Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  On this particular night, five friends of the doorman I was working with came up and tried to get in.

  ‘Sorry, gentlemen,’ I said, as nicely as I could. ‘There’s no room at the inn tonight. You’ll just have to go somewhere else.’

  ‘Come on,’ they pleaded. ‘Make an exception this once. We really want to go in. We won’t cause any trouble, mate. Scout’s honour.’

  ‘No, guys, sorry,’ I said. I could see that not only were they the wrong people for this particular club, but they were also well on their way to being outrageously drunk. Also, I had a sort of sixth sense that they were likely to cause trouble and that I would regret it if I gave in to their demands. You develop an instinct for that sort of thing after working on the doors for years.

  ‘Come on,’ my companion urged. ‘They’re my friends. Do me a favour and let them in. They are good guys. They won’t cause any trouble. You can trust me, mate. I’ll vouch for them.’

  I looked at them. They looked back. It was against my better judgement, but I did not want to be on bad terms with my colleague. Life is too short to spend your evenings working the door with someone who is annoyed with you.

  With more than a few misgivings, I stood aside to let them in. ‘All right, then. But, at the first sign of any trouble from you lot, you’re out and you’re not coming back. Got it?’

  The five geezers barged past me like five chimpanzees on heat without so much as thanking me for my generosity. They were prize morons and the very first thing they did was to start causing trouble, as I had feared they would from the outset. They went straight up on the balcony, throwing lit fag butts from the balcony into girls’ cleavages. The bar was equipped with a panic button that set off a flashing red light to alert doormen to any danger. I saw the light, went to investigate and found these five idiots tossing cigarettes over the balcony and laughing uproariously as they did so. They clearly had no idea of the trouble they could potentially find themselves in if they crossed the wrong people in a place like this.

  ‘You’re out,’ I told them. ‘You’ve got to go. I warned you when you asked to come in. Come on; fucking get outside now!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ sneered one of the bozos. ‘Like you are going to make us go? I don’t think so, mate. There’s five of us, pal, and last time I looked there was only one of you.’

  I looked around for my companion, but he had disappeared, because he knew exactly what these geniuses were capable of. Somehow, despite being on my own, I managed to get them outside, but, as we walked through the door, one of them turned to me. ‘I’ll have it with you outside on the street.’

  All I cared about at that moment was getting these five monkeys outside. The bar was packed, and I knew that if they exploded in there a lot of innocent people were going to get hurt. Glasses would be flying and people would be getting cut, and things would get very ugly very quickly.

  I stood on the step and looked at them under the street lights. They were all drunk, belligerent and astonishingly stupid. They were a disaster waiting to happen. There were five of them and, with my colleague missing in action, only one of me. The queue of people waiting to get into the bar stood and gawked at the action, not realising that, with the situation as tense as it was, it was far from unlikely that they would get caught up in whatever was about to happen, and maybe even seriously hurt. I took one step forward, off the step, so that I could tell them to sober up and piss off home, because there was nothing for them here. I hoped that there was still a chance that they would go quietly.

  Suddenly, one of the morons kicked my feet out from under me, and then all five were jumping on me and kicking me in the head as I lay on the pavement. I could hear their laughter and deep breathing as they gave it all they had.

  As you can imagine, I had to make a snap decision about what to do before I took some serious damage. There were five of these bastards, and I knew in a flash that, if I let them hurt me, if I let them keep the upper hand, I might be killed. Or worse – I could be left seriously disabled. That would mean I wouldn’t be able to work. I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Somehow, in the few seconds that passed between being knocked to the floor and the five monkeys trying to jump all over my head, I found time to think about Ronnie Redruff, an old doorman friend of mine whom I had known for years.

  Ronnie Redruff was a former British heavyweight champion and someone for whom I had always had a huge amount of respect. He was a rough guy, a real old-school doorman who had punched so much that his wrists were fucked, and been punched so much that his nose was permanently askew. Ronnie looked like the type of man you wouldn’t want to mess with, and that’s exactly what he was. But there was a lot more to Ronnie than just brawn. He was also a smart customer whose advice I tended to listen to, because he had been around the block more than a few times and knew a hell of a lot about human nature and how the world works. Some years before, Ronnie and I had worked on the door together at The Kings, which is one of the toughest pubs in Ilford. They had boxing on every night as well as strippers and blue comedians. It was a really rough house with tough customers who were liable to cause trouble and they needed a serious doorman to stop the whole thing from descending into bloody chaos. Ronnie worked with another big geezer called Lenny McLean who went by the nickname ‘The Guv’nor’. As an aside, McLean went on to feature in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; sadly he died of cancer aged just forty-nine. In his prime, he had been a monster of a man.

  Anyway, as I lay there trying to deflect their blows and listening to their laughter and the horrified gasps of the customers queuing to get in, I remembered Ronnie’s frequent advice: ‘Paul, it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.’

  What Ronnie meant was that, when the chips are down, you do what you have to do to survive and deal with the consequences afterwards because anything is better than being killed. It is never a good time to give up.

