Powder Wars (9 page)

The card-marker told us that there was about £50,000 to £100,000's worth of these jewels in one safe alone, in a house off Prescott Road in Liverpool. The card-marker also told us when the family went out, their comings and goings and so on and loads of details about the security. Little sketches and all that carry on. ‘Bonus,' I thought, ‘this is going to be a pure walkover.' I was half kicking myself for taking a year out when crime was this easy peasy. Lazy twat at times, though, I am.

He said that every Sunday night the whole family would fuck off to the pictures or something. After the de-brief with the card-marker, we decided to put the house under surveillance. So the next day I went down and clocked the regs of their cars and the layout of the house and that. ‘Good,' I thought as I watched it from my car. There was a fenced-in courtyard where they parked their cars. That was a pure godsend. We would need that to park our van in so we could lift the safe into it and blow it in an underground tunnel later.

When I got back, me and Ritchie met up at me mam's and he revealed the plan round the kitchen table. He said: ‘This is the way it is. The card-marker has told me the exact make of the safe and I've been to a safe shop. It's light enough to carry. I know because me and the salesman in the shop fucking carried one.'

There was a bit of an argument about the fact that we should blow the safe in the house. We decided not to for three reasons:

Ritchie concluded: ‘So we go in through the windows and carry it to the van and fuck off.'

Simple as. End of. Every Sunday for a month we continued to watch the gaff.

There was a pub opposite and every Sunday I'd stand in the doorway with a pint and watch the family drive out of the house. It was a brand new Jag driven by the dad or the son. We sussed out that if they didn't come back by 8.30 at night they'd be out till about 10.30. Give or take various factors that gave us an hour to do the job. It was all set for the following week. Everything was going allday, but on Friday morning I woke up to find the busies had towed my jalopy away. The usual caper – said they wanted it as evidence for something or other. In fairness, they were just giving it to me.

Bad one, la. I was too busy to be without mon danny today, especially before going to work, knowmean? I had fucking loads of running about to do over the weekend. Ritchie wanted me to have a last look at the gaff. Christine wanted me to run her into town. Billy wanted me to pick him up and run him to this sit down with a team from Manchester. There was only one thing to do – the Fisherman.

The Fisherman was a bent busie who used to come in the Oslo. We called him the Fisherman because that's what he loved to do – go fishing and that. He was all right for a busie, just sat there at the bar talking about pike and the Liverpool–Leeds canal and that, ignoring the vast amount of organised crime that was going on around him. Fair play, to him. His drink was free and we took care of him, so he did us favours in return.

I looked at the paper. ‘Fuck,' I thought, ‘it's Friday. He'll be halfway to fucking Bala Lake, by now, with his rod and can of Party 7,' knowmean? They love all that, busies. I phoned the Oslo and told one of the lads to get a message to him at the busie station. Luckily, we'd caught him just before he was going off duty. They told me that he'd pop down the Oslo later to sort it. Is right. That night all's I had to do was tell him the make and model. The next day he got it back for me. Back on track.

On Sunday we got into position. The family in the Jag left at about six thirty in the evening and didn't come back at eight thirty. Game on. One by one we went over the back wall. Dick the Stick got busy opening the various doors and windows. Need not have bothered, in all fairness. The back door was unlocked. I just walked straight in and gave them the fright of their lives, as they were all crawling around like cat burglars.

Between the four of us we picked up the safe, but it was fucking heavy. It wasn't the safe-lite model that this card-marker had said it was. We pulled, pushed, dragged the fucker across the ground floor and down a flight of steps into the garden. Fuck's sake – there was a tow truck blocking us from driving our van into the courtyard. The gates wouldn't even open. No way, la. We'd have to drag the safe right across this fucking rolling estate, acres it fucking seemed, and hoist it over the garden wall into an alleyway.

Time was not on our side, in all fairness. It took 30 minutes of pure
World's Strongest Man
-style feats of heroism for the four of us to get it to the garden wall. Were well over budget on this one by now. The
Countdown
clock was just getting to the bit where the musical finale starts, but one last Geoff Capes impersonation, safe over wall, and we were at least £50,000 richer.

Literally, it was balancing on the top of the wall when we heard the noise – the unmistakable sound of the Jag coming down the driveway. Crunching gravel it was, but it sounded like thunder to me. Finished, we were. F-U-C-K-E-D. I spelled out in my head. Finished. Let the safe go, crashing into the alleyway. We all did the offski over the wall into the night. We had to leave the safe next to the back gate.

We didn't get collared but we were totally fucking sinkered anyways. No one could believe it. We'd been inches away from getting the safe away, no two ways. Fucking seconds, knowmean? Total gutter. Kites on us said it all, but there was only one thing to do: find the card-marker and give him a good thrashing, which we did, by the way. Apportioning blame in those situations was always a good way of relieving the stress of a no-gooder.

We gave him a few slaps but the card-marker saved himself from a pure pummelling by offering up another job there and then. Penance, it was. It was a big Volvo garage with a cash-rich safe. We hit it a short while later. Walkover. Had the safe off, got £800 quid each out of it. Wasn't too good wages, in fairness.

After that I fucked the safe-cracking off and decided to move into being a sneak thief. I got into it through one of my doormen called Bobby Chalendor. I brought him in to replace Joey Duvall. One night he said: ‘Do you fancy doing a bit of work? I know a butcher who drives round with £7,000 takings in his boot.'

I got a set of pass keys off one of the lads in the Oslo. These were a bunch of keys which would fit most cars. Car locks were piss poor in those days. Bobby said: ‘This butcher owns a string of shops and every Saturday he collects all the takings and drives home.'

