The Devil

Soon I had mastered the dark arts of taxing, robbing at least one big drug dealer a week. Drug dealers tried to freak each other out by whispering, ‘The Devil’s going to get you, the Devil’s going to get you.’ The prospect would genuinely unnerve them. I became the bogeyman of the underworld. A myth began to grow up around me, fuelled by my resolve and unshakable fearlessness in the pursuit of tax. I’d face any odds in order to get what I wanted. It’s not being prepared to kill, but being prepared to die that provides the winning ingredient.

However, I had one golden rule: once I’d got the drugs, I wasn’t fucking giving them back. A lot of taxmen had come to grief by being too keen to undo their own hard work. They would steal a load of gear but cave in to underworld pressure and end up giving it back. The victims used to send emissaries, mates of mates and all that lark, to talk a taxman around or, if that failed, to threaten him. But me? No. You could send who you wanted – the SAS, the fucking SS led by the mujahideen – but you were not fucking getting it back. You’d have to snatch it from my cold, dead corpse. And this wasn’t just said for effect or theatricality. It was the god’s honest truth. Even if a victim tried to get their gear back, the chances were that they wouldn’t be able to find me. Nobody knew my address, I had no credit cards, no bank cards – the CIA couldn’t trace me. I didn’t exist except in a drug dealer’s nightmares. And my family was always kept safe, so my victims couldn’t get at me by kidnapping my loved ones. In a nutshell, I ran a hermetically sealed operation. It was watertight.

Before I went to work, I’d go into character, like a method actor. I’d immerse myself in a part. I’d get my game face on. I’ve seen that in films, such as Pulp Fiction in which Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are talking shit about Big Macs but go into mode before they bang on the students’ door.

Nonetheless, when I came out of ‘game’, something inside of me raged against the evil. I knew that there was something better for me out there. I passed my access course, and in September 1985 I won a place at Liverpool University to study psychology. In the back of my mind, I hoped that I could give up crime one day and get a decent job.

In the meantime, I was leading a double life. By day, I went to lectures and sat in the library with blonde girls from the Home Counties. At night, the Devil would come out to play. Technically, you could say I was leading a triple life, as I was still training hard as a kick-boxer. I won my first world title at Wembley Conference Centre on 25 November 1985. I was the light-middleweight supreme champion of all four million members of the World All-Styles Kick Boxing Association. I was the only world champion the university had ever had, and they went cock-a-hoop over it, putting me in the campus newspapers.

I opened a sports management company called Wear Promotions. Between having a business to manage, drug dealers to rob and training to do, I found myself too busy to attend any lectures. When it came to my finals, I terrorised the lecturer into telling me what questions would be on the exam: psychological intimidation – the art of fighting without fighting.

In 1988, I graduated with a 2:2. Not bad. Although I was the only one out of forty students to get a full degree, I still couldn’t get a job. So I decided that if no one would employ me, I’d employ myself and opened up my own security business, supplying doormen to nightclubs. Ironically, that later opened up a mass-market for me to sell narcotics, on a hitherto unknown scale, direct to the consumer. I was working front of house and controlled the supply into the clubs.

There was a bar on black lads at a nightclub called The Grafton, so I forcibly took the door off the gangsters who had it. The underworld didn’t like a nigger getting uppity, so the threat of war went to DEFCON-1. To defend the club, I installed the fiercest crew on this planet at maximum-force readiness. We had Stephen French, British, European and world kick-boxing champion; Andrew John, of the British karate team; Jack Percival, Commonwealth boxing gold medallist; Brian Schumacher, captain of the 1984 Los Angeles olympics British boxing team; Sidney Bulwark, an infamous local boxer but a terrible bore; Aldous Pellow, former British Army boxing team; Big Victor, a real heavy street fighter; and Gerry the Gent, the nicest guy you could wish to meet but a vicious cunt once he’d had one over the eight.

In our looming war, a racist hard case called Tommy Gilday proved to be the equivalent of Archduke Franz Ferdinand before the First World War – he was the trigger. Gilday was a fearsome heroin and cocaine importer who could punch like a mule. One night, Gilday came to The Grafton to reclaim the door. Andrew John fought violently with him. Just as Andrew was starting to overpower his opponent, Aldous interfered. He was afraid that Gilday’s defeat would bring about serious, serious reprisals. I knocked out one of Gilday’s gang in the same go-around, and Gilday was ushered off the premises, promising, ‘I’ll be back, don’t worry.’

