed and died after taking an ecstasy pill supplied by Tucker and Tate. They began threatening and blaming other people, one of whom was an associate of the Blundell family.
Billy Blundell arrived at Raquel’s one evening looking for Tucker and Tate, and he was far from happy. Billy went to the club to talk. There was a conflict, and he needed to sort it out. Tucker wouldn’t come meet him, so Pat Tate came to see him at the farm.
Billy told him what the score was: they were upsetting the wrong people. “You two realize you’re with him all the time, aren’t you? If anything comes down, you’re going to get it as well as him. Someone creeps up behind you and goes bang in the back of your head, don’t be surprised.
” Tate looked him in the eye and said, “Well, if it happens, it happens. ” Billy knew it was no good trying to talk to him. People were tired of Tucker and Tate’s egotistical bullying. The drug taking spiraled so quick, from pills to cocaine to crack.
Him and Tony would sit there for hours and hours just doing crack. When they told O’Mahoney how much they’d spent, he was horrified. Pat went from being happy-go-lucky to very paranoid, very sad sometimes. Everyone could see it coming.
When the announcement came that they’d been shot, not that many people were shocked. They hit Essex in such a big way in such a short space of time. Tucker, Tate, and Craig Rolfe were found dead in a Range Rover. Following the murders, a man named Damon Alvin formed a gang hoping to fill the void in the drugs world.
Alvin’s mentor was Malcolm Walsh. Malcolm was stabbed and died following a trivial dispute. One of the Tretons put a lump of concrete through Malcolm’s BMW window and boasted about it. Malcolm found out which Treton it was and tried to put the concrete through his face.
They pulled him off. The old man Treton, the one who eventually killed Malcolm, was pissed off. He leaned out the window arguing with Malcolm and said, “I’m going to stab you. ” Rest is history.
Malcolm came in and got stabbed with a sharp knife, fell down and died. Alvin, inconsolable with grief, armed himself with a shotgun and burst into the family home of Malcolm’s killer, opening fire on men, women, and children. Some lost body parts, others never recovered. Three of the Tretons got shot.
The gunmen buggered off. One of Alvin’s gang was a man named Dean Boshell. He idealized Alvin and told people they were brothers. Alvin had no intention of being his friend, let alone his brother.
He just wanted to use Boshell to store and distribute drugs. Boshell was a little gopher, looking after parcels of drugs. One time a parcel went missing. Alvin gave him a good hiding, and Boshell went on the missing.
Then Boshell went to the police station. He owed Alvin big time, so Alvin wanted to get him involved, get a couple of shooters. At this time, Mark Bradford was on police bail for the alleged murder of a heroin addict. He had to sign on at the police station every day.
On one occasion, he saw Boshell leaving after talking to a detective. Bradford told Alvin he’d seen Boshell walking out of the police station. Alvin wanted to know what Boshell was doing down there. Boshell turned around and said, “They want to pull me in regarding the shooting of the Tretons.
They know I was driving the car. They said turn around and tell us what you know about Damon and Ricky, and we’ll give you immunity, 10 grand. ” There were a couple of offers they put on the table. Each time, he turned around and told Alvin.
It was a big mistake, because Alvin was getting more nervous. The night before Alvin was killed, Alvin had arranged to meet Boshell, referring to him as his brother. Alvin went to Southend, picked him up, took him back to Wickford. The next morning, no one saw him alive again.
Boshell was found in the allotment, shot three times. From what O’Mahoney knew, they got him with ammonia or something, shot him as he went down, then another two in the head. The police arrested Alvin. He denied picking Boshell up, claiming he’d been in a flat with his friends Kevin Walsh and Ricky Percival.
All those present made statements supporting the alibi. Three years later, using mobile phone evidence, the police proved Alvin had lied. He was charged with murder, and his friends were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. When it went to trial, they wanted to introduce proof that Boshell was a grass, which would have been incriminating to Alvin.
Alvin started panicking, knowing that if that was introduced, he was going to get done for murder. He told his barrister to stop the trial. He changed his story and grassed up Ricky Percival instead, saying Ricky committed the murder while Alvin was with him. There was no evidence against Ricky Percival except Alvin’s word.
Alvin lived in a dream world trying to be the big I am. He thought Pat Tate, Tony Tucker, and Craig Rolfe were big gangsters and he worshipped them. In a way, he also thought O’Mahoney was something special, because O’Mahoney apparently shot or killed Tucker, Tate, and Rolfe. Alvin wanted to be like that.
He wanted to always kill someone. He was always going on about his double tap. Maybe that was his chance to put a few notches on his gun. Ricky Percival was well and truly stitched up.
Damon Alvin was given a new identity and walked away with his wife to start a new life. At the age of 26, Ricky was sentenced to serve a minimum of 28 years behind bars. His nightmare started in 2003. Early in the morning, police were banging at the door.
Ricky’s mom got up and opened it. Armed police flooded the house. They went upstairs and got Ricky’s brother Danny out of bed naked, guns and everything. Then they realized it wasn’t Ricky.
They stayed all day, and the family couldn’t go out. Guns all along the front, all the neighbors watching. Ricky wasn’t even there. Ricky heard about it and went with his solicitor to the police station.
He was let out. He came home. Ricky’s mom thought it was all going to go away. But then he had to go with his solicitor to Harlow.
“She said he’ll be back this afternoon. He’ll be home. ” But that was 11 years ago, and he’s still not home. They had a 12-week trial.
Their legal teams all said there was no case. Not one bit of evidence. No case. So they didn’t push things.
He was convicted after 12 weeks. 28 years. No evidence or anything. It’s just one man who wanted to save himself.
The police didn’t like Ricky. He was a little criminal, but he wasn’t the big criminal they tried to make him out to be. He wasn’t one of the Essex Boys, the big drug baron, the murderer. Ricky’s mom still can’t believe he’s away.
Her mom’s funeral, he couldn’t come. Her dad’s, he wasn’t there. Her sister’s, he wasn’t there. She just prays he gets out while she’s alive, so she can enjoy it, and hopefully he’ll have family and she’ll have grandchildren.
She still wants somebody to show her evidence that he did it. “He might not be perfect, but he’s not a killer. I know he’s not a killer.
“
