The Devil

by Graham Johnson

I have an unnatural ability to read situations and get a feel for the way a thing is going to go. I was 99.9 per cent sure that this one was going to go in our favour, as I felt we had all the advantages psychologically. When Andrew John and I were together, we unnerved people. We were like a pair of panthers. Also, Tommy Gilday had already felt the strength of Andrew John in the fight that had sparked everything off and he’d faced a gunshot from me.

  I did all the talking, whilst Andrew maintained a menacing silence. Everybody knew that I was the brains. I immediately went on the offensive, making out that it was all their fault. Then I said, ‘We’ll let your attack by 300 men go. We’ll grant you a reprieve.’ As a sweetener, I threw in a bone: ‘We don’t even mind if you go to the club when you want. You can come in for free.’

  Finally, it was decided that we would work The Grafton. Then, in a unifying spirit of underworld togetherness, we also negotiated a little bit of a protection racket that would benefit us all. If the owner of the club tried to get rid of me and Andrew, Tommy agreed that he would come down, make some noise and smash up a few things. We would pretend to chase him and his crew off, and Mecca would be forced to keep us on as security and up the fee, which we’d then share with Tommy. Textbook protection.

  There’s a book called The 48 Laws of Power, which reinterprets for the twentieth century the teachings of such political thinkers as Machiavelli and Stalin. One of the main rules states that you must use your enemies. We hadn’t even heard of the book at the time, but that’s what we were doing naturally.

  In the end, we became allies with Gilday, although Andrew wanted the last word: ‘You’ve reprieved yourselves this time from some very serious violence, so you owe me a favour.’ He was cryptically referring to Gilday’s connections as a drugs trafficker. The favour meant that any time we wanted some large amounts of coke or heroin, Tommy would have to serve us up.

  A few years later, Tommy fell out of a tree and died. I was genuinely upset, as I had got to know him well by then and thought that he was a very funny guy. I remember thinking, ‘Isn’t it mad? Tommy faced death in the underworld every day, but he died because of an act of God.’ It reminded me of a story I’d read about soldiers in Vietnam who’d freaked out after one of their mates drowned while on R & R – despite having been shot at every day in the jungle. It was a lesson in our mortality. Every day before going to work, I’d ask Marsellus or A.J., ‘Are you ready to die today, kidder?’

  Without fail, they’d reply, ‘At the drop of a hat, mate.’

  9

  THE HOUSE OF HORRORS

  Andrew and I decided to make our taxation more systematic. Through The Grafton, we had met a drug dealer called the Blagger. The Blagger was unique in the narco hierarchy. Although he was black, he lived in a hard-core white area of Liverpool called Croxteth, where drug dealing was carried out on a similar scale to the boom in Chinese manufacturing. The inhabitants of the tower blocks in this decimated post-war wasteland consumed so many drugs that the area became known as ‘Smack City’. Behind the misery of the whacked-out families, dealers were growing disproportionately rich. To us, that meant only one thing – potential tax victims. The beauty of it was that the Blagger knew exactly who to target. All that we had to do was devise a method of luring the dealers into our trap.

  We quickly persuaded the Blagger to switch sides – from straightforward dealer to point man in our tax crew. His job was to act as the bait for our taxations, by posing as the front man for a fictitious gang of drug ‘Mr Bigs’. He was to groom the dealers over several months by doing a few legit deals with them before the sting. On each project, we had a kitty of, say, thirty grand – ten grand each from Andrew and me, plus ten grand from a ruthless villain called the Rock Star, our new business partner. We’d give it to the Blagger, and he’d buy a kilo of cocaine from the latest hotshot drug baron. We’d turn that over quickly and then buy another kilo off the same dealer, which we’d also turn over quickly. This phase was all about setting up the victim, getting his confidence and making him believe that the Blagger was a valuable and trustworthy customer – always paying the exact amount in cash, and always with a chat and a smile. Most importantly during this honeymoon period, the deal would always take place at their venue.

  Before we knew it, the dealer was ready to give the Blagger credit. This was our signal to start preparation for the sting. The dealer was thinking, ‘Well, the Blagger is a great customer – buys loads, no gip and always comes up with the money. Everything’s OK. Everything’s straightforward.’

