3

Brains

BY the time the whole school charade was over and exams were finished, getting a job or going to college were the furthest things from my mind. Billy and I were inseparable and I drove him around, like some sort of unofficial chauffeur. It was a way for him to support me financially until I found my feet.

The summer of 1999 became a hectic one, with lots of meet-ups in bars and restaurants and lots of parties. I found out very early on that the criminal fraternity like to load up on booze and drugs in their downtime. When you always have to look over your shoulder, wondering when your end will come, it can be a stressful existence. You need to blow off steam. The parties were raucous and you would see the same faces – the villains and all their kids. We were like our own social sub-set.

Billy had a particular Spanish restaurant in Blackheath, El Pirata, that he used a lot. He knew the proprietor and paid him well, so we would just take the place over. On our nights everyone in there was a player. We would help ourselves at the bar, order any food we felt like and it was all paid for. The owner loved it. There would be 150 of us, drinking crates of Dom Perignon and eating steak and lobster. On a typical night with us he could make £50,000. The actor Tamer Hassan worked in there before he was famous. He would bring us our drinks.

Next door to the restaurant was a high-end clothes shop called Raffles and we all had accounts there too. Sometimes you would be in the restaurant, get a bit of food on yourself, then go straight into Raffles and spend a grand on some new gear before hitting a club. Why bother with A Levels or an apprenticeship when you can do that? What a life!

In August of that year a friend of mine turned 16. The occasion was marked with a big get-together at his Dad’s house in Chislehurst, an enormous villa complete with tennis courts and a swimming pool. Above a grandiose bar in the garden hung a Scales of Justice sign, a replica of the one from the Old Bailey. Criminals love a bit of irony.

Players and faces packed the place and everyone was drunk or using drugs. Billy, in particular, was getting right on one and there was more powder knocking around that house than a launderette. Among all the mayhem and merriment, I noticed a new kid bouncing around, someone I didn’t recognise, blond haired, with a well-fed, open face. He looked like a nice-boy, rugby-player type. He was not one of us.

Suspicious, I went over and started a conversation. Was he Old Bill? He seemed very open, very confident. He was funny too. The girls were all over him.

He told me his name was Aaron Wild and he went to school with the host. As we spoke he kept looking up at the surroundings, open mouthed.

‘I’ve never been to a party like this before,’ he said. ‘It’s like some sort of reality TV show.’

I grinned. The kid was a good laugh. And you could see the wonder in his eyes.

Blending in with that crowd is not easy if you’re an outsider, so I made a bit of effort to keep the conversation going and made him feel at home. I gave him a drink and he soon loosened up. We hit it off straight away and kept in touch from then on. Soon we were great mates.

Aaron went to Colfe’s, a private school in Greenwich with fees of four grand a term, which was full of the children of criminals. Billy and his mates always sat around bemoaning the failings of state education and a lot of them paid for their children’s schooling. People find it surprising, but at many of the most expensive private schools you can find the children of top bankers sitting next to the children of top bank-robbers. The two groups have more in common than they realise.

Aaron wasn’t like that though. His Dad was a black cab driver and his Mum ran a beautician’s. They were lovely people and worked incredibly hard to send him there.

Aaron’s academic abilities saw him achieve well at school, following a carefully laid plan that led into the world of high finance. When we met he was serving an apprenticeship at one of the big firms in the city, trading equities packages, private investments, forex markets and all that sort of thing. In his downtime he continued mixing with us. We accepted him into our circle, but his goals were different. He enjoyed the lifestyle and was jealous of our cars and clothes, but was determined to get them through legitimate means. We all respected that. I liked Aaron and enjoyed his company. What he chose to do didn’t matter as much as what he was like.

From my point of view, after I bought the gun from Ozcan in Dulwich, I was ready to get started. I stashed it at a friend’s house, following another of Billy’s lessons – never keep anything under your own roof. That way, if the door ever comes through (and one day it will, it always does) they can’t find anything to incriminate you. My education was still ongoing.

At the time I had a girlfriend called Katrina, a lovely girl, from a good family. Her parents had done a bit of research and were not too keen on me but we had a nice connection and saw each other often. Unfortunately, a local chancer called Chris kept harassing her and asking her out. I shrugged it off, but he was slimy and persistent. She told him repeatedly that she was with me, but he continued. After one failed approach he asked her, ‘Why are you going out with that fucking idiot anyway?’

