The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  I continued with my ventures a little closer to home. I started going to London to watch the big fights. The hotel I would stay in seemed to be a prime location for a monthly drug-dealers’ convention. Loads of us would stay there – firms from Scotland, Manchester and all over.

  One night, we were all drinking in the hotel bar. A dealer from Amsterdam started to boast about how huge he really was. Foolishly – very foolishly – he let slip to one of the lads in the bar that he had £100,000 in cash stashed in his room. Now this feller was a well-known hard-hitter, so he wasn’t banking on any of the London villains or the Mancs having him off. Not only did the firms fear his reputation, but they also relied on him for gear. They weren’t about to shoot themselves in the foot by thieving from him.

  But when I found out about it, there was only one outcome. I made my way over to the Dutchman, bought him a few drinks and got him pissed up. Then, when he turned in, I bid him goodnight and went straight into action. I collected my bally and gun from my room. I then tapped on his door and pretended to be room service. When he opened it, I put the gun to his head and backed him onto his bed. I then blindfolded and hog-tied him with tape.

  Within minutes, I was back in my room with a suitcase full of £100,000 in Dutch guilders. Breakfast the next day was frantic, with the Dutchman, his henchman and his allies trying to find the culprit. I sat at his table with my muesli and commiserated: ‘Bad one, la. Who would do such a thing?’

  Of course, he didn’t know it was me. However, a few of our mob asked me, ‘Was that you, Frenchie?’

  I just looked at them and said, ‘Me? Do that? What do you take me for?’ We all shared a little smile.

  I remember another incident in our nation’s capital. There was this godfather type in London, whose wife was having an affair with a celebrity hairdresser. She told the hairdresser that her untouchable husband kept £320,000 under their kid’s bed – that pillow talk is a killer. So, her fancy man tipped me off.

  Wallace and I put the godfather’s mansion under surveillance using Gulf War-surplus ex-SAS infrared night-vision goggles and remote-listening devices. Because I’ve got manners, I waited for the wife and kids to go out before Wallace and I broke in. I then crept up on the godfather while he was shaving. The Devil appeared in his mirror like an apparition and gave him the shock of his life. The money wasn’t under the bed like we had been advised, and he wouldn’t tell us where it was – at first. Unfortunately, the Tefal iron then came out. Eventually, we found the money in the cellar – and that’s where we left him.

  On jobs such as this one, a clean-up man always came in after we had departed to remove all physical evidence from the scene of the crime. This precaution was left over from our armed-robbery days when a clean-up man was responsible for petrolling the car and overalls. In this case, the clean-up man actually had to wash the victim down while he was still tied up, spending four hours cleaning the house from top to bottom. That’s how careful we were.

  When we got back to Liverpool, Johnny Phillips came to me with some more Inland Revenue work. It turned out that a distributor nicknamed Smokin’ Joe Frasier had ten kilograms of Charlie on him and two hundred and fifty large. If I cut the dope, it equated to a half-million-pound deal, which was good work. The tax went like clockwork, until we got back to Johnny’s shop on Granby Street to divvy up the winnings.

  The shop was in a basement and was full of space invaders, slot machines and that kind of thing. Johnny turned up with two white boys and had a sick grin on his face. My spider senses started tingling. I knew it was all on. Predictably, the three of them pulled blades and told me that they were keeping everything and I was getting nothing. I raised my two hands outstretched in front of me and said, ‘Look, lads, it’s like this. If you want to keep the gear, you can keep the gear and you can keep the money. It’s no big deal. No one needs to cut me. Just stay back with the blades.’

  Encouraged by my quick surrender, Johnny then said, ‘I always knew you were a shithouse. I always knew you were yellow.’

  I said, ‘You got the drop on me, man.’ Then I put a sad look on my face and said, ‘But what you’ve got to remember, Johnny, is that I’m a little bit cleverer than you.’ And with that, I whipped out my trusty 1940 Luger from the small of my back and pointed it straight at him. ‘Oh dear!’ I said. ‘Only a soft cunt like you would bring a knife to a gun fight. You think you’re man enough to take my stuff and not pay me?’

