The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  Following a nice touch, the difference between jail and a £15,000 holiday in St Lucia can be as minute as a molecule. Don’t leave any DNA on the victim. And remember, injuries are the most compelling evidence in court.

  There are two other legal factors that are related to this rule, both of which are vital to a taxman – police intelligence and police corruption, the two being interrelated. It’s not what the police know, it’s what they can prove. All villains are aware of this. My police intelligence file consists of at least four to five boxes of shit that police claim I’ve been involved in. Nonetheless, it doesn’t fucking matter, because none of it can be proven. The important fact is that my actual police record is only a sheet long. So, from four or five boxes of crime, they have only ever managed to boil it down one sheet’s worth of convictions. That’s because I make it a top priority never to leave physical evidence behind.

  Now, police intelligence can work for you or against you, and this is where the police corruption comes in. For £1,500, I could find out what sort of investigations were going on in relation to me during my taxing days, especially out of one particular police station in Liverpool. In all fairness to the Merseyside Constabulary, Norman Bettison, appointed chief constable in 1998, later cleaned up the force. He was an honest man, and if you were in tune to the nature of the beast, you could actually feel it softening when Bettison came to power. You could actually feel the beast becoming more politically correct, because law and order and fair dealing all took priority over bent officers.

  So concludes the Stephen French code of conduct. However, everyone who goes to work knows that the rules regulating behaviour don’t just exist in a vacuum: there’s something called ‘office politics’, a kind of invisible set of constantly changing rules that determine how we behave, and how the rules are interpreted and enforced, based upon our relationship with our co-workers. You’ll be glad to hear that the drugs taxation industry is no different from working in an insurance office or a bank.

  THE OFFICE POLITICS HANDBOOK FOR THE STEPHEN FRENCH FOUNDATION OF TAX STUDIES

  A – Choose your victim carefully

  Don’t prey on criminal organisations bigger than yours. For instance, I once knew a drug baron called Jim, who was head of a powerful crime dynasty. If Jim phoned me up and said, ‘Some nice Charlie there. I’m going to put a ki away for you,’ I’d have to go down and see him, pay him for the gear and do a genuine deal. (Most of the time, the code he used was cars: ‘A lovely ride. You’d love to drive this. Come down and have a look.’) If anyone else rang up and said that to me, I’d simply steal the gear and get off without paying. However, you couldn’t mess with Jim. He and guys like him were so cocksure of themselves. They had so much confidence in their own reputations that they would give out kilos of cocaine or heroin on tick, knowing that they would be paid. If they weren’t, they would just murder the culprit. In the jungle, you won’t see a lion trying to feed on a rhino. D’you get me? As a taxman, you look for an antelope that’s come into the wrong part of the jungle or one who’s come to the waterhole to feed. If you want to be involved in the nefarious world of drug taxing, you’ve got to make sure that you can hold your own.

  B – Draw up clear lines of demarcation in your business plan

  One day, I might be taxing someone, the next I’d be doing a legitimate drug deal with some proper dealers. But don’t chop and change and confuse one with the other. Get this in your head: if you’re doing a deal, do a deal. Don’t suddenly think, ‘I’m going to tax this person,’ cos you’re getting greedy. People will soon stop doing business with you, and your rep will suffer at the hands of the office politicians.

  In these kinds of situations, it was useful to have a good ‘checker’. A checker was a kind of bodyguard-cum-middleman-cum-referee who made sure that a drug deal went well between two parties who did not know each other and had yet to build up trust. Everybody and his brother wanted to sell drugs, but you needed a good checker to make sure that it didn’t descend into anarchy. The minnows were scared shitless of doing business with the sardines. The sardines were scared to do business with the sharks. Then there were the killer whales who wanted to eat everything. With a checker, the minnows got themselves a net – an equaliser – to make sure that the bigger members of the ecosystem didn’t start biting their heads off.

  Because I obeyed rule A rigidly, I became a checker myself and made hundreds of thousands of pounds in commission. During these deals, some of the sharks would turn to me and say, ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘Well, I’m here to make sure that he doesn’t get robbed,’ I’d reply.

