Because the money I was able to make on the door was not quite enough, I also did a bit of mini-cab driving on the side. Mini-cab driving was a pleasant enough way to make some money and pass the time, and it also offered other attractions in the form of the many women passengers who would hire the cab to take them home after a night out with the girls and then invite me up to their place to give them a good seeing to. Women are reputed to be the more retiring sex but, from what I saw, this often is not the case at all. I was young, very fit and handsome with my thick black hair and I was usually happy to oblige, seeing this as an attractive perk of what could otherwise be quite a boring job. I didn’t leave the meter running.
When I passed my first qualification, I got distinction for anatomy and physiology. The notes at the bottom said, ‘If this was a spelling test you would have failed but luckily enough it’s not.’
I was getting somewhere, and finally I began to feel like a bit less of a loser, but my passion for physical fitness was not earning me enough money yet. That still came from the cab driving and, increasingly, from providing security at nightclubs and other venues. Once again, all those years that I had spent boxing stood me in good stead, and, even if the arm that I had injured was not as strong as it used to be, I still had two fists and I knew how and was not afraid to use them. I was a highly trained aggressor who knew all about technique, and I was also a vicious thug with an inferiority complex and an entirely justifiable chip on my shoulder – an explosive combination.
And I still liked hurting people when I felt that they had it coming to them. God, did I like to do that!
As people got to know me on the door, my reputation as someone who was more than able to stand up and fight grew and I started to attract the attention of the sort of men who needed people like me; people who were not afraid to hit first and ask questions later. Nowadays, the area of door and security work is much more regulated in every aspect. By comparison, back then it was like the Wild West. I welcomed every single opportunity to expose myself to violence, and each time I was involved in a confrontation and survived, I became more confident, happier and less like the frightened child I had always been. In those days, doormen were mostly recruited by word-of-mouth. There was a sort of informal network of built-up guys who spent their days in old-school sweat gyms and their nights in black tie on the doors. They were much the same crowd as the ones I had grown up with – the ones who had managed not to end up in borstal, and some who had and who had come out stronger as a result.
Because we were all East End guys, we mostly worked in the East End, but occasionally we did West End gigs too. Whereas the East End was full of difficult people – the usual blacks, Irish, gypsies and general trouble-makers and ne’er-do-wells – the West End was more champagne Charlies and quite upmarket. The West End had its own problems, but they usually did not involve street fights. The East End often offered scenes from hell and, as I was frequently the only white doorman, and the smallest doorman, I saw it all.
One gig I had for a few months was at a club I’ll call the Jungle (not its real name), which is a well-known black club in East London. By the time I was working there, it was a massively popular nightclub with jungle music and hordes of drugged-up partiers out for a good time. A good mate of mine was the head doorman, and he was working with Leroy, an equally tough character. Leroy was tough but even he could not deflect bullets. He was shot and killed while I was working at the Jungle. The promoter of the venue had been dealing drugs, and had fallen foul of some drug dealers one night. They were pissed off because he owed them money. I was working on the door with a big guy called Dexter, who I really liked – everyone liked Dexter. We were expecting trouble, so we were all wearing bulletproof vests and keeping our eyes open so that we would be ready to deal with the tricky situation that we were anticipating. When the dealers turned up, they tried to get into the club, but of course we could not let them. They were understandably upset, and immediately pulled out their guns and started waving them around. We picked them up and threw them out, but one of them came right back and shot Leroy. The bullet ricocheted off Leroy’s elbow and went into the side of the vest into his heart, killing him straight away. It was just bad luck that it was Leroy, because it could have been any one of us, and he was massively unfortunate that the bullet ricocheted, because his vest should have been able to absorb the blow.
You might think that the last thing that anyone would want to do after that was go back to working on the door, but the rest of us felt that it would be the right thing to do. We were determined not to be scared off, because we didn’t like to think of scumbags of the sort that had killed Leroy getting away with it.
One other night, I was away from one of the doors I usually worked on when another doorman was killed. It was a similar situation. A bunch of tough black guys had turned up from South London and had been refused entry into the club for some reason. The door was slatted, saloon-style, and these guys shot the doors out, took out the window, put their guns through it and unloaded an automatic pistol into the foyer, hitting about ten people. Nobody was ever caught for this crime. The only description received for the guy who had unloaded his pistol was that he was small, black and wearing a hoodie. He could have been one of hundreds of thousands and to the best of my knowledge he was never identified. Chris, the doorman, was one of the people killed and, although I did not know him well at all, I did take note of his death, as we all did, because it could have been any one of us. But none of these things made me scared, because I was fearless, not because I believed that nothing could happen to me but because I really did not care if I got shot and killed. I never did heroin, but I imagine that similar sentiments must be felt by anyone with the habit; I know it could kill me, but who really gives a fuck? Not me, mate.
Who needed drugs when there was a chance of getting killed on any given night at work? Knowing that was my high, right there.
Soon I moved on from just doing door work to private, close-protection jobs for some very serious people who also had lots of wealthy clients, Arabs and foreign dignitaries, all of whom needed bodyguards to take care of them when they visited London. This was very lucrative work for everyone involved and a real change from the environment I was coming from, and I felt that it would open the doors to some real money for me. I was correct in this assumption.
