I said, ‘You think that you know faces in the underworld, do you? Well, now you’re facing the Devil. How does it feel to be selling your soul?’ Laurel and Hardy caved in and agreed to hand over the full 90 grand the following week.
However, as sure as night follows day, I knew that the second I left they would be on to the co-director they had screwed over. They would apologise profusely, take him and all their birds out for Chinese, and try to kiss and make up. The next day, they’d go and watch the rugby in the directors’ box and then hit him with the old, ‘We’ve had a few differences over the years, but it was all business. We’re three white middle-aged businessmen who’ve started off with fuck all and done very nicely for ourselves, thanks very much. So, why are we letting this nigger get involved in our business, trying to destroy what we’ve worked for all these years? Fuck him off and let’s just sort this thing out between ourselves, like the fat cunts we are.’
Before half-time, Laurel and Hardy would have talked their old mate round and found out about my 50 per cent commission, thus realising that their mate would only be getting 45 grand out of it anyway. They’d say, ‘We’ll give you 30 grand, and we’ll all be mates again,’ no doubt promising a future partnership.
Lo and behold, a few days later, I found out from my sources that my client had indeed naively decided to realign himself with Laurel and Hardy, thereby cutting me out of the deal and treating me like I was a fucking Muppet or something – a mistake with a capital ‘M’. I called up my client and organised a meeting with him. I was really nice and cosy with him. I explained that it was all bullshit, and they’d fucked him once, so they’d do it again. ‘Don’t realign with them,’ I said. ‘Stay with me, and I’ll reduce my commission to 30 per cent.’ This convinced him to come back over to my side. However, I was well and truly fucked off with the effrontery of it all, so I made an executive decision: I was taking the fucking lot. Nobody was getting any of the gravy. To be honest, I had been looking for a reason to fuck them all as it was, and now he had given me one and played right into my hands. He’d wavered. That would cost him.
Collection day soon came around. My spider senses started to tingle as soon as I woke up. However, it didn’t feel as though it was a warning about the Old Bill or anything like that. They were tingling as if to forewarn me that these fellas might try something. I could see a vision of an upstairs office and had a sensation that the danger might come from above. As I was cleaning my teeth, I grabbed my .38 – my great equaliser – and put it in my jacket, just in case.
However, when me and C.J. got there, the lovely money was ready for counting. It was all going swimmingly. Nevertheless, I felt my attention constantly being drawn upwards. ‘What’s upstairs?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ they told me. ‘Just a storeroom.’
I suddenly got an overwhelming desire to go upstairs. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ I said. On the way to the ‘toilet’, I found a set of stairs and crept up to a room at the top of the building. When I opened the door, I saw two of the biggest fellas I’d ever seen in my life sitting on a bed. These guys must have each been six feet five inches and twenty-five stone. They had an array of weapons on the floor, as well as some tape and a couple of chairs. They had planned to beat us up and then tie us to the chairs.
I wasn’t going to fight them, so I pulled my gat out and said, ‘You fuckers sitting there, get fucking downstairs, now.’ I then marched them down the stairs, like two huge baboons, booting them up the arse to make them get a move on.
‘Who the fuck are these?’ I asked one of the businessmen. ‘What are they for?’
The biggest thug said, ‘Please, mate, we’re just rugby players from the local team. You’re not going to shoot us, are you?’ It turned out they were two professional players.
I turned to Laurel, ‘You brought these pair of pricks for me. You think these guys frighten me? The two of you get on your fucking knees now.’ Laurel and Hardy got on their knees and started begging for their lives. I told them that I was going to fine them an extra five grand for this outrage. I then got the two gorillas to strip off. They stood there like a couple of naughty schoolboys.
C.J., who had a broad south London accent, said to me, ‘Fackin’ shoot the cants. Let’s fackin’ fill ‘em full,’ but he was just playing the game. He didn’t mean any of it – it was just a bit of psychological terror to keep everyone under control. Within sixty seconds, Laurel had appeared with an extra five grand. I made him sign a piece of paper, and then I turned to the rugby lads, ‘Good luck with your game on Saturday.’ With that, I got off.
