Hateland (27 page)

    I felt this stance put everyone in danger: staff, doormen and decent customers alike. I raised the subject more than once with the head doorman. Discussion dissolved into dispute. Our differences festered for several months before culminating in his walking out. He told the manager he could no longer work with me.

    The following day, I took over the door. I immediately set about replacing most of the local doormen. Over the next few months, under my leadership, the new team ruthlessly established a rough sort of order over the once-prevailing anarchy. The foundation stone of my new approach was that violent people should be dealt with violently. We, the doormen, had a stash of our own weapons, which we used without compunction.

    People soon began to joke about the three ways of leaving Raquels: on foot, by taxi or in an ambulance. In fact, a fourth existed - out the back, head-first down the concrete stairs. We reserved this exit for the most badly behaved customers. Some nights, there seemed more ambulances outside than taxis.

    The matronly woman who ran the cloakroom was Jewish. Before I started working at the club, some of the other doormen - all white and non-Jewish - had begun light-heartedly taking the piss out of her. She'd ignored them. When I arrived, and more customers began turning up for their cloaks in a badly beaten state, she started complaining to both the manager and his area superior about what she saw as our excessive violence. We regarded her behaviour as 'grassing'. The piss-taking became more personal and vicious. Doormen would leave pork sausages on her counter, ask for directions to Auschwitz and wail the Yiddish exclamation 'oy vay, oy vay' whenever she spoke.

    One evening, a doorman brought to the cloakroom a grey, Second-World-War German officer's trenchcoat. To it, he'd pinned a metal Wehrmacht eagle clutching a Nazi swastika. As he handed it over and received his ticket, he said to her, 'We'll be back for this - and you - later, you kike grass.' She collected her own coat and handbag before walking out. She never returned.

    Around the same time that I took over the door, the club got a new manager. Usually, it's the manager's job to get on well with the council and police. Then they all blame the head doorman for any trouble. But the manager and I hit it off, so the usual 'good guy, bad guy' scenario couldn't gel. Soon, the council and police hated us both.

    Not all of the customers were violent villains. Many were just ordinary freaks. One character I grew to like was an awesomely thin creature in his late teens or early 20s. Around 6 ft and with lizard-like features, he'd gulp and stutter violently when he tried talking. We named him Disco Dave.

    On Mondays, we used to hold an under-18s night, which attracted 300 potential and actual juvenile delinquents from the local estates. We wouldn't sell them alcohol. It didn't make any difference. They'd just get pissed beforehand. Like their sociopathic parents, these kids would then indulge in brawls, beatings and drunken gropes. One night, we got called to a disturbance on the dance floor. As I approached, I noticed a heap of around ten writhing, spitting kids. They appeared to be attacking someone who lay on the floor beneath them. We dragged the kids off one by one to find a bleeding man at the bottom. Disco Dave had entered my life. Apparently, he'd taken off his shirt to expose his gruesomely underdeveloped body. A group of youths - who may have been eating at the time - objected. Disco told them to fuck off, and they'd steamed him. I cleaned him up and suggested he go home and come instead to the adult nights, as a few years had now passed since he'd been under 18. He said he didn't have enough money to attend the adult nights or to get home. I agreed to give him a lift when the club closed.

    He waited for me patiently. Every time I tried talking to him he became engulfed in violent gulping and stuttering. In the end, silence seemed the best policy. I sent him to sit in the back of my car to prevent idle chat. On the way to his house, the police stopped me. Not an unusual event: they liked sitting on my case. When I saw the flashing blue light, I told Disco to let me do the talking, because I wanted to get home at a reasonable hour. The policeman walked up to the driver's door and asked me the usual questions. I said, 'I've been to work, and I'm going home, and - before you ask - he's fuck all to do with me. I'm just giving him a lift home.'

    The officer then asked Disco for his details. The request provoked a nervous crisis. Despite superhuman efforts, Disco couldn't squeeze out an answer. He gulped, stuttered, spat and blinked for so long that in the end the policeman said, 'It's all right, mate. Forget it. Off you go.'

