The Devil (14 page)

However, he was tough and refused to give it up without a fight. So, one of the lads with me called Johnny grabbed his baby and hung it out the window, which was about seven floors up. He threatened to chuck the baby out if the Chief didn't give him what we wanted. This is something that I utterly condemn and would never do. However, I didn't know that this atrocity was taking place, cos I was busy in the other room. Later on – because it was my operation – I would get the blame for the Blagger's action, adding to my reputation as the Devil.

Meanwhile, some of the neighbours had seen the baby dangling over the veranda – Wacko Jacko-style – and had telephoned the police. By that point, the Chief had given the bags of heroin and coke to the Blagger.

I told him I wanted the people in his room brought into mine, so that everybody could be brought under control in one space before we got off. Just as he was bringing the last person in, there was a bang, bang, bang on the door – police.

Immediately, the Blagger threw the heroin-coke combo out of the window, but, unbelievably, some of the stuff landed on a small ledge beneath it, and there was no time to brush it off before the bizzies came in. Within milliseconds, I'd taken my balaclava off, hidden my tool and mixed myself up in the room full of people. In the fray, I'd even grabbed a seat in front of the TV. I was totally confident that no one would grass me up, because that's a game of Russian roulette. Why grass me up when there is 20 kis of their gear in the vicinity? It was in the interests of all of the criminal fraternity in the room to get rid of the bizzies, so that we could sort it out between ourselves.

The copper said, ‘We've just had a report of a little kid hanging out the window.'

I didn't say anything, just carried on watching
EastEnders,
keeping an eye on the door. Then, two more coppers came in, and I could hear more coming up the stairs. Some of the people in the room just said that it was all a domestic, a bit of a party that had got out of hand. The police were suspicious at first, but then they began to buy it – it was just a family squabble, nothing more.

Soon, to the collective relief of everyone in the flat, the bizzies started to file out. But as the last one was on his way out the door, something caught his eye. Suddenly, he turned around, his eyes fixed on a net curtain fluttering out of the window. I looked at the window and then looked at him. He moved his gaze down towards the ledge. ‘What's this?' he blurted out. ‘Whose is this?'

‘For fuck's sake,' I thought. ‘Here we go.'

He bolted over and scooped up a mash of white and brown powder from the ledge. The hard-core users in the room baulked at the sight. He immediately got on the blower, and, within seconds, the bizzies filed back into the flat. They grilled people left, right and centre, but nobody claimed responsibility for the drugs, so they called for more back-up. We all got nicked and were taken to the police station. It wasn't long before they found my gun and my bally in the flat. Of course, I said fuck all. They also found the money – they found everything. Not good.

At the station, a bizzy came into my cell, ‘One of the people in the room has told us everything. We know what happened. We know everything about you. You're that taxman from Liverpool, and you were down here to rob them.'

I replied, ‘Nah, I don't know what you're talking about,' totally blanking the suggestion.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I'm not interested in you. You're just a villain from Liverpool. He's a major drug dealer. He's been a major thorn in my side for years, and I want rid of him. If you make a statement against him, you're home. End of story.'

I retorted, ‘I don't believe you, mate. I don't believe a word you're saying.'

He then went and got the Blagger from another cell and shoved him in with me to let us conspire. This was against the rules, so, at that point, I knew the copper was serious. If we dobbed the Chief in, we would be free to go. Of course, no one wants to grass anyone up, but I said to the Blagger, ‘It won't be like informing. We'll make the statements, and then we'll just fuck them off and hide when we get up north. When they try and find us for the court case, we won't turn up. We'll just give them a jarg statement for now to say that the drugs were in the flat but had nothing to do with us – we were just doing whatever. It's a win-win.'

This decision would later come back to haunt me, and I would get a reputation for being a grass.

Anyway, we got out, and as planned the Chief's court case later collapsed because we didn't turn up.

