The Devil (10 page)

‘You're going to get yourself together, and you're going to make that call to your bird,' I told him. ‘You're going to tell her that a lad is coming round to your house in 20 or 30 minutes. You're going to tell her that she's got to get all the money out of the kit bag, because you're expecting a raid. Or that you need the money out of the house quick, because you've got a good deal on. Tell her not to panic, not to worry, just to get the money out of the house.'

The main thing for me was to get Kevin to sound normal. So I gave him a drink of water, calmed him down and said, ‘Look, this ordeal is nearly over. You're worth the money, believe me.'

I was reassuring him because there was a chance he could get a bit brave as he calmed down and began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. People do – it's just human nature. He might also try to pull a fast one. Many drug dealers have worked out in advance a code with their wives and their stash minders to deal with exactly this type of emergency kidnap situation. For instance, say that Kevin's wife was called Margaret, he might have told her that if he ever called her ‘Maggie' over the phone, it was bang on. So, my job was to convince him not to try any funny stuff.

He made the call and kept it simple: ‘Look, love, just get everything out of the kit bag and put it in a bin liner. I can't come home and do it, cos I'm a bit tied up right now [how we laughed], so I'm going to send someone else. A lad called Jap will be around in about half an hour, so just give him the parcel.' His wife agreed.

Jap was our hand-picked bagman and a key player in the operation. Imagine what would have happened if I had gone around to see Kevin's wife to pick up the dough. If I had turned up at her door – 225 pounds of prime black underworld – she would have immediately thought that something was wrong: ‘Aye, aye. What's Kevin doing sending this cunt to collect the money?' However, Jap was on hand. He was 17, had the face of an angel and a sunny demeanour like one of Fonzie's mates from
Happy Days.
He was skinny, innocuous and unthreatening.

Jap went to the house, and Kevin's wife said, ‘You all right, kid? Are you sure that Kevin wants me to give you the money? You want me to come with you?'

‘No, I'll be fine,' he replied. ‘I'm going to meet him with the money. He'll call you when it's all sorted out. You stay where you are. You've got the kids to look after, and that. He just asked me to do it, knowworramean?'

Kevin's wife was cooing all over Jap: ‘Aargh, aren't you lovely.' She was probably also thinking, ‘Kevin must be on for a few quid here. Whoever he's with, they must have a deal going on.'

Jap was white. Well, he had to be white, didn't he? All of these scenarios had been carefully worked out by me. Years later, I would apply the same technique when borrowing millions of pounds from the banks for legitimate property deals. I'd do all the arse work on the deal – getting a site and planning permission – then I'd just put a squeaky-clean white guy in front of the bank manager to borrow £14 million. The banks would do the checks on him, and, boom, boom, boom, the money would be released. It's simple psychology: a white guy is someone the banks know, someone they can trust and are used to. Don't give them anything out of the ordinary. That's when the alarm bells start sounding.

I had a number of Jap-style bagpersons on the books, such as a half-Chinese bird who was brilliant for collecting money because she was pretty and ingenious. However, behind the babes-in-the-woods exterior, she had balls of steel – the only thing that stopped her from being a man was the fact that she had no dick.

Anyway, Kevin's bird left Jap on the doorstep, bolted upstairs and came back down with a bin liner stuffed inside a massive holdall. Jap thanked her, smiled and got off the plot. He then counted the dough, bringing in the tally at £68,000. That was over £20,000 each between the three of us – me, A.J. and the Rock Star. Plus a little drink for the Blagger. Not bad for the late 1980s. We booted Kevin out of the House of Horrors, and that was that.

The best kind of tax was when you got the money and nobody got seriously hurt – just like in Kevin's case. Of course, they all
start off
with violence, so the prey can be led into a situation where he can be held against his will. To get to that point, they have to be pounced on. Nonetheless, if you're a good taxman, you can quickly end the violence and extract the tribute through psychological intimidation.

