The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  ‘I want my money,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve done months of remand because of you making a statement. You can’t ask me for that.’

  I shouted, ‘I don’t give a fuck how much fucking jail you’ve done! If you don’t give me the money, I’m going to fucking come down there and kill you. I’m going to burn you, set you on fire, do this, do that, do the other.’

  Now, in the past, I’ve had some bad experiences with tape recorders, so I wasn’t saying anything too bad – just telling him off a bit. It seemed to have the desired effect: he soon folded under pressure and agreed to meet me to return the money.

  In November 1990, I jumped the rattler to meet him in Brighton station. The place was packed. As I was waiting, I gave a fiver to the tramp sitting on the floor next to me – the poor cunt. Still no show. I was there so long that the cleaner had to brush up around me. I bought a cup of tea for a beggar by the phones. The sheer number of tramps in the station got me thinking – there seemed to be a lot of homelessness down south. How could that be? Not that I was arsed. It just got me thinking.

  Just as I was about to give up, I looked up from my copy of The Guardian and saw the Chief waving at me in the crowd. I bounced over to him. At that instant, everyone around me appeared to come to life: the tramp next to me, the skinny twat beggar by the phones, even the cleaner who had been pottering around me. Oh, dear! They were all fucking bizzies. And here I was, the voice of social conscience, thinking that Brighton was suffering from a plague of poverty and homelessness when the real reason was that the dossers were really undercover police. It was fucking horrible. Every one of them was a fucking policeman. A fake toilet attendant put the cuffs on me, and a phoney British Rail guy started to read me my rights. Pure cop-show fare.

  The detective in charge said, ‘OK, Blagger, you’re nicked.’

  Of course, they still thought I was the Blagger. However, the Chief soon put them right. He said, ‘That’s not the Blagger. That’s his boss. He’s the one – the taxman, the killer, the murderer. He is the Devil.’

  The bizzies must have been thinking, ‘This is great. We’ve got Mr Big. The Devil no less.’ They were having a much better day than they’d expected.

  That was just before Christmas 1990. How was that for a fucking present? I’d been a fucking fool, too right. Before I knew it, I was in a sweatbox – one of those long white prison vans with little windows for transporting inmates between jail, court and police stations. Each con sits in a little locker about 20 inches wide. It was very cramped and claustrophobic for a feller my size. I looked out of the window, and I could see the white facade of Pentonville Prison in north London.

  I got put on the fours (the fourth landing) on C wing. The bizzies came to see me, and one of the detectives told me that my goose was cooked – that I was fucked. I was thinking, ‘Well, what’s the big fucking problem here. I’ve only told someone off down the phone. I’ll be out of here once my briefs tie you in knots.’

  However, he told me that it was serious and that they were going to charge me with two counts of blackmail. I said, ‘Blackmail? Fuck off! What are you on about? I was only talking shit down the phone and that.’

  However, there was a problem. This was around about the time of a famous poison plot involving Cadbury Creme Eggs. A man had been trying to extort money out of Cadbury by phoning up and pretending that he had spiked their chocolate eggs with poison. He hadn’t actually done anything at all, but he still got ten years in jail for trying it on. The police were putting me in the same category. Blackmail was all the rage in the papers at the time. It was the de rigueur crime, and I was gonna get the full fucking Daily Mail pasting. The bizzies were gonna offer me up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of public opinion and load me up with ten years – no back answers. All for talking shit down the phone. Can you believe that shit?

  As if that wasn’t enough, I then met my new prison guards. One looked me right in the eye and said, ‘There’s only one thing I hate worse than Scousers and that’s black Scousers.’ He then lifted up his lapel to reveal a National Front badge.

  ‘That’s all I need,’ I thought. That was when I knew I was well and truly fucked.

  15

  THE GRIM REAPER

  A lot of the top hard cases gave it the ‘Big Time Charlie Potatoes’ in the shovel. However, I kept my head down, didn’t mention I was a world-champion kick-boxer and defo didn’t mention I was the Devil. However, some inmates took my low-key demeanour as a sign of weakness.

