The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  After barricading the doors, I climbed up to a ground floor window to see what was going on outside. I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me: one of my top martial-arts instructors was flying towards the entrance. His name was Sensei Gary Spears, 7th Dan Goju-ryu and karate instructor. He was a giant six-feet-seven-inch Maori weighing about 24 stone, and he had a long flowing mane of hair down his back. His feet were so big that he could only wear sandals. He had been to Japan, where he had fought the masters and beaten them at their own game.

  He shouted, ‘I want to see the fucking black guy that’s causing all the problems.’

  This was the second miracle of the day. The martial-arts code dictated that I had to defer to and respect my sensei, so I immediately opened the door and walked up the stairs. My opposing warriors stopped in their tracks and parted. I walked over to the sensei and bowed to him. I turned to his men and said, ‘I’ve got to respect this man. He’s trained in martial arts. He’s my instructor. Do what you will to me, but I cannot take up arms against him.’ I’ll tell you straight and honestly – he’d have ripped me to bits. He’d trained me to fight, and I was in awe of him, psychologically and physically. He would’ve just broken me up.

  In response, Sensei Spears said, ‘Fucking hell, guvnor, it’s you! Come ’ere.’ He got hold of me and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was you?’

  Relieved, I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Have a look up there,’ he replied and pointed to a balcony on a nearby house. I could just about make out a man holding a gun, trained on me. Sensei continued, ‘Do you see him? He’s an ex-army sniper. We brought him here to assassinate you.’ Sensei waved his arms to the sniper to signal that it was all off. ‘As it’s you Stephen, we’ll sort it all out,’ he said. We shook hands, and that was that.

  After that, the nightclub became a cash cow. We joined forces with Sensei and his gang, and did the old protection racket on the club. Any time there was a problem, the manager would give me and A.J. four or five nights’ work at exorbitant rates. So, every few weeks, we’d ask Sensei and his mob to go in and smash a few plates. We’d get the contract and split the money with them.

  This episode had taught me another valuable lesson: to abide by my own set of values. By staying true to the martial-arts code, I had saved my own skin and brought about a successful outcome. Unfortunately, this lesson proved to be short-lived, as I began to break my own rules – with devastating results.

  13

  PLAYING DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

  The Hull connection and our protection rackets had taken off – but it wasn’t enough. So, in 1989, I opened up another route smuggling cocaine. Andrew and I smashed it and made money hand over fist.

  Then one day, a member of the gang called Romy Marion came to me and said, ‘I need two grand out of the kitty.’ I gave it to him, because it was fuck all to me.

  A few days later, a woman came to see me and told me that Marion had been getting high on crack cocaine and that it had become a big problem for him. When I saw him next, I said to him, ‘Where’s the fucking two grand?’

  Of course, he replied, ‘I spent it.’

  Now, in hindsight, I should have left it there. Trying to get £2,000 off a crack head is chasing dead money. Also, he was a mate, so it was against two of my personal rules to do him over for it. But I couldn’t let it go: two grand is two grand.

  After threats were made, Marion tried to make up the loss by offering a benefit in kind. He gave me a tip-off about some potential tax work involving a drug dealer called Samuel. Marion thought that he could get himself off the hook by returning the £2,000 commission on the money I was going to tax from Samuel. He reckoned I could score £100,000 off the guy. So, one night, I got my gloves and mask on. and went to Samuel’s ken. A.J. wasn’t around that night, so I took a lad with me who had been asking me for some tax work – his name will go with me to the grave. Inside the flat, we searched high and low but couldn’t find the money. Me being the determined individual that I am, I decided to wait for this lad Samuel to come home so I could make him tell us where he had hidden his stash. I grabbed a big knife and a baseball bat, and crouched down in the dark, ready to jump on him as soon as he walked in the door.

  One hour later, I heard the key in the lock and a shaft of light poured in as the door opened. I couldn’t see who it was at first, because the figure was silhouetted. However, as he turned his head, I got a glimpse of who it was. For fuck’s sake! It was Val the getaway driver from the Solid Gold Posse – my old crew. He was a very old and trusted friend. I’d been given jarg info by Marion – there was no Samuel.