  I knew that Ronnie was right and that I should take care of myself now and ask questions later. I’ve got to do something about this, I thought. I’m not going to be carried by six.

  I was doing my best to parry the blows that seemed to be raining on me from all directions when, luckily, seemingly out of nowhere, one of the other doormen appeared on the scene and started dragging these idiots off me. I somehow managed to get to my feet and faced the bastards. They were all very drunk. That might help me. But there were still five of them, and only one of me.

  ‘Think you’re big men then, do you?’ I said, wiping my own blood off my face with my sleeve. ‘I’ll have it with the fucking lot of you, you pricks.’

  The mouthpiece of the little gang came at me, roaring and flailing his fists. I hit him with an upper cut as he tried to head-butt me. I took him sideways and he went up in the air. I took all his teeth out and left him on the floor, sprawling among the discarded ivories with his face pushed sideways against the cement. His friend came running at me and I put him through a glass door, leaving him in shreds and shrieking like a turkey the day before Christmas. I turned around to see where the others were, but all I could hear was the sound of their footsteps receding into the distance because they had seen what I had dished up to their friends, and they didn’t want any of it for themselves. So they weren’t a problem any more, or at least not for now. But I still had two men to deal with. They were wounded and they were also very angry and they were both getting back to their feet, planning to join forces so as to get their revenge on me.

  The adrenaline rushed to my head, granting me strength and the will to take on two men at the same time, and I gave it to them both until they stopped punching back and fell to the ground. I will never know how one of them managed to get up again, because I was more determined than I had ever been before to stand up for myself and not to put myself in a vulnerable situation.

  The other three ran away from the nightclub until they encountered some coppers. They told the police that their mates had just been beaten by a giant of a man, who was at least s
ix foot four and heavily muscled with blond cropped hair. I am a lot shorter than that, and my hair is black, but the police didn’t have any trouble identifying me, because my monkey suit was completely soaked in the blood of the two men I had taken out. When the police arrived, I didn’t make any effort to conceal who I was or what I had done because I knew that I had just been doing my job and that, if I hadn’t reacted as quickly, decisively and violently as I had, I would be seriously injured or even dead. I also knew that I had protected the people in the queue, any one of whom could have been caught up in the violence.

  Unfortunately, the police did not see things the same way.

  ‘You’re in trouble now, mate,’ I was told by a cheery-looking officer. ‘You’re coming with us.’

  I was used to dealing with the Met in London and these were the suburban Essex coppers, who seemed to have a different rule book and not to understand the law of the street.

  There and then, outside the nightclub with my hands slick with blood and my heart still beating fast from the exertion of defending myself, I was arrested and charged with Grievous Bodily Harm. Several of my attackers’ teeth were still embedded in my knuckles and, while getting them there may have hurt them more than it hurt me, my hands were still smarting. My head was bleeding heavily, too, and I could already feel the swelling coming up. The police took a lot of photographs of my hands for their evidence. I could not fucking believe it. How had I let this happen? Things had been going so well for me. I had finally created a career that I could be justifiably proud of. I was building my own set of contacts. I had my own home in a pleasant part of Essex. I had a good network of friends and, increasingly, friends who had nothing to do with the dark world in which I had spent so much time living and working. I had begun, finally, to respect myself and my capabilities and, for the first time that I could remember, the voice of Auntie Coral, which had stayed with me every day, telling me how useless I was, had begun to recede.

  Now I was up for a charge of GBH and GBH with Intent, and if I went down for either charge it meant a prison sentence and almost certainly the end of any respectable career. If I got done for GBH with Intent, it would mean a long sentence and a bad reputation that would follow me for the rest of my life. Either way, I would have a criminal record, which would mean that there would be no chance of working in any upmarket gym or health establishment and pretty much doom me to a life of not being qualified to do anything but work doors or in private security until I was too old and battered to do even that any more.

  It would also mean that all the horrible things that Auntie Coral had said about me when I was a child were, in fact, true. That despite all my hard work; despite the fact that I had learned how to read and write and had become qualified in my field; despite my successes, my magazine articles and my experiences of working out the rich and famous; despite all that, I was a useless, stupid lump who had been inexorably bound for prison ever since the day that I was born. That there was something intrinsically wrong with me and that I had been doomed to this from the moment my mother had left me out with the rubbish because even then she had been able to see what sort of a misbegotten spawn I was.

  The case took a year and a half to come to court; the worst eighteen months of my life and a time that I would do literally anything to avoid having to go through again. During that period, I had to appear at a magistrates’ court on a regular basis and I couldn’t leave the country without permission from the local police station. Because work was taking me overseas a lot at that time, I had to go to the police station often, which was both a pain in the arse and a constant reminder of the awful threat that was hanging over me. I couldn’t do door work, because doormen have to be registered and cannot be in any trouble with the law. Security-wise I could run private security for dubious characters, but that was all.