My break came when I was working in London’s West End, in a Jewish neighbourhood with a lot of very wealthy residents. I was at a nightclub I’ll call Charlie’s, which catered to a rather moneyed clientele and presented itself as a very exclusive establishment with a dress code and an entry policy to match. This was the late 1980s and there was cocaine everywhere – it went with the Lycra dresses and the big hair – and it went up the noses of a lot of Premier League players, models and ex-public school boys rolling up in limousines.
A friend of mine ran the door at Charlie’s and he invited me to work for him. He told me that not all the money that exchanged hands in the club was legitimate, because there were plenty of drugs floating around, but that wasn’t really my concern. I would be there to take care of the punters and to do my best to make sure that nobody got hurt and, so far I was concerned, if people wanted to get off their faces on cocaine that was nobody’s business but their own.
I had been used to working in dives where I spent my nights taking guns away from irate Irish, Scots, blacks, gypsies and regular London geezers and breaking up fights every five minutes, so working the door in a more upmarket establishment was a nice change and a bit of a rest, and it did not make any difference to me whether the punters were sticking cocaine up their noses or not. I had grown used to working for joints where the customers regularly invited the doormen to fight it out. The only way to deal with the dregs of society who turned up was to give it to ’em proper. It was the only language they understood and, if you did not stand up to them, they did not respect you. If you did not beat them to a bloody pulp, they beat you, so it was an easy choice to ma
ke. Going to work, it was never a question of whether or not there was going to be some violence, but of how much, and how long it was going to take to quell it.
This West End gig was almost restful in comparison. There was rarely any violence at all, and when there was it was just a little scuffle between a couple of toffs who really did not want to get blood on the expensive shirts they had just picked up on Savile Row. We would take it out the back where they would take a few pops at each other to save face and nobody would ever be any the wiser. The clients were generally nicer here, and a lot of celebrities turned up, which lent a certain amount of glamour to the job.
There was a good rapport among the various doormen at Charlie’s and I worked there for quite a long time and grew friendly with the other men. We bonded in a variety of ways. One year, for example, we had a competition to see which of us could shag the most women in twelve months. Because I had a history of success with women, I felt that I was in with more than a sporting chance. We all took the challenge very seriously, and at the end of the year we organised a bona fide ceremony with an Olympic-style podium and bronze, silver and gold medals. It was hilarious. Steve, who was a dead ringer for Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I., came first with forty; I came second and took silver with thirty-eight; and the bronze medal was shared by Billy Big Arms and Nicky No Neck who – for obvious reasons – couldn’t both fit on the third-place podium at the same time!
Although there was much less aggro at Charlie’s than at some of the other places I had worked, because I was small for a doorman, if anyone ever did want to pick on someone, they chose me. They lived to regret that. Because I didn’t weigh twenty stone they tended to seriously underestimate me. I looked smaller than I actually was, too, because I was usually standing next to behemoths. One of the doormen at Charlie’s, John (not his real name), was a big guy who was a bit of a bully and most of the doormen tried to avoid John because he was a massive dickhead, basically, with the emphasis on ‘massive’.
One night, John was off work and in the club. Of course, he got drunk and as inevitably as night follows day he started to cause trouble. This oversized moron was threatening the barman and harassing women by putting his hands up their skirts and abusing their boyfriends.
The bar was equipped with a red light that went off when a panic button was pushed and, when that happened, we had to get into the bar quickly and deal with the situation. The guy I was working with pretended not to see the red light, because we all knew what sort of reputation the drunken bully had and most of the doormen were scared of John. But I went down, because I wasn’t scared. I had been stabbed and beaten so many times by now – what difference did one more time make? Now, John was built like a tank, so fearless or not I had a moment of relief when he left the club by himself. But then he walked straight back in again, because the doormen were too afraid to stop him.
Now I knew that it was my time to shine.
I went and stood in front of John and looked up at his red face. I was standing two steps up from him, but he was still towering over me. ‘Where are you going, mate?’
‘I’m going inside.’ He belched beer fumes down on to me.
‘No, you fucking ain’t.’
‘Says who?’
‘Me. Get out, mate. Time to go home.’
‘Fuck off, you little prick.’
I knew I didn’t have the luxury of time to decide what to do so I hit John with a straight right hand and knocked the gigantic fucker out with one punch. He keeled over like a felled mountain gorilla and lay there sweating and twitching on the tiled floor. It took four of us to lift him up and drag him outside. It was like a scene from Gulliver’s Travels.
Because Charlie’s was a respectable establishment, the police were called, and I was sure that I was going to get nicked, because someone was going to have a very sore head in the morning.
Fortunately for me, John was so embarrassed about having been laid flat by a bloke of about half his weight that he didn’t tell the coppers. But my colleagues told everyone they knew, and my reputation and prestige grew exponentially until guys I didn’t even know were coming up to me on the street and shaking my hand, saying, ‘Well done, mate!’
