Bouncers and Bodyguards

by Robin Barratt

  One day, we were chatting when a black man came into the cell and interrupted us, asking if we had any ‘burn’ (dope). From his sock, John took out a blade he had made from two toothbrushes melted together with a lighter and told the guy to fuck off or he would stab him there and then and leave him to bleed. We then returned to our discussion as though nothing had happened. He would have killed him just because he’d interrupted our conversation. John had nothing to lose. That is what it is like in prison.

  Lifers who will never get out, who have no family, who no one writes to, who have nothing and who have nothing to lose make their life a little better by intimidation and running the prison as best they can. Their only home is prison, which is why they are the way they are.

  Lisa wrote to me every single day while I was inside. I could not have done it without her. A lot of problems with prisoners is that they don’t have anyone to keep them strong. They get depressed and try to hang themselves. They self-harm. They don’t wash. They stink.

  Compared to Norwich Prison, Britannia House is brilliant. It is really for people who have only made one mistake and shouldn’t have been put in prison in the first place. In Britannia House, you eventually become a human being again, and after a while you can do charity work or get a day job. However, you have to work hard to get to Britannia House – you have to be a listener or a Samaritan, you have to keep out of trouble and you have to be seen to be a bit of a mentor to other people. It was a little bit easier for me, because I was well known around Norwich and well respected, and I became a mentor to a lot of young people coming into prison. Usually, if you do all of these things, you can get to Britannia House after about half of your sentence, but I was transferred in just ten months, mainly because I stayed in Norwich and used my reputation and the people I knew.

  At Britannia House, you are allowed out every day, but you have to report back every night for the duration of your sentence. It is still prison, and if you don’t return one night or are late, or if you do something wrong, you are sent straight back to Norwich Prison. You can lose your place in Britannia House just like that. There could be an argument in which someone gets hurt and you get sent back to proper prison just for being a witness. Or if you get stopped when on day release for not wearing a seat belt or for not having a tax disc on your car – in fact, if you have any kind of run-in with the police at all – that will be it.

  I sometimes stop at The Prince of Wales, the last venue I worked at, on my way back to Britannia House. If there has been an argument, part of me wants to sort it out, but the other part says, ‘I am invisible. I am not here.’ Because of who I am, I could so easily get dragged in. While I am in Britannia House, I have to be whiter than white.

  One of the most moving and emotional experiences I had while in prison was on my first New Year’s Eve inside. Because I could see into the car park, Lisa told me she would come and visit me. I kept looking for her and eventually saw her waving up at me. On the stroke of midnight, and just as the fireworks exploded nearby, she shouted, ‘I love you, Bob.’ Suddenly, one of the other prisoners shouted, ‘She loves you, Bob.’ A few seconds later, the whole prison was filled with the noise of inmates banging their mugs on the railings and shouting, ‘She loves you, Bob. She loves you, Bob.’

  I would never be allowed to work the doors any more, but, to be honest, I don’t think I want to. Prison has allowed me to get out of the door game. I did almost 27 years and left the industry with my reputation and more importantly my dignity intact.

  BIOGRAPHY OF BOB ETCHELLS

  Bob Etchells started working the doors when he was just 17 years old at The Festival House, one of the toughest pubs in Norwich at that time. He ended his career in 2005 when he was charged and found guilty of possessing a firearm. For almost 27 years, Bob ran some of the toughest and busiest clubs and pubs in Norwich, as well as following his managers to work the doors with them in Plymouth and the Welsh borders. However, Norwich was his home, and he always came back.

  Bob ran a number of door companies, at one time employing over 50 doormen throughout the region, as well as providing debt-collecting and other security-related services. He has never applied for his SIA badge, nor is he ever likely to.

  Bob will soon be due for parole.

