New witness over gangland murders
1 November 2007

When a prosecution witness is given a more lenient sentence because he has given vital evidence against fellow criminals, there must always be an element of doubt attached to a verdict. Someone stands to gain by their own - perhaps tainted - testimony. More alarming in this case however has to be the fact that if the allegations raised by the defence solicitor are true, the police have once again put someone behind bars by hook or by crook.

Rettendon Two appeal refused on 22 February 2006

This case has now been referred to the appeal court by the Criminal Cases Review Commission
Key witness Darren Nicholls is now known to have made a deal before the trial with Granada TV to make a video diary, potentially worth £10,000 - £15,000. The programme was never made, and he actually received £1000.

Case may go to appeal - Independent, 25 Sept 2001

The Rettendon Two - A BBC News special investigation

'The truth will out' - Interviews in prison with Jack Whomes and Michael Steele by Chris Summers of BBC Online

'Jailed for life on the word of a liar' - Margarette Driscoll of the Sunday Times reports on the campaign to free the two men

My life as a supergrass - an interview with Darren Nicholls, who turned Queen's evidence, by Tony Thompson.

Tony Thompson has also written a book - Bloggs 19 - on 'supergrasses' and the role of Darren Nicholls in the case of the 'Essex Range Rover Triple Murders'. See book review 'Bloggs 19'

Prison in the age of the informant - Guardian article by Tony Thompson

See also:
Bernard O'Mahoney - Range Rover Murders - an eponymous site by the author of the book 'Essex Boys', which looks closely at the lives of the three victims

The case of one of Britain's most notorious gangland murders could be referred to the Court of Appeal because of the emergence of "new evidence" casting doubt on the credibility of the key witness.

The shooting of three drug barons in a Range Rover in the Essex countryside six years ago was one of the most ruthless killings in modern British criminal history.

The story of the deaths of gangsters Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe was later made into the film Essex Boys, starring Sean Bean.

Mick Steele, a known drug importer, and Jack Whomes, a car mechanic and insurance fraudster, were jailed for life for the murders in January 1998.

But yesterday the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) said it was preparing to have the case reviewed. A decision will then be made on whether the case is put back before the courts.

A solicitor acting for the two men claimed to have uncovered evidence that undermined the credibility of Darren Nicholls, a supergrass whose testimony was central to the prosecution case.

Nicholls, a police informant and drug dealer with convictions for dishonesty, testified that he had been the unwitting getaway driver in the killings after being called to a remote country lane by Whomes. He said Whomes and Steele had been covered in blood.

Nicholls made his confession after being stopped by police in a car that had cannabis worth £10,000 in the boot. He is now in hiding, having been given a new name under the police witness protection scheme.

Richard Hill, a solicitor, said: "When the evidence, or 95 per cent of the evidence, is from somebody who has been arrested in possession of a massive quantity of drugs, one has to be worried about that. New evidence has emerged which suggests there is a credibility issue over Nicholls."

Steele, 58, and Whomes, 39, have always maintained their innocence, although there are links between them and the murder victims. Whomes had met Tate and Steele while serving a 16-month sentence for fraud in Hollesley Bay prison. The prisoners, who were all from Suffolk and Essex, kept in touch. Tate, a bodybuilder, went on to become an enforcer for Tucker, who ran a security firm that controlled the drugs trade in clubs across Essex and parts of south London. Rolfe was also a violent underworld figure and drug dealer.

Nicholls alleged that Steele and Whomes, angry because an earlier drug deal had gone wrong, had lured their victims to the country lane in Rettendon, Essex, on the pretext of discussing a cocaine shipment. Tate, 37, Tucker, 38, and Rolfe, 26, were all shot through the back of the head. Their bodies were discovered in the Range Rover on a snowy December morning in 1995.

The police investigation that followed became high-profile because the murders were only a month after the death of Leah Betts, a policeman's daughter who had taken ecstasy at an Essex nightclub.

Two Essex officers, said to be linked to the Range Rover case but not to the police investigation, were suspended, pending disciplinary hearings. Detective Constable Wolfgang Bird resigned earlier this year and Detective Sergeant Phil Stimpson remains suspended.