I’d arranged to meet the original director at McDonald’s to give him his share. When I got there, the greedy twat took one look at my bag and greeted me like I was his best mate. I pulled out a tenner and said, ‘Go and get yourself a burger and cup of tea while I sit down and get sorted.’
He was cracking jokes with the burger flippers, steadying little kids with their drinks and practically helping little old ladies across the road. It was the best day of his life, and why not? He’d just had his revenge on his old business partners and earned 63 grand to boot. When he finally sat down, he started tucking into his dinner and asked, ‘Have you got the money?’
I replied, ‘See that hamburger? Enjoy it. Cos it’s the most expensive fucking Big Mac in history. That’s all you’re fucking getting.’ C.J. had waltzed in behind me to get a Filet-O-Fish. He looked at the stunned director and said, ’90 grand for a burger? Bit toppy, innit? You should have got a meal deal, mate.’
With that, I shouted to the lad at the counter, ‘I’ll have mine to go, please,’ and I left, sipping my Coke.
I drove to a relative’s house and gave them the bag of money. When I had a large amount of cash on me like that, I’d put the dough in a safe house and head out of town for a few days, just in case the Old Bill turned up. However, fortunately for me, the rugby players obviously didn’t want to pursue the matter, probably because they were so fucking embarrassed.
That was a good pay day. In the end, I took 50 grand and gave C.J. 45. I knew he was an all-the-way nigger, as he had stayed with me and had covered my back. After all, the Devil – legit or not – needs his helpers.
32
YOU CAN TAKE THE DEVIL OUT OF HELL, BUT . . .
My security company quickly became very successful and landed a number of lucrative contracts to provide guards to building sites and commercial premises all over the UK. At its height, the business employed the cream – ex-bodyguards for the Saudi royal family, ex-servicemen and ex-coppers among them. Valued at £7.5 million, we seriously thought about floating our company on the stock exchange. However, there was a downside to being a successful businessman – the politics. There was sniping and backstabbing from the competition, the customers, the local council and the police. It was just a part of the culture of the business I was in, and I needed skin like a crocodile’s to deal with it.
All the top builders who I did business with were Freemasons, and they used to get the gossip about me from the top bizzies. The talk at the top table was, ‘We’ve got to bring that black cunt down. He’s just getting too big for his own britches.’ It was sour grapes. The police hated me doing well, because it looked like I had beaten the system, and I made more in a month than a lot of them made in a year.
But, to be totally honest, I hadn’t actually cut all my ties with the underworld. I still knew all the major firms, and if there were problems between them, I would often help bring them together and arbitrate a solution without any bloodletting – a kind of underworld counselling service. RELATE for gangsters who’d fallen out of love.
For instance, one day, two of the most feared crime families in the country had a tiff. One was a huge multimillion-pound nightclub-owning dynasty, and the other family were prolific importers – both spearheaded by ultra-violent men. They were on the brink of nuclear war. Then I stepped in, told them to call off their submarines and brought them around to my attempt a
t the Oslo Peace Accords. After that, my stock went up, and I began to get a reputation for arbitration.
No one wants war – war is bad for business. War costs. A lot of the big firms had studied the gun war that had followed the death of David Ungi. Although David was just a businessman, gangsters had taken it upon themselves to start killing each other, and the police had flooded the streets with armed response vehicles. I’m not suggesting that the Ungi family were involved in drugs in any way, but David’s death led to unrelated gangs killing each other. And who could move heroin around the city when there were bizzies everywhere? War interfered with trade. The cheaper alternative was me. I could counsel for both sides and strike a deal that would keep everybody happy – if they adhered to the terms. Everybody could then move on.
I actually liked that role. I was still a face, without being an active one. There was also another key factor: power, the ancient and irresistible addiction. Power, however petty and insignificant, is a turn on. When you walk into a nightclub for free with eight or nine big men in tow while every other cunt is shuffling about in the queue with a long face wondering if he’s going to get in, that’s power. It’s not power on the same level as Tony Blair, who could send all those troops to Iraq to kill women and children. His power was on a macro scale, mine was on a micro scale. It was personal power. The power to say you can do this or you can’t do that in my own little world. Whatever the practical differences, you bet your bottom dollar that the feeling was the same.
