The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  But, according to Customs and Excise reports, Curtis Warren took it to a different level – he bought a tonne of coke. He was buying a kilo for between £3,000 and £4,000 in Colombia, and selling it for £30,000 a kilo in the UK. The dealers were selling that for £1,000 an ounce. You do the maths. There was £30,000 to £40,000 clear profit for them on a kilo.

  So, in the early to mid-’80s, all the conditions – environmental and personal – were in place for my entry into the drugs trade. However, I was holding back. Even though my peers were growing rich, I was trying to fight the evil inside me. Again, something inside me was telling me that it wasn’t right. Instead, I threw myself into martial arts. It paid off, and I attained my first dan in Shotokan karate.

  I’d have done anything not to sell drugs, so I kept looking around to see how I could make money from my fighting skills. Still, I couldn’t even afford to go for a night out at that time. I took a job at Liverpool University as a community sports teacher, but I was trapped in a flat with Maria, my son Stephen and her three kids from a previous relationship. Deep down I knew that there was only one way to a better life – and that was education. I enrolled on an access course in the hope that getting qualifications would one day get me out of the mess I was in.

  However, things took a different turn one measly pay day when I headed down to Kirklands, my favourite bar. This was a really cool place to go, where black lads used to meet white girls. There was a doorman there called Fred Green, who used to make life difficult for me and Andrew John whenever we tried to go in. He always tried to make us pay, knowing that we were skint, while all the time he was letting everyone else in for free. We wanted revenge, but we didn’t think that we could take him individually, so we did what’s known in the trade as a ‘double bank’ on him. I attacked him from the front, whilst Andrew came from behind, and we had it away with him. As he was rolling around on the ground, we both looked to the stars and had an idea. If we could actually defeat the man on the door, why couldn’t we just take over the venue’s security for ourselves? So we did. He was an old lion who was starting to lose his teeth, so he didn’t make too much noise when we told him that the door was ours.

  From the off, Marcello Pole, the millionaire owner of the bar, took a shine to me. He said, ‘You’ve had the ability to remove Fred from the door. I’m going to give you a chance, cos I’m a believer in the survival of the fittest.’ After that, to give him his due, he gave us the contract. Nevertheless, he still said, ‘You’ve got to let me stay in charge of the bar and business.’

  I find that when you meet new people in life, it takes between thirty seconds and one minute to find out whether they’re good for you or not, and Marcello and I knew we were good for each other. Other young bucks with the taste of fresh blood in their mouths would have tried to take the whole club off Marcello. However, I knew that if I allowed him to give me instructions, he would always feed me when I was hungry. He was an experienced businessman and had been involved in clubland for over 30 years. He had seen it all before – the hard cases coming and going. He wasn’t intimidated by me; he knew that I was just the latest in a long line of faces. It was a case of ‘Here’s the new guy I’m dealing with’ as far as Marcello was concerned.

  The door at Kirklands was like a crash course in drug dealing and our first proper entry into that game. In a way, the drugs came to me in the end. They always do.

  6

  THE APPRENTICE TAXMAN

  The white customers who came to Kirklands smoked hash, and the black guys liked bush. The dealers were doing a roaring trade, knocking out £2 draws to the punters, so we told them that from now on they were going to have to give us – the security – some money if they wanted to serve up. They gave us between £20 and £50, on top of our £30-a-night proper wages – an instant 100 per cent pay rise. Marcello turned a blind eye to the cannabis dealing as long as we stopped it every now and then under his instruction – before a police raid, for example.

  Meanwhile, I was picking up kick-boxing trophies at breakneck speed – first by becoming the British champion and then by winning the European title. I was using a technique called ‘visualisation’ to devastating effect. The first time I came across it was in 1977 when I was listening to an interview with Wimbledon tennis champ Björn Borg. He said, ‘Before I start the tournament, I see myself lifting the Wimbledon shield. I look in my mind and visualise myself being a champion on centre court.’ I was like, ‘Wow. Fucking powerful stuff, man, powerful stuff.’ I robbed his idea and envisaged becoming the British champion. I fought a guy called Nick North in Manchester for the title and battered him. To this day, he’s never forgiven me. Later, I won my European title in Athens against a German guy called Carlos. I had also pictured that victory clearly in my mind before making it an actuality.