    I suppose I adopted Disco Dave as a sort of club mascot. I knew he had no money, so I used to let him in free. I could see this made him feel important. One day, I told him that in the future he should ignore the long queues, march straight to the front, walk past the doorstaff, cashier and those searching and, if ANYBODY said ANYTHING, he had to say, 'My name's Disco Dave. I don't pay. And I don't give a fuck.'

    Nothing more. Nothing less.

    One evening, the company directors and other VIPs visited the club. They were all standing around the reception area when Disco walked in wearing trainers, which the management had banned in an unsuccessful attempt to filter out the riff-raff. One of the directors looked at Disco, stared at his forbidden footwear, glanced at me and stood waiting for me to say something. I just shrugged my shoulders.

    The director decided to intervene. He said to Disco, 'I'm afraid you can't come in wearing trainers, Sir.'

    Disco looked straight at him, gulped and, with the pride and arrogance of a bullfighter, stuttered out the words, 'My name's Disco Dave. I don't pay. And I don't give a fuck.'

    He then marched past the director and all the doorstaff and disappeared upstairs. The director said, 'Who on earth is that?'

    'Don't ask,' I said. 'He's a fucking nightmare.'

    When we went upstairs later, we watched Disco dancing on a raised podium with his shirt off. He looked in need of urgent psychiatric assistance.

    Indirectly, he'd helped us rebuff the charge that we'd become too violent to customers. Indeed, the director thought we ought to impose our authority a bit more firmly. He hadn't liked our completely hands-off approach to a stuttering and skeletal representative of the undead who'd pushed his way into the club without paying.

    One day, the manager told me he had a friend due for release from prison. Would I be able to employ him on the door? The man's name was Maurice and he came from Bristol. He'd broken a man's arm with a baseball bat during a road-rage incident.

    The manager said, 'But he's not a violent man, Bernie. Honest.'

    I said half-jokingly, 'If he ain't violent, he's no use to me.'

    One Friday night, I watched as a big black car pulled up outside the club. The driver's door opened and a big black man got out. Decorated generously with gold jewellery, he strolled majestically towards the club, avoiding undue exertion of his muscular frame. I thought, 'Pimp.' Lamentable racial stereotyping, I know. In fact, Maurice had just arrived. I shook his hand, gave him a hundred pounds (as cash is usually what you need most when you walk out of prison) and showed him round the club.

    To be honest, his skin colour didn't present a problem for me. But I feared it might for many of the customers. Basildon isn't known for its commitment to multiculturalism. Not many blacks live there. The few that do often end up being driven out. Many of the white residents have their roots in the East End. They'll tell anyone willing to listen that they only left their beloved Bow Bells to escape the blacks and Asians. Some Nazis even dreamt of setting up in Essex an Aryan 'homeland' - a whites-only separatist state.

    I liked Maurice. Although quiet and reserved, he feared no one and would fight all-comers. After working with him for a while, I mentioned that I needed a tenant for my flat in south-east London. He confided that he had a few West Country women working for him in the capital as prostitutes. I suppose this made him a lamentable racial stereotype after all. I agreed to let some of his working girls rent the flat. Since the road-rage incident, he'd also been banned from driving. I let him use my licence. Without really realising, I'd become good friends with a black man.

    Despite spending my nights beating manners into the locals, then sleeping till mid-morning, I still managed to go to the odd Millwall game on a Saturday afternoon, but not usually as a Bushwhacker. I even took my infant son Vinney along to a few.

    My friends seemed to be growing up a bit, too. I spoke more on the phone with Adolf than with the others, who'd all become a bit resistant to his nutty Nazi ways. I was probably the only one of our circle still willing to listen to his political rants for more than three minutes.

    Adolf kept me informed of developments in the world of the far-right. He continued to invite me to meetings and to send me Nazi magazines. So I knew that, by 1990, the National Front (new and old) had almost expired, devoured by the usual splits and in-fighting. The BNP had become the Great White Hope, though not for Adolf, who regarded them as left-wing Tories. He often sounded disillusioned and gave the impression he was biding his time till the emergence of a new Messiah who'd lead us to the Aryan promised land.