  The worst thing, however, was the waiting, the endless waiting. I would wake in the morning and think, Shit, I might be going down for GBH. I might be about to lose all that I have been working for all these years. This might be it. I tried to banish the thought as best I could by working so hard physically that I was exhausted in the evenings. Somehow, I would manage to avoid thinking about it and get to sleep. But it was still there, tormenting me, every time I woke in the morning, my very own sword of Damocles, taunting me with my past and with the prospect of a ruined future.

  During this period, I took a trip to San Francisco to see Ian, who was living over there, ostensibly to help me to take my mind off things. As we enjoyed the good weather and the Californian food one beautiful afternoon, Ian suggested that we might do a tour of San Francisco Bay, including Alcatraz.

  ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’ I asked him. ‘I could easily be seeing Alcatraz for real when I get home.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, mate,’ Ian said, immediately realising his gaffe.

  But the day had been ruined for me; the thought of prison had been introduced, banishing everything else.

  And then, all I could hear was Coral and Starling saying to me as they had said so many times, ‘You are scum. You are a Connolly. You are in here because nobody wants you. You are abnormal. Why would you be in here otherwise? You would be at home with a normal family.’

  Over the years, I had taken more beatings than I could remember. I had been stabbed and bitten, beaten and spat at. My body was covered in scars from all of these encounters, as it still is today. It was a roadmap that illustrated more than graphically how I had travelled from childhood to the present, from one violent encounter to another. I had often been asked by people gentler than me how it was that I seemed not to be traumatised by all the attacks and counterattacks I had suffered. The fact was that none of the beatings, stabbings or bites I ever took affected me in the slightest, compared to the mental torture I took from Auntie Coral for years. Over and over again, the woman who was supposed to be caring for me had eroded whatever confidence and self-respect I might otherwise have had. The worst thing is that mental torture is the hardest to prove, and the easiest to get away with. The beatings, bites and stabbings? They had never really bothered me much at all. In fact, in a strange way, I had almost enjoyed them, because surviving and becoming stronger despite being hurt was testimony to my ability to survive almost anything and made me feel that, just perhaps, I would come out on top in the end.

  But now the thought that maybe Auntie Coral had been right about me all along stayed with me all day long and accompanied me to bed at night. There were few people to whom I could talk about it, but my mate Ian came through for me. Ian, who worked in the area of Information Technology, was not even remotely involved in my world, so I could tell him things that couldn’t be voiced elsewhere. Ian is a classy, university-educated guy from a good family. To say that he has a different perspective from me on things is putting it mildly. He was unlike most of my friends, who were tough guys like me. It was good to have someone who could give me a fresh way of looking at things.

  Ian kept telling me that Auntie Coral had been wrong about me and trying to assure me that things would work out all right in the end because he knew and I knew that I hadn’t done anything inappropriate in a situation in which my own life was very much on the line. I appreciated his efforts to provide solace. But it was very difficult for me to have faith in his words as I waited for my trial date to be announced.

  When my case finally came up in Crown Court, it took a week to be heard. One long, stressful, awful week that I never want to have to go through again. The only good thing about the start of that week was that it meant that the waiting was finally over. Whatever was about to happen, at least I would know my fate.

  When you are in trouble, you learn who your real friends are. I had a pal called Ray Tame who ran the door at a nightclub called Palms. Ray was getting on a bit in years by then, but even then I still wouldn’t have wanted to fight him – and I was prepared to take on almost anybody. He is a big, tough guy who does not ask questions or take any prisoners. Ray came to court for
me every day and gave evidence in my defence.

  ‘I’ve worked with Paul on many occasions,’ Ray said. ‘I’ve seen him being spat at and provoked and he’s never reacted with anything but professionalism. Paul is not a violent character. Paul wouldn’t have taken them out if he didn’t have to. It was a question of defending himself from attack.’

  But the prosecuting barrister kept harping on about how I should have walked away: ‘Why didn’t you just go? Why didn’t you just put the aggressors outside and leave them there? You didn’t have to fight them. You didn’t have to get involved. You could have been the bigger man, and just left them there…’

  Ray, who had run security courses for the government and was a court bailiff, explained on my behalf, ‘There was a queue of customers outside the door. Anybody who knows anything about security work realises that Mr Connolly had a primary responsibility to the people in the queue at the front of the premises. He couldn’t walk back in; he had to stay outside to protect the people in the queue, because, in a situation like that, any one of them could have been hurt. And that would have meant that Mr Connolly had failed to do his job properly.’

  As Ray spoke, I could see the jury nodding and an understanding beginning to dawn on their faces, and I began to have some hope that maybe, just maybe, things would go my way. I did feel confident that I had not done the wrong thing. It was true that I had hurt two men very badly. It was also true that the encounter had started with them and their three friends jumping on my head.

  Ray didn’t just know about security work; he was also very knowledgeable about the law, thanks to his work as a court bailiff. He was able to use all this information; he was able to make the jury see the situation from the viewpoint of a doorman. He was able to make them understand that the people who had attacked me were bullies who could have lashed out at anyone and that, if I had not defended myself, I might very well have been killed by them, while any of the customers waiting in the queue outside the club could have been badly hurt. While my actions might not have been nice and while they might not have been gentle, they were very necessary.