An Essex Police spokesman said: "We shall co-operate with the CCRC should they decide that this is a case which warrants further action."

Two men are serving life sentences for the murder of three Essex drug dealers shot dead in a Range Rover parked down a quiet country lane. BBC News Online's Chris Summers went to meet them in prison and found them determined to prove their innocence.

If the story Jack Whomes and Michael Steele tell is true, they are the unwitting victims of a miscarriage of justice which has alarming repercussions for police conduct and the handling of "supergrasses".

Steele, 58, and Whomes, 39, were convicted of the murder of three Essex drug dealers, who were found shot dead in a Range Rover parked in a country lane in Rettendon, near Chelmsford in December 1995.

The victims, Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe were responsible for supplying the ecstasy tablet which killed teenager Leah Betts. A friend of hers had bought the fatal pill at a nightclub in Basildon which the three men controlled.

Five months after the murders Essex Police appeared to have drawn a blank.

But then Darren Nicholls, a registered police informer, was arrested in possession of 10kg of cannabis.

Facing a lengthy sentence, Nicholls turned Queen's evidence and gave police a statement saying he had taken and picked up Steele and Whomes from the murder scene.

In return for his testimony, Nicholls escaped a long jail sentence, was given a new identity and is now living somewhere in the UK.

Whomes and Steele have always denied they were in the lane. There was little to corroborate Nicholls' testimony save for some complex evidence about mobile phone calls - which appears to have been undermined by new tests carried out since the trial.

There was no forensic evidence linking them to the scene and no witnesses to corroborate Nicholls' story.

At their trial in January 1998 the judge, Mr Justice Hidden, told the jury they should treat Nicholls' evidence with "great caution".

He said: "So much hinges on what he said. You must bear in mind it was in his own interest to become a prosecution witness."

Since their conviction, a former cellmate of Nicholls at a special prison "supergrass" unit, has come forward and told Daily Mail journalist Jo-Ann Goodwin how Nicholls told him he had lied to police about what happened.

Steele said the prosecution had failed to prove a motive. The nearest they could come was a suggestion that Steele "got his retaliation in first" after hearing from Tate's ex-girlfriend, Sarah Saunders, that Tate planned to kill him.

But, questioned in the witness box, she denied ever having said it.

Furthermore Nicholls tried to claim the motive was tied up with £40,000 which Tate had borrowed from two IRA brothers, Billy and John.

Nicholls claimed Tate told the Irishmen he could not pay them back because Steele had ripped him off by selling him poor quality cannabis.

But Nicholls had to admit, at the trial, this could not be a motive because "Billy and John" were actually a couple of undercover RUC officers posing as IRA men who had been asked to "smoke out" Steele by Essex Police.

They made a series of threatening phone calls to Steele in February 1996 - two months after the murders.

As far as Whomes was concerned, the prosecution admitted he had no motive and suggested he had killed the men as a "favour" for his friend.

Steele, speaking from Full Sutton prison near York, said: "There is not one piece of evidence enough to convict me of the murders. I was not even near the place. There has been a conspiracy."

He has now applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission - Whomes' application is due in shortly - and is confident the case will be referred back to the Court of Appeal.

Whomes, interviewed at Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire, is also desperate to prove his innocence and says: "You don't know how many nights I have wet my pillow at night, crying at the thought of my wife and kids."

His solicitor, Trevor Linn, who handled the M25 Three's successful appeal, said: "There is a lot of unease in the legal profession about these convictions and I'm confident that it will be referred to the Court of Appeal and will be the next big miscarriage of justice. The truth will out."

A spokeswoman for Essex Police said they could not comment while disciplinary proceedings were ongoing in the case of two serving police officers.

She said she could not comment on any connection with the Rettendon case and said the force remained convinced the convictions were safe.

Most miscarriages of justice take decades to come to light. But the solicitor for the Rettendon Two - serving life for the murder of three gangsters in a Range Rover in 1998 - is convinced they were wrongly convicted, and is confident they will be cleared.