However, not all of the arbitrations went smoothly. For example, C.J. went off and formed his own security firm with another mate of mine called Kieran Packet, but they soon fell out. C.J. was scared to roll around with Kieran, but Kieran was equally frightened. A powder keg of a situation developed, so I agreed to arbitrate. A meeting was set up in a disused warehouse down the dock road. However, relations deteriorated from the outset. Suddenly, C.J. put a gun to Kieran’s head and in his cockney accent said, ‘You facking cant.’
To be fair, Kieran didn’t flinch and said, ‘What are you going to do with that? Are you going to fucking shoot me?’
It was a red rag to a bull. As if in slow motion, C.J. started to squeeze the trigger. ‘No!’ I cried and jumped up from my chair, whacking his hand down towards the floor. There was a massive bang. The gun had fired, but the bullet had miraculously missed Kieran’s head. Instead, it had lodged in his hip.
Kieran was badly injured, so he had to go to the ozzie – there was no two ways about it. This meant the bizzies getting involved, which was just what the top brass had been waiting for – me to fuck up. Irrespective of whether I had been there to referee or not, it would look like I had gone there to help C.J. shoot Kieran. The bizzies must have been rubbing their hands with glee, saying, ‘I knew if we gave him enough rope, he would hang himself one day. It’s just one more nigger for the jail house.’
However, as always, I didn’t wait for events to catch up with me. I hit on a genius idea and surrendered myself to the police. I circumvented the whole car crash by telling them the truth: that I had been there to keep the peace; that I hadn’t known C.J. had a gun; and that by whacking his hand, I had actually saved Kieran’s life. I even made myself out to be a hero. Talk about turning a negative into a positive. The bizzies at the station were fucking flummoxed. I was released without charge, and C.J. went on the run. Kieran made a statement against C.J. and stuck with it. C.J. eventually got caught and was sentenced to eight years.
When we built our office, I insisted that a back door be put in behind my desk. Chris asked me, ‘What do we need a back door for?’ But I insisted, even though I could see he still didn’t really understand my reasons.
Not long afterwards, we started getting hassle from a gangster called the Psycho from over the water. He didn’t know I was involved in the business, and he started smashing up our sites and asking for protection money. One day, the Psycho came into the office, slammed his two hands on Chris’s desk and said, ‘Are you Stephen French?’
The blood drained from Chris’s face. I knew straight away that the Psycho had won that fight. I stood up from behind my desk and said, ‘I’m Frenchie. I want everybody fucking out the office except him.’
Psycho walked over towards me. It was obvious to me that he wasn’t a trained fighter, because the first thing he did was launch a haymaker from South America. I intercepted him with a swift right hook and smashed him on the mouth, splattering his teeth and blood across the wall. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know any more. I kicked him up the hallway and said, ‘Get this piece of shit out of my place.’ Chris didn’t know that any of this was going on.
However, he made one more pathetic stab at revenge before he left the premises. He keyed my Lexus 300 Sport down to the metal and then went to the police station to report me for GBH. By the time the police arrived to see the blood-smeared walls, I had flown out the back door, over the back wall and disappeared. That was the reason I needed a back door – in my line of work it was essential. It was a Friday evening, and I knew it was a bad time to get arrested, because I’d be locked up until Monday morning. So, I phoned up CID officers and asked them not to put a warrant out for me, saying that I’d come in on the Monday to sort things out.
The officer gave me attitude and said, ‘Don’t tell me what to do. If I want to put a warrant out for you, I will.’
I said, ‘I’ve got the resources to disappear if you put out a warrant. You’ll never be able to catch me, so it’s best if we cooperate. I’ll see you on Monday.’ That gave me two days to remedy the situation. I had to find the Psycho to force him to withdraw his statement. I soon found out that he was drinking in a pub with a couple of his friends. So Aldous Pellow, a mate of mine called the Pig and I set off to find our man. We were all big lads, and when we walked into the pub it went silent. I walked over to the Psycho, dropped one of his teeth into his lager and said, ‘You know what to do, and you know when to do it.’
