The Devil

One time, I went to prison to visit a friend and through him ended up making a useful contact. Pat was a baggage handler on the ferries between Hull and Holland. He had run up a load of arrears with the casino and had maxed out on his credit cards, so he offered to smuggle drugs for us to clear his debts. He had sussed out a fail-safe method: transport the drugs on a Sunday night. It was a no-brainer, really, because the security was so lax.

We started off small to see how it went, but I can’t tell you how elated I was when it worked like clockwork – it was like finding a vein of gold in the Yukon. Every other Sunday, he brought in ten-or twenty-kilogram packages of cocaine. We would score it in Amsterdam for eighteen grand, Pat would get five grand, so that took our cost price up to twenty-three grand. We were knocking it out for £30,000 in Liverpool. So, on a twenty-kilo parcel, I was making one hundred and forty grand – every two weeks.

The downside was that Pat was earning so much cash that it didn’t take him long to get himself out of the mire money-wise, and he decided that he wanted to put a stop to our smuggling operation. Oh no you fucking don’t! I made him continue the scam for a further two years. Every fortnight, he’d come off the ferry with his bags, half pissed off. He’d be met by a van sent by me. Then it was a straight run down the M62 to Liverpool, where the bags would be distributed. We called the run from Holland through the Pennines to Liverpool the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’. That was our code word.

Twelve hours after the gear had been scored in Holland, it was on the streets. Personally, I was strictly hands off – organisational only. My philosophy was to pay others to take the risk wherever possible. I took 80 per cent of the money pot and gave 20 per cent to joeys to do the serious work. They hadn’t put up any of the capital outlay, so it was fair enough in my view. I would just remain at the back, not putting myself in any difficult situations. I had a man to pick up the stuff, a man for distribution and street soldiers to sell it to the users. It wasn’t rocket science. It was pretty straightforward, but the return was fucking interstellar – thousands of percentages. Any businessman will tell you that a 25 per cent profit on a legitimate business is good – money for old rope compared with the drugs game.

However, wealth brings its own problems. I had loads of paper around that had to be laundered. I bought restaurants, bars, cafés – anything to make it clean and legal. There’s a whole host of ways to launder money. For instance, a basic method is to give someone a grand in cash, and they’ll give you a cheque for £950 back. But a personal favourite was the bookie scam we had going. We’d give a bookmaker we had on the firm £20,000 in cash every week. In return, he would give us a cheque for £18,000, saying that we had won it on a bet and that he had taken his 10 per cent. We could launder anything up to 100 grand on an accumulative bet. Then I found a similar scam. I’d go into a casino and change five grand of cash into chips. I’d play for a little bit, maybe losing about £500. Then I’d cash in the £4,500 of remaining chips and get them to give me a cheque, suggesting to the authorities that I’d won it.

When my profits got to a silly amount, I started doing computer transfers from abroad, moving money from offshore accounts into my UK account or sending a telefax to a shelf company. A shelf company was a company that could be bought ‘off the shelf’ from an accountant in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. I would then hide my drug profits in one of these companies so that it looked as though the company had generated the profit itself. I’d then send a telefax to the bank controlling the shelf company’s account, instructing them to transfer the money back to me. It was all just numbers.

Meanwhile, news of our success on the doors at The Grafton had spread, and new contracts started to roll in. A mate of mine called Panama Jones – on licence for double murder at the time – asked us to scare off some local bodybuilders who were hassling the owner of a club called XO’s. Incidentally, Panama was the only security boss ever to stop Roger Cook from investigating him. I’m not sure how he did it, but his face never appeared on The Cook Report, that’s for sure.

So, Andrew John, Aldous Pellow and I went to the rescue. We also took along a guy called Euan, who we nicknamed ‘Clank’ because he had so many tools on him that he clanked when he walked. Our first night on the doors was pretty eventful. A bodybuilder threw a heavy steel tyre-lever at me and another called Ergun threatened to throw me into hot fat. However, we soon saw them off, using a bit of the old ‘ultraviolence’.

But it wasn’t over yet. One day when we were on our way into the club, I looked up and saw five men in balaclavas coming towards me. Behind them, I could see people dropping out of the trees. There were about 30 or 40 of them in all. We took off, aiming to get inside the club, pull the drawbridge up and barricade ourselves inside. XO’s was underground, and to get in you had to go down a narrow 45-degree staircase to a door at the bottom. To make sure that Aldous and Clank got safely inside, Andrew John and I mounted a formidable defence. At the top of the stairs, in a rearguard action, I pulled out my machete and performed some Errol Flynn-style sabre rattling to keep the attacking troops at bay. This gave Aldous and Clank time to get safely inside the club, arm themselves and institute a flanking manoeuvre to guard the next phase: our insertion.

