Powder Wars (6 page)

The fence, by the way, was a very rich businessman called Arthur who owned a string of butchers and supermarkets all over the country. He was legit so he'd be getting very jumpy if we were late with the drop off. He was looking forward to this robbed coffee keeping his shelves stocked up for a long time to come.

By the time I got back to the warehouse to pick up the last van it was about five in the morning. There's no cunt on the roads still, but I'm thinking that it won't be long before working fellers will be on their way and that. I'm regretting not taking the van there and then last night, in fairness, instead of leaving it. But I start her up and get off, and in no time I'm bombing down the East Lancs making good progress thinking this is allday. But suddenly this car goes past with a couple of workies in it.

I have to stop at the lights and next minute, in my rear-view mirror, I noticed that one of these pikies is running towards me, gesticulating and all that. Instinctively, I know that obviously these fellers work in this coffee firm and they've clocked that I've had their van off. They're obviously double alert after so many attempted break-ins of recent and they're on my case. The only thing was to jump out. There's no way I'm chancing a
Streets of San Francisco
-style car chase through the suburbs with these have-a-go types, especially loaded down with five tons of Mellow Birds or whatever. So I say's fuck it. Cuts my losses. Jumped out and got on my toes over the fields. It was about five-to-eight-grand load lost, but it would give the others a chance to get clean away.

It was all in a night's work, as far as I was concerned. There were plenty more successes than no-gooders. For a good couple of years I was doing pure wages – week in, week out – often more than five to ten grand a week. You've got to remember that the average weekly wage was about £30 a week then, so it was happy days.

Sometimes we'd just drive a wagon through a wall like a battering ram. One time we did this at a warehouse storing tens of thousands of pounds worth of salmon. We used the work's wagon we'd found on the premises. But during the get-away the brakes totally went when I was doing about 70 mph. Bottle went, to be truthful, but there was no way I was going to let go this little fortune I was carrying. So I stuck with it all the way to the drop-off point. Round roundabouts, through red lights. The full fucking sitcom skenario. It was touch and go and that, but I managed to deliver the load and get the money for it.

A few days later Ritchie rang me: ‘Birds' clothes. Pricey gear, it is. Frocks and all that. There's two wagon loads just leaving the docks and they'll be parked up for the night in a depot down south. Get your wagon ready for Friday night.'

At that time I was getting very into being a young businessman. Was making maximum use of my assets in my haulage business. Very proud of it I was, and all, too. In the day they were doing legit deliveries for proper firms all over the place and of a night and at weekends they were commandeered for hole in the walling. No logistician in the business was as efficient as my good self. Pure Sir John Harvey Jones, I was, know where I'm going? It was busy. I was having to get more drivers and lads in to work for me. Sometimes, it was that chocca, it was touch and go whether I'd have a wagon available for doing a warehouse. I'd got our Snowball working for me. He was one of the family. But he was a pure black sheep, knowmean? Even in a family of black sheep, the cunt could not be trusted. At all.

A few days before we were going to do the women's clothes job I was getting calls from my legitimate customers saying that stuff was not getting delivered or it was constantly late. I didn't mind anyone having their own sidelines and that, but he was taking the piss. When he got back to yard I told him to sort hisself out otherwise I'd fuck him off.

‘And make sure that ten tonner is back by Friday afternoon,' I double warned him, for good measure.

Comes Friday, he's not back. I makes a few calls and the lads tell me that he's been hanging around with this South End villain called Dave Dicko. Dave – or Dick the Trick as we called him – dabbled a bit with the warehouses and that. He had his own wagons, but it was obvious that he was paying Snowball to use mine in robberies and that. I knew that because they'd pinched some of my burning gear, so it was obvious they were breaking into warehouses and that.

Like me he had his own haulage firm and an engineering business. He went on to become a very big gangster, in all fairness in the end. Snowball had been card-marking Dave Dicko on warehouse jobs that he should have been ringing-in to us. Only fair and that. So it was triple fucking betrayal in my book. They were using my wagons and my burning gear to rob places which my good self should have been robbing. Liberty or what? Not only that but his non-appearance with the lorry fucked up the bit of work re. the tarts' clothes. Could not get hold of another wagon for the life of me. Am £5,000 down and Richie is going spare, la. Calling me all the cunts, he is.