Unluckily for Chris, my mate Nick overheard the conversation and reported back. I felt belittled and disrespected, in my own area too. Didn’t he know who I was? I put feelers out and found the pub he usually drank in, then cooked up a half-arsed plan involving bundling him into the back of a van, roughing him up a bit and teaching him some manners.

On the night I waited outside the pub, in the back of the van, with my mean face on and a bat. Nick went to coax Chris out and initially he came, but when he saw the van waiting, he sensed danger and ran. He ended up phoning us a couple of hours later, in tears, pleading with me to leave him alone, saying he had misunderstood the situation and would not bother Katrina again. Friends of his made desperate phone calls to whoever they could. They didn’t want Chris on the wrong side of the McAvoys.

I was happy, having got exactly the result I wanted, but when Billy heard he was incensed. He closed the kitchen door and stood over me.

‘You’re behaving like an idiot,’ he said. ‘Like a fucking thug. You should know better than that. Was there any money involved? Was there?’

‘No.’

‘So why are you hanging yourself out there for no reward? If you’d bashed this kid up you could have been pinched. You could even end up going away! For what, for a fucking bird? That’s what mugs do. Are you a mug?’

‘No.’

‘Now listen, this is important.’ He said these words slowly, staring straight into my eyes. ‘YOU AREN’T A GANGSTER. We aren’t gangsters. Gangsters are filth. We call them “thieves’ ponces”. All they do is steal using bullying and intimidation. There’s no brains in it. What we are, are money getters. Do you understand?’

‘Yes Bill.’

‘Let the little prick try his luck, who gives a toss? This Katrina might be a nice girl but she’s not your wife, she’s not going to be around in three years’ time if you get sent down. Don’t ever get yourself in trouble over a woman. Do you hear me? And never trust women, neither. It happens all the time, guys are loose lipped when it comes to pillow talk, then years later their ex-girlfriend is the main witness for the prosecution. It’s not worth it.’

Just to reinforce the point, a few days later we took a drive up the M4 towards Heathrow. I had an idea for a big robbery and wanted to show him the target and the basic plan. My phone rang in my pocket. It was Katrina, so I answered.

‘Hello babe.’

Billy looked sideways at me with an expression of absolute horror. ‘What in the name of blue fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he said.

‘What? It’s my girlfriend…’

‘Give me the phone.’ He snatched it off me and threw it out of the window.

‘You never bring phones on work, never, ever, ever. And you definitely don’t use them to make calls.’

I nodded.

‘You don’t help those bastards by giving them evidence. They can use a phone to cell-site you. And if the signal’s picked up near a job, you’re as good as gone.’

Without him I probably wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. At that stage I still only had ideas I was developing, but had been out of school a few months and was eager to start.

I got a new phone sorted the following morning and Aaron was the first to call me on it. It was about 11am and I was getting ready to meet Billy for lunch.

‘I can’t do it,’ Aaron said, as soon as I picked up.

‘What are you on about, mate?’

‘I can’t keep going like this. It’s doing my head in. Years and years of this? It’s not worth it.’

‘Eh, you’ve lost me. Are you all right?’

‘This job, all the bullshit, I can’t do it.’

He had been moaning about work for a while, which I had written off as needless whining.

‘What do you mean? Are you going to quit?’

‘I already have.’

Aaron had got within a few weeks of the end of his apprenticeship, but our world and way of life, with all its excitement and fast rewards got inside his head. He wanted what we had. The game had sucked him in, too.

Later I found out the full story. He had been on his way to work that morning on a typically crowded tube train. Aaron spent the whole 30-minute journey pressed against an Australian’s armpit, with an enormous African sandwiching him from behind. He had disembarked feeling angry and sick, only to plod up to the escalators in a funereal procession of silent, slate-faced office drones. When he finally emerged from the station on to the street, with suits hurrying this way and that, fighting for every second, every inch of space, he paused, breathed in and had a moment.

It struck him, hard. No one looked happy. Words lit up in his head like a neon sign.

I can’t live like this.

Aaron took his tie off, headed straight in to the boss’s office and told him he was leaving. Then he bought a beer, sat in a nearby park and laughed at all the superficiality. As he observed the suits and the tramps and the mums with buggies buzzing here and there, he had a chat with himself. He knew it. He had decided. Unlike all of them, he would exist outside the system from then on, the fucking system.

