The Devil

by Graham Johnson

  The first thing I asked Daniel was, ‘What is your settlement figure?’ I knew he had probably exaggerated the actual figure he was owed. Sure enough, we arrived at four grand as a satisfactory amount. I went to see to Norman in my very scary black uniform. I allowed him to list the reasons why he thought he didn’t owe the money to Daniel. All the while, I wasn’t even listening. You have to be dogmatic, otherwise you find yourself being led up the garden path.

  Then I said, ‘Are you finished? I’ve listened to what you’ve got to say, lad. Here’s my card. This is who I am. You owe our kid ten grand.’ This was simply the opening gambit. Remember, I was ready to settle for four grand.

  The next time I went down, I took Daniel, and we opened talks in their kitchen. I said to Norman and Owen, ‘I don’t give a fuck who you are. I don’t give a fuck who you know. You’re going to pay this money, and you’re going to pay it before you go to jail.’ Then, in the interests of fair play, I bollocked Daniel as well: ‘I’ve told you about messing around with these white guys. They just think you’re a dumb nigger. They’ll turn you over as soon as look at you. Stick with your fucking own.’ It was all role play. I was saying this in front of them for effect. As a sweetener to Norman, I then said, ‘I know you’re going to prison soon for the head shop. One of my relatives is in there at the moment. You can either have a good reception when you land on K wing or a bad one.’ I could see him thinking, ‘He’s cornering me on the outside, and he’s cornering me on the inside. What the fuck am I going to do?’

  The next day, I decided to switch the pressure from Norman to his partner Owen. This was a good debt-collecting tactic, just in case Norman decided to go to the police. Owen was a businessman who didn’t want any aggravation. I said, ‘Make me an offer, and I’ll go away.’

  A little later, I received a phone call from Alfie Lewis. ‘Stephen, you’re going to have some problems over this debt that you’re trying to collect.’ He mentioned the name of a notorious crime family who had agreed to throw in their lot with Norman and Owen if it all went down to the wire.

  I told him, ‘Well, Alfie, you know me. Tell them I don’t give a fuck. I don’t care who they are.’

  ‘Well, I know that, Stephen. I’m just phoning you up to let you know who’s involved. If you need anything, give us a shout.’

  At that point, both sides were preparing their nuclear arsenals, polishing the warheads ready for mutually assured destruction. It was Cuban Missile Crisis time. It would soon escalate into a fully fledged gang war – if someone didn’t bring the matter back to the table.

  Forty-five minutes later, Owen called me up. I said, ‘Look, I’m not getting a penny out of all this. My nephew’s a pain in the arse to me. Your partner’s a pain in the arse to you. We need to sort this out, lad. What d’you say?’

  He said, ‘I’ll give you three grand.’

  Remember that Daniel had said that he’d settle for four. I told Owen to make it four and we’d have a deal.

  However, he replied, ‘No, I’m giving you three.’

  I couldn’t be seen to have been bullied, so I went away, sat Daniel down and said, ‘Look, they want to give you three grand. No guns drawn. No aggravation. My advice to you is to take the three.’

  ‘Man, the Stephen of old would’ve got 50 grand,’ he argued, trying to pour scorn on my attempt to go straight. He was trying to use emotional blackmail to get me to step back over the line. I had to point certain facts out to him.

  ‘Look, you’ve been on this for 12 months and got fuck all,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on it for a day and you’ve got three grand. Shut your fucking mouth and take the money.’ I phoned Owen back and said, ‘That’s a deal.’