  Now, as you will remember, one of the golden rules was that I didn’t rob anyone I knew. I only robbed strangers, so I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t tax him. What’s more, I actually liked Val. I’d been in a lot of hairy chases with him, and he’d got me away on every fucking one, thus keeping me out of prison. I was indebted to the guy.

  I lashed the tool and the bat on the floor in front of him and said, ‘Don’t move.’ That was my signal to let him know I didn’t mean him any harm and that I would not take up arms against him. If I’d been looking to rob him, I’d have whacked him senseless. Instead, I just wanted to make off without revealing my identity. However, he went for me. I didn’t really want to fight back, so he was able to pull my mask off. ‘Aaaahh, it’s you Frenchie, it’s you,’ he screamed. Then, in a moment of panic, I whacked him once, knocked him out and got off.

  Word quickly spread around the ghetto about what had happened. My name on the street was mud. Val was still part of the Solid Gold Posse, and they were still the main people from the black area. They were disgusted that I could do such a thing to one of our own. I was so enraged by the mess Marion had got me into, I decided that I was gonna kill him. I didn’t mean just beat him up – I was gonna chop his fucking head off.

  When I found him, I hit him on the back of the neck with a machete. He went down, stunned, and rolled over. I was now in prime position to chop right into his head. However, he suddenly got a second wind. It was like the crack cocaine was acting as an anaesthetic, making him immune to the pain and giving him the strength to fight back. He curled up on the floor and managed to put his leg up to protect his head, and I cut right into his flesh and bone. I kept on hacking through his arteries and sinews, but they wouldn’t give way. The crack had got him bad, so I pulled back – breathless and covered in claret – and jumped into my car. As I got off, I ran him over for good measure. I thought he was dead – five chops to the head and neck and virtual amputation of his left leg. He’d ruined my reputation – I wanted him to suffer.

  I then went to see Val, who was still in hospital after my attack, to argue my case – not out of fear, but because what had happened was a cunt’s trick, and I didn’t want my name associated with it. ‘Val, I didn’t know it was you,’ I said. ‘It was a genuine mistake.’ By the end of the visit, I still wasn’t sure whether Val believed me or not, but at least I’d got it off my chest and done the honourable thing.

  Meanwhile, Marion had also gone into hospital with his savage, life-threatening injuries. He didn’t fold under questioning, but the doctors reported the incident as a matter of routine. Before long, the police had launched a full-on attempted-murder investigation. It didn’t take long before my name was thrown into the frame and the bizzies started to hunt me down.

  As a result, Marion had realised that the situation had got out of hand and had checked himself out of hospital. He came to my house to make peace and have his say. At first, I didn’t want to know, but he kept shouting through the letterbox, ‘I know you’re in.’ Eventually, I opened up, and he started backing away from me, right down the path. I guess he didn’t know how I was gonna react, so he was keeping his distance. He told me that he’d had a nervous breakdown, and was using crack to try and cope with it.

  However, in spite of his explanation, I still couldn’t forgive him for setting me up. ‘You kne
w it was Val’s flat,’ I said, ‘Val has got me away from several robberies, and the only reason I didn’t twat him as soon as he came through the door was that it was him. All I was trying to do was get away, and I whacked him out of panic.’

  Now, little did I know, Val had also checked himself out of hospital and was on the warpath. The drugs had worn off, and, in the cold light of day, he’d rejected the explanation I had given him at the hospital. He’d gone home to get his Magnum and had vowed to kill me. In fact, at that very moment – though I didn’t know it at the time – he was sitting outside my house in some bushes, right next to where Marion was making his speech. Apparently, he’d been there for a couple of hours, lying in wait for me. He was gonna zap me right there and then on the doorstep. However, his plan had been thwarted when Marion had turned up.

  Finally, my pay-off line to Marion was, ‘You told me it was a guy called Samuel in the flat with the money, not Val. I wouldn’t have gone into Val’s flat, cos he’s a mate of mine.’

