The practical self-defence training made all the difference on the doors and his security company became highly regarded for its professionalism and service.
During the 1990s John completed about thirty courses in Britain, including Peter Consterdine’s Body Guarding Course, as well as his driving and surveillance courses, and Close Quarters Battle Training with Dennis Martin. Brawn incorporated all that he learned in practical self-defence into his work and his training courses for doormen. Currently, as well as the security training, John runs fitness and kick-boxing classes, gives private self-defence and kettlebell training, and has made three DVDs on power-punching.
Years of dedication and training have made him highly skilled and incredibly tough. Here’s a day in the life of the Irish hard man.
The Longest Day
In John Brawn’s sixteen-year career as a doorman, one day stands out as the perfect illustration of his stature as one of the hardest men in Ireland.
The day started off with a trip to the next county to give a karate demonstration at the dojo he had set up. It was a great success and went down really well with the spectators. John was on top form and upped his game to break two one-inch roof tiles with a single punch. However, despite his conditioned knuckles, he came away from the event with an injured, swollen hand and had only a few hours before he was on duty at a well-known nightclub.
As Brawn arrived at the venue for work, he saw two guys arguing with one of his team on the door. To have people causing trouble early on in the night wasn’t unusual so John quickly manoeuvred himself past the men, noticing that one of them was already blind drunk and the other, was “nasty drunk”. As he was now standing closer to them than his colleague, he started to talk to them, taking on the “good cop” role to try and diffuse the situation. Generally an effective technique to avoid trouble, this night it wasn’t working. The two troublemakers still tried to push their way into the club, one using the body of his drunken mate almost as a riot shield. Both doormen were at a disadvantage where height was concerned and, thinking that John’s “nice” approach was a sign of weakness, the more dangerous of the two men pushed his friend into John and started raining blows down on him. No more Mr Nice Guy! Brawn grabbed his attacker by the front of the hair, leaving the other man for his partner, and intended to move him round to the side of the building. A thirty-foot drop around the corner meant an instantaneous change of plan so John quickly slammed the man on to the ground and gave him three or four rapid punches to the head, with a chop to the meridian line on the back as the coup de grâce – the would-be tough guy “lost all interest in fighting after that”, remembers John. Turning to help the other doorman, he saw that drunk number two was down but trying to get up. After such a start to the night John was in no mood to take anything from the second guy but, thankfully he says, his partner stopped him before he lost the plot altogether as he’d have “taken his head off!” The last the two doormen saw of the men was them crawling on their hands and knees twenty yards down the road and round a corner.
It was a quarter past eleven. John looked up and saw that there was a full moon and thought to himself, “This is going to be a long fucking night.” He told the other doorman that it was going to be a “shit-house” and laid out the plan – Martin (not his real name) would man the inside door, John would stay outside, and they would watch one another’s backs. The nightclub had hired only six doormen for the night (two of them Brawn describes as “toilet attendants” – likely to hide in the bathroom if a fight broke out!). Brawn would have brought more if he had known what the night had in store for them.
With the earlier karate demonstration keeping him busy, John had forgotten that in addition to the usual weekend revelries, the Irish soccer team had been playing that day and, unexpectedly, had lost to a much weaker team. This had meant that many of the punters out on the town had been in bad humour and, fuelled with drink, they were spoiling for a fight. Just to make matters worse, in a venue with a capacity of 650, complimentary passes had swelled the crowd to over 750 – basically, a recipe for trouble.
The club was filling up but the next thing John had to deal with was a couple coming up to him and asking him if he had seen a fight outside the club earlier. John said he hadn’t but they were insistent, saying that two of their friends were in hospital after being badly “beaten up”. As he was physically involved, Brawn could truthfully answer that he didn’t “see” a fight but that only served to enrage the man, who started screaming abuse, calling Brawn every name under the sun. Before anything could kick off, the door of the club burst open and a brawling fight spilled out from inside. John excused himself (in very impolite terms) and said he had to get to work. The doormen pulled the fighters out of the entrance and dumped them out on the street where they quickly lost interest in fighting. Quickly, the team went back inside and were met with what Brawn describes as a “scene from the Somme”. There was broken glass all over the floor, blood everywhere, people lay all round the place and there was an all-pervasive ugly mood in the air. And the night was only starting.
A man staggered towards John and Martin, blood streaming down his face from where he had been glassed in the toilets. He was taken to the first aid station for treatment and the team headed back into the mêlée to get those responsible and eject them from the club. From then on, until about three o’clock in the morning, Brawn spent the night fighting. He and his team were constantly moving through the crowd to where the latest fight had broken out, circling the protagonists, and then pushing, pulling and, if necessary, punching them through the room and outside. They worked in pairs, John and Martin targeting the ringleaders, watching each other’s backs. Brawn reckons he punched more people in that one night than the rest of his career on the doors. “Anything that came into your zone you punched it … elbowed, kneed it, whatever way it was. It was a fight for survival,” he recalls.