  10

  LETTER FROM IRAQ

  BY ALEX POWELL

  It was mid-december. Christmas decorations sparkled annoyingly in every shop window and on every street corner. Stupid-looking Santas stood in shopping malls and on high streets, ringing their irritating bells and demanding money for some good cause or other but probably pocketing half of it themselves and spending the rest in the pub at the end of their shift. People raced around frantically, looking morose and stressed, worried that they wouldn’t be able to do all their shopping on time or that the gift they’d bought their uncle’s cousin’s first nephew’s fucking sister wasn’t expensive enough.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas . . . really. I love waking up on Christmas morning next to my gorgeous wife and presenting her with a gift I have tried – although admittedly not always successfully – to think carefully about buying. I love the Christmas morning shag and a hearty English breakfast – although not always in that order. And I do love vegging out in front of the TV after an excessive Christmas dinner, trying to keep my eyes open but never quite managing it. I just hate all the crap that goes with Christmas and the obscene commerciality of it all. It drives me mad, and every Christmas since leaving the Foreign Legion I have vowed to escape to somewhere better, sunnier and infinitely more exciting.

  But I didn’t really expect to be going to bloody Iraq again!

  After my first stint in the hellhole of the universe, I was told many times, by many people, that one tour would never be enough. Like a virus, the bug of war wiggles its wretched way into the soul of a true soldier and embeds itself for all eternity – or at least until the nagging wife really does pack her bags and leave. Even then, I have met many soldiers who have endured failed marriages and relationships just to get back to the front line, listening to the sweet sound of bullets whizzing by their heads and the thud and mayhem of the mortar shell. After my first spell in the ‘sandpit’, I half-heartedly said I wouldn’t be going back – that one tour was enough – but I think deep inside I knew I would. Just one more trip, and it would help with the bills and go towards a nice car. It might even pay off a bit of the mortgage.

  I am a former French Foreign Legion soldier, or a Legionnaire as we are usually more affectionately called. For some reason, I didn’t fancy joining the British Army and joined the Legion in 1992 when I was just 18 years old – I was young, incredibly foolish and most definitely off my tiny trolley. One evening, while getting high on grass and drunk on cheap Tesco lager, I had watched a fascinating documentary on the National Geographic Channel about the French Foreign Legion and decided there and then that a Legionnaire’s life was definitely the life for me. Surprisingly, I thought the same the very next day when I had a blinding hangover and had to clear up my vomit-stained carpet. And the day after, I still wanted to join. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, I made my plans to escape the mindless teenage world of grass, cheap beer and puke and do something constructive with my life. And one day, I just woke up, packed my bags and headed to Marseilles.

  After the initial basic instruction and tests, I trained to be a medic, as that almost guaranteed a posting to some god-forsaken hellhole where the action really was. It was just kicking off in Somalia at that time, and I knew they wanted as many medics as they could muster, so I was first in the queue. If you finish high in the rankings, you get to choose which regiment you go to, and if you finish low, you go wherever you are sent! I finished 12th out of 65, which I was surprised at. I chose to go to the 13th DBLE (Demi-Brigade de Légion Étrangère) based in Djibouti on the Somalia border. It was a fucking crazy hellhole. I was in Djibouti for just three weeks before I was sent into Somalia, and I ended up doing two tours there alt
ogether – out of my two years in Djibouti, I spent nearly eighteen months in Somalia. There were bad bits, of course, and war had a huge impact on me mentally, as I witnessed a lot of really bad things when I was still very young. Africa was, and still is, fucked – life there is worth shit. Also, having to learn a foreign language and being away from family and friends at that age was also sometimes very hard, and losing friends in accidents or incidents had a profound effect on me.

  As well as the action, there were other reasons I chose Djibouti: the sunshine and the higher wages!

  I had some great moments in the Legion. One time, during basic training, there were really severe floods in Avignon, very similar to those in the UK in 2007, and the Legion was sent to help out. We spent days rescuing people, saving lives and belongings, and cleaning up. Afterwards, when the floods had receded and the city was almost back to normal, we were asked to parade through the town centre, and we all received commendations for the work we had done to help the local community. It was a proud moment.

