Free Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters by Christopher Berry-Dee

the January 1993 contract killing of 55-year-old property tycoon Robert Urquhart – a good friend of Noye – outside his Marylebone home when he was shot dead by a gunman who escaped on a motorcycle.
• Keith Hedley
    Hedley was murdered by alleged bandits on his yacht in Corfu in November 1996.
• Pate Tate, Craig Rolfe and Tony Tucker
    All were shot to death by shotgun blasts into their Range Rover along a farm lane in Rettendon, Essex, during the night of 6 December 1995. Engineer Michael Steele and mechanic Jack Whomes were convicted solely on the word of police supergrass Darren Nicholls. The case highlights police corruption and is presently under review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
    While in jail at Swaleside, Noye had befriended Tate, a tattooed, muscle-bound, 18-stone drug-dealer from Essex, who acted as his protector. At Tate’s suggestion, Noye invested £ 30,000 on an Ecstasy shipment, makinga quick £ 70,000 profit. Police claim that Ecstasy from this part of the batch could be forensically linked to the death of teenager Leah Betts. The claim was another attempt to implicate Noye.
    Leah was a schoolgirl from Latchingdon in Essex. She is notable for the extensive media coverage and moral panic that followed her death several days after her 18th birthday, during which she took an Ecstasy tablet, then collapsed four hours later into a coma, from which she did not recover. Subsequently, it was discovered that water intoxication was the cause of her death.
• Sidney Wink
    Wink was a gunsmith and dealer who put a pistol to his own head and squeezed the trigger in August 1994.
• Nick Whiting
    Whiting came unstuck when he was stabbed nine times and shot twice with a 9mm pistol in 1990. A car dealer, he went missing from his showroom in West Kingsdown in 1990. His body was later recovered from Rainham Marshes in Essex.
• Stephen Dalligan
    Dalligan was shot six times in the Old Kent Road in 1990.
• Daniel Morgan
    Morgan was at the centre of one of Britain’s most enduring murder mysteries. In March 1987, private detective Daniel Morgan was found in the car park of the Golden Lion public house in Sydenham, south London,with an axe embedded in his skull. Morgan’s business partner, with whom he had fallen out, was friendly with a number of police officers who have since been implicated in the killing. Allegations of police involvement were made at the inquest but, in spite of hundreds of statements, hours of covert surveillance and four investigations that identified several key suspects, no one has ever been charged.
    The inquest, which took place in April 1986, and ended with a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’, heard allegations of involvement by Metropolitan Police officers, and allegations of attempts to cover up that involvement. It also heard that Jonathan Rees, Daniel Morgan’s business partner in their private detective company, Southern Investigations Ltd, had talked about having Daniel killed and arranging for police officers at Catford CID to be involved in the murder and its subsequent cover-up.
    Morgan had enjoyed a number of careers, and he also ‘enjoyed’ a falling out with his business partners in the PI business. Things came to a head when Southern Investigations was asked to provide security for a car auction company in Charlton, south London. Though Morgan didn’t want the work, his partner, Jonathan Rees, took the job on, using some of his police contacts to moonlight while off duty.
    On 18 March 1986, Rees was in charge of the night’s takings for the auction – some £ 18,000. He took the money to a local bank, but discovered that the night safe had been glued shut. Some say this was a most convenient state of affairs, one that demanded that Rees take the money home, where, as coincidence would have it, he was sprayed in the face with a ‘noxious liquid’.
    As might be expected, no one was ever arrested for the robbery. Indeed, many – including the car auction