When gangster turned author Dave Courtney was found dead last month in the east London terrace that he had transformed into a crenellated castle, it was not a shock to his inner circle.
Courtney, said to be the inspiration for Vinnie Jones’s character Big Chris in the crime comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, had been planning his exit for months.
He was 64, had been in severe pain from rheumatoid arthritis and was saddled with several other serious health issues, including prostate cancer and treatment for a replaced heart valve.
Despite Courtney’s repeated claims that the arsenal of weapons at his house, “Camelot Castle”, were all decommissioned, he found a pistol that worked and turned it on himself. His friends and family said they wished he could have avoided a violent end – and that others in ill health had options too.
His wife, Jennifer Pinto, 54, who remained married to him after they separated, said: “He couldn’t take the pain … And because Dave Courtney was Dave Courtney, he had the ways and the means.”
She said of assisted suicide: “I do wish the option could have been there, because it’s inhumane … I remember we went to go and see Reggie Kray. He’d had a stroke so his mouth was open … and people were lining up to take pictures of him. He had no control of it whatsoever. And Dave said: ‘Don’t let that be me.’”
On the day his body was secretly sent off in a van to be cremated last week, his friends and family gathered in his Plumstead front room.
His lodger and longtime friend, Brendan McGirr, 56, found Courtney dead in his bed on 22 October. McGirr said that since July, Courtney had been filming farewell videos for his family, and that he had been open about his desire to go.
His arthritis medication had stopped working, he was in serious pain and did not want his health to deteriorate further. Previous prostate cancer treatment had made him impotent and his heart condition meant he could not take Viagra any more, leaving him frustrated at not being able to use the “sex dungeon” he had constructed in his front garden.
Sitting beneath dozens of wall-mounted weapons and a portrait depicting Courtney as an angel with wings, a golden halo and matching knuckle dusters, McGirr said the gangster told him: “I can’t fuck and I can’t fight, so I’m bored and I’m in pain every day.”
In a video shared online by his family, Courtney explained his reasons, saying: “I am hurting and disguising a lot of pain.”
Speaking about legalising assisted dying for the seriously ill, McGirr added: “Dave would have taken that option, and would have had his family there with him surrounded, and he would have been able to do it properly and say goodbye.
“I just think that the extra suffering that he’s had and mental stress that he’s had to have because of that … could have been avoided [if the law was different]. I do think if anything comes out of his passing, it should be a debate on assisted euthanasia.”
Courtney’s case would not meet the criteria that most campaigners for a change in the law on assisted dying want. While the majority of the public support legalising euthanasia, that is only if strict conditions are met, such as the patient having a terminal condition.
McGirr and Courtney shared moments of black humour over choosing his last day. After one recent Charlton Athletic game, McGirr said: “He could hardly walk, the arthritis was really bad” and their team had just lost three-nil. “I went: ‘If you’re thinking of doing it tonight, I might join you,’ and he said: ‘Fuck it, nah, I can’t be bothered now.’”
In the end, Charlton beat Reading 4-0 the afternoon before Courtney made his exit.
Wearing the gold knuckle duster and crucifix necklace he gave her as a present, his most recent girlfriend, Angela Hoy, 62, described their first meeting at a ball five years ago. “He came over and I was 57 and I said to him, ‘Mate, unless your cock’s made of chocolate and spits out money, I’m not interested.’ He laughed and came back an hour later with a hollow Lindt rabbit on his willy and a £20 note hanging off of it.”
Courtney, who confessed in a video released after his death to murdering a drug-dealing rival and once attacking five Chinese waiters with a meat cleaver, was described by friends as “like an angel”. They said he recently paid for a homeless woman’s dinner in a cafe and had previously paid off bailiffs for the father of a doorman.
Courtney claimed to have organised the security for Reggie Kray’s funeral, among other notorious gangsters, but did not want a big one of his own. McGirr explained: “He said: ‘Look, the funeral, this is how I want to do it. I don’t want one.’ He went on: ‘My funeral will be a fucking fiasco,’ adding: ‘I’m going to have 20 or 30 different birds, I’ve got all that ag.’”
Pinto said they met in 1989 when she was an MC at a club that he owned in south London. He was smoking marijuana and she asked him how he was able to, without realising he was the owner. “He didn’t say a word to me – he just gave me the joint,” she said.
In June 2004, Courtney was cleared of beating Pinto, which was reported as being over a lesbian affair with their friend, Angela Bostock, before Bostock successfully sued for libel. Pinto said the episode had been misreported and that she and Courtney had remained friends, and Courtney had driven her to cancer treatments last year.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