Andrew and I then made a tactical withdrawal down the stairs with our backs to the wall so that we could join the others inside. However, the plan did not go well. When we got to the bottom, lo and behold, Aldous had shut the door and wouldn’t let us in. Clank was also stunned into inaction.

Something similar had already happened to me with Brian Schumacher in The Grafton. Some people react badly in the face of fear. Self-preservation kicks in, and they do some strange things for their own survival. They don’t care about you – they just care about themselves. Aldous had lost his bottle and had left us to our fate. There was a little glass panel in the door, and I could see the whites of Aldous’s frightened eyes. We banged on the door in desperation, but to no avail.

‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘Whatever will be will be.’ Andrew John and I gave each other the stare, steeled ourselves and prepared to stand to. We made an about-turn and faced the enemy. The hordes were now coming down towards us, like lava from a volcano or savages across a plain. They were baying like hyenas – they could smell the blood of victory – and were rejoicing in our hopelessness. Bar a miracle, it looked like the end of me and Andrew John. We were going to get chopped to death – no two ways about it.

Not so fast. Thank God for the narrow stairwell. As the stairs were only about four feet wide, the attackers could only come down two at a time. Their massive frames had been funnelled into a tight space. Luckily, both Andrew and I had our machetes and were fighting them off, making good work of their flailing arms and legs. We had our backs against the wall and a defensive shield of cold steel as our front line. As a result, they couldn’t outflank us, and their tactical advantage of overwhelming firepower was gone. It was like we were the Spartans and they were the Persians coming down the mountain to get us. We were seriously outnumbered, but, because it was such a narrow pass, they couldn’t get at us. The battlefield was just too small for them. The angle of the staircase also gave us a major advantage, as it meant our eye-level met with their foot-level and we were in prime position to hack into their shins and calves as they prepared their descent into the fray, cutting them off at their jump-off point. The two of us were holding off over thirty men – sounds mad, but it’s true.

Suddenly, somebody called The Destroyer hurled an axe at us from the top of the stairs, trying to smash our defence. He knew that if he could take one of us down, our line would fold. I moved my head in the nick of time, and the axe went straight through the little glass window behind us. Smash! Like a gift from heaven, the crash awoke Aldous from his fear-induced trance, and he unlocked the door.

Once inside, there was no time for a steward’s inquiry about Aldous’s loss of bottle. I had the phone number of one of the bodybuilders’ main men, so I called it and shouted, ‘Come and do your worst! There’s only four of us. Let’s have it.’

After barricading the doors, I climbed up to a ground floor window to see what was going on outside. I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me: one of my top martial-arts instructors was flying towards the entrance. His name was Sensei Gary Spears, 7th Dan Goju-ryu and karate instructor. He was a giant six-feet-seven-inch Maori weighing about 24 stone, and he had a long flowing mane of hair down his back. His feet were so big that he could only wear sandals. He had been to Japan, where he had fought the masters and beaten them at their own game.

This was the second miracle of the day. The martial-arts code dictated that I had to defer to and respect my sensei, so I immediately opened the door and walked up the stairs. My opposing warriors stopped in their tracks and parted. I walked over to the sensei and bowed to him. I turned to his men and said, ‘I’ve got to respect this man. He’s trained in martial arts. He’s my instructor. Do what you will to me, but I cannot take up arms against him.’ I’ll tell you straight and honestly – he’d have ripped me to bits. He’d trained me to fight, and I was in awe of him, psychologically and physically. He would’ve just broken me up.

‘Have a look up there,’ he replied and pointed to a balcony on a nearby house. I could just about make out a man holding a gun, trained on me. Sensei continued, ‘Do you see him? He’s an ex-army sniper. We brought him here to assassinate you.’ Sensei waved his arms to the sniper to signal that it was all off. ‘As it’s you Stephen, we’ll sort it all out,’ he said. We shook hands, and that was that.

After that, the nightclub became a cash cow. We joined forces with Sensei and his gang, and did the old protection racket on the club. Any time there was a problem, the manager would give me and A.J. four or five nights’ work at exorbitant rates. So, every few weeks, we’d ask Sensei and his mob to go in and smash a few plates. We’d get the contract and split the money with them.

This episode had taught me another valuable lesson: to abide by my own set of values. By staying true to the martial-arts code, I had saved my own skin and brought about a successful outcome. Unfortunately, this lesson proved to be short-lived, as I began to break my own rules – with devastating results.