by Iain Parke
Then there were the safe-deposit boxes filled with cash or stones.
Then I would use the same ID documentation to open investment accounts, some funds were noticeably less fussy than others in wanting to check details and asking where the money was coming from. Pretty soon I had built up quite a network of accounts with investment firms who took cash on a very few questions asked basis. There was so much of it coming in that I didn’t have time to manage it all so why not trust the professionals, I thought? After all, it’s their job.
Pretty soon layering had started to become an increasingly full-time job.
We were building something fantastic here.
But there was still the third problem.
How do you get it back out again?
Well as far as possible I guess the answer is that you don’t. The last thing you want to do is draw the plod’s attention to you by having a whole load of cash that you can’t explain, and Dazza was far too fly to make that sort of mistake.
Of course not all of the money that went in was pure profit. Dazza also had his costs to meet to his suppliers which was where some of the money danced away overseas. But even so there was a lot sticking to the sides right from the start as we got going. He was also quite happy to have the money working for him within the system or as investments. Dazza was a bit of an aesthete in some ways. He lived in a modest house a bit out of town and spent most of his time when he wasn’t out on a run or at a party in his office at the pub, so it wasn’t as though he had a particularly flash lifestyle that he wanted to fund. To a large degree he was happy to leave the cash in the system until I could find ways to diversify it out into investments in legitimate businesses or property. He was particularly keen to get some in South Africa for some reason, I arranged to buy a ranch for him out there through one of our dummy companies. I think he was planning on that as his retirement home.
Anyway the whole arrangement suited me.
I regarded it as good insurance. I was the money man. I knew where it all was and how to access it. Without me much of it would be lost so Dazza couldn’t afford to lose me I reckoned. Not that I thought he would want to you understand, but it’s always best to have some kind of back up.
And of course if he didn’t know where it was, then there was no way he could keep tabs on whether it was all there or not, which was always handy if you were a bit careful.
*
Dazza called about the trip a fortnight later.
‘Hi, how ya doing?’ he asked.
‘OK.’
‘Good.’
‘Where are you off to?’ asked Sharon as I put the phone down. Cautious as ever Dazza hadn’t really said much on the line. Just that it was on and the date.
‘Somewhere called the Algarve apparently,’ I told her.
‘That’s in Spain isn’t it?’
‘No, Portugal I think.’
‘Can I come?’
‘No, this is a Dazza thing. He just wants me along.’
‘Why?
‘Fucked if I know,’ I said shrugging my shoulders, ‘I just hope it’s not to play fucking golf.’
‘Not with Dazza it won’t be,’ said Sharon, ‘it’ll be business. That’s all he ever does.’
‘That’s true.’
Even so I did have to wonder as we got off the plane and swanned through customs. Why were we here? Dressed like a couple of plonkers.
We checked into our business class hotel and met back downstairs in the bar for a beer.
‘So what d’ya think,’ asked Dazza as we wandered to a table on the outside terrace, ‘eat here this evening or wander into town?’
I shrugged, ‘Not fussed, whatever you want to do. I’m more interested in knowing what we’re doing here and what this is all about?’
‘Hey relax bro, all in good time.’ He took a long satisfied drag on his cold beer and lounged back into his chair. ‘You need to cool it OK? Just think for a moment what we’ve got here and how it looks. Here we are, just two ordinary guys as everyone can see, smart casuals, nothing unusual, we’ve obviously just slipped off the leash from the old dears at home for a week of sun and sangria or whatever the shit is. We’ve even brought a set of fucking golf clubs each, we’re probably going to get a few rounds in. What could be more normal?’
‘So this is what? Fucking cover? We’re into spy shit now?’
‘No, just good business. And sometimes for business you have to dress the part.’ He finished his beer, ‘Be patient, you’ll see. Now, where do you fancy eating tonight. I’m told there’s an English pub in town that does good fish and chips. Fancy it?’
We had a leisurely breakfast and sat around the next morning. I think Dazza was waiting for something but he didn’t say what. I found that the hotel had access to a clay pigeon range just outside of town so we spent the afternoon with some shotguns blasting away. It was good practise, you never knew when it might come in handy.
We ate out again that night and had some beers. But mindful this was business we kept our heads, nothing too wild.
The next morning Dazza was in conversation at reception as I came down for breakfast.
‘What’s up?’ I asked joining him.
‘We’re on,’ he said, ‘I’m just booking a room.’
‘OK.’
I still didn’t have a clue what we were doing here.
Dazza’s contact arrived at about three in the afternoon. Burly guy, smartly dressed, Dazza met him at reception and they shook hands before heading off across the lobby to one of the hotel’s little meeting rooms which Dazza had booked that morning.
As the door shut, I stayed sat in reception, a coffee on the table in front of me as I settled down to read the English language paper while I kept an eye on the door for interruptions.
Dazza was in there for about an hour or so while I wondered why he had wanted me along? If it was just to have a bodyguard why not bring Butcher or one of his crew instead of leaving him in charge back home the way he had.
Then the door opened and Dazza reappeared, waving me over to join them.