As the night drew to a close and the music was finishing, the crowd was still milling around on the glass-strewn dance-floor and finishing up their drinks at the bar counter and tables. Brawn was walking through the room, hoping that things would now quieten down, when he witnessed one of the worst acts of violence of the night. A man took a run at a girl and kicked her squarely between the legs, leaving her screaming in agony on the floor. John couldn’t believe his eyes but went instantly into action. He grabbed the man in a headlock but, unfortunately, he was so slick with sweat that the hold didn’t take. When one of his mates grabbed John’s arm, the man got out of Brawn’s grip and landed a head-butt on the side of his face. This is where all the training and experience came into play. Brawn wasn’t going to take any chances so he changed to a trachea hold, gripping tightly along the nerve pathways so that his opponent had to stop struggling or lose his windpipe. The girl was still screaming in pain and Brawn was in no mood to be gentle. Following a swift head-butt, he started towards the main door, knocking and bumping the assailant against all the stationary furniture they passed. He got him as far as the entrance, slammed him against the door and then outside, where he gave him six more head-butts. As the man was sliding to the ground, lapsing into unconsciousness, another doorman had to stop John before he found himself up on a murder charge!
Then all hell broke loose at the door. Somehow the team had to get the doors shut, and get everyone else who was fighting out and keep them out. This wasn’t easy because the door opened outwards which meant John had to lean out into a crowd that was punching, kicking and wrestling to grab the door and pull it closed. At the same time, the other doormen were pushing, punching and manhandling those fighting inside out through the same door. It was complete mayhem. At one stage Brawn remembers seeing something coming at him out of the corner of his eye. He instinctively ducked and felt a kick going along the side of his head. If he hadn’t moved he would have been seriously injured or even knocked unconscious. That would have been disastrous because once he was down he would have been used as “a can of coke”.
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nbsp; Finally, the door was closed with all the fighting now on the other side. Brawn turned round and lo and behold, there was the club manager! He didn’t get a chance to say a word. The danger and tension of the night had Brawn incensed; feeling as if he was a foot off the floor with adrenaline, he lambasted the manager for overcrowding, lack of sufficient doormen to control the crowd and goodness knows what else. John says he didn’t know what he looked like at that moment but he certainly felt like another person altogether.
The exhausted team then went into the club and surveyed the effect of the rolling maul that the night had turned into. There was an inch-and-a-half of glass covering the floor and so much blood that it might have been used as a slaughterhouse. Brawn could now feel the effects of the head-butts, punches and kicks he had received over the past four hours but at least the night was over. It dawned on him that he was lucky not to be one of those taken away by ambulance that night. This was one night the team had a drink together before heading home. It was the most violent night of John’s life and he says the whole thing was a blur. He compares it to boxing in the ring. “When you are in a boxing match you don’t know how well you’ve done or badly you’ve done, but when you look at the tape afterwards you realize you did a lot better than you thought,” he says. “The four hours were like that.” He never worked in any venue that was as violent as that one, with so much anger in the crowd from losing the football match. He and his team may have looked in bad shape but none had more than superficial injuries; in another town on the same night a doorman had to have twenty-two stitches to his face after he had been glassed by a well-known football fan.
As Brawn drove back to Westport, “feeling like an eighty-year-old”, he swears he saw the Man in the Moon laughing at him!
After this incident, Brawn developed a zero tolerance policy when it came to running security at a venue. His company would be hired in to clean up clubs and pubs where violence was the norm and regular troublemakers needed to be removed. He insisted that once he was responsible for maintaining order, his rules must be applied. When a person was thrown out, they stayed out, barred for life. The last thing a doorman needs is to be walking through a crowd in poor lighting and someone with a grudge shoving a glass in his face! A few weeks afterwards, JB Security was working the same venue when Brawn noticed that the man who had kicked the girl was back in the club. He got his team together and walked out. Even if it meant losing business, the safety of his team was paramount. None of his staff was ever hospitalized when working for him.
Thankfully, not all nights on the doors are like that. There could be a thousand routine, quiet nights but every doorman has to expect the worst as it will happen and Brawn says that if you’re not fit to do the job you will be seriously injured, or even killed. This is why Brawn is so insistent that doormen are trained properly, not just in the classroom to get a licence, but also in self-defence as well as combatives to counter the current trend of troublemakers carrying knives. Not just trained, but they also must keep up a fitness-training programme to make sure that they are ready for the bad nights.
JB Security was wound up in 2007. Brawn says he wouldn’t work the doors in the overly PC world of legislation and red tape. Times have changed a lot since Brawn started working in security. Fights at clubs and other venues used to be sorted by the bouncers and nobody would dream of calling the police if they got a hiding for starting trouble. Now all doormen and security personnel have to be licensed and wear badges, and CCTV watches their every move. He has strong feelings about the lack of protection and proper training for doormen, who, if the official training course to get a licence is anything to go by, are expected to do nothing but try and talk their way out of trouble. As John says, “They might as well walk around with ‘Target’ on their back and someday a doorman will pay the ultimate price for that.”
