Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters Read Online Free PDF

face with an ashtray. O’Brien, who was with his mate, 31-year-old Gary Salmon, retreated to Salmon’s flat nearby, where they changed into dark clothes and balaclavas. They also picked up a single-barrel shotgun to commit what was to become the seventeenth shooting in Nottingham that August.
    Back at The Sporting Chance, four men left the premises and climbed into a silver Renault Laguna car. At the wheel was Marvyn Bradshaw. Sitting beside him was his longtime friend Jamie Gunn. As the car edged out of the car park, a shot was discharged and Bradshaw, hit in the head, slumped sideways. He died later in hospital; having been shot from such close range, death from the head wound was inevitable. The lad had most certainly been killed in a case of mistaken identity. Indeed, neither he nor Jamie Gunn had been involved in the ashtray incident.
    After the shooting, the two men returned to Salmon’s flat where O’Brien boasted to two teenage girls, ‘I shot him… he was a bad man.’ Scared to death, they contacted the police. The loud-mouthed O’Brien’s bragging proved to be his downfall, and that of his parents, too.
    As the result of the shooting, the Stirlands were forced to flee their Nottingham home after several shots were fired into their living room. Thugs had warned the coupleto leave the area or ‘stay and face the consequences’. They immediately packed up a few possessions and left without telling friends where they were going.
    First, they moved to Humberside, but it is believed that they may have been forced, once again urgently, to abandon their new home because they turned up at a second address, a bungalow in Trusthorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast, in December 2003, with only the clothes they stood up in.
    In April 2004, they told Nottinghamshire Police that they had moved and senior officers in Lincolnshire were made aware of the problems and their background.
    In July, their son, 23-year-old O’Brien, was sentenced to life for murdering Marvyn Bradshaw. O’Brien rubbed salt into the wounds of the dead man’s parents, taunting them from the dock, ‘I’m not bothered, I’m a bad boy. It means nothing to me. Your son looked like a doughnut with a big hole in his head. I know where you live.’ Before being escorted away, he threw a beaker of water towards Mr and Mrs Bradshaw, screaming, ‘I will do my time standing on my head.’ Quite understandably, Colin Gunn was livid when he heard of this.
    Three days later, 53-year-old Mrs Stirland rang Nottinghamshire Police to say that fresh threats had been made against her and her family. Lincolnshire Police were informed the next day. Despite this, when she rang Nottingham Police at 11.30am on Sunday to say that there had been a prowler in her garden the previous night, the police did not consider it immediately necessary to inform their neighbouring force. Instead, an officer Mrs Stirland knew rang her back at 2.00pm. After a seven-minute conversation, the officer called Lincolnshire Policeto tell them of the prowler, but did not ask for a patrol car to drive past the bungalow. She did not want to call 999 because she didn’t want police cars swooping on the house and alarming her neighbours.
    Within minutes of speaking to the Nottinghamshire officer, and almost three hours after first reporting the prowler, the Stirlings were shot dead. Two men wearing blue boiler suits were seen in the vicinity of the murder scene. Witnesses described them walking or running away from the bungalow while a black Volkswagen Passat was parked nearby with its hazard lights flashing. The car was later found ablaze in a quiet country lane. The two men were spotted close by. The car had been stolen on 31 July, from Nottinghamshire.
    Chief Constable Green said, ‘The ruthlessness with which Gunn tracked the Stirlands down after they fled Nottingham was characteristic of a man who led a bloodthirsty and violent regime.’
    But, the question now was: how had Gunn tracked down