Fuming, I gets in the jalopy and goes out looking for Dave Dicko. I found out that the cunt still lived with his mum and dad in a tenement block off've Scotland Road. Gets there, knocks on the door, he answers, I drags him onto the piss-smelling landing and batters him there and then. Am kicking fuck out of his head and ramming my boot into his bollocks. Cunt is writhing around in agony. Picks him up by the hair, drags him over to the metal railings and starts twatting his head and teeth on the metal crossbar. Blood everywhere, in all fairness. Not only that but I'm half thinking his ma is watching all this from their kitchen window.

I'd already battered Dicko once before, a few years earlier. Was how we met in fact. So I'm still booting fuck out of him when Snowball comes running out of Dicko's ma's kennel. But I'm thinking there's no way Snowball is going to jog in. He's a shithouse, knowmean? But while my back is turned he gets me right on the crown with his fist, the sneaky cunt, and I go down. Stars and all that. I'm half conscious.

A few seconds later I'm coming round and I feel that they've picked me up and are carrying me across the landing. Don't know where this is going in fairness, but do not have the means to fight back. I can feel myself being manhandled across the iron crossbar at the top of the wall over which is a four- or five-storey drop. Suddenly I can see the ground. I'm half hanging over the edge. I'm dead, no two ways. If they throw me off at this height. Pure pulverised, I am, no two ways.

But I could sense they were struggling. Dave Dicko was a near-dead man walking after his thrashing, wobbling and blabbering all over the show. So I kicks out wildly. Grabs the fucking railing and would not let go for the life of me. Snowball was punching and biting me. Kicking my hands. Doing everything to make me let go, la. Digging his nails in. Pure birds' stuff. But pure willing he was, to throw me off. After all I'd done for the little cunt, as well. But would I let go? Would I fuck. Don't know how, but by my own physical strength I edged my way back to safety. Pure contorted my way over the railing, grabbed Snowball who was now realising the balance of power was shifting, and punched him. I battered them both. They were both covered in blood. I gave them one hell of a beating. Snowball never robbed one of my lorries again and Dave Dicko never stepped out of line.

After a few years with the Hole in the Wall gang it started to dry up. So I started to plan my outro. We started losing money. I remember it began after we'd planned to do this tyre warehouse, which had thousands of big wagon wheels inside and all that. These were fetching big money at the time and I had good connections in the haulage industry to fence them through. We did the business and I made about eight grand off my end, which was about a grand-an-hour in my estimation. The lads who we sold them to were screaming out for more. So we lined another tyre warehouse up in St Helens, but when we got there it was too belled up. Alarms were becoming fashionable then and this one was a shocker so we aborted the mission. But by this time the lads were getting greedy. They didn't want to go home empty handed, cut their losses and that. So Dick the Stick backed the wagon into a warehouse depot on an industrial estate nearby and opened the doors. It was a slaughterhouse with a huge refrigerated storage area. So we cleaned it out of the meat, steaks and all that. It was a quick hit. A chancer, but we got £1,500 each. I was slowly realising that the Hole in the Wall gang had possibly peaked. That kind of tank was no good to me, in all fairness.

The next job was a huge cigarette warehouse in Speke, Liverpool. If it came off, this was big time, worth tens of grands to us, so we had a team of seven men looking at it. We'd done these before and it had always been a military operation. In. Out. Get paid. But the card-marker who'd put it up had got his gen wrong. When we met outside the warehouse they were all arguing, saying: ‘He said it wasn't alarmed but it fucking is and that.' Pure scene, knowmean? Amateurs. Bringing it ontop for all and sundry. The next thing a busie car drives past. I clock them in the mirror and was thinking it all looks a bit skewwiff this, know where I'm going? So I turned to Ronnie and said: ‘I'm fucking going.'