  As I’m a big, athletic man, the claustrophobia of prison soon started to wear me down. My only escape was the visits. One day, my mum came to see me and said, ‘I’m glad you’re in here.’

  ‘What!’ I gasped, hardly believing my ears.

  ‘You’re in jail for a reason, and I know it’s for the good,’ she continued.

  No way. I couldn’t believe it. My ma wishing the shovel on her son. Deep down, I knew that it was just the Irish in her – she’s a bit of a psychic, and I think she said this because something inside her had told her to. Her spider senses had triggered for an as yet unknown reason. Nonetheless, for me, it was a sledgehammer. It robbed me of my only asset: hope.

  When I got back to my cell, I started crying my eyes out, thinking, ‘No one fucking cares. Even me ma’s glad I’m in fucking jail.’

  My cellmate turned to me and said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be a hard-case Scouser. What’s all the fucking tears for?’

  Before he’d finished his sentence, I’d got him by the neck and lifted him so his feet were off the floor. It was only a bit of a go-around, but the NF guard ran into the cell, iumped in and immediately gave me a cuffing. He then got some other guards to bash me up, and I was subsequently moved to B wing.

  After that incident, I decided that I was going to kill the NF guard. Luckily, I had fallen in with a lad called Dillon, who was connected to a big family of London gangsters. He persuaded me to lay off the bad screw. ‘You don’t have to have him,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my family to sort it out.’

  Three days later, the NF guard knocked on my cell door and said, ‘Mr French, I won’t give you any more aggravation. I won’t ride you any more. I didn’t realise . . .’ blah, blah, blah. True to his word, Dillon’s family had boxed it for me.

  One Sunday morning in early 1991, I was doing the 7.30 a.m. slop out when some lad on the fours shouted over, ‘Frenchie, some lad’s been killed from your neck of the woods. Do you know him?’

  A murder still made the national news at that time. These days you’d be lucky to find a few lines about it in the Echo. I went back into my cell and listened to the 8 a.m. bulletin on Radio One, hoping that it was one of my enemies who had been ironed. There was nothing like starting off the day in jail knowing that great tragedy had befallen one of your rivals.

  Suddenly, the relevant story came on and gave a bit more info – a karate champion had been gunned down. A feeling of dread came over me. ‘What’s his name?’ I whispered into the tranny, biting my lip. The announcer shot back, ‘Andrew John, shot dead in Liverpool.’

  I looked at my cellmate and said, ‘That’s my brother.’

  He said, ‘What?’

  I said it again, ‘It’s my brother. He’s been shot.’

  I was shocked and numb but not crying, as I hadn’t taken it in yet. My cell door then opened, and the wing governor and a doctor walked in. The jail had already been phoned from the outside and told of the connection between me and Andrew. OK, he might not have been my blood brother, but everybody had classed us as siblings. We may not have come out of the same woman, but we had lived like brothers for a long time.

  The doctor tried to give me some tablets. I said, ‘I don’t want no fucking medication.’ A priest then came into the cell, but I fucked him off as well and said that I wanted to make a phone call. I phoned Stephen’s mum and asked her, ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘Val, the getaway driver,’ she said.

  V
al, who I had knocked out during the mistaken taxation of his ken. The same Val who had been waiting in the bushes for me with the piece. Maria filled me in on the details. After I had whacked Val and we had made up, I had given him two grand in compensation to see him all right. He had taken the money off me, saying, ‘I now believe you didn’t know it was me, which is why I didn’t shoot you.’

  That should’ve been the end of it, but, apparently, after I had gone inside, Andrew had reignited the dispute. He had said to Val, ‘You fucking cunt, taking two grand off my mate in the jug after he didn’t even know it was you.’ Andrew had then made out that Val had threatened to go to the police if I hadn’t compensated him. He said, ‘You took two grand off him, otherwise you were going to the Old Bill. What kind of a fucking villain are you? Let’s have it right.’

