On one occasion, we were discussing my near miss with the police. ‘That wasn’t your heat,’ Curtis said, ‘that was my heat.’ He then explained how the authorities were fast closing in on him.
We were standing by a wall outside of the gym and steam was coming off my sweat. ‘Why do you do it, lad?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds. I do it because I’m going to jail and I need the money.’
Another rule in The 48 Laws of Power states:
Never outshine the master. Always make those above you feel comfortable and superior. In your desire to please and impress, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are, and you will attain the heights of power.
I was doing this shit instinctively, without even having read the book at that time.
I said, ‘Fucking hell, Curtis. How do you do it, lad? I’ve only had one bizzy on me, and my fucking arse is like that – gone. I don’t know how you can cope with having a whole division on you.’ A sick-looking grin spread across his face. Inside, I could see he was thinking, ‘I can do something Frenchie can’t and Frenchie is supposed to be the hardest bastard in Liverpool and far beyond.’ I reinforced my point: ‘You do this fucking 24/7, like it’s nothing.’
He said, ‘I’ve got enough money to stop and I wouldn’t have to work again. But what am I going to do? Fucking sit at home and watch daytime TV? I do it cos it’s something to do, lad.’
He was taking the patriarchal position with me, and I allowed him to, because I was making seventeen grand every three days from the geezer. I was trying to be useful to him, providing him with technology and so on, so that I could continue to curry favour in his court. I was trying to align myself with the king. It’s what you’re supposed to do as a courtier. You’re supposed to align yourself around power but not make it too obvious. Machiavelli had written about it and now I was putting it into action.
Curtis then told me that his motives went beyond the money. He said, ‘If I spent 50 grand a fucking day, I couldn’t go broke.’ He used to drop little lines like that on you to make you start counting up his money, but he never told anyone what he had outright.
I respected what he did, despite the problems I’d had with him over Andrew John. He had outwitted some of the smartest that the opposition had to offer. Also, he followed the rules of engagement: never grassed or compromised himself. I’ve had it said to me that Curtis Warren’s a grass, and I think, ‘Go and kiss my granny.’ He’s just anti-establishment and has been from the day he was fucking born. He was born kicking and screaming, but envious people have said that he couldn’t have got to where he did and be as big as he did without being a grass. I would say to those people, ‘No, he paid people to get there, and he had the bizzies in place.’
We could have gotten real big together, but there was a fundamental mistrust between us. He knew it was there, and I knew it was there, but we didn’t talk about it. Two bulls can’t live in the one pen. However, I’ve still got a massive, grudging respect for the guy. Later, when he went to prison, he did his bird without bitching and screaming. In contrast, when I was in jail, he spread this rumour that I had had a nervous breakdown. He said, ‘Frenchie isn’t a proper criminal.’ That was because I had been to university, had a job and was doing things. My comeback was that I considered myself a twenty-first-century criminal, whereas they were still lagging behind in the twentieth century. The funny thing was that it was still only 1995. There were five years to go until the twenty-first century. I always was ahead of my time.
So, anyway, there we were outside the boxing gym, and I was having a little bit of a cool down. I asked him, ‘If I want to start up again, can I come and see you?’
He said, ‘Your money is as good as anybody else’s, Stephen.’
When I paid him, I always ensured that my money was in five-grand bundles – never a penny short. Curtis loved that, because he counted every penny he got. I’d watched him count his money from the other dealers, and he’d explode if it was short. He’d say, ‘That cunt. He gave me a bag with 25 grand in it, and there was only £24,980. The cunt kept £20 for ciggies.’ That’s how I knew he counted every penny of his money.