Now, that should have been that, but, me being me, I couldn't sleep at night knowing that I'd actually
lost
money on the venture. Remember the £10,000 I'd given to the Blagger? Well, that had gone skew-whiff in the scuffle during the police raid and had been confiscated by one of the plods. Knowing that it was gone for ever was niggling at me. I just couldn't live with myself, having not balanced the books. It was chasing dead money, and I told myself to leave it. Nonetheless, the darker angels of my nature got the better of me once again, and I phoned the Chief up, pretending to be the Blagger.

‘I want my money,' I said.

‘No,' he replied. ‘I've done months of remand because of you making a statement. You can't ask me for that.'

I shouted, ‘I don't give a fuck how much fucking jail you've done! If you don't give me the money, I'm going to fucking come down there and kill you. I'm going to burn you, set you on fire, do this, do that, do the other.'

Now, in the past, I've had some bad experiences with tape recorders, so I wasn't saying anything too bad – just telling him off a bit. It seemed to have the desired effect: he soon folded under pressure and agreed to meet me to return the money.

In November 1990, I jumped the rattler to meet him in Brighton station. The place was packed. As I was waiting, I gave a fiver to the tramp sitting on the floor next to me – the poor cunt. Still no show. I was there so long that the cleaner had to brush up around me. I bought a cup of tea for a beggar by the phones. The sheer number of tramps in the station got me thinking – there seemed to be a lot of homelessness down south. How could that be? Not that I was arsed. It just got me thinking.

Just as I was about to give up, I looked up from my copy of
The Guardian
and saw the Chief waving at me in the crowd. I bounced over to him. At that instant, everyone around me appeared to come to life: the tramp next to me, the skinny twat beggar by the phones, even the cleaner who had been pottering around me. Oh, dear! They were
all
fucking bizzies. And here I was, the voice of social conscience, thinking that Brighton was suffering from a plague of poverty and homelessness when the real reason was that the dossers were really undercover police. It was fucking horrible. Every one of them was a fucking policeman. A fake toilet attendant put the cuffs on me, and a phoney British Rail guy started to read me my rights. Pure cop-show fare.

The detective in charge said, ‘OK, Blagger, you're nicked.'

Of course, they still thought I was the Blagger. However, the Chief soon put them right. He said, ‘That's not the Blagger. That's his boss. He's the one – the taxman, the killer, the murderer. He is
the Devil.
'

The bizzies must have been thinking, ‘This is great. We've got Mr Big. The Devil no less.' They were having a much better day than they'd expected.

That was just before Christmas 1990. How was that for a fucking present? I'd been a fucking fool, too right. Before I knew it, I was in a sweatbox – one of those long white prison vans with little windows for transporting inmates between jail, court and police stations. Each con sits in a little locker about 20 inches wide. It was very cramped and claustrophobic for a feller my size. I looked out of the window, and I could see the white facade of Pentonville Prison in north London.

I got put on the fours (the fourth landing) on C wing. The bizzies came to see me, and one of the detectives told me that my goose was cooked – that I was fucked. I was thinking, ‘Well, what's the big fucking problem here. I've only told someone off down the phone. I'll be out of here once my briefs tie you in knots.'

However, he told me that it was serious and that they were going to charge me with two counts of blackmail. I said, ‘Blackmail? Fuck off! What are you on about? I was only talking shit down the phone and that.'

However, there was a problem. This was around about the time of a famous poison plot involving Cadbury Creme Eggs. A man had been trying to extort money out of Cadbury by phoning up and pretending that he had spiked their chocolate eggs with poison. He hadn't actually done anything at all, but he still got ten years in jail for trying it on. The police were putting me in the same category. Blackmail was all the rage in the papers at the time. It was
the
de rigueur crime, and I was gonna get the full fucking
Daily Mail
pasting. The bizzies were gonna offer me up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of public opinion and load me up with ten years – no back answers. All for talking shit down the phone. Can you believe that shit?

