The Devil

My first taxation was on a heroin dealer called Brian Wagner from the Everton area of Liverpool. Me and my mate Marsellus conned him into thinking that we wanted to purchase ten kilograms of heroin – worth about £250,000 wholesale.

Strangely enough, he invited us to his mother’s house to do the deal and took us right up to his bedroom. Here was one of the biggest Class A dealers in the city, taking us up to his room as though we were going to listen to pop records. I quickly came to realise that the majority of drug dealers weren’t very smart guys. They’d put their most valued narcotics in their own houses, under their own mother’s bed. How fucking daft is that?

I sat on his bed while he took out a blue Puma sports bag from his wardrobe and laid it on his Liverpool FC quilt cover next to me. Then he showed us a packet of the gear, containing about five kilograms.

I said, ‘Well that’s nice. But where’s the rest?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said that he couldn’t show us the other five kilos, so I pulled a gun on him and pistol-whipped him across the mouth. We were in game now. He knew that this was no run-of-the-mill sale. He was bleeding, saying that he didn’t have any more kilos, so I put the gun in his mouth and said, ‘Tell me where it is, prick, or I’ll put your fucking brains all over that Pink Floyd poster on the wall.’

Meanwhile, his mum was shouting up the stairs, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, lads?’ She didn’t know what was going on, and there she was getting out the chocolate HobNobs for her visitors.

‘No thanks, Mrs Wagner,’ I said politely, pushing the gun further down her son’s throat. I then said to Wagner, ‘If you don’t fucking tell me, I’ll do your fucking ma as well, you fat cunt.’ With that, he loosened up a bit.

I marched him out of his house. However, as we were leaving, his mum spotted the blood from where I’d just hit him. She said to him, ‘What’s happened, Brian? Are you all right, son?’

Fair play to the lad, he just smiled and replied, ‘We’re just messing about, mam. Don’t worry. Just wrestling and boxing and that. I’m only going to the car to get plasters. I’ll be back in a minute. Put the kettle on.’

We all smiled, thanked her for her hospitality and got in the car to go and find the goods. Dickhead was in the back, I was driving and Marsellus was in the passenger seat. We were travelling north in the direction of the new cathedral when suddenly blue lights appeared behind us. Oh dear! The bizzies. I had a firearm on my person, five kilograms of heroin in the boot, a top drug dealer held under duress in the back and the police were about to stop us. Had his mum got suspicious and called 999? ‘No,’ I thought. ‘It’s too quick, surely?’ I looked for other bizzy cars. ‘If his mum didn’t call them, what the fuck is going on?’

My brain started to work overtime as I tried to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, Marsellus interrupted my train of thought. He said, ‘Kick it, kick it,’ street talk for ‘Foot down and get off’. ‘Kick it, Stephen, now.’

He was panicking, but I said, ‘No, I can blag this.’ By then, I had concluded that it was a routine stop. Even back then, I had nerves of steel. I didn’t want a chase all over the city. I knew my limitations behind the wheel of a car – I’m no getaway driver. In fact, I’m not even a very good jockey. ‘No, it’s OK, I can handle it,’ I insisted.

Marsellus replied, ‘No, Stephen, no. Take the chase. It’s too on top.’ But I wanted to see if I could speak to the police officer. If he intended to arrest us, we would have to take it from there, but there was half a chance I could blag it if he was just a traffic bizzy.

I jumped out confidently and said, ‘Yes, officer, how can I help you? What is the problem?’ I gave him my details, using a false name and address, and all the while I was lining him up for a good right hand, just in case. If he was to decide that he was blowing us through or calling for back-up, then it would all be on. The bizzy would get knocked out, and I would be getting off. Then again, why take that chance? For some reason, I had a sixth sense for that sort of thing. I didn’t feel any danger about the tug. I didn’t feel it was on top, despite the fact that Marsellus was still nudging me and telling me to, ‘Kick it, kick it. We can do it! Take the chase. It’s not too late.’ No, I knew that my false details would match with my description, so I was going to front it out for the time being.

