The Devil

Even though we hadn’t spoken for ages, Curtis was letting me know that he had me pegged. The subtext of the conversation was: ‘You think I don’t know where you live? Warning: don’t try anything clever with me.’ So much was said without being said. One of Curtis’s key phrases was, ‘Sometimes information is more valuable than gold.’

After the initial verbal fencing on the telephone, I told him that I was on bail, and it wasn’t safe for me to meet him in Liverpool. I said that I was moving to Dublin in Ireland until things cooled down. Curtis said that he was frequently in Dublin doing business, so we agreed to meet the following week.

I then launched into a brief history of the blackmailing of the Chief. I told him all about the statements that I had made to get us out of the police station. The pay-off for telling him all this was that I wanted him to think of me as being a man who he could work with. However, this confession would later come back to haunt me.

Anyway, I told him that I had 25 grand left. He said, ‘I’ll do you a ki for that.’ I asked for more on scrap, so we reached a compromise – buy one get one free. I was getting 50 grand’s worth for 25 grand to get me up and running. After that, I’d have to pay for everything up front.

In a matter of days, I was back for more, and business boomed from them on. My out-of-town connection would bake up the gear so that we got £1,200 for the ounce. That meant we made 17 grand on every kilo. From April 1991, we started doing a kilo every three days. That was seventeen grand every three days – roughly thirty grand a week – and we kept that up solid and steady until the end of July. Bam, Bam, Bam. All I had to do was meet Curtis in Dublin, get the goods off him, organise the courier and send them out of town.

Now, the amazing thing about Curtis Warren was that he would actually serve me up himself. He was Interpol’s number-one target, the biggest drug dealer in Europe, with NCIS, MI5 and Drug Squad tracking his every move, but he would still take time out to come and sell me a couple of kis in person. Normally, he would have sent a bottom-feeder around with such a paltry amount. However, this deal was special to him. He was back working the street again. This was two kids from the neighbourhood doing business together. No international phone calls, no helicopters in the jungle, no Swiss bank accounts – just two lads from Liverpool grafting in a backstreet.

He would arrive in his own hire car, park two streets away, walk up to the back door of the house I was renting and say, ‘There you go, Stephen. Where’s my money?’ He would then take his dough and leave. It was as raw and up front as that. He actually believed he was untouchable. I guess he had his sixth sense to guide him.

We both had systems in place to arrive at my safehouse. To this day, I go around a roundabout four times, even if I’m just going out to buy a pint of milk. It’s just habit. I once went on a private-detectives course and learned about three-car surveillance – the authorities’ preferred technique. However, three-car surveillance is easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. I learned how to travel southbound on a carriageway and all of a sudden switch to a northbound carriageway. This meant breaking a few driving regulations, but if somebody mimicked my move, I instantly knew I was being followed.

I also had special mobile phones that allowed me to switch between several numbers without changing the handset. Curtis loved that. He never feared my physical prowess; he feared my intelligence when I showed him things like that.

Everyone in our network kept logs of suspicious cars and detailed descriptions of undercover officers – information that we assiduously shared and disseminated. One day, a dark-haired man from a police unit in the UK was hovering around near my safehouse. I had a kilo of cocaine on me that had just been served up by Curtis. He was trying to appear nonchalant, but I could feel him watching me to see where I was going. I knew that I needed to get off the road, because I was going to get nicked any minute. I walked towards a railway bridge, but there was nowhere to hide. It was a 40-foot drop from the bridge to the ground below. People actually used to commit suicide by jumping off it.

Suddenly, a bend in the road gave me the opportunity I needed. I was out of his sight for a few seconds, so I took full advantage. I jumped over the wall and dropped the 40 feet down to the railway lines. Martial arts had given me incredibly strong legs, and because I knew how to drop and roll, I could do it. You’d be amazed how far a young body can actually jump. I was a world-class athlete at that time, and I could actually vault a six-feet-high wall in a single go. One of my nicknames was ‘Frenchie Lightfoot’. You’re not catching me – I’m too fast, like the fucking wind.

I scrambled up the grass embankment and relieved myself of the parcel on the way, stashing it carefully. I knew that he hadn’t seen where I’d gone. At the top, I slipped through a fence and deliberately came back into view. The whole daredevil exercise had taken less than 90 seconds.

As soon as I got home, they swooped on me. Whoosh. There were three unmarked cars and about seven or eight officers, all in plain clothes. ‘Freeze,’ they shouted. ‘Get your hands up. We want to search you.’ Some of them were Irish police, others were intelligence officers from the UK. They frisked me and searched the car but found nothing. They were completely perplexed.

Nine times out of ten, the authorities jump quicker than they should. With them, it’s all a matter of timing: should we hit the suspect now, or should we do it a bit later? Then again, a few of us top criminals had a major advantage: a sixth sense that saved us time and again from total annihilation. Kenny Noye had it. Curtis Warren had it. And I had it.

