The Devil (19 page)

Every king loves to bestow favours to his underlings. I could see the power trip he was on: ‘Yeah, Frenchie. You're back at my fucking table again, mate. I've got to sort your problems out again.' Picture the scene: we were looking at each other and playing a mind game – continual and unspoken – that we both knew was there. On the surface, I was happy to pay lip service to him, but, deep down, the gratitude was a burden.

He scribbled down an address in Germany, close to the border with Holland, and said, ‘Have your weed delivered to that address by 4 p.m. tomorrow and you'll have it over here in two days' time.'

Sure enough, our parcel was smuggled into a busy port in a container of motorbikes. Curtis's men then unloaded it into a van and parked it in a pre-arranged place. Later on, when I was given the keys, I summoned one of my £500-a-day men to go and pick up the van.

I said to him, ‘We don't know if it's on top or not. Are you prepared to do it?'

He replied, ‘What is it, weed? Yeah, I'll go and do it.' This was because nine times out of ten there was nobody watching. Also, if he got nicked, I'd give him a grand and his family would get looked after while he was inside.

These £500-a-day men have super spider senses, and they have a good look around before they open the van. They know how fucking hard it is to hide a full surveillance team, so they're often able to pick up on anything suspicious.

Anyway, the van was collected with the cannabis inside. The first thing I did was make sure everything was there. Whacker, the bloke in Amsterdam, had put it in the container, having wrapped it and given it a particular seal. Each crew has a different seal, and that is how you can tell where certain drugs have come from. Next was the weighing. I always made sure that I was personally present at the weigh-in. However, instead of 100 kilograms of weed there was only 95. That missing weed was worth ten grand of my cash, which equated to a new car and a holiday.

Somewhere along the line, someone had stuck down on us, just as used to happen after a robbery. Up until then, there had been trust and camaraderie between us. Nevertheless, this kind of underworld camaraderie is like Scotch mist. When it suits, it's there, and when it doesn't, it's not.

I had to make a call to Curtis to suss out what had happened to the missing weed. I'm a great believer in contractual law and ironing everything out at the beginning of a deal. So, in my mind, now that it had gone wrong, he owed me ten grand or five kilograms, because from the beginning I'd made a verbal agreement with him. However, if you ever started talking to Curtis on the phone about drugs, he'd just hang up on you, so we arranged to meet up.

Although I was doing business all over Europe, I regularly commuted back to Liverpool. At that time, there was a big gang war going on in the city. This meant that we couldn't meet in our usual haunts, as people were getting shot left, right and centre, so we met in the park. I told him the situation and said, ‘Well, you know, you either give me five kilograms of bush or ten grand.'

Curtis said, ‘All right, lad, I'll sort it out.'

Although the transport was a favour, he was still charging us the going rate – 100 times £250. That was 25 grand for the delivery. The way I figured it, even if he had to pay us off from his end, he'd still have been up by 15 grand. This was part of his day-to-day business. It was what he was into, what he did best. Not only was he an international trafficker, he was also renting out his transport. He had transport all the way from Colombia, or so the rumour went. He supposedly had lorries full of cocaine in England circling the motorways all day.

The ten grand didn't
really
matter. It was just that I didn't want him to get one over on me. However, I could afford to wait for Curtis to give it to me. In the meantime, I paid off my partners Rock Star and Whacker, who were in on the deal.

Most drug dealers live from hand to mouth. Take my partner Rock Star, for example. One minute, he'd be driving the best car and so would his bird, and the next he wouldn't even have a pint of milk in the fridge. It was all fast money, so it was spent just as fast.

Eventually, I set up my own transport network, and we carried on shipping weed over from Holland by the tonne. Business was booming, but the ten grand thing kept nagging me. A perceived slight can distort your mind and send you crazy. When I was in Pentonville, Ski Gold yoghurts were a luxury. One day, a top drugs baron did me out of two of these yoghurts. In revenge, I decided to murder him. I spent a month plotting and planning his death, like it was a military operation – all because I was thinking, ‘Does he think I'm a prick?' After he stole my Ski Gold yoghurts, I had my eye on the fucker. Now I was having similarly dark thoughts about Curtis.