The bizzy started taking notes and going through the motions. It turned out that he didn’t even want to search the vehicle, he just wanted to tell us about a broken tail light. ‘Get it fixed,’ he said.

Meanwhile, I was still lining up for a right hand, because I knew that it could go either way. If things went wrong, it would be a case of escape by any means possible. However, in the end, the bizzy drove off, and I got back into the car. Marsellus and I sat heavily into our seats. He turned his head towards me and said, ‘You’re fucking good, you. You are really fucking good. Now let’s go.’

Meanwhile, Wagner was in the back, probably thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ He was one of the top grafters from one of the toughest barrios in one of the most on-top cities in the world. He was a pretty streetwise guy. Nonetheless, he had just watched a live lesson by a ‘big-top operator’ in action. I actually reckon he was half impressed – half rooting for me, even though we had kidnapped him. After all, he was also a villain at the end of the day.

Once we were on our way, he directed us to some lock-ups at the back of a school, where he had the rest of his gear stashed. We quickly relieved him of the other five kilograms, stripped him naked and let him go. That was our first tax – a quarter of a million pounds for a few hours’ work.

Funnily enough, the same guy got taxed three or four times after that by different crews. He ended up – and I’ve got to be very careful about bandying this label about, because I’ve been tarnished with it as well – as a police informer, to get him out of a prison sentence later on in his life. I haven’t heard much of him since.

The main lesson that I learned from my virgin tax was to trust my instincts. Some people have a sixth sense for danger – I am one of them. Some people call it instinct; in comic books they call it spider senses. Whatever it is called, this sixth sense is an intuitive early warning system that allows me to pick up on impending threats – even when there are no visible signs of danger. It required me being totally switched on to my environment so that when something was out of place my spider senses would tingle. Jails and cemeteries are littered with people who don’t listen to their sixth sense. I was determined to keep my body free from stress and worry so that my spider senses were never dulled.

One of my heroes is Bruce Lee, who mastered the philosophy of Jeet Kune Do. Jeet Kune Do involves a fighter adopting any style or move that’s good for him, discarding the rest. I put this into practice on a micro level with my taxing and widened the principle to apply to my whole life. I took on board what was good for me, what I felt worked, and discarded the rest. Nevertheless, it’s a totally subjective thing. Jeet Kune Do – the way of the fist.

The other lesson I learned was: make hay while the sun shines. The drugs game was still in its infancy and ripe for exploitation. It was the early days of Class A, and the police weren’t giving it the attention that I instinctively knew it would later receive. It was a free-for-all, a perfectly open market. For the importers, there weren’t any restrictions on the ports. For the distributors, there wasn’t any surveillance, no video cameras on the street. So, while I was driving around with kidnapped men in the car, I didn’t have to worry about leaving a televised record of the journey. That would never happen these days. You’d be on the telly at 6 p.m., near-live, like O.J. in his infamous car chase. Security wise, it was a much easier and laxer time – but I knew that wouldn’t always be the case.

The next bit of tax work to come my way involved five kilograms of cocaine and £20,000 in cash. This time the tip-off came from a ‘cardmarker’ – a third-party informant, close to the drug dealer involved. This meant that I would not have to torture the dealer in person, just go straight for the drugs. However, the downside was that the specifics were less reliable, because, at the end of the day, I was relying on someone else’s information.

The cardmarker had told me that the gear was hidden in a mansion just outside Liverpool. I got my cat burglar gear on – black clothes and a balaclava – and put my experience as a juvenile housebreaker to good use. I picked the window locks and disabled the alarm, but when I got to where the gear was supposed to be it wasn’t there. It was bum information.

I learned an important lesson from that: wherever possible, always get the drug dealer in person to tell you where his assets are, even if you have to burn him with a steam iron or razor his testicles to get him to fold under questioning. From then on, I would discard information given to me by third parties and go straight to the horse’s mouth.

Although I had just started my new career, I had learned many important lessons, and unlike most villains I took them on board. The vast majority of criminals live random, ill-conceived lifestyles by the seat of their pants. Already I was applying science, martial-arts philosophy and business reason to get ahead. However, that was only the beginning . . .