  When he saw the Luger, the look on his face was priceless because he’d actually sold me the gun in the first place! I turned to him and said, ‘I’ll let you walk out of here, because I feel sorry for you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. Pack everything up – all of the cash and all of the gear. I’ll take everything, and we’ll call it a day.’ I had turned a negative into a positive once again.

  The irony of the situation was that he had tried to rob me at knifepoint, but I had ended up robbing him with his own gun! How sweet was that? It was a nice little earner, too, and the most beautiful thing of all was that Johnny had made the mistake of thinking I was yellow. As for the two white compadres, it didn’t really have anything to do with them, so I let them go. It was just a power game between me and their boss.

  The whole matter was sorted with the steel of my word and the strength of my character. It was beautiful man, absolutely fucking beautiful.

  28

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL–THE EPIPHANY

  On 6 August 1994, my wife went into labour. At the time, I was in Walthamstow doing a deal – buying and selling huge amounts of Class A drugs that would destroy lives and decimate communities on an industrial scale. I could try and pretend I didn’t know or care about the consequences of my actions, but deep down I knew, all right. I knew that the super-powerful poisons I was trading in could turn pregnant mothers into prostitutes and fathers into thieves, their children abandoned, battered and abused amidst the crack fumes in the living room. Dignified lads would be converted into horrible bag-heads, with shit coming out the back of their baggy-arsed kecks. Young girls who once played with dolls would be getting their disease-ridden bodies shagged silly by old fellas for the price of a ten-pound rock.

  Anyway, I was determined not to miss the birth, because several years before I’d missed the birth of my first son Stephen in almost exactly the same circumstances – I’d been doing a drug deal. A wave of guilt and shame flushed over me. Nothing had changed in the intervening years. I was still a drug dealer. I was still the Devil. And now it looked like I was going to be bringing a second child into my hell. I jumped into my brand-new Lexus and did the journey back to Liverpool’s Oxford Street maternity hospital in two hours and sixteen minutes.

  On 7 August 1994 at 7.10 a.m., my daughter Abbey was born. I actually saw her leaving her mum, and, I have to admit, I didn’t find it a pleasant experience. It was touch and go, cos the cord got tied round her neck and the midwife had to take the baby off somewhere. My mother-in-law Sylvia, who was a fierce defender of her family, followed her to see what was happening. When they took the cord from around her neck, she spluttered into life and suddenly we had a tiny new baby. For months, we’d been having arguments about whether she’d look like me or her mum – how dark she’d be, which of our features she would have, etc. When she came out, she was the spitting image of her mother with eyelashes you could sweep the carpet with. She was beautiful. When I held her, I’d never felt love like it before, and I knew there and then I couldn’t be the Devil any longer.

  From a moral point of view, how could I look this human in the eye if I was responsible for the misery and deaths of so many like her? From a personal point of view, not only did I have to stay alive, but I also had to stay free in order to make sure that this little bundle of joy got the start in life she deserved. It was a true epiphany – that’s the only way I can describe it. I filled up with warmth, love and happiness, and a single tear rolled down my left cheek. It was kind of sentimental and fuzzy – it was fuzzy wuzzy.
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  From that moment on, I became a different person. I vowed I would get out of the drugs game and avoid any confrontation that could lead to trouble. The epiphany happened in an instant, but I’d been building up to it for a while. In all honesty, I felt guilty. The drugs had affected all communities but had destroyed the black ghettos in particular. I had started off in the Young Black Panthers. My brother Shaun had founded the Federation of Liverpool Black Organisations. We’d dined with King Gustav at his place in Sweden with hope in our hearts. I had fought racist doormen to let black lads in. We’d been strong, fit and clear of thought. After the riots, we’d had the choice to build something positive out of what had happened. Instead, I was a drug dealer, and Shaun’s life was in turmoil. Somehow we had chosen the wrong path.

  When drugs started coming into the community, people sold them and made money. They weakened our militancy. Drugs made us apathetic and turned us against our own. We started killing each other. In America, the black male under the age of 25 is an endangered species. They’re killing each other at a prolific rate, each murder going unreported. It’s started to happen here, too.

