In the first of a series of exclusive abridged extracts from his new book Hoods, journalist CARL FELLSTROM charts the rise of Colin Gunn and the Bestwood Cartel

DAVID and Colin Gunn grew up in Eastwood but when the opportunity arose to move to Bestwood, their mother grabbed the chance.

In part they were the clichéd by-products of a single-parent family, along with a brother and a sister.

One event in their formative years gives an early clue to the contradictions within them.

As youngsters they appeared in a local church magazine. A street robber had attacked a woman and made off with her purse. Colin and David gave chase and apprehended the man.

But at the same time as they were being have-a-go heroes, they had a reputation as bruisers in the school playground.

By the time they reached Padstow Comprehensive School, Colin Gunn was bully-in-chief, intimidating others with his cold, steely eyes.

AUDIO SLIDESHOW: The Stirlands' terrifying final moments - an extract from Hoods

By his teens, Colin was already carrying out burglaries on the estate and mixing with older people who were veterans of credit card and cheque fraud.

He was part of a gang run by the Dawes family, who later based themselves in Sutton-in-Ashfield, in north Notts, and was involved in cheque fraud worth thousands of pounds.

Colin, then in his late teens, received his first custodial sentence of six months.

By the early 1990s, now both in their mid-twenties, David and Colin were steadily clocking up convictions such as burglary, theft, handling stolen goods and violence.

Like other fledgling criminal gangs, they built up their enterprise by relying on the people they had grown up with and who they could trust.

All would become members of the Bestwood Cartel – a name coined by the gang itself. The brothers, too, were united.

One former associate said: "They looked after each other; they were pretty close in those days. David would be the only one who could get away with taking the piss out of Colin.

"Colin had this kind of compulsive obsessive fear thing about dirty ashtrays and fag ends and one stunt David would pull would be to fill up Colin's coat pockets in the pub with the contents of various ashtrays while he went off to the bog."

The Gunn brothers forged links with other criminal gangs while stepping up their activities in Bestwood, nearby Bulwell and Arnold.

Extreme violence

By the late 1990s, Colin Gunn was running a large criminal operation enforced by extreme violence. He was also beginning to use police officers extensively.

Some felt that the Gunns were looking after the estate in a perverse kind of way.

By 2001, such was Colin Gunn's reputation as a provider of good information that he was trailed by a police officer with a National Crime Squad background who wanted him to become a registered informant.

By this time Colin, who had been on steroids for more than a decade, was also using cocaine regularly – a combination which caused an escalation in his volatile behaviour.

One former associate said Gunn's favourite punishment was to have someone's hands held down while he smashed their knuckles with a hammer or baseball bat.

"Colin also used to get really paranoid about people looking at him when he went in the pubs. Some unfortunate would get a right pasting and sometimes they never knew why," the associate said.

According to former associates, Colin Gunn also had a penchant for teenage girls.

One woman, who fears for her life to this day, told me how she was first sought out by Gunn on a night out.

"The next thing I remember is waking up the next morning. He'd obviously drugged me," she said.

"And that's what would happen whenever I met him during those six weeks. He'd get me back to one of his flats and have sex with me while I didn't really know where I was."

One night Gunn tried to suffocate her, so she went to the police. She is now in witness protection.

"I know there's a bullet with my name on it," she said. "Sometimes I think I should just go back and take what's coming because I know they will find me."

Both Colin and David were capable of grandiose acts of compassion.

A number of people told me about regular incidents where Colin would pop cash into an envelope and card and post it to elderly people who were celebrating birthdays.

One year the brothers paid for a huge firework display on Guy Fawkes Night for all the community to enjoy.

These tales were not propagated by people who were part of the Cartel, these were genuine, law-abiding citizens who could see little wrong in the Gunn brothers.

More than that, people felt the Gunn brothers were doing the job the police should have been doing.

Colin became increasingly unstable and erratic. He would sometimes explode at the slightest thing and usually lashed out at the first person he saw, leaving others to pick up the pieces and wrap the broken bones.

His psychotic alter-ego was beginning to surface more frequently than his community-spirited, Robin Hood persona, and he was starting to believe in his own myth as a type of real-life Tony Montana in Scarface.

Colin Gunn made an ill-fated trip into the centre of Nottingham on a stag night in October 1998.

The group ended up at the Astoria nightclub, near the Broadmarsh Centre, and a huge fight erupted, ending with Colin and another Cartel member beating another man senseless.

The victim pursued GBH charges and apparently CCTV footage of the incident was held by the nightclub.

A warrant was issued for Gunn's arrest, but he used a contact to destroy the CCTV tapes.

At a later date he was able to call on a doctor who concluded Gunn's violence was caused by a reaction to prescription drugs.

Colin Gunn was given a few hundred hours' community service instead of a potential prison sentence of five years. He asked an imposter to complete it.

The same year, Colin and David's sister was given community service after punching a teacher in a dispute at her son's school.

Meanwhile, David Gunn was jailed for four years and nine months after brutally attacking a man who had dared to get into a row with his wife, Sandie.

Now Colin would have to run the Cartel without the support of his brother and without the stabilising influence that some of the Cartel believed David brought to Colin's decision-making.

He set about recruiting drug dealers who could negotiate their way through the tribal ganglands of The Meadows, St Ann's and Radford.

Having seen three members of the Gunn family convicted of criminal offences within a single year, the police were about to embark on an operation which, had it been followed through to its logical conclusion, might have halted David and Colin's growing influence in its tracks and perhaps saved lives.

The operation would be called Opal and it already had in its sights the very dealers Colin Gunn was recruiting.

But Colin was also working on an audacious plan that he hoped would protect the long-term future of the Cartel and their associates. Its success would eventually leave a trail straight back to his door, but for a time it would help the Cartel stay a step ahead of the police.

Copyright Carl Fellstrom©