Free Bonded by Blood by Bernard O'Mahoney Page A

among the revellers. With the crowds and the house music came a demand for Ecstasy. Raquels was hit by an avalanche of drugs. Local men were quickly recruited by Mark Murray and dealers were everywhere in the club. The demand was being met.
    I had now recruited what I considered to be an ideal door. I had doormen who were not bullies. They were friendly and could mix with the people who were entering the club and were not seen as intimidating. Yet if someone wanted trouble, they would get it – and they would regret it. None of the men were from the Basildon area; they came from south and east London, so they weren’t impressed by the local men’s reputations. They took people how they found them and dealt with them accordingly. Without exception, everybody accepted it.
    On the face of it, the police now had a peaceful club. They could divert their attentions elsewhere. The occasional victim was of our own kind and so of little concern to them. Previously, we had endured twice-weekly visits from the constabulary, but we rarely saw them now. We had a club full to capacity with peaceful people. The customers were getting what they wanted and the firm got what it wanted. The lunatics had taken over the asylum.
    Another lunatic was making himself at home in rather different surroundings. Pat Tate had secured his favourite gym-orderly job upon his arrival at HMP Spring Hill and had managed to talk officers into letting him train at a local gym. There, Tate met several local girls whom he invited back to the prison. At first, they thought he was joking, but Tate assured them he always meant what he said. Soon Tate and his female entourage were indulging in group sex fuelled by drink and drugs in his cell.
    In the same month that Raquels started hosting rave nights, Tate was released from prison. All he possessed was his drug habit and a bad attitude. I call prisons hate factories because all they produce are people full of hatred. Tate came out of prison much that way. He wanted the world to know he was out and he wanted the world to know he was not happy about the way he had been treated. No doubt the prison staff who had encountered Tate were unhappy about the way he had treated them too.
    Tony Tucker met Tate quite by chance with Craig Rolfe one morning at a café in Southend. Tate was with a man named Shaun Miller, who knew both Tucker and Rolfe. Tucker warmed to men like Tate; he was the sort of man he deemed ‘useful’. Tate was 6 ft 2 in., extremely broad, 18 stone and fearless. He also had a glamorous bit of history. His fight with the police in court and escape on a motorbike were talking points in criminal circles. Tucker invited Tate to a night out and the same evening he became a member of the firm.
    I had been made aware of Tate long before his release from prison. A teenage girl who regularly came into Raquels had told me during a conversation that her uncle was in prison and she visited him on a fairly regular basis. Over the following weeks and months, I’d always ask her how her uncle was getting on, let her into the club for nothing and get her the occasional drink. Having been in prison myself, I know how much it means to have your loved ones ‘on the outside’ taken care of.
    When Tate was released he came down to the club to thank me and introduce himself since he had now joined forces with Tucker. He struck me as an extremely likeable person and when he invited me to a party that was being held later that night, I readily accepted. When I arrived, the likeable Pat Tate whom I had met just a few hours earlier had been replaced by a drugged-up, slurring zombie. He was in an alley that ran down the side of the house. His huge frame was propping up a wall. He was sweating so much, vapour was pouring from his head. The cold night air was visibly cooling him down, but his mood was a blazing inferno. He was rambling about people he wanted sorted out and other firms he wanted crushed. I put Tate’s rant down