The Devil (2 page)

Forty minutes earlier, my partner Marsellus and I had burst his ken: a spartan, suburban mansion in a commuter town, just outside London. Our aim was to ‘tax' the drug dealer – that is, to steal his drugs and money. Mucus now dripped from the man's bloodied nose, the detritus of kidnap and torture soiling his Lacoste T-shirt and pastel-blue tennis shorts. The steel plate of his wife's state-of-the-art iron was now smeared with the sludgy, brown mess of burned human matter, mostly skin and follicle.

Using the same controlled, monotone voice – which I had learned from the psychological warfare manuals now used in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib – I whispered into the godfather's ear, ‘Tell me where the pound notes are, and I'll turn the iron off. You'll never see me again.' But he refused to play ball, shaking his head desperately.

There followed a few seconds of struggle, while Marsellus kicked the chair backwards and wrestled the detainee's shorts and boxers off. Within the same motion, I thrust the near-melted-hot Tefal onto his naked bollocks, ramming it home hard for full effect, following it through with multiple blasts of steam.

Within two hours, I was on my way back to Liverpool with £320,000 in the boot of my Lexus and 20 kilograms of cocaine secreted at a safe house in Walthamstow in east London. Before I left the drug dealer's mansion, however, I wasn't able to resist going back for the biggest thrill of all. As he lay semi-conscious on the floor, coated with a thin film of vomit and bile, I lifted his head up and looked into his defeated and terrified eyes. Now I would show him just how bad I
really
was.
I took my balaclava off.
His eyes screamed in horror as he recognised my features.

‘Yes,' I told him. ‘You've just been taxed by the Devil. I really do exist. Now, what the fuck are you going to do about it?'

In my game, revealing your identity to a victim was a cardinal sin, but I couldn't resist this encore: showing him who had done this to him, challenging him to seek revenge. Of course, I knew that he never would. I was just testing myself, and, with that, I disappeared into the night.

PART ONE

THE RISE

1

BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

I was born in Liverpool on october 1 , the son of a flame-haired white woman of Irish immigrant stock and film-star looks, and a black West Indian seafarer who was on the run for killing a man. Now, I am not going to bore you with a long family history, save to say that I am the product of the Irish potato famine and the African slave trade. I know that you want to get to the guns-and-drugs bit real quick, so I'll keep it brief.

My dad, Thomas Benjamin French, came to the UK aged 26 in 1955 from Trinidad as part of the ‘Windrush' wave of immigration overseen by Enoch Powell. A year later, he married Vera Hughes, my mum. But it wasn't long before he fucked off – with the babysitter, in fact – leaving my mum with five children from three different fathers. There was my elder sister and brother Carol and Tony Desson, my middle brother Shaun Deckon and my full sister Helen French, shortly followed by yours truly. Having an absent father had a profound effect on me and was one of the main reasons I fell into a life of crime.

My mum sacrificed everything to bring us up. For a long time, I thought she was a vegetarian, because she would give us children the meat at teatime and go hungry herself. My first experiences of violence came from within the home – from my sister Helen. She tormented me physically, mentally and emotionally with fists, bats and knives from the age of three. That was probably the second reason I became a gangster. Helen gave me an incredible ability to tolerate pain, for which today I give thanks to her, for it has saved my life on many occasions.

At the age of six, I experienced racism for the first time. It was 1966, and I was keen to buy some World Cup Willy football stickers from the local sweet shop. My mum had hidden us under her coat to keep us out of the rain, but when she took it off in the shop the whole world stopped. The shopkeeper was disgusted that the white woman in front of the counter had slept with niggers. But it taught me an invaluable lesson. From that day on, I would not let prejudice and bigotry bother me.

Though my mum had a fierce love for us, she sometimes broke down under the pressure of trying to raise five children – every colour of the rainbow – without any money or support. I first went into care in North Wales with Tony when I was seven. On every occasion after that, I ran away. One time, I sneaked back home to discover that my dad had returned – to have an affair with the social worker, who was supposed to be looking after us. He had sex with her right on my mum's bed.

I picked up my first conviction for robbing cars at the age of 11, fuelled by the high-speed chases I had seen on
The Sweeney.
But I soon realised that nicking cars was not going to make me money. Enter George Osu – a real-life black Fagin. He was only 16, but he was a movie star to us all. Tall and slim, with the neatest of neat afros, he wore a long, black leather midi coat just like Shaft, and he always had pound notes on him. George's bag was house burglaries. It all came down to one thing – small windows. Only kids could get through them. At one time, George himself had been a house burglar – the kid who squeezed through those windows – but now he'd grown too big, so he was looking for others to recruit. George took me under his wing because I was skinny and nimble. He showed me how to get into a house and trained me how to systematically clean a place out. Soon, I was screwing two houses a week, and we made lots of cash. In no time at all, I was dressing just like George.

Meanwhile, the violence and racism of everyday street life were turning me into a world-class athlete. Every day I had to run the gauntlet of older skinheads who wanted to beat me to within an inch of my life. Skinheads were fierce-looking individuals – bright red ‘ox-blood' Dr Martens, Fleming jeans, braces, Ben Sherman shirts and Crombie overcoats lined with red silk to soak up a nigger's blood. My nickname soon became Frenchie Lightfoot, because I could move like the wind and was as slippery as an eel. My body was like a reed: no meat, just tall with long legs. Sometimes the skinheads came to our house, and we had to barricade ourselves in while the windows were smashed and the door was booted in.

Not only was I fast, but I was also becoming a champion fighter in waiting. My sister's beatings had made me immune to pain. Most people are not hurt when they're hit, they're just shocked because they've never been hit before. However, I was so used to getting battered that I was able to strike back immediately. I also took up boxing, perfecting my natural ability for street combat, and was soon cock of the school.