  Anyway, he kept riding the guy and eventually got the two grand back off him. However, he then wanted more and more dough. He started taxing Val, taking a Mercedes from him. Val was terrified and humiliated. Even his family were ashamed of him. Apparently, Val’s dad had wound him up even more by saying, ‘Val, if you were back home in Jamaica, you would have to do something about him. Andrew John just thinks you’re a bitch.’

  So, Val had his dad telling him he was a bitch, and he had Andrew John pressuring him. He was coiled up in fear for his life – a terrified animal. So what did he do next? He lashed out and shot his tormentor. He sneaked up behind Andrew and put four bullets in his back. He didn’t face him and shoot him from in front, because he was so scared.

  At that moment, everything became clear to me – it was like a lightning bolt of truth, searing down from heaven. That was why my mum had said I was in jail for a reason. As I was the cause of all this, Val had more reason to kill me than Andrew. Also, if I had been on the outside, he would have assumed that I was pulling Andrew’s strings, egging him on. The only reason I’m alive today is that I was safe in a prison cell.

  However, I was in Pentonville, and my world had fallen in. I had been holding everything in since I’d been inside, but now I had a reason to let everything out, and I began to bawl and cry. When my brothers came to see me later that day, they smuggled in a two ounce piece of weed to get me through the mourning period. Usually, I’d have stuck the weed up my arse to get it past the screws. However, that day, my head was so up my own arse that I simply put the lump in my hand and walked brazenly past the screw. He spotted it immediately. ‘What’s that?’ he growled.

  I told him, ‘I fucking need this. You’re not taking it off me. My brother’s just been killed, and that’s that.’ He looked at me and could see my head was done in.

  ‘Go on, Scouse,’ he said. ‘You can go through with it, just this once.’ He showed me some compassion that day, and I’ve never forgotten him for that kindness.

  Back in my cell, I cut the toes off a sock to make a black armband in remembrance of Andrew. But, my God, you couldn’t do fuck all in there without some shitbag trying to have a go. As soon as I came out of my cell, one of the inmates started sneering and jeering. ‘What the fuck have you got that on your arm for?’ he said.

  Now, this prick had been riding me for weeks. Nonetheless, I’d kept my nose clean, saying nothing and not letting him know what I was really like. However, showing disrespect to the dead and the mourning was a different matter. I grabbed him by the bottom of his jeans and pounded him with my fists before throwing him off the fourth-floor landing. Luckily, the safety net caught him, but he had broken his arm. The screws came for me, but there were no witnesses. Then, some of the lads said to the top screw, ‘Frenchie did what he had to do. The other lad was bang out of order.’ As a result, the matter was dropped and nothing more was said.

  Soon afterwards, I was called in to see the governor regarding my application to go to the funeral. When I got to his office, I saw that he’d drafted in a squad of muftis. Muftis are specially trained riot-control officers who specifically work in prisons. They wear crash helmets, black uniforms and protective gloves, and they wield batons to deadly effect. By bringing in the heavy artillery, I knew that the governor wasn’t going to let me go to the funeral. The muftis were a precaution, in anticipation of my angry reaction. I had read the play, so I just wanted to hear what the chief was going to say, out of curiosity.

  He immediately launched into a tirade. ‘You’ve come to this jail and you haven’t joined in any of the activities,’ he said. ‘You walk round this jail like you own it.’ Apparently, when I walk, I strut. I’ve been told that it looks arrogant a few times. ‘You’re not going to your brother’s funeral, and that’s that,’ he said.

  At this, I launched myself at him. He was only a couple of yards away, but I only got as far as his desk before the muftis got hold of me. Greased lightning, they were. They fucking murdered me – they slaughtered me and knocked me unconscious for the first time in my life.

  On the day of Andrew’s burial, I was caged in a padded cell in solitary wearing a straightjacket with dried blood and mucus caked into my nose and my mouth – it was the lowest point in my entire life. ‘It can’t get any worse than this,’ I thought.