Take, for instance, the next episode at the House of Horrors. The following week, we lured a 17-stone drug dealer called Dominic to our ‘Inland Revenue' office. Dominic had three kilograms of heroin that he wanted to sell to us, and we were sitting on a sofa negotiating. I opened my briefcase, which looked like it was full to the top with £20 notes – all counterfeit, of course, a thin layer simply covering some newspapers underneath. I closed the case and put it on my knee. ‘You've seen the money, now where's the heroin?' I asked him. Then, suddenly, I flipped over the case to reveal a dagger hidden beneath – a twelve-inch blade with a five-inch handle.

During the seconds in which he had been bedazzled by the dough, I had taken one step forward and had threatened to slit his throat with a blade. He literally pissed and shit himself. He was a big guy, and there were all kinds of problems with his motions. The smell and sheer volume of faeces was phenomenal. A pool of urine started to spread around his trousers. The guy was 17 stone and supposed to be rough as houses, but I overcame him with ease, partly because I had taken him by surprise and partly due to my use of overwhelming force.

I put the blade to his throat and said to Andrew, ‘You control him and get the details we need.' He was crying, and tears were running down his face. He told me where to find the gear, and we sent the half-Chinese bird around to collect it.

Now, deep inside me, I felt a bit sorry for him, sitting there in such a totally humiliating position. ‘Go and clean yourself up, lad. I won't send you home stinking of shit. Take them kecks off. There's a pair of jeans up in the bedroom.' I couldn't let certain geezers go upstairs, because they'd be looking for a weapon to come back downstairs to smash me over the head with, but I knew who I could turn my back on, and I knew the villains who were to be given no quarter. Again, it came down to my spider senses. Nevertheless, Dominic was a broken man. He had come into the house a giant and had left a midget.

Once he realised that he wasn't going to be physically hurt, his reaction was one of overwhelming relief. If we were that way inclined, we could have fucking messed around with him: raped him; sexually tortured him with a broom handle. I've seen it done – not for a turn on, though, just for effect. But Dominic wanted to be away from us in one piece. He knew he'd embarrassed himself. There was no reason for him to keep up any bravado in front of us. His whole demeanour said, ‘You've seen me for what I am. I'm a yellow coward. You have robbed me of my wealth and dignity. Before you I stand humiliated.'

‘You won't tell anyone that I shit my kecks, will you?' he begged us, sobbing.

Our reply was, ‘Don't make any problems for us, and this is the end of the matter. You've been taxed. It's part of your game. Put it down to experience, and get on with your life. It's nothing personal. It's just about money.'

That was true. It was never anything personal, as I never ever taxed anybody that I knew. It was always strangers, always people I didn't know. Also, I always taxed white geezers. Now, readers, the cautionary tale to come out of all this is simple: don't get involved with drugs, because it's a horrible, nasty fucking world, full of nasty, horrible fucking people – like me.

By that point, I had learned that taxing was all about raising enough money to fund bigger and better drug deals. For instance, we got £68,000 from Kevin. To buy two kilograms of coke you needed £60,000. You might sell one kilogram straight away for £33,000, making a quick three grand on the deal. Then you ounce one out or keep an ounce for yourself and find someone who sells ounces for you.

Friday was pay day. You bombed round everywhere and got your kitty back together again. Class A drugs – it's all cash. I've seen bin bags full of £20 notes. You could select one in three £20 notes in Merseyside, subject it to analysis and you'd find traces of cocaine on it. The thing about Charlie – and I've had lots of cocaine – is that it really heightens sexual pleasure. It's a sex drug – and that's the key to its selling power, if truth be known. The downside is that Charlie can also give you a bit of a floppy dick. However, you can always trust the market to throw up a solution, and it has done so in the form of Viagra. So, you get the nice rush off the cocaine, a fucking big hard-on off the Viagra and you're banging away all night. That's what the nation is awash with now – shagging round the clock.

There is a well-known gangster called Dave Courtney, and he has actually given that recipe out on a TV travel programme. I don't know which one it was, but you won't get those kinds of tips off Judith Chalmers.