The funny thing was, my wife used to work at Granada TV, based at the Albert Dock, right next to where Curtis had his docklands ken. Every morning when I was back in Liverpool, I'd take her to work at 8.30 a.m. and without fail I'd see Curtis leaving the Albert Dock. We'd give each other a wave and smile through gritted teeth. I'd give him a wave, whilst saying to Dionne under my breath, ‘That fucking cunt again.' But, if truth be known, I could not help but like and admire him. He'd also wave, probably thinking that I was a cunt, too. He always looked at me in a nervous, suspicious way in case I was coming to the Albert Dock to do something to him. Curtis was always very aware that he could be kidnapped, tortured and robbed at any time – when all I ever wanted was to be on his firm.

One time, I bumped into him and said, ‘If you're not going to give me my money, I'm going to get it by any which way, because nobody keeps the Frenchman's money.' If you owed me, you paid me. If you didn't pay me, you'd see me. At the end of the day, there was nothing that would stop me, short of a .45 in the head.

As well as this little niggle, I also had another nagging thought at the back of my head. All the time, I was thinking that I was better than this. I knew I could make money legitimately. Inherently, I knew I was worth more than picking drugs up from A, carrying them to B and selling them for X plus Y. All the while, I was questioning my self-worth. Whatever had happened to the world champ? I wasn't doing anything about it, but deep down I knew my current lifestyle was a dead end to nowhere. I didn't find it challenging. The treachery and betrayal had become a headache.

I also found the constant intrusion of the Old Bill disturbing. They regularly pushed my wife around when I wasn't there, and there was nothing I could do about it. When the harassment reached breaking point, I seriously considered taking a policeman out. I actually thought about saying to Merseyside Constabulary, ‘Well, OK, let's go to war, shall we?' and then assassinating a copper.

So, like all men under pressure, I started to make mistakes – a lot of mistakes.

21

A PRESSING ENGAGEMENT

I received a tip-off that a drug dealer called Mona had 85 grand hidden away. Needless to say, I wanted it. Marsellus and I kidnapped Mona, which turned out to be a very pressing engagement. Mona refused to tell me where the money was, so I put the Morphy Richards on him. Marsellus held him down while I ironed his arse and his arms with a red-hot steam iron. But the real
coup de grâce
was yet to be delivered – a 90,000-volt stun gun applied to his feet, neck and ears. The fumes from the burning skin and hair made us both baulk. By the time I got to his bollocks with the iron and the stun gun, he was screaming like a bitch. When we got to his pubic hair, he well and truly shit out the money.

We also took his red Mercedes convertible off him, sold it out of town and subsequently bought a brand-new one with the dough. On the way back, I dropped Marsellus off near his house. I went 150 yards up the road, looked in my mirror and saw the police swooping down on him. I had managed to escape by the skin of my teeth.

Consequently, I found myself on my toes in Manchester. Most people think that if you go on the run, you have to go abroad. However, if you follow basic rules, you can stay hidden for years, just miles from your manor. Top criminals like myself – and solicitors defending a case – rely a lot on the apathy of the ordinary police officer. Basically, they're lazy bastards, and the only thing they care about is getting paid. I moved 30 miles up the road, lived under an assumed name, got myself a little flat and set up shop again in an Asian area called Rusholme. I also took the precaution of securing a safe house in Cleckheaton, near Leeds – just in case.

Any visitors from my old life simply had to cover their tracks when they came to see me. For instance, when Dionne came to visit, she would start off by leaving our house in Liverpool and travelling to my auntie's, who lived over the water on the Wirral. Dionne would park her car outside their house, with the police watching it. My uncle would then take her down the back garden and smuggle her into a secret car a few streets away. She would then jump on the train to a place in the countryside before switching to a bus to Manchester. If there had been tail on her, she'd have lost it by then. In the meantime, the main surveillance team would be left sitting in front of my auntie's house, thinking she was in there having a cup of tea.

