Dave Courtney
Bling-toting gangster who developed a flourishing career as celebrity author, actor and style guru
DAVE COURTNEY, who has died aged 64, was a nightclub bouncer, knuckle-duster wielding debt collector and latter-day henchman of the Kray brothers; he was nicknamed “Yellow Pages” for his gangland connections – until he decided to adopt the persona of mediafriendly mobster, publishing a best-selling true crime memoir and making a living from television documentaries, films and speaking engagements, while also raising money for charity.
Courtney’s criminal resumé included an attempt to steal a spider monkey from Crystal Palace Zoo, and an incident in 1980 involving six Chinese waiters, a meat cleaver and a Samurai sword, which led to a year in Belmarsh (an initial charge of attempted murder was dropped).
His website boasted of his involvement in crimes including murder, assault, theft, robbery, fraud and unlicensed fighting. He had, he claimed, been found not guilty in 19 separate trials, including one for murder in 1989 when he announced on the steps of the court after the verdict that he was, in fact, guilty.
Along the way he claimed to have been shot, stabbed and had his nose almost bitten off in a pub brawl (“I’ve got holes all over my body”). In interviews he explained that he had had to kill to stay alive: “I don’t enjoy killing people. But… it’s like playing football. The more you do it, the easier it gets.”
A 1991 BBC profile of the self-professed “hard man” was said to be the inspiration for Vinnie Jones’s character in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 black comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and in 1999 Courtney penned the first of six books, Stop the Ride I Want to Get Off, a memoir serialised in a tabloid newspaper under headlines such as “I STUCK A FORK IN HIS HEAD”.
Since most of the stories of mayhem came from the man himself, it was difficult to know how much to believe. He referred to himself as Dave Courtney OBE – “One Big Ego”. His other nickname was “Dodgy”, and in 1999, when his likeness was included in “Cons to Icons”, a show of busts by Nick Reynolds, sculptor son of Great Train Robber Bruce, “Mad” Frankie Fraser (the infamous Richardson gang enforcer) objected that Courtney had no right to a place in the criminal pantheon, claiming that he was “a grass” [police informer].
Indeed, during a 2000 trial at the Old Bailey, when he was cleared of being part of a plot to plant cocaine on an innocent woman, Courtney was named as a registered police informant under the alias “Tommy Mack”. He always denied being a grass, of course, insisting in his case that he simply took advantage of the system to disguise a relationship with a corrupt detective.
Yet Courtney certainly established impressive contacts in the criminal underworld, albeit after most of them had ended up behind bars or on the run. The index to his memoirs was littered with such names as Caesar the Geezer, Fred the Head, Bulldog Dean, Eight Ball Pete, Jimmy Five Bellies, Jack “The Hat” Mcvitie and John “Mad Dog” Mangan; there were 23 entries under “B” for “Big”.
Courtney was four years old at the time of the Great Train Robbery, yet in 1999, dripping in gold bling, he attended the 70th birthday party of Ronnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro, where he delivered a hand-made card from Charles Bronson, Britain’s most dangerous inmate. “For want of a better word, it’s romantic,” Courtney said, tears in his eyes. “I feel like I’m living a part of history.”
By his own account, the high point of Courtney’s criminal career was being asked by Reggie Kray to organise the security at the 1995 funeral of brother Ronnie. It was, he said, “an honour”: “They were from the old school and I had always had the highest regard for both the twins.”
The occasion drew huge crowds and went more peacefully than might have been expected, Courtney cutting a prominent figure in the cortege in a floor-length, £5,000 cashmere silk-lined Versace coat – “like Darth Vader”. Inspecting the regiment of bouncers recruited for the event, he mused that “with this lot, I could have invaded Poland.” Afterwards he took 40 of his “boys” on holiday to Tenerife to celebrate.
When he returned, however, he found that many of those he had employed to work as doormen and bouncers at clubs across London had been sacked, claiming that the police had threatened to close down establishments that employed men working for a “member of the Kray gang”, even though “when they were in their heyday I was in a pram chewing a rusk.”
“Ronnie’s funeral,” he reflected later, “was the end of an era – and the beginning of my transformation from infamy to celebrity.” In any case the world of organised crime was not what it had been: “I loved the excitement of being a gangster, the code of honour, the flash cars, smart suits. Now drugs has changed all that. How can you respect someone who’d nick their mother’s telly to get their next fix?”
