‘Now, you listen to me you fucking Kraut cunt,’ he says, growling like a gunslinger, and already me and Delroy are in stitches. ‘I’ve been making suits for longer than you fucking lot ruled the Third Reich and I’ve never heard of a ‘seexties keek’. And I’ll be totally honest with you, not only are you starting to get right on my fucking testicles, but I ain’t even charging you the full price. So that means I’m walking round Soho with a man’s dick and a boy’s wages. Furthermore, you’re embarrassing me in front of me pals. Never mind about a ‘seexties keek’ on your strides. I’ll give you a ‘Soho keek’ right up your bollocks, you Hitler-loving cunt.’ And with that, Cocky strong-arms the Kraut back into the changing room, makes him get hold of all his gear then lobs him right out into the street. I tell you, it don’t come any better. We then get down to some more charlie, and it sets Cocky to walking right out on the wire.
‘I want a fucking yogger, Billy,’ he says, foam forming in the corners of his mouth.
‘What for?’ I say.
‘Got a bit of problem with me brother-in-law.’
‘You don’t need a yogger for him, Cocky, he’s a cunt.’
‘Yeah I know, but I wanna show him I’m a proper man, mate.’
‘You are a proper man, Cocky.’
‘I know, Billy. But fucking hell, mate, I should be ironing out people, not their fucking trousers.’
‘Let’s go for a drink and talk about it later.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ I say. ‘But hadn’t you better call The Duchess and tell her you’ll be late?’
‘Fuck her, Cocky gets home when Cocky gets home.’
So the craic’s on. But first Cocky, the pussy, needs to get his hair seen to, and a pal of his from a barbershop in Frith Street, has told him all about this spray that covers up bald patches. And being a vain bastard he wants to try it out. Cocky closes up his shop and we stroll out into the night. It’s about a five minute walk to Frith Street from where we are, and the streets, as always, are rammed. But I tell you this gaff is deceptive. And do you know what’s funny? That the majority of the punters out there don’t even know that they’re walking streets crammed with gangster lore. And I must admit on a night like tonight when I’m feeling fine, it feels good to be a part of it. Right here, outside Cocky’s shop, for instance, is where the Jewish gangster Jack Spot played out the last call of his infamous knife fight with ‘ltalian’ Albert Dimes. Jack Spot earned his stripes fighting Mosley’s blackshirts in the battle of Cable Street back in the thirties, and Dimes was an enforcer for the racetrack gangsters, the Sabini Brothers.
And right over there, opposite Charlie Chester’s casino, is the very brass’s flat where yours truly first cut his teeth in Soho by cutting his first gangster, on behalf of Soho godfather Bernie Silver. Bernie had been jailed for the biggest Old Bill corruption case in British history, and for shooting dead fellow gangster Tommy ‘Scarface’ Smithison in a row over protection. So while Bernie was stewing his life away in Wandsworth nick, Maltese gangsters had started squatting his various Soho businesses and weren’t weighing on profits accordingly. Through my kickboxing club I was approached by Bernie’s partner, an ex-Maltese traffic cop by the name of Big Frank Misfud. I in turn recruited two pals for the bit of graft and went out and bought my first yogger, courtesy of a black pal of mine, Gibbo, who sadly got beaten to death with a golf club over a two-bit drugs deal a few years later. Off we went into Soho, all of us with our arses chomping at our ringpieces but determined to do the right thing. We caught up with the first transgressor, a Maltese enforcer by the name of One-Eyed Joe. After opening him up like a tin of beans, we beat him half to death with claw hammers and then threw him out of a first floor window. He screamed like a baby and broke two paving slabs when he hit the floor.
Then we went round to the Maltese gambling club above the Bar Italia in Frith Street to confront the main man, a Malteser by the name of Nutty Derek. Nutty Derek had just been released after a ten stretch for petrol bombing a brass’s flat in Peter Street. I put the newly purchased yogger in his mouth, and the cunt melted. Which is strange, because if you read the packets it says, Maltesers melt in your mouth, not at the business end of a yogger. We chuck a left into Rupert Street where, just up past the Flamingo topless bar, Tommy ‘Scarface’ Smithison copped it in the nut. Right into Tisbury Court and that khazi on the right is the Lord Rockingham. It belongs to me and Danny. We used to rent it out as a shebeen to a dude named Johnny Shaft. Johnny’s a white man who thinks he’s a black man who thinks he’s a Harlem hustler. True to name he did shaft us, for six months’ rent. We caught up with him a bit later and stabbed the granny out of him, after which Danny cut off his counting thumbs with a pair of secateurs. So, if you ever see a white man who thinks he’s a black man who thinks he’s a Harlem hustler, trying to hitch a lift and not getting very far, you already know his story.