Some time during the night of 6 - 7 December 1995 three men - all career criminals - were blown away with a shotgun as they sat in a Range Rover parked in a remote farm track in Essex.

After a long trial at the Old Bailey, engineer Michael Steele and mechanic Jack Whomes were convicted largely on the word of police "supergrass" Darren Nicholls.

Nicholls was a former friend who claimed he had driven the pair to the scene and picked them up after the killing.

The informant, who had been charged with conspiracy to import cannabis, was later given credit for turning Queen's Evidence and was sentenced to 15 months in jail. He walked free in lieu of time he had served on remand.

But the families of the two convicted men, and their solicitor, Chris Bowen, say new evidence has undermined Nicholls' credibility and, without him, the conviction is unsafe.

Steele's case has now been referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has the power to refer it back to the Court of Appeal, and an application from Whomes will be made in due course.

Looking back at the scenes of crime photographs, it is truly horrific to see what a double-barrelled shotgun did to the handsome, chiselled features of drug barons Tony Tucker, Craig Rolfe and Pat Tate. From their relaxed body language - Rolfe was still holding the steering wheel - it is clear the killer struck with the maximum degree of surprise.

A month after the killings an East End villain, Billy Jasper, who had been arrested for an armed robbery, confessed to having been the getaway driver.

He claimed another criminal, Jesse Gale, gave him £5,000 to drive an accomplice, referred to for legal reasons as Mr D, to and from Workhouse Lane in Rettendon, Essex, where he was going to carry out a cocaine deal with the three men.

Jasper testified at the Old Bailey that he had agreed to the plan, but had not spotted Mr D's 9mm Browning pistol and a sawn-off shotgun when he first drove him to Workhouse Lane. He said it was only on collecting him that he saw the weapon and realised Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had been killed.

But Jasper did not fit in with Essex Police's line of enquiry - 54-year-old Michael Steele was already their prime suspect - and Jasper was never charged in connection with the murder.

Four months later, Nicholls told police he was the real getaway driver.

In January 1998 Steele and his friend, Jack Whomes, 36, were jailed for life for the murders.

Nicholls, like Jasper, claimed he was unaware of the true purpose of the trip until afterwards.

During the case, the trial judge, Mr Justice Hidden, said in his summing up to the jury: "Nicholls is a convicted criminal who was engaged in drug abuse and the importation of drugs into this country. You must bear in mind it was in his own interest to become a prosecution witness... he hopes to get less time to serve."

Long before the Rettendon murders Nicholls was a police informant who worked with a handler, referred to in court as Detective Constable A. DC A is suspended from duty pending a disciplinary hearing, but Mr Bowen has been refused permission to attend this hearing, to find out whether it impinges on his clients' convictions.

Earlier this year one of Nicholls' fellow "supergrasses" on the Protected Witness Programme in Woodhill prison near Milton Keynes came forward and spoke to the Daily Mail.

The man, known for legal reasons as Mr P, said Nicholls told him early in 1997 that the story he was supposed to tell in court was "a pack of lies". Nicholls asked Mr P if he should go through with it, and he replied: "If you're telling lies you better not get caught".

Mr P said he assumed Steele and Whomes were guilty and was not unduly bothered. "I thought there were forensics, witnesses. I could ignore Darren's perjury because I thought it was just the cherry on the cake. Now I realise Darren wasn't the cherry on the cake - he was the cake," he told the Mail.

There is also new evidence from a mobile phone expert which appears to undermine Nicholls' version of events.

Whomes called Nicholls at 6.44pm. Nicholls claimed this was Whomes ringing him from Workhouse Lane to say "come and pick us up" after the murders.

Whomes said he rang from the car park of a nearby pub to confirm he had picked up Nicholls' broken-down car.

David Bristowe, an independent forensic scientist, conducted a series of tests for the first time using Whomes' own mobile phone.

Of the 20 calls made from the pub car park more than a third connected via the Hockley transmitter, which he is known to have used, but none from Workhouse Lane did so.