  When I was a drug dealer, I would try and rationalise my actions. The more money we made, the more power it gave us. It gave us a sense that the whole community was getting strong. But then the real effects started to kick in. Drugs gave us a false sense of security. That was the eternal contradiction – the drugs were making us strong in one way but killing us in another.

  I never set out to harm anyone, but I couldn’t deny that my actions had a hand in poisoning my own community. I was caught up in my own duality. If the truth be known, I did it partly because my feet were bigger than my stepbrother’s feet. As a child, I was forced to wear his shoes, because his dad would buy shoes for him and my dad liked to back horses and play cards. I had to force my feet into his small shoes, crushing them. To this day, my wife laughs at me because I like to save on the leccie. My mother would leave us sitting in the dark until she could get some money on her book for the leccie. I don’t say these things to curry sympathy or for respect. I say these things as a matter of fact.

  There were other more practical reasons why I wanted to go straight. Drug dealing was getting harder, and the bizzies were catching up. Marsellus had got 15 years, and I knew they were gaining ground on the bigger fish – like me, Curtis Warren and all the rest. It was time to move on.

  A few months before my change of heart, my solicitor had told me that my best quality was my ability to read when the writing was on the wall. A lot of villains get shown the writing on the wall but don’t read it. He said, ‘If you carry on the way you’re going, you’re going to get 15 to 20 years rammed up your arse.’ After Abbey was born, he said, ‘If you’re not careful, the next time that you’ll see your daughter she’ll have a daughter herself.’

  That’s what straightened me out. It wasn’t fear of other gangsters. It wasn’t fear of getting older. It was fear of incarceration. I knew everything that jail had to offer, because I’d spent four months on remand. The only thing I didn’t know was the long-term effects of incarceration. Individuals who say that they’ll do a long stretch spinning on their dicks – and in the underworld we all know who they are – are either liars or insane. For anyone reading this book and thinking about being a crook – the downside is jail. Jail is a waste of your life, a waste of your time, a waste of your space. When you go to jail, it’s like you’ve died, and when you get out of jail it’s like a resurrection. You can start your life again. I know guys that are 40 and have spent 18 years in jail. It’s no good.

  Even the old-school guys from the 1970s couldn’t cut it in the end. One was a villain I knew called John Haase. I had the utmost respect for him, because of his raw courage and bottle. He was a one-man army, and he feared no one. He spent most of his young life in prison for armed robbery. When he came out, he got onto the drugs bandwagon and made himself a lot of money real quick. When they arrested him, they found around £200,000 under the bed – just a small part of his financial empire. Nevertheless, when I went to visit him in Long Lartin prison, it was clear that jail had got to him. That was in 1993, a year before my epiphany. I remembered thinking, ‘If he can’t cut it, what chance do I have?’

  PART THREE

  THE STRAIGHTGOER

  29

  ON THE SIDE OF ANGELS

  Going straight wasn’t as easy as all that. I had a lot of money stashed away, but I needed to invest it in legitimate businesses in order to get a regular income flowing. However, my first ventures were disasters, and I lost a lot of cash very quickly. To make matters worse, one of my cash hoards from my previous life had been captured. Money had been lost and robbed, and money I was owed from big drug deals never materialised. In the past, I would have used extreme violence to right these wrongs, but I was determined not to go back there. Astonishingly, I virtually went broke. I got down to a house – which still had a mortgage on it – a car and nine or ten grand in readies. Panic stations.

  The hardest thing was to avoid temptation. My mates – who were still grafting – would call me up and offer me 20 kilograms of cocaine or give me a tip-off about a drug dealer I could rob. If I had given in, I could have made £100,000 in a matter of hours. By teatime, I could have been rich again, but I’d had enough and just kept looking at my baby while I was on the phone to these people. I’d be knee-deep in nappies with Richard and Judy on the telly in the background, Abbey on one arm and the handset wedged between my ear and shoulder, and I’d think, ‘No, I don’t want to go to jail.’