  Once we had their trust, we’d start getting a few kilos on tick and repay the credit bang on time. Then we’d gradually start to introduce a few problems. We’d be deliberately late for a payment, for example, thus forcing the dealer to come out of his comfort zone for the first time – straight to the ‘House of Horrors’.

  I’ll give you a real example. Our first victim was a red-headed guy called Kevin. Now, Kevin was making noise that the Blagger owed him £28,000, which was true, as we had deliberately failed to clean our slate after a handover. The Blagger said that he had the dough, so Kevin agreed to come down to the House of Horrors to collect. This house was purposely acquired for taxation torture. It was a Victorian property in probate, waiting to be repossessed by some mortgage company, but I had the keys. It was perfect for an ambush. The front door opened to the left onto a long, 16-feet corridor that ran straight into the kitchen. This open-plan effect lulled the victim into a false sense of security. However, what they didn’t know was that there was a recessed alcove under the staircase on one side of the corridor: an ideal place for an assailant to launch onto unsuspecting prey.

  As part of our drive for increasing tax efficiency, I had revamped our intelligence-gathering arm. Through research – one of the lads was fucking Kevin’s bird – we found out that Kevin kept all of his drug profits in an army kit bag in his house. One night, Kevin arrived at the House of Horrors to pick up his dough as arranged. We positioned a girl in the kitchen at a wooden table, eating a bowl of soup. This was the first scene that Kevin was greeted with – a welcoming, non-threatening female. As a further distraction, she had great tits and was wearing a low-cut, tight-fitting top – a pure Sharon Stone-style decoy. Don’t forget, when a drug dealer like Kevin is going to do a job, such as collecting dough, he’s on point; he’s on red alert, ready for danger. So, he clocked the juggling tits, and the girl smiled at him. Kev smiled back and bounced indoors, acting the rock-hard drug dealer trying to impress her.

  Little did he know that the Devil was coiled up, ready to pounce from the alcove. As he idled past, I put a serious choke on him. After that, I got him in a grip that lifted him off his feet, while Andrew made sure that he had no weapons. Physically subdued, real quick. I used my favourite method on him: I grabbed his forehead and wrenched it back using my left hand, whilst putting my right hand on his throat. I snapped my right hand down and gave him a good punch on the windpipe. After three or four seconds, he was out cold. I had cut off his air supply, and he was rendered unconscious. He’d be bruised the next day, but that was all.

  When Kevin woke up, he found himself blindfolded and duct-taped to a chair. I said into his ear, ‘Everything can go OK if you just tell us what we want to hear.’ I was following my usual script. ‘If you want to come out of this situation unscarred and unharmed, just cooperate. Give up your money, give up your goods and everything will be OK.’ I pressed a knife into his face and neck. ‘Look, I don’t want to have to cut you. I’ve cut a lot of people in the past, but all I want is your money.’

  Then, to put him under further psychological pressure, I established a bit of moral superiority. ‘You’re peddling misery and death on the streets. You’re selling drugs to kids, and you’re not supposed to do that. So, I feel it’s my responsibility to relieve you of the profits and redistribute the wealth.’ This idea of playing a vigilante was so successful that I started using it as PR in the wider community. People on the street actually started
to believe that I was on a crusade to stamp out drugs. It was good cover, especially in the newly politicised ghetto, where Malcolm X-style rejection of Class As was starting to be good currency. Cynical, I know, but true.

  Despite all that has been said, the ideal taxing scenario is to be able to release your victim, if at all possible, without any physical marks on them. Let’s say they choose to go to the Old Bill afterwards. Now, if I’ve actually sliced them on the face and given them seven stitches, that means that there’s physical evidence. Pictures of the scars and the doctor’s report can all be presented in a court of law. On the other hand, if I’ve only made the victim believe that he’s going to be cut so that he gives up his money, then that’s a different story altogether.