Mr Bristowe told BBC News Online: "The new tests suggest Jack Whomes was telling the truth, and Darren Nicholls wasn't."

Timing was key to the case. The pathologist did not provide a time of death so Essex Police based their theory about the deaths on the fact that Tate, Tucker and Rolfe made no calls on their mobile phones after 7pm.

But by the same reasoning Steele and Whomes could have been dead after 7pm themselves, for their phones were not used either.

Jasper claimed the shootings took place late at night and two independent witnesses both heard gunshots at around midnight.

The later time of death would at least go some way towards explaining why the Range Rover was not iced over when it was found by farmer Peter Theobald and his friend Ken Jiggins at 8am on 7 December. Their own vehicle had been left outside all night and was completely iced over.

What is not in doubt is that the man responsible for the Rettendon murders must have been an expert marksman - all three victims were gunned down in seconds.

At the trial Nicholls claimed Whomes was the "shooter", with Steele only joining in to finish off the three men.

But Whomes' brother, John, told BBC News Online: "Jack is frightened of guns, ever since he was hit by a clay pigeon trap when he was a kid. My dad used to own guns but Jack never had one. He couldn't have done this."

Mr D, on the other hand, was a former soldier and a crack shot who won several regimental prizes.

In October 1997 Mr D's friend Jesse Gale was killed when he collided head-on with another car on the M20 in Kent.

Gale was wanted for questioning by a number of police forces but a friend of the family denied Gale was connected to the Rettendon murders. She said: "He was no Kenny Noye. He was a lovable villain with a bad temper and there is no way he had anything to do with those murders. They're clutching at straws."

The whereabouts of Jasper and Mr D are unknown but as Mr Bowen told BBC News Online: "It's not my job to prove who carried out these killings. My job is simply to prove my clients did not."

Whomes' brother John told BBC News Online: "If Jack had gone there to shoot those three men he would not take Nicholls and Steele. He would have taken me. We did everything together."

Steele's partner, Jackie Street, told BBC News Online there was "not a shred of evidence that supports the convictions".

Essex Police said: "The whole case was fully investigated and the men were sentenced. If anyone has any hard evidence they should contact us. But so far nothing has come our way which changes our views on the conviction."

Workhouse Lane was suffused with the gentle sound of birdsong last week. The secluded farmtrack, deep in the Essex countryside, ran with ribbons of water underfoot after weeks of rain. The remains of a small bunch of flowers - brown and desiccated now - on a rusty field gate was the only clue to what was once a scene of unimaginable horror.

In the first, bleak sunlight of December 7, 1995, two men were tramping through the snowy fields near the village of Rettendon, on the way to feed their pheasants, when they came across a dark blue Range Rover where the lane meets open fields. Its doors were closed, but its sunroof, strangely, open. Through the blood-spattered windscreen they saw the slumped bodies of three men, victims of a cold and calculated massacre.

Inside the car were Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe, local underworld figures. Tucker was head of a security firm that controlled the supply of drugs in nightclubs across Essex and south London, with a sideline in debt-collecting and punishment beatings. Tate, a bodybuilder, was Tucker's enforcer. Rolfe, shortly before his own death, had helped murder a small-time drug dealer who had crossed "the firm".

Each man had been shot through the back of the head, so swiftly that they had no time to react, let alone retaliate. Rolfe's hands were still on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake. Tucker was holding his mobile phone. Tate took a bullet in the stomach to immobilise him before he, too, was shot in the head.

Jack Whomes, 39, a local motor mechanic who had served time for insurance fraud, and Mick Steele, 52, a known drug importer, were convicted of the murders in January 1998 and given triple life sentences.

The conviction rested on the word of a "supergrass", Darren Nicholls, a paid police informer and drug dealer with convictions for dishonesty. Nicholls told the court a compelling story of being the unwitting getaway driver on the night of the killings. He said he had dropped Whomes off in Rettendon; then, at 7pm, Whomes called and asked to be picked up at the end of Workhouse Lane. There, Whomes and Steele got into the car, dripping with blood. Nicholls told a hushed Old Bailey courtroom: "Steele said he felt like the angel of death."