The next day, he withdrew his statement. Deep down, something was telling me that bit by bit I was getting dragged back in.
33
AN EXPLOSIVE FAMILY
If there is one story which symbolises the breakdown of the black community in Britain, it is this one. Just over half a century ago, three young men from the West Indies set out on a voyage together in search of a new life. One was my dad Henry French, the second was Nathaniel Earl and the third was Papa Jaafan. They were friends, brothers and comrades who sailed to Britain on the same boat, weathered the same storms and pulled each other up by the bootstraps until they eventually found their feet in a new land. When they were older, they would laugh about the old days in the shebeens around Granby Street, quietly proud that they had made a better life for themselves and their children.
Two generations down the line, the love between the three families had imploded. All three grandsons had moved down to London to make their fortunes in the drugs game. Now they were at war, locked in an everyday ghetto conflict of drugs, guns and death, without any respect for the family history. It was 1997. I was thirty-eight years of age with a three-year-old daughter. My adopted son Danny was 17 and had already been in trouble with the police on several occasions. Through my connections, I had managed to keep him out of jail.
One of Nathaniel Earl’s grandsons was called Lito Earl. Lito’s parents were decent, law-abiding folk. Lito, in contrast, worked for a white drug dealer who happened to be the husband of a very famous pop sineer. One day, a member of a rival eane shot Lito, and he ran to the police, like a rat. Later, in a classic case of Scouse perversion, the gunman paid him £30,000 to drop the charges, which he duly did. On hearing about Lito’s good fortune, our Danny naturally wanted a cut for himself, so he started to plan a taxing expedition with a few of his mates. One night, Danny and his mate Harley Jaafan, the grandson of Papa, kidnapped Lito and took him to a secret abode. Danny whispered into Lito’s ear, ‘You’re not keeping that fucking money. We’re taking that money off you because you’
re a rat. Hand that fucking money over.’ Like father, like son.
Not surprisingly, Lito Earl didn’t have the 30 grand on him, so Danny got on the blower and repeatedly called members of Lito’s gang to get them to come up with the £30,000 as ransom money. These phone calls set off a chain reaction through the ghetto. It wasn’t long before I got a call. A guy called Lance Holman – acting as special emissary for the Earl family – phoned me up and said, ‘Look, your Danny has kidnapped Lito Earl. His mum’s talking about going to the Old Bill if her son isn’t set free. Can you sort it?’ I was particularly annoyed by all this hassle, as it was a Friday evening and I had been all set to go out for a nice bowl of soup down the Marbo (a Chinese restaurant) with Dionne.
I knew from experience that the first thing I had to do in this type of situation was to nominate an emissary for myself – someone who knew the parties involved and could mediate on my behalf. Therefore, I nominated a drug dealer mate of mine called Neo. Next, I phoned Danny, but, predictably, he had switched his mobile off. So I called up one of his mates and told her, ‘If you get hold of Danny, just tell him to let the lad go.’
I spoke to her again a few hours later, and she said, ‘Danny spoke to me, and he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He hasn’t kidnapped anybody.’
Did he think I was brand new or what? Other dads tell their kids off for forgetting to put petrol in the car. Here I was trying to sort out a kidnapping as though it happened every fucking day. Within hours, I’d got hold of all my connections on the street to try and find out the location of Danny and his gang. Once I knew where they were, I could SAS the ken, rescue Lito Earl, give our Danny a slap on the wrist and hand Lito back to his mum before she called the bizzies. Then I would be free to enjoy a nice Chinese meal with my wife.
Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. The Earl family lost their nerve before I could act and went to the police. In response, the bizzies launched a sting operation to nail Danny and his mates. First, the police taped all the ransom conversations. Second, they planted a stooge to pose as one of Lito Earl’s gang and agree to the £30,000 ransom. Finally, they put £30,000 worth of traceable money into a bugged bag and sent it to the kidnappers in a taxi.
The Devil Page 21