A few days later Ronnie rings me up and offers another one. It was a Crown Paints warehouse. It was a simple hole in the wall job. But as soon as Ritchie puts his head through the hole there's alarms going off everywhere. Even though he'd assured me that it had been disabled. There were busies and guards all over the show. I managed to run down this road, then along a railway line and up an embankment and get back to the van. I realised that Ritchie was getting sloppy. No two ways. After that, I didn't want to know any more.

During his time with the Hole in the Wall gang Paul had decided to set down some roots. He got married to a local girl called Christine from a respectable family in 1971. A short while later on 1 July 1971 she gave birth to their first son, Jason.

PAUL: We were always getting nicked for this and that. But it always seemed to be minor things, which no one cared about. We just got on with doing the time. It was second nature. It was a nice break from all the madness.

When I was 21 I got sent to borstal for robbing a car. It was for something daft, which I couldn't even remember doing. I done it for a laugh with the lads. I was still only young. The only problem about being inside is that you couldn't earn. The Hole in the Wall were at their height and making a lot of dough. And here I was in a fucking borstal with a load of fucking vandals and bike robbers and that. Serves me right for being a tit, in all fairness.

On home leave I married Christine. I was half-doing it because I knew getting married might get me out of borstal quicker, go down well with the authorities and all that. It did. I got out. But I didn't bother going home much. It was straight out onto the street to start earning again.

CHRISTINE: When I first met Paul I didn't know he was a villain. He had two jobs. He seemed respectable. I noticed that people were frightened of him, but I thought nothing of it. I just thought he was well respected. He had a nickname – he was known as Oscar in the pubs and clubs. So when people would be going on about how bad this Oscar was and being terrified of him I didn't fully understand. It was as though they were talking about someone else.

He went to borstal for car theft. He just brushed it off as though that was normal. Even then I didn't know he was a gangster because it seemed such a small thing. I married him when he came back on home leave. My mum went crazy at the time. Mine was a respectable family. We all had normal jobs. It was only after we got married that I realised the price I had paid.

He was a villain. A big villain. He was robbing warehouses and factories all the time. Stealing wagons with Ritchie, his uncle. He was always committing crime. I couldn't believe it. It was non-stop. Paul would disappear for about ten days at a time and when he returned, if his dinner was not on the table, he'd be off again.

That was my life with Paul Grimes. I was a fool.

5

Den for Meets

Meanwhile, back at the Oslo, an orgy of gang violence had erupted. Paul was gradually consolidating his power base. His ambition was to make the club his personal headquarters, a 24-hour-a-day operational centre for organised crime. The plan was simple: to make the Oslo open season for gangsters, allowing him to oversee and control all of their various graft and thus entitling him to a slice of all the best action that went through there.

But paving the way to power was violent and bloody work. There was no structure to the Liverpool gangs. They were disorganised, fiercely independent and totally fluid in membership. Many of the top faces were little more than latter-day guns for hire, who would join a gang to carry out an armed robbery or a warehouse raid, and then move onto their competitors once the ‘work' had been executed. There was no hierarchy or manor to protect. The pecking order was purely based on crime-driven revenues. Financially, many of the gangsters were wealthier than their counterparts in London and Manchester. Organisationally, it was a recipe for disaster. There were constant gang wars, internecine feuds, shootings, stabbings, murders . . . it was total chaos.

Loyalty was based on who was paying the ‘wages' at any instant. Astonishingly, the one keystone, the only constant that kept the whole house of cards from imploding on itself, was the code of silence, or the gangland code as it was known to doormen and club owners. No one talked to the police, no matter what. Against this backdrop, Paul launched his bid for power and began his struggle to carve out a profitable niche.

PAUL: Before I took over the door, the Oslo nightclub was pretty innocent. It was stuck in a time warp. It was full of Norwegians and Germans who just wanted to get drunk and get laid. Sometimes they'd refuse to pay £25 for a bottle of vodka. They knew they were being ripped. Which is fair enough, but it's one of them. I'd have to do them in anyways. I was taking my wages out of the place and the right to charge drunken seafarers £25 for a bottle of vodka was that of the management. That's how they made their bonuses. As long as I ensured it kept coming, it was happy days all round. Mind you, I half used to think about taking the place over lock, stock. But in truth, I could not be arsed with the hassle.