Whomes and Steele have always maintained their innocence. Whomes's brother, John, has campaigned tirelessly since they were arrested, but all of a sudden he has real hope. "The first pebbles have rolled over the precipice," he says. "Very soon, there'll be an avalanche."

New evidence suggests the story the men told of their whereabouts on the night of the murder is true and that Nicholls's account was the "pack of lies" he allegedly confessed it to be to a fellow supergrass before the trial. This man, an inmate on the supergrass unit at Woodhill prison, where all inmates are known as "Bloggs" to protect their identity (Nicholls was Bloggs 19), has now come forward. His name has been passed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has the power to send the case to the Court of Appeal.

Whomes admits he was in Rettendon on the night of the murder, but says Nicholls had asked him to fetch a broken-down car from the car park of the Wheatsheaf pub.

New sophisticated telephone tests suggest Whomes is telling the truth. Of 41 calls made by an expert - using Whomes's telephone - along the length of Workhouse Lane, none connected to the sector picked up by Whomes's call on the night of the murder. A third of calls made from the Wheatsheaf car park did.

The forensic engineer's report says it is "rather more likely that he [Whomes] was at the Wheatsheaf than in Workhouse Lane". Chris Bowen, the solicitor who represented the men at trial, is so convinced their convictions were a miscarriage of justice that he is working on their appeal without charge.

"Two men were convicted of a triple murder on the evidence of a man who was himself a suspect, a self-confessed liar, convicted criminal and dishonest police informant," he says. "Frankly, that is scandalous."

Nobody denies there were links between the men: in 1992, both Jack and John Whomes went to prison for helping a friend get rid of a car so she could claim on the insurance. They were sentenced to 16 months, for a first offence.

In Hollesley Bay open prison, John struck up a friendship with his cellmate, Pat Tate, and introduced him to Jack. After a fortnight, Tate and John were moved to another prison. Steele was also at Hollesley Bay, as was Nicholls. They all lived in the Essex/Suffolk area and kept in touch.

The Rettendon killings would have caused a sensation at any time, but the shootings came less than a month after the death of Leah Betts, the policeman's daughter who collapsed after taking an ecstasy tablet at her 18th birthday party.

By May, six months after the murders, the police seemed no closer to the killers; John Whomes believes it was desperation to close the case that led them to fall for Nicholls's story. "The idea that my brother would shoot someone is ridiculous," he says. "But if he did, he would take one person and one person only with him - me. We did everything together. He'd never have gone with Mick Steele or anyone else. I know, absolutely, without question, in my heart that he didn't do it. I will fight and fight till he gets out."

Nicholls was stopped that May accompanying a friend who had £10,000 worth of cannabis in the boot of his car. Facing many years in jail, he began to talk. Before his story - honed in more than 20 often-contradictory and confused statements - Whomes and Steele had not been serious suspects. An intelligence report compiled in the weeks after the murder has 167 entries. Steele's name appears twice, with informants suggesting that he, as an associate of Tate, might know who carried out the killings. Jack Whomes does not appear at all.

Police investigating the murder of Jill Dando, the television presenter, say they are looking for a man with a military background, someone well used to handling guns. She was a lone woman, taken by surprise. Tucker, Tate and Rolfe were highly dangerous men. In his summing-up, even the trial judge pointed out that whoever committed the murders must have been an expert marksman.

Yet Whomes says that, though his father and youngest brother have licensed shotguns (the family lived on a farm in Suffolk), Jack was never interested: "He's a mechanic. He's interested in how things work. When we was kids, my dad bought a clay pigeon trap. Jack was fascinated. He was pulling the arm around when it swung full circle, hit him on the neck and knocked him out cold. He's still got the scar. He never went near guns or clay pigeons after that."

The brothers spent every weekend together, parascending off the back of a speedboat they owned jointly: "I suppose people thought is was bought with drug money," says John, "but my half is still being paid on the mortgage and Jack's was paid up when his house was sold."