David John Courtney was born in Bermondsey on February 17 1959 to respectable working-class parents. His father, a Scout leader, worked for the gas board; his mother, an “Akela” in the Cub Scouts, was a store detective at Woolworth’s. “I wish I could blame coming from a deprived background,” he once said, “but I can’t. I came from a loving family and I broke my mum and dad’s hearts… I was born naughty. I wanted to be a villain.”
At school, he stole charity money donated by parents to help Biafran children, diversifying into shoplifting, stealing cars, snatching wages and collecting door-todoor for non-existent sponsored swims. After expulsion from school he worked as a department-store window dresser, a period of employment soon terminated when he was caught stealing from the store.
He became a kind of rent-a-yob and was soon supplying the security guards for London nightclubs as well as travelling as far afield as Australia to collect debts, working on commission of 50 per cent. When one debtor proved reluctant to part with money, Courtney cut off his finger.
His reason for becoming a criminal was simple: “I wanted the nice clothes, the flash jewellery, the cars, holidays.” But there was a problem: “The bigger and better crime you do, the less you can tell people about it and the less you can spend… I didn’t become a criminal because I wanted to keep a low profile. I’m an ego-junkie, I like the glamour.”
His yen for celebrity was satisfied when he began making a living from appearances in television documentaries and low-budget British gangster films. “It is a sad indictment of something that Dave is the television natural,” lamented one critic.
He also starred in and produced his own film, Hell To Pay, featuring several underworld friends and Sally Farmiloe – one-time star of Howard’s Way. Other acting credits included The Baby Juice Express (2004), a crime comedy about sperm smuggling in Bognor Regis; Mike Mccarthy’s 2006 comedy Six Bend Trap; and The Dead Sleep Easy (2007), about wrestling and people smuggling, filmed on location in Mexico.
In addition he wrote columns for Front,a rival to the lads’ mag Loaded, recorded a version of I Fought the Law with the Scottish punk band Mute, addressed the Oxford Union and cultivated a sideline as “gangster chic” style guru.
“The old-fashioned days of all gangsters wearing black, it ain’t like that any more,” he told The Independent in 2000. “That old gangster image that the Kray twins wore? It would be very hard to walk round like that now. You’d actually look a bit of a prat, with everyone else in Versace, Hugo Boss and Armani, and you’re sitting there with a black suit and a white shirt.”
He himself boasted a wardrobe of more than 100 suits, including several white silk numbers, and was proud of his collection of gold bling: “I have a bracelet worth nearly £90,000 on one hand, and a bracelet worth 10 grand on the other… I’ve got a solid gold knuckleduster with diamonds – and I’m sorry about the bits of skin in it… Just a joke.”
Courtney’s south London house in Plumstead, called Camelot Castle, was adorned with a huge mural of a bald-headed bloke looking remarkably like the owner, dressed as King Arthur on a white charger. Inside, it rattled with guns, swords and suits of armour and was furnished with a “sex dungeon”.
Last year he apologised to neighbours after a peacock escaped his garden and “ran amok” in the neighbourhood. “I didn’t know they could fly,” he explained. “I thought it was like a chicken or something.”
Courtney was reported to have done much work for charity, especially those concerned with helping children with ADHD. He was a patron of Autistic Inclusive Meets (AIM) and of Misunderstood, a children’s ADHD charity, and was said to have done work with the Prince’s Trust.
But old habits die hard. In 2004 he headed the funeral cortege of Tony Lambrianou, a junior associate of the Krays, riding a Harley Davidson. The same year he was tried, though later cleared, for attacking his third wife Jennifer Pinto (a rap artist known as Jennybean) over an alleged lesbian affair.
In January 2009 he was given an 18-month conditional discharge after admitting possessing live ammunition. Later the same year he was declared bankrupt and was subsequently acquitted at the Old Bailey of three charges of possessing prohibited weapons.
Courtney was married three times. His first two marriages, to Susan Ray and Annette Barn, were dissolved and he was separated from his third wife, Jennifer Pinto.
He is survived by his partner, Angela, and by three sons and two daughters. A stepson, Genson, a drug dealer, was shot dead in 2011: his uncle, David Pinto, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his murder.
A journalist who visited Courtney’s home in 1999 noted a tombstone by the front door which read “Dodgy Dave Courtney. One flash bastard but a nice flash bastard. Born 17.2.59. Died: Never.”
On Monday, however, a statement posted by his family on Courtney’s social media read: “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Dave Courtney at the age of 64. Dave tragically took his own life in the early hours of Sunday 22nd October, with a firearm.” He had reportedly been suffering from cancer and arthritis.