Curtis told me that one of his turn-ons was counting money. I’ve seen bundles of money the size of a couch – four-feet long and three-feet wide. He allegedly used to keep cars in inner-city streets, miles away from Liverpool 8, with bags the size of a man crammed with £10 and £20 notes in the boot. However, no one would look at these cars twice, cos they were bangers. I’ve seen him reduce the bulk of £100,000 in sterling to the size of a laptop by converting it into 1,000-guilder notes. This was a common practice among international drug dealers, who were always trying to reduce the physical size of their huge piles of cash by converting it into high-denomination foreign notes. A 1,000-guilder note was worth about £300, and Curtis was thought to have 1,000-guilder stashes all over Holland. According to underworld rumours, he had so much English money buried that there wasn’t enough time to dig it all up when the notes changed, rendering millions obsolete. But fuck it. There was tens of millions more, reportedly wrapped up in businesses all over the world.
So, that was that. I had made a lot of dough, and I was ready to face prison. Bring it on.
18
LUCK OF THE DEVIL
While I’d been dealing drugs, I’d also been working on my case to try and ‘persuade’ the Chief into not showing up at court. I was hoping to do this by digging up more compromising information on the arranged marriages he’d been involved in. However, my team of DIY detectives couldn’t find any hard evidence.
My barrister didn’t know what I was doing behind the scenes, so he took one look at the case and said, ‘The best thing you could do is plead guilty.’
I replied, ‘The best thing you can do is take your fucking briefcase and fuck off. You’re fired. That’s not what I want to be hearing.’
The truth was that I was all out of puff, ready to throw my hand in. But one night I stayed up until five in the morning studying the legal papers, looking for a way out. Just as I was ready to turn in defeated and depressed, I noticed something strange. The bizzies had photocopied the Chief’s passport, which had his full name on it. But on his statement they had got it wrong in the rush, as bizzies often do – they aren’t very good spellers. Not only was it spelled wrong, but it was also back to front. In their ignorance of African names, they had put the surname first. So, all this time, we had been working off the wrong name. Fuck me.
I jumped in the car – wearing my trackies and housecoat – and drove down to the central registry office in Liverpool. I waited outside until it was open and was first in the queue to ask the civil servant if they had anything with the Chief’s name on it. I waited around with a plastic cup of tea from the vending machine.
About an hour later, the guy called me to the counter and said, ‘Sir, there must be some mistake. We’ve got this guy down as the groom in four marriages in the same name.’ Fuck off! Mistake? Give it fucking here! I took the certificates and dropped £50 to the lad behind the counter.
Within weeks, using the correct name, my team and I had dug up a whopping 17 false marriages in which he’d been a groom or witness. This information was gold dust. I got copies of the certificates and sent them to the Chief. Then I got on the phone and said, ‘Right. Are you listening, prick? If you come to court on the day of my trial, these certificates will be given to the judge and you’ll be getting nicked.’ The dickhead didn’t know whether to shit or comb his hair.
On the day of the court case, the Chief didn’t turn up. The judge slagged him off for leaving his ten-year-old kid at home, for disappearing back to Africa and for his previous history of heroin charges. To me, he said, ‘Mr French, you’re not guilty, and the charges are dropped.’ My new brief then told me to get arraigned, which meant standing in the dock and saying ‘Not guilty’ so t
hat I could never be charged with the same crime again.
The first person to congratulate me was Curtis Warren. That was Curtis all over. But, deep down, I was made up that he’d called. He had given me a glimmer of hope that one day I might be invited into his inner sanctum. I wanted to tell him there and then, ‘I can take instruction. I can be part of a team. Everybody’s got it confused about me. I don’t always want to be in charge and be the leader. I just want to be liked and accepted.’ However, I knew Curtis was just playing me – hinting at the paradise that could be mine, while at the same time able to snatch it away from me at any time. He was teasing me like a kid.
Curtis, like all powerful people, also showed me he could be totally ruthless. As he was shaking my hand, he was telling everyone I was a grass. People say there’s a thin line between genius and criminality. Well, it was fucking true with him. It was true to a lesser extent with me. As I’ve said before, I reckon it’s all to do with having no men in our lives as kids: being raised by women; no dad to show us right from wrong. I was a masculine man but had gotten everything from a feminine perspective. It’s like a gasman fitting a leccie meter. He’s going to wire it up wrong. Somewhere along the line, he’s going to fuck it up and the house is going to blow up. I’ve looked for explanations for people like me and Curtis. Why was I so ruthless and uncompassionate? I’d rob a drug dealer, and as I was leaving I’d turn around, take my mask off and say, ‘It’s me, Frenchie. You know where to find me, don’t you?’ I was testing and proving myself. When I look back now, it’s all crap. It’s all bullshit. Nonetheless, I believed it at the time.
