Free Bonded by Blood by Bernard O'Mahoney Page B

to the fact he was celebrating his release and had taken too many drugs, but I was not the only one his behaviour had alarmed.
    Tate’s arrival was met with resentment by many firm members. A man named Chris Wheatley had returned from America some time before Tate’s release. Tucker had latched onto him, becoming a ‘close’ friend and giving him control of the door of Club Art, one of his clubs in Southend. When Tate was released, however, Tucker dropped Chris as if he didn’t exist. He also began to badmouth him to other doormen, casting doubt on his ability and sneering at the way he handled incidents that arose at the club. I really liked Chris and couldn’t understand why Tucker behaved the way he did. There was no room for sentiment in the firm, though: Chris had fallen from grace and Pat Tate was to take his place.
    Others who had no reason to dislike Tate felt their position was threatened. Few felt comfortable about his appointment because he had a domineering attitude and an explosive temper. Tucker, on the other hand, was loving every minute of it. He enjoyed pitching people against one another. On one occasion a doorman from Chelmsford mentioned in conversation that he thought another doorman named JJ was a police informant. JJ was a good, decent man who had known Tucker for years but that counted for nothing in our firm.
    Tucker rang JJ and arranged a meeting with him outside McDonald’s in Chelmsford. Then he told the other man that if he thought JJ was a grass, he should confront him and not talk about him behind his back. The accuser was allowed to arm himself with a machete and was taken to the meeting at McDonald’s. Fearing he was going to lose face, he accused the unsuspecting JJ of being a grass in front of Tucker. JJ denied it, of course.
    ‘He’s just called you a fucking grass,’ said Tucker. ‘What are you going to do about it? I’d fucking hit him if he said that to me.’
    JJ, an unwilling combatant, threw a half-hearted punch and the other man responded by slashing JJ’s arm with the machete. JJ fled. You didn’t get a P45 in our firm.
    One evening, I received a telephone call from Steve and Nathan. They were with Thomkins. They told me they were having trouble with some doormen from Bristol who, seeing them driving round in a BMW and knowing they had a flat in London, wanted to get in on the act. I told them I would make some phone calls and sort it out. I rang the doormen and told them to leave it out with Steve, Nathan and Thomkins otherwise they would have trouble. I gave them the impression the trio was working for a much bigger operation. We knew the Bristol doormen’s names and where to find them. They didn’t have a clue who we were or where we were from, which put us in quite a powerful position. The doormen argued that Steve, Nathan and Thomkins were the cause of the trouble, but they said it wasn’t worth falling out over and the matter would come to an end.
    The next morning, I got a frantic phone call from Steve and Nathan. They said they had been driving through Bath in their BMW when they had been flagged down. They were dragged from the car by two men, who informed them that they were taking the vehicle and keeping it. Steve and Nathan told me they wanted their car back, but they were scared of the thieves.
    I said to them that if we were to go down to Bath to recover a car, we would have to go firm-handed because we wouldn’t know what we were up against until we got there. I asked them how many men we’d need and they said if I could get ten down there, they would pay us all £300 each. I asked for a contact number for the man who had taken the car and said I’d be down that evening with ten people. I told them to stay out of the way until the matter was resolved.
    The man holding the car was called Billy Gillings. He had a reputation in the area as a hard man and had just come out of jail for robbing a security van. I rang Billy and asked him if he had Steve