  Of course, I could have turned Turk on the minnows and robbed them. However, I had to say to myself, ‘When I’m taxing, I’m taxing. When I’m doing a deal, I’m doing a deal. If you double-cross the guy that paid you, you’re not going to get any more work.’ However, by remaining consistent and not betraying anyone, people started to say, ‘Well, Frenchie had that £1 million in cash of my money in the room, but he didn’t try and have me off.’ Those jobs would then keep coming.

  For instance, there was a gang from Huyton that was doing business with a black gang from my area. I got a call from Jim, and he said, ‘Look, something’s going on down there, Stephen, we need you around. Look after them lads. Them lads are all right.’ It was a case of the old favour syndrome.

  I said, ‘Well, I was going to have them, Jim, but since you’ve given me a call, it’ll go straight.’ The lads from Huyton then knew that they had a checker. ‘We can use this guy,’ they were thinking. ‘We can sell some stuff to the black geezers through this guy, because we’ve got a checker on them.’ I did all this because I didn’t want to upset my friends.

  A lot of people thought that you could buy into being a checker full time: ensure someone’s deal went OK, make a living and get a good drink out of it. But suddenly checkers became obsolete. This was because the minnows turned to another form of equaliser – the gun. This was why guns spread far and wide so fast throughout the drugs game – they levelled the playing field for the barnacles and crustaceans. The crustaceans could start trading with the crocs without fear. Look at all the shootings going on now. It isn’t the crocodiles and the great whites who are doing it – it’s the fucking plankton. The skinny teenagers in their 4x4s – armed to the teeth. The thing is, the killer whales can do fuck all about it. They’ve been rendered toothless because they’ve got a lot to lose, whereas the kids haven’t.

  C – Guard your reputation with your life

  This is law five in The 48 Laws of Power, one of my favourite books. You’ve got to build your rep as a taxman with fear and violence, and then you’ve got to defend it. What I’m talking about here are the everyday slights made by your co-workers, designed to undermine your power. Everyone will understand what I mean when I say, ‘Gossip is the Devil’s Radio.’

  I’ll give you an example. In sobriety, Jim was fine. However, once he had had a line of coke and a few drinks, the horrible racist in him reared its head. His chat would be, ‘Niggers this, and niggers that, and they can’t come down here, and they can’t do this and that.’

  If I was out in his company, I’d say, ‘You can’t start that Jim, cos I’m a nigger.’

  He’d then say something like, ‘But I don’t mean you, Ste.’

  I’d reply, ‘Yeah, but if anybody knows that I’m sitting here listening to you nigger this and nigger that and nigger the other, what does that make me? And I’m no fucking Uncle Tom. So don’t fucking do that, mate. Curb that, otherwise I’ll get off, understand?’ You have to make sure you get on top of things like that.

  D – Never show fear in front of the lads

  If you crumble on the job, the lads will laugh at you. They’ll say things like, ‘Go and get the piece of wood out of that skip and strap it to your back. Get some backbone, lad, if you want to get involved with the graft.’ There was a rice mill near the docks, and they’d say, ‘If your arse is going to go, go a
nd get a job in the rice mill and hump bags, don’t sell drugs.’ My fear was always under control, but I watched many fall by the wayside by lacking a good pair of town halls.

  E – It’s not all about race

  The reason why I was always taxing white geezers was because I didn’t really know any white people, and this made them practical, risk-free targets. (See the taxation code of conduct, rule 4.) Sure, it also made it easier for me to make them suffer, as I didn’t trust any white geezers in the first place – I was brought up not to like Johnnys, as in John Bull the Englishman. However, later in life, my opinion changed. I never really had much time for white people until I met a white guy called Franny Bennett, who was a mate of the Rock Star’s. And another white guy called Whacker, a really sharp young lad who was also a friend of the Rock Star’s, had an effect on me, too. I really liked him. Unfortunately, he never realised that, because he was scared of me.