Darren Nicholls is in hiding. He has been moved with his family and given a new identity under the witness protection programme. John Whomes and Jackie Steele still hold out a faint hope that his conscience will get the better of him.

There is no doubt that some of his statements were untrue. At one time, he suggested Steele had murdered Tate because Tate had told a group of IRA men that Steele had stolen money they had put up for a drug run. He did not know that the "IRA men" were really undercover police involved in an elaborate sting. On police tapes, he says of Whomes and Steele: "I wanted them out of my life. I wanted to set them up."

Jack Whomes is in Whitemoor prison, Cambridgeshire. He is a top-security category AA prisoner, whose whereabouts must be logged every 15 minutes. He has learnt to read and write in prison, taken woodwork courses and started doing technical drawing on computers.

He has a good relationship with the prison officers. John says he and his brother are so alike that, when he went to visit recently, one joked that if he wanted to slip out the back door they'd keep John till he came back. "No way," said Jack. "When I leave here I'm going the right way - out the front door."

Darren Nicholls, petty criminal turned key witness in a notorious triple murder trial, has a new identity. But he's in constant fear of his life, he tells Tony Thompson

I cannot name the pub, the street, the town or even the county where the meeting with the supergrass takes place. I cannot talk about his car, describe his physical appearance, dress or the sound of his voice. I am forbidden from revealing details about his wife, family or place of work.

All I am allowed to say is that the man I am talking to was once an Essex-based petty criminal called Darren Nicholls and that today, more than three years after joining the Witness Protection Programme, he is still struggling to come to terms with his new identity. 'Sometimes, when I'm at work,' he says between gulps of Jack Daniels, 'some of my colleagues call out my name and I just ignore them. It takes a while before it clicks that it's me they want to talk to. Getting used to a new name is the hardest thing in the world.'

The villain formerly known as Darren Nicholls ceased to exist in spring 1996 after agreeing to break the ultimate criminal code: the unwritten law that you never grass on your mates. Eighteen months later, with a £250,000 price on his head, Nicholls gave evidence at an Old Bailey trial for one of the most notorious murder cases in British history.

The victims, Patrick Tate, 37, Tony Tucker, 38, and Craig Rolfe, 26, were found in a Range Rover in a country lane in the village of Rettendon, Essex, in December 1995. Each had been shot in the head with a shotgun at point-blank range, leaving their faces so badly pulped they could be identified only by their fingerprints. All three were well-known Essex 'faces': Tucker ran security for pubs and clubs, including Raquels, where the Ecstasy tablet that killed Leah Betts had been obtained a month before the murder. Tate had been released from prison six weeks before he was killed, having narrowly survived an assassination attempt the previous year. Rolfe, a small-time drug dealer and thug, featured regularly on local police intelligence reports.

The trio had fallen out with Michael Steele, a sophisticated Essex drug smuggler, whom they had paid £70,000 for a consignment of cannabis. When the drugs arrived, the quality was so bad they could not even be given away. A furious Tate boasted he would kill the smuggler in revenge, but Steele, who had developed a close friendship with Tate's ex-girlfriend, heard of the threats and decided attack was the best form of defence.

On the pretence of making amends, Steele offered Tate a share in a massive cocaine deal. Tate, along with Tucker and Rolfe, were invited to look at the farmer's field where the drug plane would land. As Rolfe's Range Rover reached a locked gate at the bottom of Workhouse Lane, Steele jumped out to open it and at the same instant Jack Whomes, Steele's right-hand man, leant in with a pump-action shotgun and began blasting.

Seconds later, Whomes called Nicholls on his mobile and asked him to pick the pair up. It was only when they climbed into the back of his car, spattered in blood, he realised what had happened.

'I think I knew all along that they were going to do it. Six weeks before the murder, Steele had asked me to get him a gun. He said Jack had a couple but they didn't want to use them. I asked a few people but didn't come up with anything. Then, as soon as it happened, I said to myself: "You stupid bastard, that was really fucking obvious." I know if I hadn't turned up that evening, it would probably not have happened. I suppose I just didn't want to believe they were capable of that.'