One day, Dionne came to me with a message from Johnny Phillips. Like me and Marsellus, he was in the shit with the bizzies, and he wanted my help in straightening out a witness. A well-known man in the city by the name of David Ungi had just been gunned down in the street. David was white and the shooters were black, so the murder had triggered a massive gang war between the two communities. I was trying to build bridges through a white cousin of mine called Toby Marshall, who I'd saved from being killed by Johnny and members of his gang. The police couldn't link Johnny to the murder of David, but they were able to pin an earlier attack on him. They had a star witness, a guy called Bubble, who I knew very well. I made a deal with Johnny: if I leaned on Bubble and told him to withdraw his statement, Johnny would in turn lean on the witnesses against me and Marsellus to get us out of our predicament. Mona had snitched on us for torturing him with the iron. I hate grassing bastards who run to the police when it gets hard for them. Johnny came to see me in Manchester to go through the details. As a sweetener, he gave me a Colt .45 and 15 grand before he left.

I stuck to my side of the bargain and slipped back into Liverpool to threaten Bubble. I told him, ‘If you go through with this, if you give evidence against Johnny, your life will be over. And even if I don't get you sooner, it will be murder for the rest of your life.'

The next day, a terrified Bubble withdrew his statement and told the police he hadn't seen anything. Johnny was off the hook. I didn't lean on Bubble to cause any offence to the Ungi family; I was doing it to get myself out of a situation. I was trading off one thing for another to solve my problems. Tony Ungi, the eldest brother, is a guy I respect a lot, and I would do nothing to offend him. And that goes for the other brother Joey, too. It was just a case of realpolitik.

The bad news was that Johnny (who was later killed by contract killers) was as full of shit alive as he was dead and didn't keep up his end of the bargain. To add insult to injury, he had the cheek to ask me for his gun and money back. I told him to go and fuck himself. ‘Until you've done what you said you're going to do,' I said, ‘that's my payment, cos I've kept my end of the bargain.' He knew that he owed me, big time.

The downside of being on the run was that it cost a lot of money to lead a double life. I had both a British and a Russian passport, which cost a few grand. Fake documentation to enable me to hire cars cost hundreds of pounds. I had to buy a different car every few months or get one given to me. Everything had to be bought in cash so that I wouldn't leave a trail. My safe house had to be paid for up front. Furthermore, I had to keep on the move, which meant a lot of hotels – and they had to be four or five star. I wasn't able to cook anywhere, so I had to eat out. You're talking at least £15,000 a week just to keep your show on the road, if you've got a certain kind of lifestyle. Out of that, I had to keep my family going as well – mortgages, new cars, holidays, the works.

To keep the money coming, I started once again to deal drugs at a prolific rate. I used every trick in the book to avoid paying for them, so I could make double the profit. I took counterfeit money with me to buy the drugs. Every week, I'd buy 50 grand's worth of blouse notes for £200 and use it to buy a couple of kilos of cocaine from sucker dealers. I'd put the money in a plastic bag and let them see the cash when I walked in the room. If they managed to touch it or feel it, I'd let myself down. However, just showing a man a washing bag full of money and saying, ‘I've got my money, mate,' often put him at his ease. I'd crack a few jokes and be gone with the gear before they'd even cottoned on.

When I was feeling cocky, I wouldn't even bother with fake money. I'd just fill a bag with potatoes and leave the dealers with that. I'd buy ten kilograms of cocaine for the price of a sack of spuds. Some of them would moan and threaten me afterwards. At the end of the day, they were acting illegally, so it was an open playing field as far I was concerned – a gladiatorial arena in which only the fittest would survive. If you can't hack it, get out. Get yourself a nine-to-five. Don't come fucking crying to me cos I've taken something off you. Just come and try to take it back off me. That was my philosophy.

Nevertheless, even by taxing, I still couldn't keep up with my massive expenditure. I had a lot of money stashed away, but sometimes I couldn't get access to it. A lot of people owed me money, so I ended up constantly chasing them in order to keep the cash flow going. I'd been asking Curtis for my ten grand for months. Ten grand to Curtis was like a gnat's bite to an elephant – fuck all. However, for some reason, he still wouldn't give up the goods. I'd even been asking for my dough through his partner Peter Lair, who had a grudging respect for me, because we still had a connection through Andrew John. None of them would tell me to my face that they thought I was a cunt, but I knew they were saying it to each other behind my back.