  Then, finally, I met a white businessman and had an epiphany. I equate it to when Malcolm X went to Mecca and met white Muslims. Because he was so pro-black, he never wanted anything to do with white people. However, after Mecca, he realised that race and colour were just a construction of society, and it would only take two generations to breed racism out of us all. Two generations and it could all be gone. However, as it stands, the prejudice just keeps getting carried over and handed down from father to son.

  Personally, I grew into a completely different person and was more successful than I had ever been before. I went legit and made much more money than I ever did as a gangster. So, my advice is don’t let your vision be narrowed by your own prejudices.

  In conclusion, I advise you to follow all these guidelines to the letter, as they might well save your life. Unfortunately, Andrew John ignored the rules. And he paid a very high price.

  12

  GATES OF HELL

  One time, I went to prison to visit a friend and through him ended up making a useful contact. Pat was a baggage handler on the ferries between Hull and Holland. He had run up a load of arrears with the casino and had maxed out on his credit cards, so he offered to smuggle drugs for us to clear his debts. He had sussed out a fail-safe method: transport the drugs on a Sunday night. It was a no-brainer, really, because the security was so lax.

  We started off small to see how it went, but I can’t tell you how elated I was when it worked like clockwork – it was like finding a vein of gold in the Yukon. Every other Sunday, he brought in ten-or twenty-kilogram packages of cocaine. We would score it in Amsterdam for eighteen grand, Pat would get five grand, so that took our cost price up to twenty-three grand. We were knocking it out for £30,000 in Liverpool. So, on a twenty-kilo parcel, I was making one hundred and forty grand – every two weeks.

  The downside was that Pat was earning so much cash that it didn’t take him long to get himself out of the mire money-wise, and he decided that he wanted to put a stop to our smuggling operation. Oh no you fucking don’t! I made him continue the scam for a further two years. Every fortnight, he’d come off the ferry with his bags, half pissed off. He’d be met by a van sent by me. Then it was a straight run down the M62 to Liverpool, where the bags would be distributed. We called the run from Holland through the Pennines to Liverpool the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’. That was our code word.

  Twelve hours after the gear had been scored in Holland, it was on the streets. Personally, I was strictly hands off – organisational only. My philosophy was to pay others to take the risk wherever possible. I took 80 per cent of the money pot and gave 20 per cent to joeys to do the serious work. They hadn’t put up any of the capital outlay, so it was fair enough in my view. I would just remain at the back, not putting myself in any difficult situations. I had a man to pick up the stuff, a man for distribution and street soldiers to sell it to the users. It wasn’t rocket science. It was pretty straightforward, but the return was fucking interstellar – thousands of percentages. Any businessman will tell you that a 25 per cent profit on a legitimate business is good – money for old rope compared with the drugs game.

  However, wealth brings its own problems. I had loads of paper around that had to be laundered. I bought restaurants, bars, cafés – anything to make it clean and legal. There’s a whole host of ways to launder money. For instance, a basic method is to give someone a grand in cash, and they’ll give you a cheque for £950 back. But a personal favourite was the bookie scam we had going. We’d give a bookmaker we had on the firm £20,000 in cash every week. In return, he would give us a cheque for £18,000, saying that we had won it on a bet and that he had taken his 10 per cent. We could launder anything up to 100 grand on an accumulative bet. Then I found a similar scam. I’d go into a casino and change five grand of cash into chips. I’d play for a little bit, maybe losing about £500. Then I’d cash in the £4,500 of remaining chips and get them to give me a cheque, suggesting to the authorities that I’d won it.

  When my profits got to a silly amount, I started doing computer transfers from abroad, moving money from offshore accounts into my UK account or sending a telefax to a shelf company. A shelf company was a company that could be bought ‘off the shelf’ from an accountant in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. I would then hide my drug profits in one of these companies so that it looked as though the company had generated the profit itself. I’d then send a telefax to the bank controlling the shelf company’s account, instructing them to transfer the money back to me. It was all just numbers.