  I don’t know whether it was the licks they’d given me, or whether it was the medication that they had pumped into me to calm me down, or if I was simply hallucinating through lack of sleep, but I heard a whistle from outside. It was the same signature whistle that Andrew and I had always used when meeting to go on an armed robbery or to go out on a tax. I manoeuvred my arse over to the window to hear better, but heard nothing but silence. There was no more whistling.

  I’m intelligent enough to know that it could’ve been a combination of things – natural and physical phenomena – but I chose to believe that it had been a sign from Andrew. I put it down to him letting me know that he was OK.

  Andrew gave me strength that day – the courage to have hope, even under the most horrible of circumstances. I was determined to get myself out of that hellhole.

  16

  COME HELL OR HIGH PURITY

  When I got out of solitary confinement, my prophetic supernatural experience had fired me up to fight my case. As if sent by the heavens, a miracle revelation then fell into my lap. After I’d got nicked, I’d retained a firm of top accountants to look after some offshore financial affairs that I had going. During their visits, one of the tax assistants called Sandy took a shine to me. One day, Sandy was looking through my case notes when she came across the real name of the Chief. ‘That name rings a bell,’ she had muttered to herself.

  I didn’t really take any notice of her at the time, but a few days later she came to see me on a special legal visit. Breathless and excited, she exclaimed, ‘You know that African guy who brought the charges against you? Well, I’ve done a bit of homework on him, and I’ve got some news for you – he’s a well-known illegal-marriage fixer.’

  I sprang out of my lethargic prison slump and said, ‘What?’

  Sandy went on to reveal how one of her wealthy foreign clients had once been so desperate to stay in the UK that she’d undergone a bent marriage of convenience. You’ll never guess who the groom had been – the Chief. Sandy told me how he had caused all kinds of problems for her poor client – blackmailing her and the like – and she’d eventually hired Sandy to protect her assets and stop the extortion. What a stroke of luck! If it was true, the information was gold dust!

  I got some phone cards together and called my people on the outside. Although most of the young lads in the ghetto weren’t formally educated, there were some who were bright, organised and good with paperwork – good enough to be put on the payroll. I told one of them to go to the main registry office in central London and pull out all the marriage certificates that had the Chief’s real name on them. They also started trawling the birth, death and marriage certificates at the main registry offices in Liverpool and Manchester, places where we knew the Chief had drug connections. You could bet your bottom dollar that if he had been selling drugs to little firms here and there, he
’d also be involved in other dodgy dealings with them. If I could prove that he was a multiple marriage blagger, then I could use it against him.

  While I was getting on with that, another stroke of good fortune came my way. There had been a recent explosion in the prison population, and Pentonville had suddenly filled up. One night, I was shipped out on STL11 remand – a special kind of custody – to a police station in Wimbledon in order to make some room for high-priority, non-remand prisoners. My solicitor decided to take advantage of the congested jail and punt for some bail, hoping that the desperate authorities would want to see the back of me for a while. Astonishingly, a judge in chambers agreed to hear the case, but he wanted a £100,000 surety to guarantee that I wouldn’t abscond. That was some fucking money, mate, but I had it – no sweat.

  I phoned up my mate back home who was looking after my stash of dollars. I said, ‘Take a 100 quid [£100,000] out of my kitty and bring it down to London today.’ There was a long silence.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I thought. ‘What the fuck has happened to my pound notes?’

  ‘Stephen, I’ve got some bad news,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘All of your dough has gone.’

  I was silent for a moment and then said, ‘What? Can you tell me how and why please?’ Cue lots of swearing, threats, banging the phone down, etc.

  After I had been nicked for threatening the Chief, I had entrusted my money to certain individuals in Liverpool to try and make a bit of profit for me while I was in jail – in order to take care of my family. However, for better or for worse, they had invested it in a big drugs consignment, and the parcel had gone down. I had fuck all left. Can you believe that shit? I had the taste of freedom within my sights. I could almost smell the freshly cut lawns and the strawberries of the All England Tennis Club nearby – and now the rug had been pulled from under my feet. Nevertheless, there was no use complaining. Whatever the reasons, I was still in a cell, and it looked like I was going nowhere fast.