OLD COMPTON STREET. The gay capital of England and home to the country’s true queens and some brilliant fucking bars. If you like stiff drinks then this is the street for you, and if you like stiff cocks this is also the street for you. The gaff we’re passing now is another one of me and Danny’s peepshows, and used to be the original 2i’s Coffee Bar, the birthplace for the fifties British rock ‘n’ roll scene. Pop impresario Larry Parnes and his chums used to haunt it and prey on star-struck twinks, green from the provinces, who willingly had their turds burgled for a whispered promise of stardom. Some things don’t never change! Halfway down Old Compton Street and to the left is the amusement arcade where Danny ended the days of Maltese Tony. Above that are the Venus Rooms, a pox-ridden watering hole where, six weeks ago, the notorious south London Arif brothers tried to top one of their old pals. Instead the whole thing degenerated into farce.
They’d been rumped out of half a kilo of charlie by a toerag of a crackhead called Mad Mickey D from Bermondsey. And after he rumped them he was going round telling everybody that the Arifs were total fucking mugs. So they called him out for a drink one night, palled him up and then proceeded to get him paralytic. After much mirth and a few bottles of Moey on the Joey, they all ended up in the Venus Rooms out of their skulls at four in the morning. Taking a silent cue from one of his brothers, Dogan Arif slipped down to his motor and came back with a sawn-off nestled under his jacket. Only thing is, he tripped up on the stairs, the yogger went bang, as yoggers are apt to do, and he ended up blowing the bottom of his own arm off. One of his brothers, Dennis, panicked, pulled out a revolver, aimed it at Mad Mickey D’s nut and fired. Mickey ducked and the bullet sailed past his canister, striking an innocent bartender in the shoulder. Pande-fucking-monium! Mickey took his chance, swallowed hard then had it on his toes out of the West End sharpish. And now he’s back on the Arifs’ gear and walking tall round south London, telling anyone and everyone that, as well as being total fucking mugs, the Arifs should henceforth be known as ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.’
We cross over Dean Street, where Tony Muller, a tough-nut sixties gangster, got his head blown off right outside the Gargoyle striptease club. That was down to Bernie Silver as well. Chucking a right into Frith Street, we pass Ronnie Scott’s jazz club and cross over towards the Bar Italia, above which sits the Maltese gambling club where I put a yogger to Nutty Derek’s head. Any sex shops round here that ain’t run by me and Danny are run by Ronnie O’Sullivan. ‘Ron’s the name, porn’s the game’ is his mantra. Nice bloke, Ronnie, but he sells the filthiest porn in the West End. And the way it is, the fouler and filthier the mags, the higher his sales. Strange breed, the English, especially the famous ones. One veteran TV comedian, now pushing up daisies, and who was a firm family favourite, and smarm-ball par excellence, used to visit one of the brasses that worked over Ronnie’s shops. He used to lay in her bath and have her crouch over the top of him and take a pony in his mouth. I’ve always thought that accounted for his shit-eating grin.
I’ve got fond memories of Ronnie O’Sullivan. He used to
bring his boy, Ronnie Junior, around to the Ambassador club in Dean Street to play us at snooker. The kid was only about ten at the time, but was already a feisty little fucker. He had a specially-made box with wheels on it which he used to stand on because he was too short to reach the table properly. He was making hundred breaks even way back then. He used to hustle us rotten, and went onto become world champion. Good luck to him. And apart from being a blinding snooker player, there was one other thing that stuck in my mind about the boy: he was the only ten-year-old English kid I’d ever seen with a mullet. It’s a crying shame what happened to big Ronnie. The media played him up as a villain and a racist, but he weren’t neither. He was just a nice, barrow boy type geezer who got on the Devil’s Dandruff, started to believe his own bullshit and ended up stabbing Charlie Kray’s black chauffeur to death over total bollocks. And now he’s lifed off. And no matter what you read in the papers, Charlie Kray wasn’t a villain. To be sure his two brothers were the real thing. But Charlie, especially at that time of his life, was just a silly old sausage swanning about covered in snide tom and blagging dough by living in the twins’ shadow.