  Meanwhile, news of our success on the doors at The Grafton had spread, and new contracts started to roll in. A mate of mine called Panama Jones – on licence for double murder at the time – asked us to scare off some local bodybuilders who were hassling the owner of a club called XO’s. Incidentally, Panama was the only security boss ever to stop Roger Cook from investigating him. I’m not sure how he did it, but his face never appeared on The Cook Report, that’s for sure.

  So, Andrew John, Aldous Pellow and I went to the rescue. We also took along a guy called Euan, who we nicknamed ‘Clank’ because he had so many tools on him that he clanked when he walked. Our first night on the doors was pretty eventful. A bodybuilder threw a heavy steel tyre-lever at me and another called Ergun threatened to throw me into hot fat. However, we soon saw them off, using a bit of the old ‘ultraviolence’.

  But it wasn’t over yet. One day when we were on our way into the club, I looked up and saw five men in balaclavas coming towards me. Behind them, I could see people dropping out of the trees. There were about 30 or 40 of them in all. We took off, aiming to get inside the club, pull the drawbridge up and barricade ourselves inside. XO’s was underground, and to get in you had to go down a narrow 45-degree staircase to a door at the bottom. To make sure that Aldous and Clank got safely inside, Andrew John and I mounted a formidable defence. At the top of the stairs, in a rearguard action, I pulled out my machete and performed some Errol Flynn-style sabre rattling to keep the attacking troops at bay. This gave Aldous and Clank time to get safely inside the club, arm themselves and institute a flanking manoeuvre to guard the next phase: our insertion.

  Andrew and I then made a tactical withdrawal down the stairs with our backs to the wall so that we could join the others inside. However, the plan did not go well. When we got to the bottom, lo and behold, Aldous had shut the door and wouldn’t let us in. Clank was also stunned into inaction.

  Something similar had already happened to me with Brian Schumacher in The Grafton. Some people react badly in the face of fear. Self-preservation kicks in, and they do some strange things for their own survival. They don’t care about you – they just care about themselves. Aldous had lost his bottle and had left us to our fate. There was a little glass panel in the door, and I could see the whites of Aldous’s frightened eyes. We banged on the door in desperation, but to no avail.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘Whatever will be will be.’ Andrew John and I gave each other the stare, steeled ourselves and prepared to stand to. We made an about-turn and faced the enem
y. The hordes were now coming down towards us, like lava from a volcano or savages across a plain. They were baying like hyenas – they could smell the blood of victory – and were rejoicing in our hopelessness. Bar a miracle, it looked like the end of me and Andrew John. We were going to get chopped to death – no two ways about it.

  Not so fast. Thank God for the narrow stairwell. As the stairs were only about four feet wide, the attackers could only come down two at a time. Their massive frames had been funnelled into a tight space. Luckily, both Andrew and I had our machetes and were fighting them off, making good work of their flailing arms and legs. We had our backs against the wall and a defensive shield of cold steel as our front line. As a result, they couldn’t outflank us, and their tactical advantage of overwhelming firepower was gone. It was like we were the Spartans and they were the Persians coming down the mountain to get us. We were seriously outnumbered, but, because it was such a narrow pass, they couldn’t get at us. The battlefield was just too small for them. The angle of the staircase also gave us a major advantage, as it meant our eye-level met with their foot-level and we were in prime position to hack into their shins and calves as they prepared their descent into the fray, cutting them off at their jump-off point. The two of us were holding off over thirty men – sounds mad, but it’s true.

  Suddenly, somebody called The Destroyer hurled an axe at us from the top of the stairs, trying to smash our defence. He knew that if he could take one of us down, our line would fold. I moved my head in the nick of time, and the axe went straight through the little glass window behind us. Smash! Like a gift from heaven, the crash awoke Aldous from his fear-induced trance, and he unlocked the door.

  Once inside, there was no time for a steward’s inquiry about Aldous’s loss of bottle. I had the phone number of one of the bodybuilders’ main men, so I called it and shouted, ‘Come and do your worst! There’s only four of us. Let’s have it.’