With Curtis, there was also an extra motivation. All he ever wanted was to be a hard case, a good fighter, like me and Andrew. Andrew and I were like the Krays, and he wanted people to fear him in the same way. However, that desire expressed itself in a different way. Rather than physical violence, he made connections with people who had money and access to huge amounts of drugs. He was one of the few people on the planet to make it pay on a billion-dollar level. Because he couldn’t beat people with his fists, like Andrew John, he turned his mind to becoming an intellectual criminal. This is why the police would eventually be accused of having to break the law in order to catch him. Ironically, after he was caught, one of the main quotes used to describe his fabulous wealth was, ‘Next to Curtis Warren, the Krays were pathetic minnows.’
The day after my court hearing, I flew straight to the Caribbean for a month-long holiday. I stayed at the Trinidad Hilton, and we had a massive party. I met all my West Indian family and had a great time. When I got back to Liverpool, the first thing I did was go and visit Andrew’s grave, because I hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral. I was shocked to find that he’d been buried in a pauper’s plot. All the lads were millionaires and they hadn’t done jack shit. I had a whip round from Curtis, Johnny Phillips and the rest and raised £10,000 for a headstone. The epitaph, written by my Dionne, reads, ‘Andrew John. Father, son, friend, mentor, brother, relation. He was not one to turn his back and pretend he did not see. Forgive them for they know not what they have done.’
It was spring 1992. I was thirty-two and had just used up one of my nine lives. I should have been shot along with Andrew John, but, praise the Lord, I had been in jail. Now I was about to use up my second life. In March 1992, a nuclear bomb exploded in the Liverpool underworld – but I was lucky enough to be in a reinforced shelter.
To understand what had been going on, we have to rewind a couple of years. Curtis Warren had been under intense investigation for quite some time. I had felt a little bit of the heat over that one kilo, when I jumped off the bridge, but no one would ever have guessed how bad the heat was on him. In July 1990, Curtis’s gang had been infiltrated by an informer. Remember the big-time car dealer Brian Charrington? Well, he’d been recruited by the North East Regional Crime Squad to keep track of Curtis’s 1,000-kilogram loads. During the winter and spring of 1991, the Cali Cartel was preparing to send their biggest ever load to Europe – a whopping 2,000 kilograms – using a metal export company as a front. A cool 500 was going to Curtis.
In October 1991, as I was preparing for my court case in the new year, the load docked at Felixstowe. In the first week of November 1991, the ingots reached a haulage yard near Liverpool, where the cocaine was extracted using extra-long drill bits. At that point, the gang was infiltrated by a second supergrass by the name of Paul Grimes, ostensibly a scrap dealer who had been drafted in to dispose of the metal ingots once their precious cargo had been retrieved. Even with two telltale tits on the inside, Customs lost track of the load, and before they could swoop, Curtis sold his 500 for a £70 million profit.
On 12 January 1992, just a month before I was due in court, Curtis received a staggering 905-kilogram load, worth £150 million at street prices. A few days later, an 845-kilogram load arrived in Holland. On 29 March, just a month after Curtis had called me up to congratulate me on getting out of my jail sentence, Customs swooped in and arrested him and 11 others. The biggest bust in history. End of.
Just think, if I had been fully initiated into Curtis’s crew, I would have been arrested too. All my criminal life, I had wanted to be on Curtis’s team. Now I understood that I’d been frozen out for a reason. Nine lives, man. Someone up there was looking out for me.
It looked like the Devil was all on his own again, so I went back to doing what I did best – taxing. And I did it with a vengeance.