He still had the same goal – to make a lot of money – but he couldn’t accept the means he was supposed to use to get it. He would have to be an innovator, earn from unconventional sources, as we did. From that day on, Aaron became one of us.

I spoke to a friend called Paul who left school with nothing like me. He was known as a loose cannon, always in fights and situations, which I thought would be useful. I knew I would need someone headstrong, so asked him if he fancied starting work. His Dad had been involved in a few bits and pieces in the past. He had been in and out of prison. Paul agreed straight away.

Pretty quickly Aaron used his own contacts to get involved in the drugs trade, shifting decent-sized packets of gear in no time. Meanwhile Paul and I started going out in the day, driving around, following security vans. I would map their routes, note delivery times and could not believe how easy it seemed.

All the big security firms used the same vans with the same crews on the same days, making the same trips. After a few weeks of watching them, I got to know the routines of the staff and even what they looked like – at ten past ten the one with the moustache will handcuff the case to his arm and walk into the bank. I even developed a sense of how much money they were carrying at different points on the route.

At the end of each day I would pick one van and follow it back to base, then go home and catch a bit of sleep. At three in the morning I would get up and drive back to the security depot and sit outside with a video camera, filming the vans coming in and out.

In this way I got to know all the depots around the M25 motorway. One in Croydon, one at Swanley Roundabout, one in Tunbridge Wells, one at Dartford, I cased every single one of them. My personal favourite was Tunbridge Wells. It was a sitting duck for surveillance. You could get up at the back, on to a little hill where there was a small wood. You could set up under the trees knowing you were shielded from security cameras. I would sit there for hours, with binoculars under a khaki net, like I was on a military operation. I had such plans for that place, but never got to see them through. While I was inside it got taken for £53m.

The vans would leave at 5.30am and I learned where they went for their first drop on different days. On a Monday it would be Abbey National, Tuesday they would head to Barclays, Wednesday morning was NatWest. I thought of those pre-dawn jobs as my golden ticket. A normal cash machine would need £125,000 to fill it up and each of those vehicles would be carrying at least that. Hit a couple in a month and you can lie low for a while.

Once a target was identified, my focus shifted to the best possible place to smack it. There were different things to look out for, fewer CCTV cameras, less police activity. Of absolute importance were escape routes.

Ideally you wanted an ambush point away from built-up areas, or if not, somewhere with lots of alleys, so you could get out of one car and into another quickly and easily. A little foible of mine was to find one next to a flyover. I always liked that. You can do the job, run over the bridge and have a car waiting on the other side. You would be in a completely different postcode. You would be away.

Just before my first independent job and still not long out of school, I found myself in a bar in Beckenham called BlueEye, owned by Mehmet Arif. As usual it was full of London criminals. Bottles of champagne were being sent to the table and there was enough coke in the place to fill a garage. We were having a ball.

There is a certain kind of woman attracted to that crowd, well dressed, great looking, but vain and shallow. That night there were more than a few of them in BlueEye. Lots of gorgeous, sexily dressed dolly-birds in their early 20s, out of their heads and throwing themselves at anyone they thought was a player. We had the time of our lives. How many 16- or 17-year-olds have that kind of experience?

Aaron was already making a few quid by then and told us how it was going. He was mostly selling shipments of cannabis that came in from Holland, but was looking to diversify his interests in the near future. He had some very interesting ideas.

‘It’s our time now,’ I said to Paul, as we stumbled out of the bar, sniffing and grinding our teeth at five in the morning. ‘Our time now mate.’

My approach was meticulous and I obsessed over details. Someone could say, ‘Have you got anything lined up?’ casually, in conversation and I could tell them straight off, how and where the job would be done, how the getaway would work and what the likely score was. I never even had to write anything down.

I may not have got GCSEs, but within the criminal fraternity I became known as ‘Brains’. Men two or three times my age could not believe what I put together so young. ‘He’s hot,’ they would say. ‘He’s real good stuff.’

In my mind I made a resolution to become the best. I wouldn’t just be an armed robber. I would be the armed robber. If I achieved all the ambitions that formed in my mind, my accomplishments would outshine those of Billy and even Uncle Micky. John McAvoy would be a name known by the world.