As a direct consequence, the top four crime syndicates in the city ordered a mob of three hundred men to lynch the six of us. I posted lookouts outside of the nearby Grosvenor Casino and at a club at the corner – I paid little kids on bikes a fiver each.

At 10.30 p.m., the lookouts came bombing over to me. ‘There’s vans and vans and vans of them armed with machetes, baseball bats, hammers, knives, the pure works.’ I paid them and told them to get off. Apparently, a crime family connected to the IRA had been on their way to a completely separate incident when they had bumped into Gilday’s chilling cortège by complete coincidence. ‘Come with us,’ he’d told them. ‘We’re going to sort out the niggers in The Grafton.’ Filled with Nazi bloodlust, they had thrown in their lot with Gilday. Now the enlarged mob was throwing bins and bricks at the door, screaming like savages. I told my men, ‘Steady yourselves. Wait until you can see the whites of their eyes.’

I had chained the front doors up to prevent them from being booted in. The mob, who were all wearing balaclavas, started rattling the chains. It was quite an ominous sound, like the French CRS riot police banging their shields together before an attack.

Suddenly, half a face came jutting through one of the gaps. ‘Here’s Tommy,’ said Gilday, grinning maniacally, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. ‘I’m back. I told you I was going to have yous.’ Meanwhile, the machetes were coming through the three-feet high, two-inch wide vertical slits in the door.

‘Stand to,’ I said to my lads, ‘we’re going to fight this battle to the death.’ The punters were all screaming, and the assistant manager was beginning to panic. I could see Aldous Pellow also starting to fade quickly. Nonetheless, I turned to Andrew John, who stared into my eyes, giving me ‘the look’. Then the doors caved in.

Now, the Frenchman, like all good field marshals, always has a secret weapon in reserve. To be fair, I had foreseen what was going to happen, so I had taken the precaution of concealing a 1940 German Luger in a Yankee shoulder strap over my left breast. So, as the ranks charged towards me, I took up my fighting stance, drew the weapon and let go a round over the oncoming stampede. Pow! Bang! Crack! I called my Luger ‘the equaliser’, because all 300 men about-turned and ran for their lives. Well, nobody wants to get shot, do they? This was before guns became standard, so it came as a bit of a shock to the gang and snapped many of them out of their lynch-mob lust.

Within minutes, the police arrived on the scene. Cunningly, I reversed the story completely and said that Gilday’s crew had shot at us. These were the days before they could dust you off for forensics. However, while I was blagging the bizzy, I noticed that other members of my team were not doing quite so well under the pressure of questioning. I could see that Aldous was faltering under his interrogation and was going to fold at any moment. I was afraid he would tell them that I had fired the gun. Aldous was frightened of authority, after being in the army, so I made up an excuse and got him away from the bizzies as soon as I could.

Suddenly, the phone in the nightclub rang. It was Tommy Gilday. Aldous picked it up, and Gilday immediately started trying to rewrite the history of the rout. He said, ‘I knew there were only blanks in the gun,’ blah, blah, blah, trying to undermine our glorious victory.

Aldous was frightened of Tommy, so he was gibbering, ‘Yeah, but, no, but, yeah, but,’ and almost being nice to him. What I had come to realise in dealing with these guys was that you didn’t give an inch. You didn’t call them ‘Tommy’, and you didn’t talk friendly with them. You let them start to doubt their own confidence. Let them start to worry. Let them start to think, ‘Who the fuck is this guy Stephen French who they call the Devil?’

Now, what you have to realise is that this guy was used to his peers and enemies – mainly other middle-aged, white gangsters – sucking his cock and telling him how big his muscles were, what a criminal mastermind he was and how they were not worthy to sell his kilos of brown and white. Like all godfathers, he was seriously fettered by his suck-holing crew. Now here I was, a young black kid whom he had never met, showing him no respect and what’s more telling him to go fuck himself. For the first time in his career, Tommy had been confronted by a dark, animalistic force as unpredictable as nature itself. The result – his head was wrecked. The battle had been won in the mind – and I was the victor. End of.