  I understood that the biggest worry for owen would be looking like he’d lost face by giving over the three grand. So I said to him, ‘You’ll hear a lot of bullshit designed to wind you up, so I’m going to send you a text message, and I’m going to sign it with my name. When anyone says to you that the Frenchman’s stood on you or made a show of you, you show them it.’ I’d covered all bases. The text said:

  Thanks for your cooperation and your help in sorting out this problem between your partner, who’s a pain in your side, and my nephew, who’s a pain in my arse. You had no debt. You had no responsibility to pay it, but you’ve shown the maturity of a man, and you’ve paid three grand in order to save everybody’s face. If, in the future, the Frenchman can do anything for you or any favours for you, do not hesitate to ask. Also, when Norman lands on K wing, he’ll be looked after. I’ll make sure that he gets a good reception.

  Twenty-five minutes after sending that text to him, I got a phone call from Alfie Lewis, laughing down the phone. ‘I’ve seen the message you sent him, you cunt,’ he said. ‘He’s done nothing but fucking show it to everyone in Anfield.’ Of course, I knew that he would. I knew that people would say to him, ‘The Frenchman came and you melted. You collapsed.’ However, with that text he was able to defend himself and say, ‘No, I didn’t. Here’s the message I got off Frenchie. Me and Frenchie, we’re mates. There you go.’ He’d be able to big himself up with his crew and say, ‘As far as I’m concerned, that cunt French owes me a favour. What’s three grand to me? It’s that fucking knobhead partner of mine causing all kinds of fucking problems. Frenchie hasn’t told me to give him the money. He hasn’t made me give him the money. He has asked me. He’s not telling me what to do. He’s asking me what to do.’

  In that world, being told what to do and being asked what to do is a universe apart. If you’re told what to do, you’re a boy. If you’re asked what to do, you’re a man.

  Around that time, I had another revelation. Up until about 1995, you could’ve termed me anti-white. The truth was that I never really had much time for white people. I knew a lot of white guys and did a lot of deals with them, but, deep down, I’d always believed there was an insurmountable divide between us – never the twain shall meet. That was until I came across a young man called Christian Mark Nesbet, who changed my view of a whole race.

  30

  UP FROM THE ASHES

  There was an old-time comedian called Michael Bentine, who was in the RAF during the war. He joked that he always knew when a pilot was going to be shot down on the next mission, as he could see the tombstones in his eyes at breakfast. Well, on the reverse side, I had the ability to spot people with lights in their eyes – winners. And Chris Nesbet was one of them. He was a guy with bright, shining beams behind his retinas.

  Chris had a simple vision. He’d worked as a surveyor in a massive building corporation and had noticed that businesses were obliged to spend millions on security for their sites – on unreliable gangsters who always let them down. His dream was to set up a clean, efficient, gangster-free security company and take the world by storm.

  Chris set up his first company with a man known as the Pugilist. Not the best idea. By the time I caught up with him, Chris was on his arse. He was sleeping on his mum’s couch, his house was in danger of being repossessed and, worst of all, he was driving a Rover. Chris and the Pugilist didn’t have the best relationship – and there was fuck all Chris could do about it.

  Enter the Frenchman. I was desperate to buy into Chris’s utopian dream. I had a chat with the Pugilist, and he brought me on board. My first job was to go and collect a ten-grand debt from a furniture shop. I entered the store and immediately asked the skinny proprietor to give me the keys. He said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  I replied, ‘My name’s Stephen French. You owe our clients ten grand for rent. I’m seizing the goods in the shop.’

  Meanwhile, Chris was bombing around with a calculator, adding up the price tags. The owner then piped up and tried to threaten me: ‘I know a few faces. I’m going to make a few calls, and you’ll be dead within an hour.’ To be fair, he was connected to some very bad firms, but when he went away and did his research it was clear that he was told, ‘If the Devil is in your shop, the best thing you can do is give him the keys and lea
ve.’ So he did.

  The itinerary in the shop amounted to 50-grand’s worth of pine: beds, wardrobes – everything you could possibly think of made of fucking pine. We decided to flog it in a half-price sale and invest the 25-grand profit in our company and vision for the future – all for a little growl at some prick. That was good business as far as I was concerned.