To complement my physical prowess, I started honing my intellectual capacity by questioning everything going on around me. Come the early 1970s, we were the first generation of post-war British-born blacks. It wasn't like we were just off the boat we felt that we had a right to be here. Black people had been in Liverpool in one form or another for 400 years, and this gave us a deeper sense of heritage and connection with the UK. The upshot was that we were militant and the first minority to fight back. At the age of 12, I joined the Young Black Panthers, a fierce black rights group based on the one in the States. The
Observer Magazine
the colour supplement of the Sunday broadsheet – came to do an article on us. They took a picture of us climbing the wall outside the Anglican cathedral. The bit in the text below about the skinheads was spot on:

What made us fierce was simple. Unlike previous generations, we had no fear of the English lads. We went to the same schools and shit in the same toilets. One day, in a history lesson, I saw a picture of a pre-war pope blessing the Italian tanks, howitzers and machine guns that were going to Africa to fight the Abyssinian men on horses. I remember thinking, ‘Here's a priest who preaches love, forgiveness, honour and to worship thy father, and he's blessing these weapons to fight against black people in their own land.' It made me question my faith. Up until then, I'd been an altar boy.

In the course of time, I realised that it wasn't God's fault, and, instead, it was man twisting God's word. One day, I got thrown out of a class by a teacher who informed me that South Africa was a white country. When I put him right, he punished me for it.

Then came the tremendously hot summer of 1976, when race riots raged up and down the country. The National Front had been to Bradford and some of their thugs had set houses belonging to the Asian community on fire. Then they had gone to Leeds and set houses on fire there. Now they said they were coming to Liverpool to set
us
on fire.

George Osu's brother, Willie Osu – a stalwart of the community – went around rallying a demonstration with a loudhailer, saying, ‘The fascists are coming! Are we going to take it? No we're fucking not, so get out onto the streets and fight back.'

Sure enough, Colin Jordan turned up with a column of NF storm troopers, all wearing Nazi uniforms and jackboots. They walked tall because they were expecting another easy victory. In Leeds and Bradford, they'd faced the new immigrant population fresh from India, Pakistan and Uganda. This generation still had a fear and respect for the ‘Motherland' and for the white people in the country. So they took it up the arse and just let the NF do what they wanted.

Consequently, Jordan thought they were coming to Liverpool to do the same thing. But, fuck, was that a miscalculation. We ambushed them at the Pier Head and threw them into the River Mersey. The rest ran for their lives. We left them with a message – Liverpool blacks are militant. We don't take shit.

Meanwhile, I was still learning the ropes as a villain. At the age of 13, I was getting too big to fit through small windows. So, I recruited an innocent 11-year-old boy called Curtis to take my place. Curtis was reluctant at first, but I simply forced him through the windows. One crisp November evening in 1974, we picked him up from his mum's in George's stolen Ford Cortina. To make himself look older so he didn't get a tug, George wore a black false moustache that was in stark contrast to his ginger afro.

Now, our bag was this: Curtis had the face of an angel and was so light-skinned that he could pass for white. We'd find a big house in the country, get him to knock on the door with a kind of lost-babes-in-the-woods routine, and if someone answered, he'd innocently ask for directions home. If nobody was in, he'd come back to the car and give us the green light to go to work.

That night, after Curtis had established that no one was in the mansion, George turned to me and said, ‘Frenchie, get in the house with him, put the stuff in boxes in the hallway, open the door, then I'll come and pick the stuff up.' I was a bit scared, but George spat on me, hit me in the face and told me, ‘Get your fucking arse up there, open the door and stop making excuses.' That was the nature of our relationship.

As Curtis and I were creeping up the path like commandos, we suddenly heard a little noise. To make absolutely sure there was no one home, Curtis gave the door a loud rap and shouted through the letterbox, ‘Is anybody in? Is anybody in?' Even at that age, he had an incredible nerve, unshakable confidence and an ability not to panic – whereas, on the other hand, my nerves were already beginning to jingle.

We quickly got the goods: a portable TV, a radio-cassette player, jewellery, silverware – anything that could be carried and sold quickly. As George was loading the things into the car, he said, ‘You haven't done the kitchen yet. Get in there and see if there's any cash.'

So Curtis and I went back into the house. We opened the door of the kitchen, and there before us was the biggest fucking monster of a Rottweiler I had ever seen. Curtis flew into the car, leaving me to cop a terrible bite on the arse. That pretty much marked the end of my burglary career.

Curtis, however, stuck with it and went on to bigger and better things. The grounding we had given him must have stood him in good stead, for he went on to become the richest and most successful criminal in British history, worth – by some newspaper estimates – £250 million. According to the authorities, he became the most prolific drug trafficker in Britain, the most wanted man in Europe and an underworld figure revered like a modern-day Robin Hood. Such is his current standing that there are kids on council estates up and down the country named in his honour. He is Curtis Warren. Our paths would continue to cross for many years to come.

Although I had been a juvenile criminal for many years, I remember having a crisis of conscience at around this time. At school, I fought the urge to be bad, excelling academically, at maths, history and sciences. I used the phrase ‘the poet and the pain' to describe how I was feeling. My essays always got read out in English class, but one lad thought that the flowery metaphors I used made me a puff. Later, he teased and goaded me in the bogs and a rage blew up inside me like I had never experienced before. This guy hurt me in a different way from the violence I had suffered: by destroying something good in my life, something I was proud of. He evoked a new type of pain inside. I got hold of his head and cracked it against the porcelain bowl of the toilet. His head split like a grape, but I continued to pound his skull until it was a mash of blood and bone.