Theatricality and dramatics – great weapons, man, great weapons. You’ve got to be able to back it up, mind you, if it goes to the wire, but a lot of my success was down to my invincible Japanese mindset – I had a siege mentality.

So, instead of trying to attack us on a different night – and with 300 personnel under arms, he would have been assured of total victory – he caved in. He called for a powwow instead – the underworld equivalent of the Paris Peace Accords. Now, what you’ve got to realise is that in the past these white gangsters would never have tolerated black criminals, never mind negotiate with them. However, the black community was becoming more powerful. Ebonics and little bits of our culture were finding their way into the mainstream. Suddenly, everyone was wearing tracksuits in the street. We started that. Saying ‘Yeah, man’ – again, a black thing. Even The Beatles were influenced by black culture. Before they played at The Cavern, they used to go and buy pot off a black barber called Lord Woodbine. He taught them the blues. So, subliminally, black culture was kicking in – and the ripples were being keenly felt in the underworld. We had finally come of age as a force to be reckoned with.

The mediators of the powwow were two well-known black doormen from Toxteth called Smith and Suncher. Smith agreed that his house could be used for the sit-down. Because Gilday knew Smith, he would come under his protection. We only laid one ground rule. If at the end of the parley we couldn’t find a solution, we had to agree not to engage in any violence there and then. However, the next time we were to see each other, no matter where, it would all be on. The beauty of the powwow was that everyone was searched before they went in. And I was confident that my kick-boxing skills would be enough to ensure that I came out on top, if it did all go off.

So, there we all were: me and Andrew on one side of the table; and Tommy Gilday plus one of his sidekicks on the other. There was a lot at stake. First, this was our title shot – our chance to leapfrog a rung on the underworld ladder into the big time. If negotiations went badly, we could lose the door on The Grafton, which would also lose us our other contacts. Second, we could lose some serious face and slide back into the criminal gutter.

I have an unnatural ability to read situations and get a feel for the way a thing is going to go. I was 99.9 per cent sure that this one was going to go in our favour, as I felt we had all the advantages psychologically. When Andrew John and I were together, we unnerved people. We were like a pair of panthers. Also, Tommy Gilday had already felt the strength of Andrew John in the fight that had sparked everything off and he’d faced a gunshot from me.

I did all the talking, whilst Andrew maintained a menacing silence. Everybody knew that I was the brains. I immediately went on the offensive, making out that it was all their fault. Then I said, ‘We’ll let your attack by 300 men go. We’ll grant you a reprieve.’ As a sweetener, I threw in a bone: ‘We don’t even mind if you go to the club when you want. You can come in for free.’

Finally, it was decided that we would work The Grafton. Then, in a unifying spirit of underworld togetherness, we also negotiated a little bit of a protection racket that would benefit us all. If the owner of the club tried to get rid of me and Andrew, Tommy agreed that he would come down, make some noise and smash up a few things. We would pretend to chase him and his crew off, and Mecca would be forced to keep us on as security and up the fee, which we’d then share with Tommy. Textbook protection.

There’s a book called The 48 Laws of Power, which reinterprets for the twentieth century the teachings of such political thinkers as Machiavelli and Stalin. One of the main rules states that you must use your enemies. We hadn’t even heard of the book at the time, but that’s what we were doing naturally.

In the end, we became allies with Gilday, although Andrew wanted the last word: ‘You’ve reprieved yourselves this time from some very serious violence, so you owe me a favour.’ He was cryptically referring to Gilday’s connections as a drugs trafficker. The favour meant that any time we wanted some large amounts of coke or heroin, Tommy would have to serve us up.

A few years later, Tommy fell out of a tree and died. I was genuinely upset, as I had got to know him well by then and thought that he was a very funny guy. I remember thinking, ‘Isn’t it mad? Tommy faced death in the underworld every day, but he died because of an act of God.’ It reminded me of a story I’d read about soldiers in Vietnam who’d freaked out after one of their mates drowned while on R & R – despite having been shot at every day in the jungle. It was a lesson in our mortality. Every day before going to work, I’d ask Marsellus or A.J., ‘Are you ready to die today, kidder?’