  Let’s just say that afterwards he thinks, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to the police anyway.’ The bizzies would then ask him, ‘Where were you tied up? Let’s see your marks. Did you get cut?’ If he has no marks, it gives the Devil grounds for plausible denial. And plausible denial is one of my favourite phrases. It means that I could have done the crime, but I’ve got a plausible reason to deny it, because there’s no evidence. A court won’t hear it, because the British judicial system requires evidence. Praise be for plausible denial, because without it I would be in jail now on multiple life sentences. And villains facing some of the most serious murder and drug-importation charges have got off by using this gem of a loophole. When the going gets tough for the CIA and the FBI, what do they fall back on? Their old friend plausible denial. Those guys and the Mafia probably ironed J.F.K., but there’s no evidence, so that one remains in its box. The grassy knoll? Triangulation of fire? Go on, you fucking prove it.

  I had studied psychology at university, so I could talk in someone’s ear and damage them more that way than by physically harming them. What’s more, I could keep it up, Abu Ghraib-style, for two to three hours. Otherwise, I could keep a victim up for 24 hours without any sleep, drip-feeding fear into his head, Guantanamo-style.

  Without screaming or shouting, I said to Kevin, ‘It’s nothing for me to cut off your ear, put it in your pocket and send you home with it. I’ve done it before.’ Always precise and controlled, I continued, ‘If you really think hard, you’ll be able to work out who I am and who’s doing this to you. You know who the Blagger’s mates are. The Blagger brought you here. If any harm should come to him, even if he slips on a bar of soap in the bath, you’ll have us all over you like a rash. You know what we’re all about. You understand?’

  I kept pressing home my motive of moral superiority. ‘You were just hassling the Blagger for 28 grand that he didn’t really owe you, you understand? So, now you’re going to have to pay us a fine of 28 grand, cos that’s what you were trying to con him out of.’ I put the knife against his ear, and he started to weep uncontrollably. When they start to weep, that’s usually the cue to ask the big question, ‘Where’s the money?’ I said.

  ‘My stuff’s inside the kit bag,’ he replied. Because we had prior intelligence, I knew we were on the right track and he wasn’t trying to tell us lies.

  ‘Where’s the kit bag?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s in the spare room, behind the kid’s bedroom. My missus’ll be there now.’

  ‘Has she got a mobile number, yeah? Give us the digits?’ I wrote them down carefully.

  It was time for the pay-off. I gave Kevin a series of simple-to-follow instructions on how to organise the handover of the money. It was critical that his bird didn’t twig that it was a tax situation. She couldn’t be alarmed in any way. She had to be convinced that the handover was part of a routine drugs transaction that her beloved did ten times a day.

  ‘You’re going to get yourself together, and you’re going to make that call to your bird,’ I told him. ‘You’re going to tell her that a lad is coming round to your house in 20 or 30 minutes. You’re going to tell her that she’s got to get all the money out of the kit bag, because you’re expecting a raid. Or that you need the money out of the house quick, because you’ve got a good deal on. Tell her not to panic, not to worry, just to get the money out of the house.’

  The main thing for me was to get Kevin to sound normal. So I gave him a drink of water, calmed him down and said, ‘Look, this ordeal is nearly over. You’re worth the money, believe me.’

  I was reassuring him because there was a chance he could get a bit brave as he calmed down and began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. People do – it’s just human nature. He might also try to pull a fast one. Many drug dealers have worked out in advance a code with their wives and their stash minders to deal with exactly this type of emergency kidnap situation. For instance, say that Kevin’s wife was called Margaret, he might have told her that if he ever called her ‘Maggie’ over the phone, it was bang on. So, my job was to convince him not to try any funny stuff.

  He made the call and kept it simple: ‘Look, love, just get everything out of the kit bag and put it in a bin liner. I can’t come home and do it, cos I’m a bit tied up right now [how we laughed], so I’m going to send someone else. A lad called Jap will be around in about half an hour, so just give him the parcel.’ His wife agreed.

  Jap was our hand-picked bagman and a key player in the operation. Imagine what would have happened if I had gone around to see Kevin’s wife to pick up the dough. If I had turned up at her door – 225 pounds of prime black underworld – she would have immediately thought that something was wrong: ‘Aye, aye. What’s Kevin doing sending this cunt to collect the money?’ However, Jap was on hand. He was 17, had the face of an angel and a sunny demeanour like one of Fonzie’s mates from Happy Days. He was skinny, innocuous and unthreatening.

