Five years for gun threat to cab driver

Five years for gun threat to cab driver
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=567722
Published on 23/11/2007

Prison:David Wardle admitted blackmail

By Staff Reporter

A MAN who threatened a Carlisle taxi driver with a gun after refusing to pay a £70 fare has been jailed for five years.

David Wardle, 36, pulled a gun on driver Matthew Champney in Workington and held it to his cheek.

Mr Champney thought the imitation revolver was real and, according to a judge at Carlisle Crown Court yesterday, was “terrified out of his wits”

Wardle, of Station Road, Workington, had originally denied being the man holding the gun and only admitted it after Mr Champney had given evidence at a trial last month.

Then he pleaded guilty to blackmailing Mr Champney by demanding that he drove off without being given the £70 he was owed, and to possessing an imitation gun while committing a crime and breaching the terms of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (Asbo) imposed on him two years ago to stop him behaving in a violent manner.

In mitigation his barrister Brendan Burke said Wardle lived “a shambolic, chaotic lifestyle” made worse by his alcohol problems and his addiction to the painkillers he used after breaking his back in a motorbike crash.

During the trial Mr Champney told the jury he picked up Wardle, another man and two women from the Sportsman pub in Carlisle, knowing his office had already told them the trip would cost £70.

He said Wardle, who was sitting in the front, behaved strangely on the 35-mile journey, and played a CD so loudly on the car stereo that he thought the speakers would fail. Then Wardle put together a collapsible walking stick, removed its rubber bung and threatened to poke his eye out with the exposed metal spike.

“I was so scared I nearly pulled into a lay-by and got out of the car,” he said.

When they arrived outside his first floor flat, Mr Champney said, Wardle said he would go into the house to get the money.

But instead an older relative, Dale Wardle, who lived in the downstairs flat, came out to tell him he would only get paid if he returned for the money next day.

After Mr Champney said that was not good enough, David Wardle returned, leaned through the open car window and pointed the gun at him. “He held the pistol to my right cheek and said ‘This is your proof you are not getting paid’,” the taxi driver said.