I could tell you that I did not care what other people thought about me in this particular case but I would be lying; I was delighted and, the way I felt right then, the bigger, tougher and harder they were, the more ready I was to take them on. What did I have to lose? I lived in a shitty council flat. I had no wife, no kids, no loved ones, few real friends and nobody to care about or to care for me.
This was when I came to the attention of men who had a need for private security, including a lot of ex-military types. Often it was a case of people who had to carry a lot of bank bonds or cash from one place to another, and they needed protection. I was more than qualified to provide it.
Now that I was a known and celebrated quantity on the street, I also did a lot of private security work taking care of Arab businessmen visiting London. These gents are Muslims so they are not supposed to drink and they are not supposed to run around with loose women, so of course they do both things as often as possible whenever they visit decadent England where anything goes. They love parties, sex, drugs, booze and general rock ’n’ roll and they need people to protect them as they trip about from one nightclub to the next. These wealthy Arabs only go to the finest places in London, and the upmarket establishments are willing to pay handsomely to make sure that their VIP guests are well looked after.
I did not care what my rich Arab friends did with their personal lives and I was happy to provide protection for the generous sums that I was offered. Girls and drugs were on offer too, but I had never had any trouble getting girls on my own and drugs still did not interest me. The job was a doddle compared to working the doors. The clients would go and party in exclusive bars, or in the VIP areas of fancy clubs about town. My job was, firstly, not to let anyone know that I was there and, secondly, to take care of the money that they were carrying with them, arrange for a driver to take them to the airport or do whatever it was that they needed. Because I wasn’t an enormous man, I was often picked because I didn’t attract attention, which was appealing to people who wanted to keep a low profile.
Because my Arab wards were rich and fancily dressed and perfumed and not generally shy about flashing their money about, they often aggravated the rest of the drinkers and party-goers because the girls were all over them like flies on honey, ignoring Joe Bloggs in his best shirt and cheap cologne for the richies in their Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. Sometimes Joe Bloggs would take a pop at one of them and would have to be bodily removed before trouble broke out. Then, angry, he would turn on whoever happened to be in his vicinity and take his rage out on them instead. Fights were frequent and bloody, the way they tend to be when jealousy and male egos are involved. You could understand it a little; there they were, the ordinary men, standing in a queue for hours to get into the hottest new nightclub, when these rich visitors would pull up in their massively expensive cars and walk past the queues and into the clubs with their own private security and any pretty girl they wanted ready to drop her knickers whenever they clicked their fingers. They had their own areas inside with their own champagne and the best cocaine money could buy. Money talks.
So who the fuck did they think they were?
That was the way people felt about them. I could sympathise, to an extent, but it wasn’t my job to be understanding. I had to look after my foreign friends and, if that meant breaking a few noses along the way, so be it. I was glad to oblige.
London is a city that has everything. There are rich people, poor people, good people and bad people. There are honest people, white-collar crooks and petty criminals. There are also a lot of people who fall pretty much across the whole spectrum. Increasingly, my job was to provide security to the sort of individuals who really needed it, because they had plenty of enemies.
Soon my confidence grew so high that not only was I not fr
ightened, but I also became a serious bully. I enjoyed seeing the fear in the eyes of an adversary just before I punched him out or knocked him against the wall. I liked the sight and smell of the blood running out of his broken nose and down his face. I laughed when he pissed his pants out of fear. I liked it all. I was always the smallest doorman but I was also the fiercest. What I was saying each and every time was: ‘Right: I have been frightened all my life. I’ve been bullied all my life. I’ve had enough. You’re the toughest guy in here; let’s do it.’
Oh, the fun I had. There are too many examples to relate, but I can give you some.
On one occasion, I was working at the Channel Club in London when I irritated some drug dealers. I had taken some drugs from the wrong dealer and I refused to give them back. This fella had some serious friends, and they arranged for a drive-by an hour or so later to show that they were not happy. There were six of us on the door, and when they pulled the gun on us we all tried to get through the door and got stuck on our way, like in a comedy scene in an old slapstick film. They fired at us but it was just buckshot, which stung more than hurt – and anyway the bulletproof vests took care of most of it.
A few nights later, I had to evict a troublemaker from the club. I had him in a headlock in my arm when he twisted around and bit a chunk out of my side. You’ve got to keep your tetanus shots up to date in jobs like that.
A few months later again, I was working the door at a rough place in East London. I had to throw out a troublemaker and take his gun away from him. This was the sort of lowlife who might really hurt someone, so disarming him was a priority. It might have been a rough joint, but that didn’t mean that the owners wanted any of their customers to be hurt. This savage waited all night for me with his screwdriver at the ready, and when I came out he ran at me with it and stabbed me. I was hurt, obviously, but he came off very much second best, because I just grabbed him in a headlock and ran him into some nearby railings so hard that I fractured his skull. I heard it crunch; I was happy to. It was music to my ears. I did not feel even remotely sorry for him when he started to cry like a little girl or when his jeans suddenly darkened with piss. I even liked the metallic scent of his fresh blood in the cold night air.
Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read Page 9