And the saddest thing for big Ronnie about the whole episode is that Bernie Silver was friendly with one of the top cozzers on the nicking, and for two hundred grand the video tape of the stabbing that convicted him could have been ‘lost’. Instead, Ronnie gambled on playing it straight but got a losing hand. Now he’s got twenty years or so to sit down and think about it.
We reach the barbershop which is run by a Milky Bar Rasta who goes by the name of Nyah Keith. He’s all right, but a bit of a plank. Gormless but harmless. And give him due he ain’t a fucking minge. Whenever we pass by to say hello he always breaks out the spliffs and Special Brews, and you can’t say fairer than that. So I ain’t complaining, am I? It’s ten at night, warm but with a cool, cool breeze blowing through the streets of my home town. I’ve got a can of ice cold Special Brew in one hand and a fuck off big blunt in the other, which means I’m getting hammered in stereo. Meanwhile, Cocky’s stuck frowning in an antique barber’s chair, looking like Ted Bundy strapped to Old Sparky, while Nyah Keith’s all over him, carrying out some crafty combing on his receding tufts, and I’m one million miles away from all the gangster bullshit that’s currently driving me up the fucking wall.
SIX THE FOLLOWING afternoon and we’re still standing, albeit fucked up beyond all recognition, having necked the night away with booze, pills and untold grams of the Devil’s Dandruff. In fact, I’m so monged at the moment I can hardly speak, and my nose is leaking like a burst sewer pipe. But at least we’ve found one place that’s still rocking.
The Dirtbox is run out of a plush shoebox basement right behind Soho Square by nightclub hepcat, Phil Dirtbox. The great thing is, it’s West End hipsters with wonga only. No squares and no suburban scumbags. And Phil Dirtbox, a six foot six pipe cleaner in a black bowler hat and Doctor Martens, is the coolest man some doughnuts will never get to meet. And what’s great about mixing with this sort of crowd is there’s no aggravation. You couldn’t find a fight with one of these people if you asked for it. It makes partying a pleasure. The only blot on the landscape so far has been silly bollocks Cocky getting carried away on the charlie. At two in the morning, we were stumbling across Wardour Street, when we got cut up by a shitheap of a scallywagon. Instead of ignoring it Cocky went and threw a can of beer at it. So it stopped, and I was thinking, oh, we don’t need this. Turns out the motor was full of heavy-duty bulldykes. One of them got out and cracked Cocky right over his canister with a starting handle, which me and Delroy thought was fucking spot on, but give Cocky his credit, he never went down.
Then we hit Fred’s, another trendy watering hole and I started to get paranoid thinking I’d better keep an eye on Cocky in case he got himself into more trouble. True to form he went on the missing so I went looking for him. Eventually I found him in the ladies’ toilets with some bird he’d just met. She had her skirt pulled up over her head while he was plunging into her like a piledriver, so I left him to it.
Five minutes later he came bouncing out with a silly smile all over his face and spunk spattered over the front of his suit trousers. Only the thing was, it ain’t even his suit. He made it up for a punter who’s due to be getting married in it this coming Saturday. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Cocky, it’s that his punters come a very poor second to his sexual proclivities. A while back he made a trouser suit for Naomi Campbell and she’d sent the strides back for some minor alterations. Cocky passed them around his shop so that we could all have a good sniff at the crotch. A sort of top of the range cocaine chaser, if you like.
So here we are ensconced in the Dirtbox, and Cocky’s bang on form. He’s pulling off some sub-James Brown moves on the dance floor and giving it the large one in front of a couple of skinny but drop-dead gorgeous models. You know the type, think their shit don’t stink.
Out comes his white hankie, and he wipes his brow with it. I seen this trick a zillion times before but it always makes me laugh, so I move forward for a better look. After dropping the hankie on the floor he jumps down and does a one arm press-up before picking the hankie up between his teeth. The two birds are lapping it up, and he gives me a knowing wink. But what he don’t know is that the gear that the barber sprayed on his head to cover his bald spots is running in dark ugly brown streaks down the front of his mooey. And being the good pal I am, I give the man a well-deserved round of applause and the thumbs up, then return to my drink and drugs without even letting him know he’s making a total cunt of himself.