  The beauty of the situation was that it was all legitimate business – tax paid. Again, it all came down to utilising the skills I’d learned at the Inland Revenue – reputation and psychological intimidation. My unique selling point was that I could make debtors think that the moon was going to fall out of the sky and land on their house if they didn’t pay. My favourite phrase was, ‘If you double-cross me, you’ll be seeing me in your fucking dreams. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. You’ll be seeing me when you’re asleep.’ Often, they had something to hide, so I was playing on the ‘guilty act, guilty mind’ theory. Of course, I would only say this to debtors who threatened me – and Chris never knew that I said things like that.

  Anyway, we had this whole heap of pine, so the first thing we did was bring our partners down to have the pick of what they wanted. My wife chose a bed and wardrobe and basically kitted our bedroom out in pine. Chris’s mum and the Pugilist’s bird did the same. All equal. Therefore, it came as a great shock to learn later that the Pugilist had been sneaking pine out the back door and keeping the money for himself. At first, I didn’t believe Chris when he told me. I said to him that my loyalties lay with the Pugilist, as he had brought me on board in the first place. However, I also understood company politics. If the Pugilist fell on his own sword, the path would be clear for me and Chris to propel the company out of the small time and into the blue-chip world where it belonged.

  The idea of catching the Pugilist in the act appealed to my Machiavellian nature. Whether you’re planting bugs for the White House or stabbing your co-worker in the back over the water cooler, you have to get deep down and dirty. People don’t climb the greasy pole by being kind and making grand gestures. They slide up it, propelled by backbiting and base human behaviour.

  Chris said to me, ‘The Pugilist has been selling the beds incomplete without any fitments. To prove it, just go and knock on the door of someone he’s sold one to and tell the person that the Pugilist forgot to give them the fitments. If they take them off you, we know he’s been selling beds. We can then confront him with the evidence.’

  Soon after, I found out that a gangster had bought a bed from the Pugilist. I knocked on his door and said to the gangster’s moll, ‘I’ve brought the fitments round for the bed that the Pugilist sold you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘The bed’s upstairs. We still haven’t put the wheels on it.’

  The gangster realised what was going on and screamed at his bird, ‘What the fuck are you saying to him?’ However, he knew the game was up.

  To be honest, I was very upset and emotional about what had happened. I took the Pugilist for a drive, told him to get out of the car and said, ‘Let’s fight.’

  He said, ‘I’m not fighting with you, Stephen.’ He wasn’t frightened of fighting me – he would’ve had a go. However, he said, ‘I like you too much. I’m having some problems and that, and I’ll just leave the firm.’ He was embarrassed about the situation.

  Come Christmas, I knew he was struggling financially, so I dropped a couple of grand off for him and his family to get them through the day, because, believe it or not, I was developing a social conscience – and he had a lovely young family.

  The path to glory was now clear. Chris and I set up a holding company called CDS Management, which stood for ‘catering, development and security’. The key to running a successful security company was dealing with the ‘intangibles’, such as fights with other security companies, death threats and hand-grenade attacks – day-to-day occurrences in the cut-throat world of the security business. That was my area of responsibility; Chris had no idea that any of this went on.

  We immediately won a big catering contract from a Japanese car company to feed their workers. That took in two grand a week in cash at 60 per cent profit. The debt recoveries also started to fly in. With the surplus cash, we started building housing estates. If I had only known how easy it was to make money legitimately, I never would have chosen the path to evil in the first place!

  However, some of my old compadres weren’t as good as me at staying ahead of the law. One by one, they began to fall by the wayside, purely because they ignored the writing on the wall. Curtis Warren moved to Holland to distance himself from his sidekick Johnny Phillips, who was in a hell of a lot of trouble over the David Ungi incident. However, in 1996, the Dutch police linked Curtis with approximately £125-million worth of cocaine and jailed him for 12 years. I hear he spends a lot of his time behind bars trying to stay ahead of currency changes. According to some sources, he’s got a lot of money buried all over Europe, and every time they bring out a new £20 note or new note in a foreign currency he has to get his minions to dig it up and change it over. He’s lost a lot of money that way.