Brawn takes the training of doormen very seriously and runs special courses to pass on his skills and experience to them. He says that for street fighting you need to use everything you’ve got – elbows, knees, head-butts – and you have to perfect your techniques for the time you need to use them. You also need to build up strength for when you have to pull or push people out of the door and do anaerobic training, because fighting is an anaerobic activity.
Brawn would always try to calm down a situation by talking to potential troublemakers, and most of the time a composed, professional attitude is enough to keep a situation in hand. However, the “nice guy” routine won’t always work and, if an assault on a customer or doorman occurs, it’s time to get physical; control and restraint techniques, including the use of pressure points, are valuable skills to have when minimal force must be used to prevent being sued when irate punters sober up. Sometimes, though, serious fights do break out on the doors and the security staff are often the targets, so self-defence is as important, if not more so, than protecting the clients at venues. As John says, you have to be prepared to use the maximum force necessary to keep things under control and for that you need to build up a skill set and train hard. You also need to develop a mindset so that, faced with a violent opponent, you must not only make the right decisions but also be 100 per cent committed to following through.
John Brawn attributes much of his success to the Neuro Linguistics Programming he learned from Marcus Wynne. Not only does it help with physical training, it has also given him techniques that he uses to help prepare for action. He uses triggers, something like a ritual, which ensure that he is in a state of awareness before work and also help him to wind down afterwards.
Brawn doesn’t think that it is necessary to project a hard image; he knows what he is capable of and when to go into action. Being hard, for him, is the ability to switch it on when necessary, even when not feeling great or carrying an injury. He has only been attacked once when not working the doors – when he had a leg in plaster from ankle to thigh and was using crutches. As he was manoeuvring on to a bar stool to have a quiet drink in his local, he felt a flying punch swing past his head. Thinking it was one of his mates having a bit of fun, he turned and realized that the man beside him was trying to coldcock him while he was in a vulnerable position. Brawn didn’t hesitate – he hit him in the throat with a crutch and, while the man was choking, threw him out the door – on one leg! Hard or what?
“PISTOL” PETE ROLLACK (USA)
New York City Gang Member
Introducing … “Pistol” Pete Rollack
RANDY RADIC TAKES a look at a period in the life of “Pistol” Pete Rollack, notorious because of his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. One of America’s most feared men, he was the leader of the formidable and incredibly violent Sex, Money, Murder (SMM) gang, which was at the heart of the gang culture in New York.
By the time he was just twenty-four years old, Peter Rollack had personally committed four murders and ordered two other murders. By 1994 his gang SMM had several thousand members, all of whom were heavily armed and involved in murder, robbery, heroin and cocaine use, possession and distribution, and dealing in firearms. They were undoubtedly one of the most feared and toughest gangs in New York at the time. In 2000, when Rollack was twenty-seven, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of six people and drug-trafficking in three states. In addition to life, the judge also sentenced Rollack to a further 105 years in prison. If Rollack had not pleaded guilty at his trial, he would have been executed.
SEX, MONEY, MURDER
By Randy Radic
Soundview is a low-income residential neighbourhood located in the south-central section of the borough of the Bronx in New York City. Most of its population of 80,000 people, primarily African-American and Hispanic, live below the poverty line and receive whatever public assistance they can get their hands on. Poverty, disease, drugs and violence are a way of life. In short, Soundview is hell on earth.
There’s no hope and no way out.
During the 1960s, youth gangs became part and parcel of the landscap
e. The first and most famous gang was the Black Spades, originating in the Bronxdale Houses, a public housing project of twenty-eight, seven-storey buildings in Soundview. The Black Spades sprouted out of the Savage Seven and rapidly achieved renown. They dominated the area, controlling every housing project in the neighbourhood. Members of the Black Spades “bopped” through the streets, carrying boom boxes (ghetto blasters) on their shoulders, which blared music that eventually became known as “hip-hop”. Through sheer barbarity, the Black Spades became the most feared gang in New York City. By 1978, the gang had mutated into the Zulu Nation, which was strongly rooted in African ancestry and not as brutal.
Sex, Money, Murder (SMM) came on the Soundview scene in 1987. SMM was one of the sets (gangs) of the New York Gang (NYG) Alliance, which was a loose coalition of African-American gangs. Because of an ongoing power struggle, where each gang wanted to be number-one, SMM flipped. They left the NYG Alliance and became a sanctioned set of the Bloods.
The Bloods started in 1993, when many of the leaders of the various African-American gangs were doing time on Riker Island’s George Mochen Detention Center (GMDC). GMDC, which was also called C-73, was where problem inmates – those who were extremely violent – were segregated from the rest of the prison population. Which meant that GMDC resembled a war zone. Battle was being waged as the Latin Kings – a Hispanic gang – targeted the African-American gang members. To protect themselves, the African-American gangbangers banded together. They called themselves the United Blood Nation (UBN), which was a direct reference to their African heritage and the oneness of their blood. Once they were released from prison, the UBN leaders went back to their respective “hoods” in New York City, where they retained the Bloods name and began recruiting members.
The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) Page 13