I gave Curtis a call to warn him. We never talked on the phone – one ring on a mobile phone was the signal for us to both go to a pre-arranged phone box. I used to change my mobile phone every three weeks as a precaution.

Later that night, at around 4 a.m., I got dressed into my black SAS-issue combat gear. I crept into my backyard and carefully took the bricks out of the bottom of the wall, wide enough for my body to fit through. I’d learned that trick after watching a film about a gangster called The General. He had dug a tunnel out of his own garden, because the police were watching his front door. He would go out and rob banks and then come back into his ken through the tunnel. I slithered out into the night, stayed off road all the way to the railway embankment, collected the gear and sold it for 42 grand.

Although I was living in Dublin, I frequently commuted back to the UK to see my family. If I was home, I’d stay in London and train at a very well-known boxing gym in the capital. I kept my training hours religiously, so Curtis would come to the club to see me when he was passing through London. Villainy goes hand in glove with boxing, right back to the Krays.

We were standing by a wall outside of the gym and steam was coming off my sweat. ‘Why do you do it, lad?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds. I do it because I’m going to jail and I need the money.’

Never outshine the master. Always make those above you feel comfortable and superior. In your desire to please and impress, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are, and you will attain the heights of power.

I said, ‘Fucking hell, Curtis. How do you do it, lad? I’ve only had one bizzy on me, and my fucking arse is like that – gone. I don’t know how you can cope with having a whole division on you.’ A sick-looking grin spread across his face. Inside, I could see he was thinking, ‘I can do something Frenchie can’t and Frenchie is supposed to be the hardest bastard in Liverpool and far beyond.’ I reinforced my point: ‘You do this fucking 24/7, like it’s nothing.’

He was taking the patriarchal position with me, and I allowed him to, because I was making seventeen grand every three days from the geezer. I was trying to be useful to him, providing him with technology and so on, so that I could continue to curry favour in his court. I was trying to align myself with the king. It’s what you’re supposed to do as a courtier. You’re supposed to align yourself around power but not make it too obvious. Machiavelli had written about it and now I was putting it into action.

Curtis then told me that his motives went beyond the money. He said, ‘If I spent 50 grand a fucking day, I couldn’t go broke.’ He used to drop little lines like that on you to make you start counting up his money, but he never told anyone what he had outright.

I respected what he did, despite the problems I’d had with him over Andrew John. He had outwitted some of the smartest that the opposition had to offer. Also, he followed the rules of engagement: never grassed or compromised himself. I’ve had it said to me that Curtis Warren’s a grass, and I think, ‘Go and kiss my granny.’ He’s just anti-establishment and has been from the day he was fucking born. He was born kicking and screaming, but envious people have said that he couldn’t have got to where he did and be as big as he did without being a grass. I would say to those people, ‘No, he paid people to get there, and he had the bizzies in place.’

We could have gotten real big together, but there was a fundamental mistrust between us. He knew it was there, and I knew it was there, but we didn’t talk about it. Two bulls can’t live in the one pen. However, I’ve still got a massive, grudging respect for the guy. Later, when he went to prison, he did his bird without bitching and screaming. In contrast, when I was in jail, he spread this rumour that I had had a nervous breakdown. He said, ‘Frenchie isn’t a proper criminal.’ That was because I had been to university, had a job and was doing things. My comeback was that I considered myself a twenty-first-century criminal, whereas they were still lagging behind in the twentieth century. The funny thing was that it was still only 1995. There were five years to go until the twenty-first century. I always was ahead of my time.

When I paid him, I always ensured that my money was in five-grand bundles – never a penny short. Curtis loved that, because he counted every penny he got. I’d watched him count his money from the other dealers, and he’d explode if it was short. He’d say, ‘That cunt. He gave me a bag with 25 grand in it, and there was only £24,980. The cunt kept £20 for ciggies.’ That’s how I knew he counted every penny of his money.

Curtis told me that one of his turn-ons was counting money. I’ve seen bundles of money the size of a couch – four-feet long and three-feet wide. He allegedly used to keep cars in inner-city streets, miles away from Liverpool 8, with bags the size of a man crammed with £10 and £20 notes in the boot. However, no one would look at these cars twice, cos they were bangers. I’ve seen him reduce the bulk of £100,000 in sterling to the size of a laptop by converting it into 1,000-guilder notes. This was a common practice among international drug dealers, who were always trying to reduce the physical size of their huge piles of cash by converting it into high-denomination foreign notes. A 1,000-guilder note was worth about £300, and Curtis was thought to have 1,000-guilder stashes all over Holland. According to underworld rumours, he had so much English money buried that there wasn’t enough time to dig it all up when the notes changed, rendering millions obsolete. But fuck it. There was tens of millions more, reportedly wrapped up in businesses all over the world.