  Jap went to the house, and Kevin’s wife said, ‘You all right, kid? Are you sure that Kevin wants me to give you the money? You want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m going to meet him with the money. He’ll call you when it’s all sorted out. You stay where you are. You’ve got the kids to look after, and that. He just asked me to do it, knowworramean?’

  Kevin’s wife was cooing all over Jap: ‘Aargh, aren’t you lovely.’ She was probably also thinking, ‘Kevin must be on for a few quid here. Whoever he’s with, they must have a deal going on.’

  Jap was white. Well, he had to be white, didn’t he? All of these scenarios had been carefully worked out by me. Years later, I would apply the same technique when borrowing millions of pounds from the banks for legitimate property deals. I’d do all the arse work on the deal – getting a site and planning permission – then I’d just put a squeaky-clean white guy in front of the bank manager to borrow £14 million. The banks would do the checks on him, and, boom, boom, boom, the money would be released. It’s simple psychology: a white guy is someone the banks know, someone they can trust and are used to. Don’t give them anything out of the ordinary. That’s when the alarm bells start sounding.

  I had a number of Jap-style bagpersons on the books, such as a half-Chinese bird who was brilliant for collecting money because she was pretty and ingenious. However, behind the babes-in-the-woods exterior, she had balls of steel – the only thing that stopped her from being a man was the fact that she had no dick.

  Anyway, Kevin’s bird left Jap on the doorstep, bolted upstairs and came back down with a bin liner stuffed inside a massive holdall. Jap thanked her, smiled and got off the plot. He then counted the dough, bringing in the tally at £68,000. That was over £20,000 each between the three of us – me, A.J. and the Rock Star. Plus a little drink for the Blagger. Not bad for the late 1980s. We booted Kevin out of the House of Horrors, and that was that.

  The best kind of tax was when you got the money and nobody got seriously hurt – just like in Kevin’s case. Of course, they all start off with violence, so the prey can be led into a situation where he can be held against his will. To get to that point, they have to be pounced on. Nonetheless, if you’re a good taxman, you can quickly end the violence and extract the tribute through psycholog
ical intimidation.

  Take, for instance, the next episode at the House of Horrors. The following week, we lured a 17-stone drug dealer called Dominic to our ‘Inland Revenue’ office. Dominic had three kilograms of heroin that he wanted to sell to us, and we were sitting on a sofa negotiating. I opened my briefcase, which looked like it was full to the top with £20 notes – all counterfeit, of course, a thin layer simply covering some newspapers underneath. I closed the case and put it on my knee. ‘You’ve seen the money, now where’s the heroin?’ I asked him. Then, suddenly, I flipped over the case to reveal a dagger hidden beneath – a twelve-inch blade with a five-inch handle.

  During the seconds in which he had been bedazzled by the dough, I had taken one step forward and had threatened to slit his throat with a blade. He literally pissed and shit himself. He was a big guy, and there were all kinds of problems with his motions. The smell and sheer volume of faeces was phenomenal. A pool of urine started to spread around his trousers. The guy was 17 stone and supposed to be rough as houses, but I overcame him with ease, partly because I had taken him by surprise and partly due to my use of overwhelming force.

  I put the blade to his throat and said to Andrew, ‘You control him and get the details we need.’ He was crying, and tears were running down his face. He told me where to find the gear, and we sent the half-Chinese bird around to collect it.

  Now, deep inside me, I felt a bit sorry for him, sitting there in such a totally humiliating position. ‘Go and clean yourself up, lad. I won’t send you home stinking of shit. Take them kecks off. There’s a pair of jeans up in the bedroom.’ I couldn’t let certain geezers go upstairs, because they’d be looking for a weapon to come back downstairs to smash me over the head with, but I knew who I could turn my back on, and I knew the villains who were to be given no quarter. Again, it came down to my spider senses. Nevertheless, Dominic was a broken man. He had come into the house a giant and had left a midget.