  The problem was that I didn’t know how to be anything else other than a taxman. Then I had a bright idea. Why not try and apply some of the skills and techniques I had learned as a gangster to the business world? That was how I found myself in the world of legitimate debt recovery, loan arbitration and security negotiation.

  My first job was to help save Cream, the world-famous super club. The security firm who ran the doors – let’s call them Ozone Security – were making life difficult for Stuart, one of the owners, so he came to me to get them off the door. Ozone were pretty hard-hitters and had been investigated for four murders and linked to countless other shootings and maimings. So, I said to Stuart, ‘I’ll get Ozone to a meeting, and all that you’ve got to do is back me up.’ The job was all about front, because at the end of the day it was me against 14 roid-head, killer doormen.

  I got my game face on and bounced into the meeting. Once there, I made sure that I looked all 14 of them in the eye and said, ‘Stuart doesn’t want you on the door any more.’

  The Ozone boss sneered at me and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m taking over, that’s why,’ I replied.

  Now, what they shoulda done was pick me up and throw me out the window there and then. However, they knew that if they did that to me, they could get themselves sucked into some serious ninja violence – if I decided to take a step back into the dark side. You see, they didn’t know I was going straight. They thought they were still dealing with the Devil.

  I could see some of them starting to make moves. But I knew my Devil stare could freeze a man’s blood. I watched the dissenters – the ones I could tell really wanted to machete me – and said, ‘There’s no point in behaving. Yous are off the doors – end of story. You know what I mean, lad? That’s it. It’s the end. You’ve had a good run, but I’m doing it now.’

  Amazingly, they swallowed it. They put their tails between their legs and just got off. The path was now free for me to take over the door. However, Stuart still wasn’t happy. He didn’t know I had turned over a new leaf and feared I would cause him the same problems as the Ozone lot. He panicked and asked my old friend Alfie Lewis to do the contract.

  By then, Alfie had a well-established security firm that trained police officers, and he had a squeaky-clean reputation. He came to see me to sort out what was a rather delicate situation. He said, ‘Look, Stephen. He’s offered me the door, and I’d like to take it.�
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  I simply replied, ‘Brown envelope, Alf. Brown envelope and I’ll move aside. Simple.’

  He said, ‘Well, how much do you want?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got rid of Ozone, and Stuart has got his club back.’

  At that time, Cream was killing it, taking hundreds of thousands of pounds per week and millions more in official spin-offs. However, the real money was being made front of house, with the door team selling Ecstasy. Obviously, this was done covertly, and the owners and managers of the clubs had no knowledge of the illicit trade. Nevertheless, some of the doormen had become multimillionaires. One of my mates was making fucking 30 grand on a Saturday night. It was only after Leah Betts died in November 1995 that they clamped down on it. Nonetheless, I was going straight and wasn’t interested in making 30 grand a night, so I told Alfie and Stuart to make me an offer. A few days later, they paid me 20 grand to step aside – not a bad fee for a 15-minute meeting. That’s when I realised I could make a lot of money using my brain and my tongue, as opposed to a gun and a knife.

  However, the pull of the ghetto was strong. No matter how much I wanted my life to be peaceful and pure, there were always demons trying to drag me back into hell. Often, it was only the petty squabbles of everyday life – family disputes, fallings out, etc. In the past, I would have dealt with them like a gangster, but the next bit of work I did – although only small – taught me a gigantic amount about how to collect a debt without resorting to criminality and how to resist the pull of the ghetto.

  My nephew Daniel has got a bigger heart than King Kong, but he’s also got killer eyes. In the early 1990s, a few pioneers tried to set up ‘head shops’ in Britain, Amsterdam-style coffee bars where you could smoke weed and purchase all the technical apparatus you would need to grow a skunk farm. Daniel went into business with partners from Anfield called Norman and Owen, one of whom was the son of a well-known old-school face. The police quickly closed the shop down, and Norman was arrested. Even so, Daniel reckoned Norman owed him 17 grand. After a year of trying to collect his debt, Daniel came to me for help. In the past, I would have gone in straight away – all guns blazing – if only to save face for the family.