Despite flying high as a kite and in excellent company, for some reason this bad feeling washes over me. Acting on instinct I slip into the toilets and retrieve the messages from my mobile. One in particular worries me, so I ring it back and get some bad, bad news. Call it gut instinct if you like but I’m bang on the money. When it rains in this game it fucking pours and I ain’t even lost my holiday tan yet. But I’ve got fuck all time to think like this, so I just leg it out of the Dirtbox without so much as a by-your-leave. It takes me fifteen drug-addled minutes to locate my motor, which don’t bode well, and another precious minute of fumbling and dog-cunting just to get the key in the ignition. Slamming my foot right down on the floor I scream my way out of the West End. Desperately needing to breathe I wind down all four windows and start sucking in the rushing cold night air. A tiny piece of sick hiccups its way from the back of my throat onto the tip of my tongue, so I spit it out of the motor, only to find it getting stuck on the outside paintwork. With my lungs screaming for more air I push a button on the dash and the sun roof rolls slowly open to reveal a cloudless sky full of winking stars. But it ain’t all beauty, ‘cos I know the vultures are already circling.
Jewish Dave’s in deep shit, and I’m the only man who can save him. And no matter how much of a dog I can seem sometimes, one thing I’d never do is turn my back on a pal in shtook. But Dave’s in very deep shtook. The prick has gone and dipped his manicured, piano-playing fingers into the wrong pie. Namely one of ours. He’s just fucked a merchandising company that we’ve got shares in, for over two hundred grand’s worth of gear. Now, I know well enough that if he knew it had anything to do with us he wouldn’t have touched it. Like I said, he won’t mix it in the ring with the likes of us. In fact I can picture him now, giving it the large one down on the port in Marbella. White silk suit, Mediterranean glow and a thick-as-shit tart hanging off his arm, not a care in the world and his pockets bulging with his new foreskin and a wad of spanking clean fifties. The next thing you know the poor fucker’s been taken off the street by some hired help, given an almighty larruping and brought back to Blighty in the back of a fruit and veg lorry. And I weren’t told a dicky bird. I reckon I’ve got just over an hour to get to where Dave’s being held and I’ll tell you this for nothing. I won’t forgive myself or my firm if he cops it. That’d be a liberty too far.
Dave’s been given such a beating that his head’s now
the size of a pumpkin. And what with his five front teeth missing, both eye-sockets smashed to buggery and blood all over his once white suit, he looks more like a jack-o’-lantern than a human being. Six broken ribs, not to mention his nose, and every breath he takes is breaking his heart, but he’s got to keep on trying because he don’t want to die.
He’s strapped tightly to a chair but he can’t see anymore. Still, he knows he’s in a basement because of the smell and the damp. And he also knows he ain’t alone. But he’s talked himself out of tight spots before. Why not this time?
‘Where am I?’ he croaks faintly.
‘Shit street!’ snaps Stevie.
‘In a pair of fucking Jesus Boots,’ adds Frankie.
‘Can I… I… speak to Billy?’ says Jewish Dave.
‘Billy ain’t here,’ sniggers Frankie. ‘And even if he was he wouldn’t be able to do fuck all. The Old Pal’s Act was abolished the moment you fucked us.’
‘I’m so… so… sorry,’ he says.
‘Not as fucking sorry as you’re gonna be when Danny gets here,’ laughs Stevie.
‘I didn’t know it was your dough, honest.’
The trapdoor above creaks slowly open and Danny drops down on a telescopic ladder, coming to a halt beside Stevie and Frankie.
‘Now that’s what I call a Yid on the skids,’ he chuckles, rubbing his hands together. ‘And all trussed up like a rib joint, lovely.’
‘I think he’s feeling a little queasy, Danny,’ says Stevie.
‘Bless him. Must have got seasick coming back on the ferry. Personally I recommend Quells. The slag got anything to say?’
‘Reckons he didn’t fucking know it was our louver.’
‘Well he fucking knows now, don’t he, the wally-nosed cunt.’ And with that Danny picks up a baseball bat and smashes it angrily into Jewish Dave’s shins. There’s the crunch of solid ash splintering already badly-bruised bone. But then nothing. Not a sound passes Dave’s lips. Instead, his scream, an agonising banshee howl stops somewhere near the back of his throat, turns, and disappears back down into the depths of his body, sending hellish agony through every fibre of his being. Disappointed by Jewish Dave’s apparent indifference to the pain just inflicted, Frankie steps forward and pokes him in the neck with an electric cattle prod. A blue fluorescent spark punctures the darkness, momentarily illuminating the four men. It’s followed immediately by a spiteful crackle, as Jewish Dave’s whole body convulses and lurches violently forward, testing his restraints almost to breaking point. After slumping back down in his chair, a large stream of milky vomit spews out of his mouth and onto his chest, after which he starts to sob uncontrollably.
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