  When Val heard this, he was totally gobsmacked. Basically, he’d heard the non-partisan truth for himself and realised that I was completely innocent. He uncocked his Magnum – it’s like a fucking hand cannon, by the way – and slipped back to the ghetto, piecing together the whole situation.

  I know all this because Val caught up with me a few days later and said, ‘You know what, Stephen? I was in the bushes. I was gonna smoke you, but I heard the truth. If you woulda said, “So fucking what about Val, blah, blah, blah, and I wanted to rob him anyway,” I would’ve wiped you clean off the path.’ He would have, as well, all Magnumed-up, Dirty Harry-style. Did I feel lucky? Yes, indeed I did.

  Anyway, I soon got nicked for the attempted murder of Marion. I made bail, but the police banished me to Wales, banned me from Liverpool and prohibited any contact with the community.

  However, there was no way I was going to miss carnival weekend in August, a great time in the Afro-Caribbean community. Plus my brother was the organiser of the Merseyside International Caribbean Carnival, and I wanted to be there to give him some moral support. So I bought an afro wig with a beard on it as a disguise. I walked around and brushed past people that had known me for over 25 years, and they were none the wiser. I stood next to bizzies, but they didn’t even notice. I then bumped into an old mate called Stephen Brown and said, ‘Yo, Brown, what’s happening?’

  He gave me the strangest of looks, as if to say, ‘Who’s this guy? I don’t even know him.’

  Then, I said, ‘It’s me, man. It’s me – Frenchie.’

  Well, the guy fell on the floor and burst out laughing. That’s when he told me, ‘You look like “Afro Man”.’ If you remember the song ‘I was going to do my work but then I got high’, that’s what I looked like.

  This little charade taught me the beauty of disguise – the fact that you can be right on top of somebody who has known you from birth, but they won’t even see you. I began to use this to great effect in my taxing by dressing up white men as police to gain entry into drug houses – my trusted friends: subterfuge and misdirection.

  Anyway, it all got sorted. Someone had a word with Marion, and he withdrew his statement. He is actually my friend now, and I’m godfather to his 18-year-old daughter Rebecca. People are amazed that despite our history we’re close. Nevertheless, I have two words for them: crack cocaine. This drug can turn the most normal of people into the vilest of creatures. It can turn a devoted schoolteacher into a violent abuser of his pupils, a priest into a molester of his own flock and a middle-class student girl into a prostitute.

  A few days later, the wife of one of my friends came into the club. She was a lovely girl – a churchgoer and a model mother who’d never once been unfaithful. She wore floating floral dresses, had a severe bob and liked to bake cakes. Anyway, she had a line of Charlie on her birthday when she was drunk, and the next minute we caught her in a cleaning cupboard upstairs having a three-piper with some of the doormen – one up the front, one up the back and one in the mouth. A three-piper with her goody two-shoes dress in ribbons and her cotton panties in shreds at her ankles as these monster bodybuilders threw her about.

  It is a demon drug in more ways than one, and it was about to get me into a hell of a lot of trouble.

  14

  THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

  Shortly after the Marion incident, a tax tip came in about some African drug dealer called the Chief, based on the south coast, so we decided to go down and rob him. It was the usual caper – I gave the Blagger ten grand to pose as a dealer and pretend to buy whatever so that he could see what the Chief’s stash was worth and then call me in for back-up.

  The Blagger went into the Chief’s flat, while I waited outside. Sure enough, the phone call came as planned. He said, ‘There’s ten kis of cocaine, ten kis of heroin and a load of cash.’ Within seconds of the call, I had burst into the ken. There were about 25 people in the flat. I quickly gathered about eighteen of them into one room to get control of the situation, while the Blagger stayed in the adjoining room with the Chief and his hard-core henchmen. The Blagger’s job was to get him to hand over the gear and the money.

  However, he was tough and refused to give it up without a fight. So, one of the lads with me called Johnny grabbed his baby and hung it out the window, which was about seven floors up. He threatened to chuck the baby out if the Chief didn’t give him what we wanted. This is something that I utterly condemn and would never do. However, I didn’t know that this atrocity was taking place, cos I was busy in the other room. Later on – because it was my operation – I would get the blame for the Blagger’s action, adding to my reputation as the Devil.