  I started applying my Olympian violence to the street. Following some brutal skirmishes with other gangsters, mine and Andrew’s reputations as men not to be fucked with increased and attracted lucrative opportunities. And there was always barroom chaos to contend with. In the past, Andrew and I had fought and knocked out the same men, so we were well matched in that sense. One night, a black soldier who’d come from the Falklands suffering with that war syndrome thing came in. He stared at me all night, and then suddenly he started to run at me like he had a bayonet, screaming, ‘Aaaaaagh!’ He ran straight onto my Sunday punch – a right hand. His eyes rolled back, and he was unconscious before he hit the floor. He was still asleep 15 minutes later.

  While we were getting our stash together, a break into the proper drugs game came from an unexpected source. A guy called Robin came to see me, saying that he’d had a kilo of cocaine stolen from him by a black guy in our community called Randy. Andrew and I found Randy at his mother’s house. He’d gotten high on his own supply, been too fucked to sell the stolen kilo on and hadn’t made much damage to it. There was still 35 ounces left, so we just took it back off him.

  Robin was delighted when we called him with the good news. The bad news was that we were going to keep half as our payment. He said, ‘No, well, look, that wasn’t what I intended to give you.’ Too bad. Then he added, ‘I was going to give you ten grand for getting it.’

  When he said this to me, I nearly fell over. I put my hand over the receiver and said to Andrew, ‘We’re keeping half this stuff and he thinks we’re taking too much, but he’s prepared to give us ten grand for it!’ Only then did the figures start to compute in my brain – ten grand probably didn’t even cover half the amount we had. ‘A.J., we’ve got to find out what this stuff is worth,’ I said.

  At that time, I had no understanding of the amount of money involved in drugs, or the value of cocaine or anything like that. You have to remember that I was 23 or 24 years old, a member of the England karate team and I didn’t drink much or smoke – I was a finely tuned athlete, whose body was a temple, and I usually only sipped orange juice. And I had fought all temptation to get involved in the business of Class A drugs – until then.

  Strangely enough, we turned to my old mate Curtis Warren to value the stuff. He’d just been released from prison for holding up a security van. When inside, he’d become friends with Callum, an incredible, untouchable villain. Callum was from a dynasty of traditional gangsters who owned a snooker hall and gym and invested heavily in drugs. Today, the dynasty is worth tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of pounds. Callum and Curtis were only starting off then, but Curtis was still able to tell us that our kilo was worth about £1,000 per ounce. We found out we had £35,000 worth of gear.

  Armed with this info, we phoned Robin back and told him that from then on we were his unofficial partners. I said to him, ‘We’ve got your gear back for you. You wouldn’t have had it if it wasn’t for us. Whatever you’re getting for it, we’re having half. We’re not looking to do anything bad, like kill you. But next time you get one, we’ll come with you as your partners to make sure you don’t get robbed.’ Deep down, I think Robin was just happy to hav
e two good enforcers on his side who weren’t looking to rip him off or do anything bad to him.

  Word soon spread that we provided protection for drug dealers, helping them if they had a problem. Drug dealers started flocking to us, saying, ‘Such and such has robbed ten kilograms off me. Can you get it back?’ Or ‘One of my distributors took five kilograms on tick and has bumped me the money. Can you recover the debt?’

  Commissions on recovering narco debts started flooding in. Then Andrew and I hit on a brilliant idea – we should be more proactive. Robin’s problem had been a passive situation that involved us solving an existing drugs robbery through negotiation. He had come to us. Why not go out there and generate our own business? Why not simply rob the drug dealers directly? Why not use extreme violence to make them give us their drugs and money? After all, they weren’t going to fucking snitch on us, were they?