Nicholls had met Steele, Whomes and Tate a few years earlier while serving a prison sentence for distributing counterfeit currency. On his release, he joined Steele's smuggling organisation, making trips to Amsterdam and purchasing hundreds of kilos of cannabis which he drove to the Belgian coast. From there, he would meet up with Steele's speedboat. The drugs would be whisked across the Channel and landed on the Essex coast.

After the murder, Nicholls stopped smuggling, to distance himself from Steele and Whomes but, fearing he was an accessory to the killings, felt he had to continue selling drugs on Steele's behalf. As Whomes and Steele realised Nicholls was becoming a weak link, they insisted he got more involved or faced the consequences. A few days after a particularly nasty threat, the gang were arrested by a police and customs drugs operation. Nicholls was charged with murder and knew the only way out was to tell the truth.

'When I was giving evidence in the trial, I couldn't look at them in the dock. I really felt like I was letting them down. I really liked Mick and I thought he liked me. But in fact they were just using me. And now they hate me.'

Whomes and Steele are both serving triple life sentences for the killings. For Nicholls a threat remains. 'There's not much point in them killing me now. If I'm dead that won't get anybody off. What they might try to do is scare me into saying I was lying in court, so keeping my true identity secret is as important as ever.

'You start off with your new life and it's fine because no one knows anything about you.

'But if you've spent all your life hanging around with low life, and they are the people you feel most comfortable with, then wherever you go you end up drifting into the same circles. In some ways this new life is better than what we had before, but we liked what we had before. My little boy keeps saying: "Why can't we have our old name back? Why can't I call my friends? Why can't we go back to Essex?"

'One day he's going to want to get married. One day he's going to want to know why he doesn't have a birth certificate. And when it all comes out and he finds out his dad's a grass, he'll probably end up hating me too.'

Darren Nicholls's life changed at South Mimms service station, where he was arrested for distributing counterfeit money in 1992. In prison, he met Michael Steele and Jack Whomes. Six years later, Steele and Whomes were convicted of shooting dead three notorious villains in a Range Rover in a quiet Essex lane.

The key prosecution witness was Nicholls, a small-time criminal who, fearing for his life, turned supergrass. With Nicholls's co-operation, Thompson tells the gripping inside story of the build-up to the murders - the emergence of the Firm and the shifting power balance in the Essex underworld. On the witness protection programme, Nicholls became Bloggs 19, his old identity erased. In unsentimental prose, Thompson reveals the human cost of betrayal, of living a lie and always looking over your shoulder. An extraordinary insight into criminal society.

Criminals are grassing on each other as never before. Tony Thompson is the first journalist to visit the secret Parkhurst unit where they are held

The morning mail call at a top secret unit within Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight is a time of great confusion. A food parcel has arrived for Mr Bloggs. There are some fresh clothes for Mr Bloggs in the next cell.

Some magazines have arrived for the Mr Bloggs who has the cell by the kitchen area. There's a letter for the tough-looking black guy called Bloggs at the back. And there is a postcard for the short Turkish bloke who, along with the other 11 prisoners in the unit, is also called Bloggs.

The Protected Witness Unit does not officially exist. It is used exclusively to house members of major criminal gangs who have decided to break the underworld code and turn supergrass. In order to preserve their identities, all inmates are known simply as Bloggs followed by a number. Their true identities and reasons for being in the unit are known only to senior staff at the prison.

Britain's top criminals are increasingly providing the police with information about their rivals in order to get rid of the competition and improve their standing in criminal circles.

Should the 'informants' themselves then be arrested, they are increasingly using the fact that they have provided information in the past to claim substantial discounts on their own sentences. Police in some areas are so overwhelmed with the flow in information that they are able to pick and choose who to arrest.

It used to be that detectives would attempt to turn criminals into informers by letting them go for petty offences and telling them 'you owe me one now', but the police are now finding the criminals virtually queuing up to provide information.