  31

  SELLING YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL

  Over the next few years, I became Britain’s numero-uno legitimate debt collector. I recovered millions and millions of pounds’ worth of debt that had been previously classified as dead and totally irretrievable.

  Every debt has a life of its own. At every twist and turn, people change sides and lie, motivated by greed and dishonesty. I don’t suppose things have changed much since the times of the Medicis in the Middle Ages or the Hawala bankers in Arabia. Here is a typical example of how people would act when faced by the debt collector.

  One day, the multimillionaire director of a successful car dealership came to see me. He and his two partners had made their fortunes by importing used cars into Britain and flogging them off cheap. As always, greed had got the better of them, and the other two had ripped off my man to the tune of 90 grand. I told him my terms: 50 per cent commission. From then on, it was my job 100 per cent. There was to be no interference, and Chris knew nothing about it. It was a strictly freelance operation.

  My mate C.J. – a well-respected face from London – and I paid a visit to the garage. It was a nice set-up in an upmarket satellite town known for its infatuation with rugby. Let’s call the co-directors Laurel and Hardy, because one was short and fat and the other was tall and slim. I politely introduced myself, and in a businesslike way explained that I had been assigned to collect their ex-partner’s 90 grand. Predictably, they became very irate. Before I knew it, Laurel had driven his car across the entrance to the car park to block me in and had called the police. He grinned at me smugly, thinking that because he was an upstanding businessman in the community and I was a big black man in a predominantly white area, the bizzies would back him and run me out of town. I relaxed onto the bonnet of one of his cars and wearily said to him, ‘You’re going to live to regret this. You’ve been very silly here today.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he retorted. ‘After the police have had their way with you, I’m gonna have you finished off. You don’t know who I know in the underworld. I happen to know a lot of the main faces. You’re finished.’

  I replied, ‘Well, if you know anybody who’s anybody in that line of work, then they’ll know me, and I’m telling you that you’re going to live to regret doing this.’

  The police soon turned up, but I had a number of tricks up my sleeve for dealing with that type of situation. First, I always wore a suit, tie and, most importantly, shiny shoes. This impression tended to throw the bizzies off-kilter, forcing them to deal with me civilly. Second, I produced a letter of authorisation from the client to prove that the debt was real. Third, I always made sure that I didn’t threaten anybody. There’s a very thin line between demanding money with menaces – which is a serious criminal offence – and enforcing a legitimate demand, which is perfectly legal. I was an expert at enforcing a legitimate demand. In fact, to th
is day, I think I’m still the premier expert in the UK, which is why I officially operate under the auspicious title of ‘problem-solver extraordinaire’. I’m known by that name in the City of London, the debt recovery departments of many blue-chip companies and in half of the financial centres in Europe. I’m a man who can solve problems.

  Within 15 minutes, the police had gone, and Laurel’s face started to change, because he knew he was in deep trouble. He ran inside his office and phoned his gangster protectors. Now, in fairness, his contact was a senior member of a very powerful and dangerous UK crime family. But so fucking what.

  As Laurel was talking to the gangster, his face started to relax. I could hear the gangster reassuring his gobshite ally, thinking that if he scared me off there’d be a bit of wages to be had. The gangster then told Laurel to put me on the phone.

  I grabbed the phone off Laurel and said, ‘This is Stephen French.’ I immediately heard the pause. I knew that he knew who I was, and I knew I had won the battle. I continued, ‘This is nothing to do with you. I’m going to get the fucking money, and if you want to line yourself up with these pricks, then I ain’t interested.’

  A little voice squeaked up and sheepishly said, ‘Could you put Laurel back on the phone, please?’ I then heard the gangster say, ‘You’re on your own.’ Laurel went ashen-faced and began to shake.