  Thus began my descent into drugs, organised crime and what is now known as taxing. It was strange timing, because it was all completely at odds with developments in my family life, which had become more stable. After many years, I’d finally made peace with my dad for abandoning us. For the first time, we were doing the father and son thing and being friendly together. The reconciliation had started very tentatively and frostily more than ten years before when I’d been forced to go and visit him when I was aged about eleven. At that time, he was living with the same babysitter he’d run off with. When it was time for me to leave, he told me to give her a kiss goodbye. Fuck off. She was nothing to me, and as far as I was concerned she was the reason my dad wasn’t at home with us. I’ve always had a fierce loyalty to my mother and anyone close to me, so I dodged under my dad’s arm, jumped over the couch and ran out the house to avoid her.

  When I got to the age of about 18 or 19, my balls had dropped, and I actually considered myself a man. Only then did I start to empathise with my dad. He had fought in the war for ‘Queen and Country’ and had been entitled to come to the UK. Yet Britain in the early 1960s was a cold and racist place. On top of this, he also had the added pressure of being on the run. He had entered a mixed-raced relationship with my mum, who already had three children by two different men, and had two kids with her. No wonder he had fucked off – the pressure was too much for him. After realising this, I began to make allowances and started to build a relationship with him.

  However, it wasn’t as simple as that. Though I’d forgiven my dad on a surface level, I hadn’t realised the effect an absentee father was having on my life. Although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, my violence, aggression and propensity to evil and crime were partly down to my dad having not been around. While I was growing up, I’d had a series of uncles – my mum’s boyfriends – but I’d never had a father to teach me right from wrong and how to deal with certain situations.

  I had been raised mainly by women, and that is why I’m now so in touch with my feminine side. Believe it or not, it’s being so sensitive that’s made me so harsh. You wouldn’t believe how sensitive I actually am, because it’s covered by layers and layers of socialisation process and attitude. In part, I blame my father’s absence for my chequered history – car thief by the age of 11, burglar by 13, mugger by 15, urban ninja by 18, armed robber by 21 and on the verge of becoming a drug dealer and protection racketeer by 24. Still, to this day, my dad’s the only guy that I’ve never confronted about the things he’s done to me. We’ve got this father–son dynamic: I can’t face him down and tell him about the pain he’s caused me. It’s the elephant-in-the-room scenario.

  However, it wasn’t all a downer in my personal life. At that stage, I had met the woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life. Her name was Dionne Amoo. I first spotted her walking along the street. Then I bumped into her at a birthday party and instantly fell in love with her. The only problem was her boyfriend.

  She used to come into Kirklands, so one night I went over to her boyfriend and said, ‘Dionne doesn’t want to be with you any more. She’s with me now. I’ll give you the first shot free and after that it’s all on.’ He never fought me for her; he just walked away, and since that day we’ve been together.

  As for Maria, I found out something about her that destroyed my trust in her. I moved out and left her to bring up my son Stephen, with my full financial support. Danny, my adopted son, was being brought up by my family.

  Meanwhile, Andrew and I had decided to turn our business idea into a reality. There was certainly a gap in the market for something we called a ‘taxman’. This was an individual who preyed on drug dealers, taking their money off them by any means necessary – in other words, an underworld extortionist. The plan was to learn where these drug dealers held their stash of cocaine, heroin or draw and anything else of value, such as cash, cars, jewellery or expensive assets. How? By kidnapping and torturing them and stealing everything they had.

  The philosophy behind taxing was simple. As drug dealers were involved in illegal activities themselves, they couldn’t very well go to the police if they had been done over. Therefore, they could not rely on the biggest gang in Liverpool to protect them – Merseyside’s finest boys in blue, the police force. As I had learnt before, unreported crime was the best crime, and the only recourse drug dealers had was the underworld. Gangsters were the only people that they could go to for help if they had been taxed – to ask them to threaten the taxman into returning their gear. However, at the time, Andrew and I thought we were invincible. We were fearless world-champion athletes and nobody could touch us. So that didn’t fucking bother us.