One Essex detective who works in the Informants Unit said: 'I never believed the size of the information network that was out there until I started doing this job. We know what absolutely everyone is up to, down to how many ounces of puff they've got stashed under their floorboards.

'The only question is whether we act on it because there's so much information there we could spend our lives acting on it all. You wouldn't believe just how many grasses there are these days and just who some of them are.'

Darren Nicholls, the supergrass in the Essex triple murder trial - when three criminals were lured to their deaths in a country lane - spent nearly a year in the unit while waiting to give evidence. He was Bloggs 19. 'Everyone there has a price on their head,' he says. 'If we'd been kept anywhere else in the prison system, we would have been dead in a day. Someone would have paid some kid a couple of hundred quid to stab us in the showers or something like that.

'Even in the unit you have to be careful. You cook your own food just in case anyone in the kitchen finds out you're there and tries to poison you; you never meet any other prisoners, ever. Even when you exercise, you do it in a separate, fenced-off area that no other prisoners have access too.'

Even so, 'we all used to talk about what we'd done the whole time,' says Nicholls. 'Bloggs 7 was Chris Daniel, who went supergrass against a man called James Phillips, who ran a major gang of armed robbers across south London; Bloggs 3 was a crook set to be a witness in the shooting of a policeman; Bloggs 9 was a chemist who worked for this massive gang of ecstasy manufacturers.'

Nicholls met Michael 'Mickey The Pilot' Steele - one of the biggest drug smugglers in Essex - in prison while serving time for selling counterfeit money. After he was released, he joined Steele's smuggling gang and helped bring hundreds of kilos of drugs into the country.

After a dispute over poor quality cannabis, Steele and his friend Jack Whomes lured rival dealers Patrick Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe down a quiet Essex country lane and blasted them to death with a shotgun as the trio sat in their Range Rover. The killers then called Nicholls and asked him to pick them up from the murder scene. It was only when he saw their blood-spattered faces as they climbed into the car that he realised what had happened.

Nicholls, along with Steele and Whomes, was eventually arrested and provided the evidence which saw both men sentenced to 18 years. Now living under a new identity at a secret location, Nicholls discovered that he was not the only Bloggs who had continued to take an active part in criminal activity while informing to the police.

'My story was tame compared to some of the others,' claims Nicholls. 'People would talk about setting up a robbery and recruiting a gang to do it then tipping off the police about it. If you're at it in a big way, it makes a lot of sense to become an informer. If you get it right and you don't take the piss, the police will let you make a good living out of crime and keep you away from the courts just so long as you keep providing them with information.'

Another common scam is to approach the police and tell them you have been asked to take part in an armed robbery. They will register you as an informant and ask you to remain involved with the gang. The idea is that on the day of the job itself, the informant phones in sick or simply doesn't turn up and the rest of the gang get arrested. However, some informants have given false information about the date of the job. While the police are preparing for the raid, it takes place anyway. If they get away with it, the informant tells the police that they were not involved. If not, they 'grass up' the rest of the gang anyway.

'Informing means you can climb the criminal career ladder,' says Nicholls, 'and get rid of anyone who treads on your toes, but at the same time keep yourself out of trouble.'

Ivan Dibley, a former Detective Superintendent with Essex Police, said: 'Criminals soon catch on to the best way of operating. There is always a hidden agenda when someone informs. Either they want money, or they want to get off some charge, or they want to get rid of the competition because someone else is on their patch. You even get some villain who is knocking off the wife of some other villain and decides that the best way to clear the pitch is to get the husband locked up.'

Crimestoppers, the national phoneline for anonymous tips about criminal activity, confirmed to the Observer that drug dealers form the largest group calling to give information about other drugs dealers.

The most controversial aspect of criminals working as informants is that they are allowed to be paid for their services: tip-offs are worth up to £1,000 each, while Customs admit pay up to £1,000 per kilo for information leading to drug seizures.

One notorious case involved an armed robber's wife who collected a cheque for £25,000 just hours after shouting tearful abuse at the judges who sent her husband to prison for 15 years. Her marriage was not going well and she had decided to tell the police where her husband was.

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