So the following Saturday night we followed this butcher coming out of his shop. Sure enough, he throws a bag in the boot. We carry on trailing him and he stops at a pub to go in for a bevvy. I goes over, pops the boot and has the bag off. Very heavy, mind you. Sure enough, there was six, seven large in it. Get paid. I kept £5,000 and Bobby had the remnants. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

It turns out that Bobby knew a card-marker who worked in the meat trade who knew all these big butchers, who drove around with huge fucking bags in the car, thinking it was allday. We did about four or five of them sneaks before the source dried up, but they were all good payers. So good in fact that we decided we'd do our own card-marking. Find where these big shopkeepers lived and worked and put them under surveillance.

The first one was another big butcher. We could work out how much there'd be in takings from how many shops they had. We took turns to watch him for a month. He had a load of shops and this feller also owned a few market stalls and a wholesaler. He was doing very well. Every Saturday it was the same deal. Collect his winnings from all five or six shops around North Liverpool, other vans would turn up as well to drop off money to him and then he'd drive home, but on the way he'd stop off for a bevvy at this pub in Bootle. Get paid.

I sent Bobby to follow him in and see what he did and for how long. While he was in there one of us went over and tested the key. It was a nice, expensive car, but we could open the boot with a Cortina key easy peasy. That was just a dry run. The next Saturday we followed him to the boozer and while Bobby was stood next to him at the bar we twirled his boot. Bobby was a cheeky twat; by this time he was even telling the butcher jokes and talking about the match and that. There was £8,500 in there, mostly in notes. I left most of the coins.

We began tailing shopkeepers all the time and having them off. High reward. Low risk. We were getting rich again, but you can only do that for so long before it comes ontop. It's one of them. After about nine months solid of it, I began looking around for something bigger, a proper venture. Soon I found it – scrap metal.

Through my haulage business I'd often been paid to deliver scrap and I could not believe, for the life of me, the value of it. It was a pure case of where there's muck there is most defo brass. Not only that, the streets were literally paved with it. I'd noticed from spending a lot of time in the cab of a lorry that there was a lot of steel lying around on the new motorways and roads that were being built. Get paid.

One night I got a ten tonner and drove it to a new motorway that was being built. We stole all of the reinforced steel that we could see and drove off. It was in the middle of nowhere. Just a field with tonnes and tonnes of unguarded gear on it. We weighed it in as scrap at a mate of mine's yard in Widnes. I got £500. It was that easy. I knew I was onto something.

The next time I went out to recce another good spot on the same motorway. I had a look at it, saw what the situation was and had another ten tonnes away. I then started to run it like an operation. Twice a week the lads would go out. After putting a load of steel into the ground, the contractors would build a little fence around it. That was all the security. We'd just take it down. We had a few scares but it was making us a lot of money. I was making a few contacts in the building game. They were giving me a better price for the steel than the scrap. More money. Get paid.

Then I met this timber merchant who told me that he made a fortune cutting up old railway sleepers and selling them to the coal mines for shoring up. Say no more. I drove onto a siding and loaded as many sleepers as I could. We found out where they were doing repairs or putting in a new line and just go and have them off. These new lines were double-bubble. We'd steal the tracks and the sleepers. Miles and miles of it. Just fucking disappear, literally overnight. The lads would tell people they were workies and just drive the lorry down onto the tracks. It was money for old rope. Easy peasy. The security was hopeless.

It wasn't high stakes. It wasn't big time. But it was big money. I bought my own scrap yard then. My mate Mick Cairns told me that he was making a few quid taking the scrap of this old disused dog track. I said to him: ‘Why take little bits when you can have away bigger bits? Girders and that. The whole fucking place if need be.'

Using the wagons we took between three and four tonnes a day. On top of that, there were hundreds of four-by-four girders. I'd found a builders' merchant who'd pay me £60 each for them. Meanwhile, the council were trying to sell the tender to demolish this place, hoping to make a raise of the scrap value themselves. Within weeks we'd done it for them. Felt sorry for the poor cunt who'd won the contract, turning up on the first day to find an empty space.

That was it then. Any empty building was fair game. I invested in state-of-the-art burning gear. We'd go in and cut all the girders out, rip the floor off. Take the metal sheets out of the wall. Was obscene, in fairness. Some of them were brand new buildings, recently erected at great expense, waiting to be sold or rented out. Within days they would be reduced to a hollow shell, swaying in the wind. Massive fucking warehouses and factory units. The local council had no option but to condemn them. They were fucking dangerous.

No one asked any questions. We looked like a proper contractor. We looked better than fucking McAlpine – wagons, plant, radios, hard hats, the works. But one day we're taking down a warehouse in Kirby piece by piece. It had only just been built – there weren't even any doors on it. They hadn't had time to finish it before we were fucking ripping it to bits. I was supervising the operation. I looked around and suddenly there is a busie watching me through one of these non-existent doors. All the lads did a runner, even the wagon and the van with the burners. The busie was on his own so I just gave myself up knowing that the wagon would have time to drive out of another gate.

I got nicked. They tried to do me for burglary. My brief was good. He told them that they couldn't because there was no doors on the factory. No breaking and entering. The busies went back to the site and found one door and they marched back into court, very smugly indeed. Kites on them, la. You'd have thought they had just found Lord Lucan, knowmean? But even then the judge wouldn't have it, door or no fucking door. He just fucked them off and told the busies not to be silly.

Then they tried to do me for robbing scrap. The busies knew I was behind a big racket, the Mr Big and all that. Deep down they knew I was turning over hundreds of thousands from this scam, but they couldn't prove it and if they mentioned it in court they would've looked like pricks. But the judge threw it out of Crown Court because none of it could be put down to me. He said it was a waste of time. They were fucked and he knew it.