Stepping into the room I could see that Dazza had been using the whiteboard. There was some stuff on it that the other guy was in the process of wiping off.
Dazza made the introductions as the big man turned to face us, ‘Damage, this is Sergei; Sergei, Damage.’
‘Hi, please to meet you,’ he said in a heavy, almost comic book Russian accent.
‘Hi.’
So it was business, hence the whiteboard. Dazza was obviously being extra careful. He’d only booked the room that morning and we didn’t think anyone would know we were here so the chances of our or any local plod having bugged the room were remote, they just wouldn’t have had time. But even so Dazza wasn’t taking any chances. Plod couldn’t bug a whiteboard for sound so it made for a safe way to ‘talk’ business.
Sergei turned back to the whiteboard and picked up a pen. ‘OK,’ he said starting to write, ‘please excuse my English.’
I shrugged as I watched what he was writing. ‘Don’t worry about it mate, beats my Russian any day.’
Dazza looked pissed at that and held his finger to his lips. Now who needed to cool it I wondered, turning back to the board.
It was clear now at least why Dazza had wanted me along and why he’d brought me into the meeting. He and Sergei had obviously concluded their business and reached some kind of agreement whatever it was about. Now they needed to set up how payments were going to be made, which was my department.
Over the next half an hour or so, with a great swapping of marker pens back and forth between the three of us we worked out in more or less silence how we would organise it until Sergei eventually said, ‘Is OK now?’
I stood back and looked at what we had written, arms folded, tapping the top of the pen against my chin as I thought it through. I knew we had to get this right now. You never knew how difficult meeting up to change it or deal with any subsequent fuck-ups could be. It was quite straightfor
ward I decided, I couldn’t see any reason why any of it would be a problem.
‘OK, it works,’ I pronounced.
‘Sure?’ asked Dazza.
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’
‘Great,’ he said, clapping me on the back. ‘That’s good to hear. OK Sergei?’
‘OK,’ said Sergei, staring at the board with a cloth in his hand, as if to make sure he took it all in before he erased it.
Dazza wasn’t here to socialise. Sergei didn’t join us for dinner.
We ate out again, different place, table in the open. It felt pretty secure. ‘How d’you know the Ruski? They’re not Brethren are they?’ I asked quietly.
For once Dazza seemed quite talkative. ‘No. An outfit called The Wolfpack. Sergei was at the European run last year tagging along as one of their reps with the Krauts who are sponsoring them. They’re trying out, looking for the charter for Russia and Trans-Dneiper, they know how the game’s played. They need to show some class, need to get to know all the other charters and they need to show that they’ve got something to bring to the party.’
‘So that’s what’s in it for them. Fair enough.’
‘And the dosh of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s something I need to talk to you about. How we organise it our end.’
The next day was in many ways a repeat of the last.
As far as I was concerned it was the same deal. Dazza booked a room, a different one this time but still just off the lobby and I stayed out in the bar having a morning coffee and reading the previous day’s paper as Dazza’s next contact arrived.
Again Dazza waved me in after about an hour to meet a guy he introduced as ‘Luis’.
Luis, if that was his name, was quite a contrast to Sergei. Short and slight with round glasses, wavy hair and a friendly grin, dressed in his civvies you wouldn’t look at him twice. You certainly wouldn’t have him pegged as the Pres of the local Brethren charter. But once you began to speak to him you quite quickly changed your mind. Luis was sharp, very sharp, and beneath that friendly tone, every so often a harder edge showed through.
They were talking as I reached the door so I overhead a snatch of the conversation before Dazza turned to make the introductions.
‘Will it work?’
‘It should do, my contact’s very confident. He says that the guys he will be using were the ones that used to drop for the spetsnaz. Anyway what do you care? The first is a test with his gear, not yours. It’s only the real thing after that.’
‘At your risk,’ Luis noted quickly.
‘Sure, at my risk.’
‘OK. As you say, it’s at your risk,’ said Luis, turning to greet me, ‘I have my money, why should I worry?’
As before it was whiteboard work. But having gone through the process with Sergei yesterday it was quicker this time, even though whatever Dazza was going to be up to with Luis seemed as though it was going to be a bit more complicated than whatever deal he had going with Sergei.
Luis was talking about arranging schedules of payments. He wanted to know how quickly I could get access to and move sizable sums of cash. ‘After all,’ he said writing we appreciate it takes time to move cash on the board in not only excellent English but almost copperplate penmanship to finish his thought, ‘we have to be realistic and practical.’
‘Agreed,’ growled Dazza.
I proposed that we set the payments up as trading between companies. All the normal stuff of importing and exporting, invoices, remittance advices, all that sort of straight up paperwork. At our end we could use a series of companies registered in the ever willing names of my clients at our rented addresses. From what Dazza and Luis were saying there wouldn’t be that many transactions a year so if we spread them around the patch and broke the payments down into a variety of transactions they ought to pass largely unnoticed. What’s more I’d arrange to have the companies liquidated every so often, solvently, so there was no fuss, no investigation, they would simply shut up shop and disappear so by the time anyone came looking they would be long gone, dead and buried, the trail gone cold.