  Meanwhile, some of the neighbours had seen the baby dangling over the veranda – Wacko Jacko-style – and had telephoned the police. By that point, the Chief had given the bags of heroin and coke to the Blagger.

  I told him I wanted the people in his room brought into mine, so that everybody could be brought under control in one space before we got off. Just as he was bringing the last person in, there was a bang, bang, bang on the door – police.

  Immediately, the Blagger threw the heroin-coke combo out of the window, but, unbelievably, some of the stuff landed on a small ledge beneath it, and there was no time to brush it off before the bizzies came in. Within milliseconds, I’d taken my balaclava off, hidden my tool and mixed myself up in the room full of people. In the fray, I’d even grabbed a seat in front of the TV. I was totally confident that no one would grass me up, because that’s a game of Russian roulette. Why grass me up when there is 20 kis of their gear in the vicinity? It was in the interests of all of the criminal fraternity in the room to get rid of the bizzies, so that we could sort it out between ourselves.

  The copper said, ‘We’ve just had a report of a little kid hanging out the window.’

  I didn’t say anything, just carried on watching EastEnders, keeping an eye on the door. Then, two more coppers came in, and I could hear more coming up the stairs. Some of the people in the room just said that it was all a domestic, a bit of a party that had got out of hand. The police were suspicious at first, but then they began to buy it – it was just a family squabble, nothing more.

  Soon, to the collective relief of everyone in the flat, the bizzies started to file out. But as the last one was on his way out the door, something caught his eye. Suddenly, he turned around, his eyes fixed on a net curtain fluttering out of the window. I looked at the window and then looked at him. He moved his gaze down towards the ledge. ‘What’s this?’ he blurted out. ‘Whose is this?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I thought. ‘Here we go.’

  He bolted over and scooped up a mash of white and brown powder from the ledge. The hard-core users in the room baulked at the sight. He immediately got on the blower, and, within seconds, the bizzies filed back into the flat. They grilled people left, right and centre, but nobody claimed responsibility for the drugs, so they called for more back-up. We all got nicked and were taken to t
he police station. It wasn’t long before they found my gun and my bally in the flat. Of course, I said fuck all. They also found the money – they found everything. Not good.

  At the station, a bizzy came into my cell, ‘One of the people in the room has told us everything. We know what happened. We know everything about you. You’re that taxman from Liverpool, and you were down here to rob them.’

  I replied, ‘Nah, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ totally blanking the suggestion.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m not interested in you. You’re just a villain from Liverpool. He’s a major drug dealer. He’s been a major thorn in my side for years, and I want rid of him. If you make a statement against him, you’re home. End of story.’

  I retorted, ‘I don’t believe you, mate. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’

  He then went and got the Blagger from another cell and shoved him in with me to let us conspire. This was against the rules, so, at that point, I knew the copper was serious. If we dobbed the Chief in, we would be free to go. Of course, no one wants to grass anyone up, but I said to the Blagger, ‘It won’t be like informing. We’ll make the statements, and then we’ll just fuck them off and hide when we get up north. When they try and find us for the court case, we won’t turn up. We’ll just give them a jarg statement for now to say that the drugs were in the flat but had nothing to do with us – we were just doing whatever. It’s a win-win.’

  This decision would later come back to haunt me, and I would get a reputation for being a grass.

  Anyway, we got out, and as planned the Chief’s court case later collapsed because we didn’t turn up.

  Now, that should have been that, but, me being me, I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I’d actually lost money on the venture. Remember the £10,000 I’d given to the Blagger? Well, that had gone skew-whiff in the scuffle during the police raid and had been confiscated by one of the plods. Knowing that it was gone for ever was niggling at me. I just couldn’t live with myself, having not balanced the books. It was chasing dead money, and I told myself to leave it. Nonetheless, the darker angels of my nature got the better of me once again, and I phoned the Chief up, pretending to be the Blagger.