  Then, while on leave in Marseilles, I managed to be in the right place at the right time and prevented two girls from being robbed at knife-point. I was 21 years old at the time and on leave after returning from Djibouti. It had been a tough two years, and I was settling back into life in France. I had met a French girl while on leave previously; she had fallen pregnant and had just given birth to a baby girl. We had a little apartment in the town and had just moved in together. I went out to the local hypermarket to buy milk, a few fluffy toys and a couple of cans of lager for my own private celebratory drink, as I didn’t know anyone locally whom I could get pissed with. I was standing at the bus stop waiting to return home to the weird smell of nappies and to my girlfriend’s pretty puffed up face, brought on by a lack of sleep. I was in my own little world, enjoying a precious few minutes of ‘peace and quiet’, listening to Metallica on my Walkman. Metallica deafens me and helps to take my mind off things. There must have been at least 40 to 50 people standing at the bus stop: little old biddies with their trolleys on wheels, pumped-up guys returning from the gym, and the token single mother with three kids and a pushchair with at least a dozen carrier bags of crisps and sweets hanging from every corner.

  There was also a couple of girls sitting on a little wall just a few feet away from the bus stop chatting happily to each other. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a group of about nine young Algerian lads walking towards them. They were a typical bunch of street lads, aged around 20 to 23ish, kicking Coke cans, spitting on the floor, larking about and pushing each other into the road. I assumed that the two girls knew them, because they started talking to each other. Metallica was bursting my eardrums, so I couldn’t make out what was being said, but then one of the lads grabbed one of the girls’ handbags. Because no one else said or did anything, I didn’t realise anything was wrong for a few seconds, but then the girl lunged to get her bag back, and once she did that the other lads started to severely punch and kick the pair of them and grab at the second girl’s handbag. Even though there were several guys who were a lot bigger than me standing at the bus stop nearer to the group, no one reacted or did anything. It was obvious to me that these Algerian cunts were prepared to do whatever it took to get these poor young girls’ handbags, and it seemed that no one at all was prepared to stop them. Big mistake! I quickly took off my Walkman, shoved it into my carrier bag and hurriedly gave it to an old woman standing next to me to hold while I went to work.

  I went straight for the biggest and nutted him hard. He fell. As soon as I did that, the rest turned and were stunned for a second. This gave me a few seconds to unleash a torrent of punches and kicks, and I had managed to down five of them before they knew what was going on. I noticed a couple of them were already gone; they were halfway up the road. The two who remained gave me a couple of quick digs. I kicked one of them in the chest, and he collapsed like a bag of shit. His mate quickly followed the others up the road. As I was standing over the scumbags on the floor, looking down at them deciding whether to kick them in the ribs or the stomach, a screeching of tyres broke my concentration.

  Next, I felt the hot metal of a police car bonnet as my face was slammed into it. I was handcuffed and put into the back of the car. Over the pounding of my heart, I could hear one of the officers calling on his radio for an ambulance. As I stared out of the window, I noticed several people at the bus stop rushing over to the policemen, obviously explaining to them what had actually happened. Thankfully, one of the officers immediately came over to the car, took me out and removed my handcuffs. He was babbling away to me in French, but even though I spoke the language fluently and had a French girlfriend whom I only spoke French to, I was bizarrely oblivious to what he was saying. I could see his lips jabbering away, but my mind was elsewhere, and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. For a few seconds, it was as though I didn’t speak a word of French. Rage? Anger? Mental breakdown? Stress? I don’t know.

  I was taken to the police station to make a statement, and once I had identified myself as a Legionnaire I was immediately treated in a more respectful and courteous manner. Once I had made my statement and had calmed down a bit, a high-ranking police officer walked in and introduced himself. I guess he would have been the equivalent of a British superintendent. He told me that one of the girls attacked at the bus stop was actually his daughter. He shook my hand so hard it seemed as though he was going to cut off my circulation. He said he owed me and would do everything he could to make sure that what I had done would not go unrecognised.