    In early 1991, at a BNP election rally, a new security team was formed to protect the party leadership. I assumed leader John Tyndall wanted to avoid being strangled in public by strangers. The team was composed mainly of football hooligans from the London clubs Tottenham Hotspur, Millwall, Charlton and West Ham. They called themselves the 'East End Barmy Army', which was a bit puzzling because Tottenham's in north London, Millwall's in south London and no one knows where Charlton is. Only West Ham is east. They were meant to be purely for defence, but before long they went on the offensive, attacking red marches and meetings. The East End Barmy Army formed the nucleus of what later became the most feared and dangerous British Nazi grouping of recent times, Combat 18.

    In August 1991, 'Mad Bomber' Tony Lecomber asked Adolf to bring his 'mates' to a BNP demonstration being held in Bermondsey in London's Docklands. The demonstration's target was a planned march through the area by the National Black Caucus, a group campaigning for the rights of blacks. For around two years, I'd avoided taking Adolf up on his political invitations, but it just so happened that, on that day, Millwall were playing at home. I planned to go to the match with Benny, Ray and Tony.

    Bermondsey is only a stone's (or bottle's) throw from Millwall, so we told Adolf we'd combine the two events for a day out. We used to call our outings 'jolly ups' and this promised to be a double serving of jolly. We made our way to the Rotherhithe Road in Bermondsey to await the marchers. I hadn't been in such a hyped-up atmosphere since the first Millwall versus West Ham match I'd attended years earlier.

    Now members of those rival sets of hooligans had joined together in the East End Barmy Army They stood there poised for attack, along with members of the BNP and NF. Many of the area's white residents had also joined the throng. This 'black' march in a 'white' area was regarded by many of them as 'anti-white' and 'provocative'. A mob of about 400 of us stood waiting.

    The trouble started before the marchers arrived. Millwall's Bushwhackers started hurling bricks, bottles and coins at the line of police standing behind barriers. Then the marchers appeared. A cry of rage went up and everyone surged forward, smashing down the barriers. We were chanting 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' and pelting the rapidly retreating police with missiles. The marchers stopped moving as the police surrounded them. We all headed for a nearby park in the hope of attacking from behind. A police riot van tried to block our route. Missiles rained down on the van. The driver slammed the vehicle into reverse and drove almost blind down the street to escape.

    Once inside the park, we armed ourselves with whatever we could find - bottles, lumps of wood, stones, the metal inserts of bins. Then we charged the terrified marchers again. Police reinforcements swamped the area. Suddenly, a policeman announced through a loudhailer that the march had been cancelled and that we should all disperse. The BNP organisers didn't want the day to end just yet. They also took to their megaphones and whipped the mob up once again for a final effort. We regrouped and charged at the marchers, who turned and began running up the street. Later, one of the marchers said to journalists, 'We were lucky to get out alive - that was our only success.'

    Exhilarated by our victory, we turned on the police. A group of Met motorcyclists were punched, kicked and pelted with missiles before they sped away. An Asian photographer was singled out from a group of journalists to be kicked and beaten. A car containing two black people was turned over onto its roof. In a small shopping centre, an Asian shopkeeper was beaten up and another had his shop looted.

    For about ten minutes, the police seemed to have disappeared. And a marauding mob can do a lot of damage in ten minutes if no one's there to stop them. Eventually, the police returned and began hunting us down. They arrested some stragglers at the rear. Everybody else dispersed into the maze of back alleys.

    Publicly, the BNP condemned the disorder. Adolf sent me their paper,British Nationalist.The editorial read:

   The BNP continues to advocate that lawful political action is the correct method for opposing the evils of the multi-racial society that the rulers of Britain have created, but as long as those rulers do not respond to the people's wishes by bringing their hideous experiment to an end, the kind of street warfare we saw in Bermondsey is inevitable.

    Adolf resented the 'criticism'. He said angrily on the phone, 'Typical Tory bollocks from Tyndall.' He thought the BNP leaders were taking liberties in rousing the rabble, then condemning them for what they'd been roused to do.

    Around this time, I'd developed a sideline involving 'jobs' set up for me by an intermediary known as 'Fatman'. He weighed about 22 st. Hence the nickname. These jobs involved destroying property, threatening people and beating them up. The victims had usually fallen out with business associates, friends, partners or neighbours over business, money, love or the position of the garden fence. Whatever the reason, someone was willing to pay good money to have his (or, quite often, her) revenge.