That worked for Luis. He had trading companies he could use as fronts as well and it seemed that whatever plan Dazza and he had cooked up would involve some real trade as well which would help cover their tracks.
As with Sergei, this was obviously intended as far as possible to be a one-off meeting so again we sorted out communications as well.
Damage here is going to act as my front man on this. He handles all the money side of things, Dazza wrote. You contact him or me direct on that but no one else.
‘That’s OK, we understand.’
And operations? wrote Luis.
‘Me.’
At first it was by telephone. Dazza had brought a list of phone box numbers. Of course we had phone lines in all of the flats but we didn’t want to compromise them, so I had also arranged to rent a flat specifically to give us a phone to use just for this with no bank accounts attached to it. There was an answering machine that Luis could leave a message on when he wanted to talk to us, just a time and a code word to indicate which phone he was going to call us on. He would set up something similar his end.
Later, when we got tecchie, we moved to dummy Hotmail accounts which were great. Once you both had the password you didn’t even need to send an email and run the risk of it getting intercepted by the plod. You just opened up the account, typed in a draft and left it for the other guy to read and reply to with his own draft. With the number of internet cafés around, not to mention the wonderful facilities provided to me as a resident by our local library service, I could ring the changes on where I accessed it from as well just to keep secure.
‘Now what?’ I asked as we sat in the bar later that evening having said our goodbyes to Luis.
‘Now? Nothing. That’s it, all done.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Kick back, relax, have some beers by the pool, chase some skirt if you want to. What am I? Your holiday rep? What the fuck do I care what you do? Just enjoy the rest of your holiday. We’ve got to do the rest of the week so just get into it. Tell you what, d’ya fancy doing the shotgun thing again tomorrow? It was a blast!’
It was weak but I still laughed.
And so we did. Christ Dazza even insisted we played a round of fucking golf on the Friday. I don’t think it was completely for cover either. He could actually hit the fucking ball which was more than I could.
Dazza said I ought to learn. It would come in handy if I ever retired to Spain.
Chapter 7 – THE DROP
We got back to a crisis. Tiny was dead. And that was hard to take.
It hadn’t been easy for me to make a choice when it had come to the vote, so I knew it would have been much harder for Tiny. OK, so we had partied with The Brethren over the years, gone on runs with them, hosted them at our clubhouse and at our bike show. But still Tiny didn’t really know them, and Dazza in particular, the way that I did. After all, I knew Dazza from before, not only as someone to party with but as someone to do business with from my days of dealing with Gyppo, in a way that Tiny didn’t.
And then again I didn’t really have any position to lose in what would obviously be a new regime. OK, so I was road captain, but to be frank, given the hassle and the need to stay clean it wasn’t a job that many guys wanted. Me, I could take it or leave it, so I wasn’t too fussed either way.
But Tiny, like I said before, back then Tiny had been the P. If we went into The Brethren Tiny knew there would be only one P of the charter, and that would be Dazza. Tiny would be giving up a lot to go in.
But fuck it. He had taken a view and he had gone for it. Leaving aside his own personal position and interests he had voted the way a leader should, he had voted in what he saw as the best interests of the club. You had to respect the man for that.
And now he’d left behind a family; his wife, two kids and Jane, his righteous girlfriend.
*
<
br /> I arranged to meet Billy at the clubhouse and leave my bike there. Billy had bought himself a big fuck off four-by-four, a top of the range Landcruiser and gave me a lift over to Tiny’s place to see Sally and the kids. I got the impression that he hadn’t wanted to run the risk of visiting alone. I didn’t know why.
I soon found out.
I had wanted to go round, to offer some comfort, to let her know that we, the club, would look after her.
But she was distraught. She wouldn’t listen. Kept cursing out the club and all it had done. It was as though she blamed us for what had happened. She screamed at us to get out, that she didn’t want our dirty money. And that set the kids off too. Her folks arrived and we just didn’t need the noise or the grief.
‘Fuck it,’ I said to Billy, ‘Let’s go.’
We sat largely in silence in the car on the way back. We couldn’t say too much there obviously. Unlike the clubhouse which only people we knew visited, and which we swept for bugs regularly, you never knew whether somewhere like the car was secure. So I only spoke once he’d parked up again out front of the clubhouse and we were out of the car. It didn’t seem like a conversation for inside either.
‘So,’ I demanded, ‘something’s up, isn’t it?’
Billy looked away nervously.
‘What’s going on?’ I insisted.
‘I don’t know, but I’m worried.’
‘About what?’
Billy just shrugged.
‘OK then, if you don’t want to tell me you don’t. Just don’t come crying to me whenever it gets to be a problem.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You fucking will, you always do. You know you do.’
‘Yeah, suppose so,’ he said sheepishly.
‘Still, I always was the brains of the outfit,’ I smiled. Another little victory. They all mounted up over the years.
‘Yeah, but don’t forget I’m the good looking one.’
‘If you say so!’ I laughed, changing the subject, ‘So I’ve been meaning to ask, how are you getting on?’