  My leave lasted 93 days, and upon returning to the regiment I saw my name on the notice board telling me to report immediately to the base commander. Everyone in the regiment knows that if you get nicked when on leave, you are going down big time, and doing time in a Legion nick is not something that anyone wants to do.

  So there I was in my parade uniform, in a long line of guys who were all reporting to the base commander to be punished. My shoes were shining in the roasting summer sun, sweat was streaming down my neck and back, and my trusty white képi was keeping the sun off my worried head and out of my eyes. One by one, the colonel and his assistant worked their way down the line of soldiers, dishing out various punishments for stupid things like drunkenness, crashing a jeep, coming back from leave a day late. They all got prison time. Harsh? Yes, but (in theory) they would think twice before making the same mistakes again. Then they reached me. Fuck. The colonel stared at me for what felt like ages, and then in a harsh tone said, ‘You know what happens to people who get arrested outside of the regiment, don’t you?’ Of course I fucking did. ‘This is really unfair,’ I thought to myself, but what was I supposed to do? Let those girls get mugged and beaten?

  As I stared at the colonel, I wondered what he would have done? Probably fuck all. He was half my size, in his late 50s and French. I stared straight at him and unkindly thought to myself, ‘Not the bravest chap in the world, are you? Weren’t so fucking brave in both the world wars, were you? Isn’t that why you have Legionnaires? You need a foreign army because the fucking French Army are a bunch of cowards.’

  Fuck it. In a similar situation, I would have done the same again. ‘Fuck all those pussies at the bus stop who didn’t help, and fuck you,’ I almost shouted at the colonel.

  ‘While you prats were crashing jeeps and getting pissed,’ he said, turning to rant at the other guys who were being punished, ‘this crazy bastard fought off a gang of nine Algerians who were mugging two girls with no regard for his own safety.’ I wasn’t going to be punished after all. ‘Damn right I’m not,’ I happily thought to myself. The colonel didn’t seem so bad after all. ‘This is why I want to see Legionnaires standing here in front of me,’ he shouted. He then pulled out a sheet of paper and told me he was presenting me with a citation. He read out loud, embarrassing me, ‘It is with great pleasure . . .’ Blah blah blah. My citation looks great framed, but I didn’t really want it and didn’t really need it – it is something I th
ink I would have done any time, anywhere, and it certainly didn’t merit a fuss.

  I served five years in the Legion altogether, and ten years later I am still immensely proud of what I achieved personally and what the Legion achieved as a unit. We did some good work in Somalia: we delivered tons of food, managed a massive vaccination campaign, and escorted a large number of medical convoys throughout the region and into some of the worst places in the world.

  I certainly missed the Legion when I left. Five years were enough, but for a few years after I left I pined to see some action again and was chomping at the bit for an adrenalin rush and to smell the smell of war. It is an experience unlike any other: gruesome yet compulsive; exhausting yet exhilarating; exciting yet fucking scary.

  I first decided I wanted to go to Iraq when the war ended and reconstruction of the country began. I knew then that private security would be big business, as many of the major security providers were already in discussions with both the British and American governments with regard to tendering for security contracts. Most of the large private security companies are run by high-ranking ex-military officers, who have all the contacts to be able to secure the ripest contracts, and discreet nods were already being given to the likes of Olive Group, CRG, ArmorGroup, etc. I had just started close protection training and had attended a three-day course run by Robin Barratt in Norwich. Robin had just returned from Moscow and was eager to start instructing again, both in the UK and abroad. He ran a three-day course entitled ‘Introduction to Close Protection’ for those of us who were keen to enter the industry but wanted to know more before committing a lot more money and time. After that, I went on to join Robin in Iceland for three weeks of intensive training and then went back to Iceland once more on a course for instructors.