19
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL
After Curtis was arrested, my drug dealing opportunities dried up, so I started collecting debts for international drug cartels. My first clients were some hard-hitters from London who were owed £750,000 by a notorious Scouser drug smuggler called Paul Bennett. This wasn’t a huge amount of money to them, but in the underworld debt recovery is all about the Japanese concept of saving face. These top cockney villains wanted to be able to tell their cronies at the next boxing do, ‘That cunt Ben owed me three quarter of a million quid. I had him sorted by a black Scouser.’
The most accurate British gangster film is Gangster No. 1, which really encapsulates this culture. There’s a scene in the film in which the main characters are all sitting around a table at a charity boxing match smoking cigars when one of them goes to the toilet. All the others call him a fucking cunt behind his back. Then they laugh and joke with him when he returns. That’s what it’s like.
I arranged to meet up with Ben outside Yates wine bar. As soon as I jumped into his Mitsubishi Shogun, my spider senses shot through the roof. Ben was only a skinny, scruffy kid from Norris Green. He was dressed in a bottle-green Lacoste tracksuit, was wearing trainers and had seven days’ worth of growth on his face – he was unshaven and unwashed. I seemed to terrify him, but my instincts were telling me that he was bad for me. I would either end up dead or in iail. There was a dark and inexplicable force at work.
Someone like me has to be very careful around these sorts of guys. They will plot, scheme, trap and kill you. If that wasn’t the case, the lions would be ruling the world instead of men. Men cage and trap lions, then feed them meat and kill them.
I’ve had seven attempts on my life, including four contracts on my head ranging from £5,000 to £30,000. I’ve had my house petrol bombed, I’ve been shot at and I’ve been stabbed. The reason why I’m still here is that I’ve always listened to my instincts. Sometimes, I’ll get up in the morning to do some graft, but if there’s a bad sign, I won’t do it. For example, if I stumble over a chair or put a hole in my shirt with the iron, I won’t follow through with my plans for that day.
So, all I said to Ben was, ‘You know what? Forget it, lad.’ Then I jumped out of his car. Later on, I found out that if I had pursued those funds, I’d have found myself in a lot of trouble. It turns out that they had a nice acid bath prepared for me.
The next debt I collected wasn’t a drug debt. Brian Schumacher, who was one of my doormen, was owed a load of dough by a top boxing promoter after a f
ight in London. I went to another boxing match and got the promoter in the toilet. I said, ‘You think we’re all stupid from up north, don’t you? We’ll have you here and now, mate. You can bring who you want. You’ll never walk again.’ Consequently, he gave me the cheque. However, it didn’t do Brian much good – he later went to jail for killing his stepfather.
During that time, I also took the opportunity to settle a few scores from the past. One day, my mate Kevin told me that he’d been beaten up by a club owner in town. ‘What’s this guy’s name?’ I asked.
‘Tommy,’ he replied.
The name sent a shiver down my spine. As you may remember, this was the same Tommy who had bullied and humiliated me outside a club when I was a kid. This was my chance for revenge. Tommy now owned a club with an ex-footballer. I told Kevin to pretend that he’d lost a 14-grand Rolex in the fight. I then went to see Tommy and could immediately tell that he was a yellow bastard. I told him that I wanted five-grand tax as compensation for the fictitious Rolex.
Tommy spluttered, ‘’Ere y’are, lad.’
I said, ‘No. There’s no “’ere y’are, lad” about it, Tommy. You slapped me when I was a fucking kid. I’m not a fucking kid any more. I’m a man.’
‘Oh, is that what this is about?’ he replied.
‘Yeah, it’s a little bit about that, and it’s also about the fucking watch. You’re going to pay.’
I hit him in the stomach, right into his big, fat belly. He doubled up and fell to his knees. His mate, the ex-footballer, went to make a move. ‘Stand still,’ I ordered. ‘Don’t even fucking move.’ He froze, because I’d given him my monster stare. I grabbed Tommy by his hair with my left hand and said, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow at 2.30 p.m. for my money. Don’t think about getting anybody down here to wait for me.’
The Devil Page 13