As if that wasn't enough, I then met my new prison guards. One looked me right in the eye and said, ‘There's only one thing I hate worse than Scousers and that's black Scousers.' He then lifted up his lapel to reveal a National Front badge.

‘That's all I need,' I thought. That was when I knew I was well and truly fucked.

15

THE GRIM REAPER

A lot of the top hard cases gave it the ‘Big Time Charlie Potatoes' in the shovel. However, I kept my head down, didn't mention I was a world-champion kick-boxer and defo didn't mention I was the Devil. However, some inmates took my low-key demeanour as a sign of weakness.

As I'm a big, athletic man, the claustrophobia of prison soon started to wear me down. My only escape was the visits. One day, my mum came to see me and said, ‘I'm glad you're in here.'

‘What!' I gasped, hardly believing my ears.

‘You're in jail for a reason, and I know it's for the good,' she continued.

No way. I couldn't believe it. My ma
wishing
the shovel on her son. Deep down, I knew that it was just the Irish in her – she's a bit of a psychic, and I think she said this because something inside her had told her to.
Her
spider senses had triggered for an as yet unknown reason. Nonetheless, for me, it was a sledgehammer. It robbed me of my only asset: hope.

When I got back to my cell, I started crying my eyes out, thinking, ‘No one fucking cares. Even me ma's glad I'm in fucking jail.'

My cellmate turned to me and said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be a hard-case Scouser. What's all the fucking tears for?'

Before he'd finished his sentence, I'd got him by the neck and lifted him so his feet were off the floor. It was only a bit of a go-around, but the NF guard ran into the cell, iumped in and immediately gave me a cuffing. He then got some other guards to bash me up, and I was subsequently moved to B wing.

After that incident, I decided that I was going to kill the NF guard. Luckily, I had fallen in with a lad called Dillon, who was connected to a big family of London gangsters. He persuaded me to lay off the bad screw. ‘You don't have to have him,' he said. ‘I'll get my family to sort it out.'

Three days later, the NF guard knocked on my cell door and said, ‘Mr French, I won't give you any more aggravation. I won't ride you any more. I didn't realise . . .' blah, blah, blah. True to his word, Dillon's family had boxed it for me.

One Sunday morning in early 1991, I was doing the 7.30 a.m. slop out when some lad on the fours shouted over, ‘Frenchie, some lad's been killed from your neck of the woods. Do you know him?'

A murder still made the national news at that time. These days you'd be lucky to find a few lines about it in the
Echo.
I went back into my cell and listened to the 8 a.m. bulletin on Radio One, hoping that it was one of my enemies who had been ironed. There was nothing like starting off the day in jail knowing that great tragedy had befallen one of your rivals.

Suddenly, the relevant story came on and gave a bit more info – a karate champion had been gunned down. A feeling of dread came over me. ‘What's his name?' I whispered into the tranny, biting my lip. The announcer shot back, ‘Andrew John, shot dead in Liverpool.'

I looked at my cellmate and said, ‘That's my brother.'

He said, ‘What?'

I said it again, ‘It's my brother. He's been shot.'

I was shocked and numb but not crying, as I hadn't taken it in yet. My cell door then opened, and the wing governor and a doctor walked in. The jail had already been phoned from the outside and told of the connection between me and Andrew. OK, he might not have been my blood brother, but everybody had classed us as siblings. We may not have come out of the same woman, but we had lived like brothers for a long time.

The doctor tried to give me some tablets. I said, ‘I don't want no fucking medication.' A priest then came into the cell, but I fucked him off as well and said that I wanted to make a phone call. I phoned Stephen's mum and asked her, ‘Who killed him?'

‘Val, the getaway driver,' she said.

Val, who I had knocked out during the mistaken taxation of his ken. The same Val who had been waiting in the bushes for me with the piece. Maria filled me in on the details. After I had whacked Val and we had made up, I had given him two grand in compensation to see him all right. He had taken the money off me, saying, ‘I now believe you didn't know it was me, which is why I didn't shoot you.'