10

DEFY BEELZEBUB

In the tax business, everything is political and interlinked. Being on the ball 24 hours a day like the prime minister is critical, as illustrated by the following scenario. Andrew and I were a little bit at loggerheads, because he had started dealing drugs with Curtis Warren and Peter Lair – but they wouldn't let me on the firm because they feared I would turn on them. Curtis Warren had been doing a number on Andrew's head for a while, trying to lure him away from me. To divide and rule.

One night, Curtis came into The Grafton and used his favourite line on Andrew: ‘Are you still taking all the lumps, whilst Stephen's taking all the money?'

Curtis feared my intelligence more than my physical prowess. He knew that I was a very intelligent guy, which is why he wanted to weaken me by turning Andrew against me.

Other than that, things seemed to be going pretty well. I'd even got myself a new lieutenant called Robin. This was the same Robin I'd rescued the coke for in the ‘Case of the Missing Kilo'. He'd fallen on hard times and now drove me around in a silver Mercedes. Any time we were going to sort out some serious problems, he was the guy who'd carry the tools. Andrew, Aldous Pellow and I usually travelled point in one car, whilst he drove behind in a separate vehicle with the guns. To get him back on his feet, I made him a partner in my drug deals. I was selling Class As, and he was selling Class Bs, but we pooled the profits.

It was a good deal for him: I was splitting thousands with him to give him a little leg up, and he was splitting hundreds with me. But, as students of
The 48 Laws of Power
will know, gratitude is a burden.

Soon, I found out that Robin had been chipping me on the weed. He was actually making £250 on a kilo but was telling me that he was only making £200 and pocketing the extra £50. Now, people may say, ‘Well, it's only £50,' but, as businessmen like Philip Green and Bernie Ecclestone will tell you, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. Robin's scam had me down by £5,000.

As well as the dough, this hurt me personally. The French philosophy on friendship is simple: friendship is like a clean piece of blotting paper with no marks on it – brilliantly white and unblemished. However, if you blot your copybook, even with a little black mark by chipping me, I will get revenge. I will cover the sheet completely and turn it into a sheet of black carbon paper. And just remember, when it comes on top and I'm standing in your bedroom at the witching hour sporting the Devil's horns and a sacrificial pentacle, that it was you who opened the floodgates. I didn't start it. Second, if you're doing me out of what's mine, I won't moan and I won't cry, but I will plot and scheme to get you back – behind your back, so you don't know when it's coming. This is something that I always tell anybody at the start of a business relationship or a new friendship – just so that they know the rules.

The following morning, I got up and went to Granby Street. Peter Lair walked up to me very purposefully and, completely out of the blue, said, ‘Was that your weed last night?' I'd not long been up, so I was a little slow, but I quickly regained my street wisdom, realising that whatever he was talking about could be an earner.

‘Yeah, it was my weed,' I replied, not having a fucking clue what he was on about. However, he knew by my delayed reaction that it wasn't mine. That just goes to show what a fraction of a second can mean on the street.

Apparently, the night before, Lair had robbed 150 kilograms of weed off a young guy called Nazim. Curtis had had something to do with it as well, and they must have done it after I'd seen them at the club. During the taxation process, Nazim had told them that it was my weed in a bid to scare them off, or at least to cause them to have second thoughts. Me being me, and them being them, if I had said yes that morning – ‘Yes, that's my weed and you better give it back' – it would've been returned, no two ways about it. This was because we had a mutual, grudging respect. Even though the weed had fuck all to do with me, if I had been on the ball I could have convinced them that it was mine and got myself 150 kilograms for nothing. However, I was a bit slow on that chilly ghetto morning, and Lair had got one over me.

Nonetheless, this little scenario ended up putting me in touch with Nazim, who was always backwards and forwards between England and Holland. He told me that he could bring us over some Class A – some cocaine – from Holland, score it for 16 grand a kilo and split it into ounces when it landed here, selling each one for a grand – that's 35 grand for a kilo. As a result, we'd make 19 grand profit on a kilo.