  PART TWO

  THE PLAYER

  7

  FULL-TIME TAXMAN

  My first taxation was on a heroin dealer called Brian Wagner from the Everton area of Liverpool. Me and my mate Marsellus conned him into thinking that we wanted to purchase ten kilograms of heroin – worth about £250,000 wholesale.

  Strangely enough, he invited us to his mother’s house to do the deal and took us right up to his bedroom. Here was one of the biggest Class A dealers in the city, taking us up to his room as though we were going to listen to pop records. I quickly came to realise that the majority of drug dealers weren’t very smart guys. They’d put their most valued narcotics in their own houses, under their own mother’s bed. How fucking daft is that?

  I sat on his bed while he took out a blue Puma sports bag from his wardrobe and laid it on his Liverpool FC quilt cover next to me. Then he showed us a packet of the gear, containing about five kilograms.

  I said, ‘Well that’s nice. But where’s the rest?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said that he couldn’t show us the other five kilos, so I pulled a gun on him and pistol-whipped him across the mouth. We were in game now. He knew that this was no run-of-the-mill sale. He was bleeding, saying that he didn’t have any more kilos, so I put the gun in his mouth and said, ‘Tell me where it is, prick, or I’ll put your fucking brains all over that Pink Floyd poster on the wall.’

  He mumbled some bollocks about ‘no more gear’, so I rammed the end of the barrel further into his mouth, smashing his teeth.

  Meanwhile, his mum was shouting up the stairs, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, lads?’ She didn’t know what was going on, and there she was getting out the chocolate HobNobs for her visitors.

  ‘No thanks, Mrs Wagner,’ I said politely, pushing the gun further down her son’s throat. I then said to Wagner, ‘If you don’t fucking tell me, I’ll do your fucking ma as well, you fat cunt.’ With that, he loosened up a bit.

  ‘I’ve got it stashed close by,’ he admitted.

  ‘Good lad,’ I said, putting the gun in my back pocket, like you see in the old films during a stick-up.

  I marched him out of his house. However, as we were leaving, his mum spotted the blood from where I’d just hit him. She said to him, ‘What’s happened, Brian? Are you all right, son?’

  Fair play to the lad, he just smiled and replied, ‘We’re just messing about, mam. Don’t worry. Just wrestling and boxing and that. I’
m only going to the car to get plasters. I’ll be back in a minute. Put the kettle on.’

  We all smiled, thanked her for her hospitality and got in the car to go and find the goods. Dickhead was in the back, I was driving and Marsellus was in the passenger seat. We were travelling north in the direction of the new cathedral when suddenly blue lights appeared behind us. Oh dear! The bizzies. I had a firearm on my person, five kilograms of heroin in the boot, a top drug dealer held under duress in the back and the police were about to stop us. Had his mum got suspicious and called 999? ‘No,’ I thought. ‘It’s too quick, surely?’ I looked for other bizzy cars. ‘If his mum didn’t call them, what the fuck is going on?’

  My brain started to work overtime as I tried to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, Marsellus interrupted my train of thought. He said, ‘Kick it, kick it,’ street talk for ‘Foot down and get off’. ‘Kick it, Stephen, now.’

  He was panicking, but I said, ‘No, I can blag this.’ By then, I had concluded that it was a routine stop. Even back then, I had nerves of steel. I didn’t want a chase all over the city. I knew my limitations behind the wheel of a car – I’m no getaway driver. In fact, I’m not even a very good jockey. ‘No, it’s OK, I can handle it,’ I insisted.

  Marsellus replied, ‘No, Stephen, no. Take the chase. It’s too on top.’ But I wanted to see if I could speak to the police officer. If he intended to arrest us, we would have to take it from there, but there was half a chance I could blag it if he was just a traffic bizzy.