When asked about what the future held for those who ratted out the New York mob, Henry Hill, gangster turned protected witness, said:
“See, your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who've cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time that you're at your weakest and most in need of their help.”
If assassins come with smiles, so do character assassins. And the way my colleague, Carl Fellstrom, an investigative reporter, got fucked says something about the dangers of reporting on organised crime in the UK.
As some of you will no doubt come to think, it also says something about Carl, who let his guard down, made a mistake, did something he shouldn’t have done, at least not in those circumstances.
The assassin’s smile in Carl’s case was the lure of real information, which some reporters crave like junkies. In doing so it makes us vulnerable to being pulled onto a meet with offers that cannot be refused, such as a document or an insight into the very thing we are hooked on.
And that’s exactly what happened to Carl, no cub reporter but an old head who’d done his time at news agencies and the red tops when Fleet Street was a thing.
Carl’s specialism is the leading Midlands crime families who turned Nottingham into a shooting gallery over the drug trade.
The reporter had married an independently wealthy women who was willing to bankroll a sabbatical to finish a book, his first, which Carl had started writing in 2004 but remained unfinished in 2007, when they moved in together.
The book took a while longer to produce. In part because of waiting for criminal trials to end and also because Carl no longer had deadlines and editors telling him what to do. In their place were expensive holidays, restaurants, bottles of wine and an engaging wife to share them with.
But she was no soft touch and expected him to keep up his end of the deal. They both knew he needed a kick up the arse, as most writers do, so she effectively locked him in a room everyday and let him out only when he had pages to read over a glass of wine and a log fire at the end of the day.
It worked, and in November 2008 Hoods was published by Milo Books. The blurb on the back said this:
In 2004, the murder of a middle-aged couple in their village bungalow lifted the lid on the great untold story of British organised crime. The slaughter of Joan and John Stirland revealed an evil empire of powerful ganglords, contract killings and police corruption. At its dark heart was the East Midlands city of Nottingham.
A prosperous centre of business, education and leisure, Nottingham had fallen under the shadow of vicious gangsters. Eventually its police were investigating so many murders that their boss had to appeal to other forces for help, and the influx of drugs and weapons saw the city labelled "Gun Capital UK".
[My book] traces the roots of the gangs, revealing how economic dislocation and the clash of cultures between working-class white residents and black immigrants from the 1950s onwards created an alienated underclass. In the 1990s, a more malignant breed of organised criminal emerged. Crime families who had been involved in armed robbery, protection rackets and extortion now sought to control the recreational drugs trade and forged links across Europe to import wholesale quantities of cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines. By 2002, shootings were running at one a week.
As local police struggled to cope with the mayhem, MI5 and the National Crime Squad launched a massive undercover investigation into the Nottingham ‘untouchables’. It led ultimately to the dismantling of some of the UK’s most powerful crime networks.
Carl’s penetrating expose stood apart from the gangster-porn and make believe of the True Crime genre.
Unlike in the US and Europe, British publishers have caperised organised crime rather than seeing it as a window into the soul of a society gone or going wrong.
In short, the genre of True Crime here is populated by characters who mostly don’t exist saying amazing things that can’t be checked. It is a genre of heavily made up works of fiction sitting in the non-fiction section of a bookshop.
Hoods is not that kind of book. Carl had solid sources in the police and the underworld, and because of it he had earned the enmity of both. There were documents and court transcripts too, plus the personal testimony of victims of gangland violence.
Carl had taken on the top two family-based organised crime groups in his backyard - the Gunns and the much more powerful Dawes syndicate.
Neither took kindly to his work, which is why, a few years after Hoods was published, Carl Fellstrom had to be fucked back.