8
MEHMET dropped me off at Mum’s. Predictably, she was in tears for hours and wouldn’t let go of me. All my aunts were there.
I knew Mum felt guilty about the way things had gone, which was upsetting. She had been the one person in my life who tried to keep me on the straight path from the beginning. The choices I made weren’t her fault and she did all she could. I was an adult and responsible for myself, but it’s natural for a mother to think like that.
We went out for a Chinese with the family to celebrate. Mum cheered up and we all enjoyed ourselves. The food was average, but after eating HMP goulash for three years, any old plate of slop can seem like a royal banquet. No one asked what I was going to do from then, which was nice. It would have been a shame to spoil the party mood by lying.
Before we went to bed that night, Mum grabbed me, sobbing and shaking.
‘Promise me you won’t ever go to prison again,’ she said.
I looked into her eyes. ‘I promise Mum.’ I meant it too. I had no intention of returning to jail. I would be too smart for that.
The following day I went around to visit Auntie Kathy, Uncle Micky’s wife, at their house in Keston. They were doing nicely in Spain and building a good life for themselves. Auntie Kathy had popped back to sort out some things and by coincidence he phoned up while I was there.
‘Jonathon’s here,’ she said before passing the phone to me.
‘What you doing John?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Long term? You coming out here?’
‘Maybe, yeah.’
‘Do it. Just book a flight. Come.’
‘I can’t Micky, not now. I’m on licence for nine months.’
‘Okay, listen, the day the licence is finished, get over here. You won’t do yourself any favours hanging about in England. They’re on you now. I’ll get Kathy to give you some money so you’re okay for a while.’
As I was leaving Auntie Kathy gave me an envelope with five grand inside.
‘Listen to Micky,’ she said, as she kissed me goodbye. ‘Keep your head down, okay?’
I knew that Micky was talking sense, so started making plans. I thought it best to stay away from armed robbery for a while and my thoughts were to ride out the nine months, head to Europe and get involved in the drugs trade. Aaron had really pushed on during my time inside, bringing hundred-kilo shipments of cannabis into the country, distributing it and making a nice living. Through him I had high-profile contacts, ready to use. It could be very lucrative.
My only concern was the scum you had to deal with in that line of work. Armed robbers tend to be tight, small groups with a code of honour, but the drugs world sucked in every two-bob wanker who had watched a couple of Guy Ritchie films. We used to laugh about it, the weekend criminals, as we called them. They weren’t proper villains, like us. A lot of them had jobs and worked for the system. They were people from outside our world who didn’t really understand it, had stumbled into drugs, often by being users and then found they could make a few quid out of it.
A lot of those sorts of people got carried away and started thinking they were hard-men, but most of them were fake as a copper’s promise. The real trouble with them is they are unlikely to hold their nerve when needed. You do business with them but when police threaten them or offer incentives for information, they won’t think twice about singing their hearts out to save themselves.
Nice house and family you’ve got, must be expensive maintaining all that? If you don’t give us names, we’ll go public with this. I’m sure your boss would like to know what you’re up to.
I would need to manage my associates very carefully.
Life kicked back in at a million miles an hour as I rushed around to meetings and chased up leads. I wanted to have everything ready so that when the time came, I could hop on a plane and go. Yet the more I made my arrangements, the more I began to get an uneasy feeling. I often saw the same cars around me, sometimes the same drivers. For a time, I wrote it off as paranoia but the suspicion persisted, so I took my Golf GTi to a mechanic for reassurance.
Aaron picked me up from the garage and within five minutes my phone went.
‘Do you mind coming back quickly, John?’ the mechanic said. ‘There’s some important work needs doing on your car and I want to run it by you.’
When we returned the Golf was up on a hydraulic lift. The mechanic put his finger to his lips.
‘Listen mate,’ he said. ‘There’s a bit of a problem. Do you mind coming into the office to talk it over?’
I followed him into his office, a classic grease monkey’s gaff, Pirelli calendars, mess everywhere.
He shut the door, turned to me and started to speak so quietly I could barely hear it.
‘They’re fucking on you mate,’ he whispered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I found a GPS tracker and a radar device on the underside of your chassis.’
I followed him back out to the workshop and he showed me what he had found. He had removed them and placed them on a stool next to the car.
Immediately my mind was a blur. Where had I been? Who had I seen? Was there anything in my movements that could incriminate me, or anyone else?
I had a think and told him to put them back on. At least I knew they were tracking me. It made more sense to leave the devices intact so they wouldn’t suspect I had second-guessed their ploy.
Later that day I rang up my friend Brendan, who ran a small construction company.
‘I’m bang in trouble, mate,’ I told him. ‘I’ve only been out three weeks and I’ve got them all over me. I’m on licence. If they suspect I’m organising anything they’ll recall me. I’ll be back inside.’
‘So how can I help?’
‘Can I come to your office during the day, so it looks like I’ve got a job? If they think I’ve found work they might believe I’ve gone straight.’
‘Not a problem, mate!’
The next morning, about half past five, I turned up at Brendan’s house. He answered the door with the smile of someone who was used to being up at that time and we jumped in his car to head down to the site. No more than a minute into the journey the air filled with the roar of high-powered engines and five unmarked police cars with little blue lights flew past us back towards his house.
‘What the hell?’ Brendan asked.
‘They were on standby,’ I told him. ‘They’ve followed me down here. Because the car’s stopped they think I’m doing a job. That’s how it works. They track the vehicle and when it’s not moving is their time to come steaming in. If you’re driving, you’re not robbing!’
To maintain the pretence, I continued going to work with Brendan for a few weeks. I did no actual work, I just sat in his office, but it meant they had a log of me being there. I thought about them, analysing the readings from their devices, wondering what I was up to. It gave me a little kick. Soon I started coming up with other ways to mess with their heads.
‘Okay,’ I thought. ‘You’re going to follow me around? In that case I’ll make your lives as tedious as possible.’
Some days I would just go on random drives up the M1, pull in at a junction for a bit, give it a few minutes, then go around a roundabout and start coming back the other way. Other days I would drive into central London and spend the whole day crawling around in nose-to-nose traffic. I knew they were probably only 100 metres behind me and just wanted to tire them out.
Sometimes I would come out of my house with a holdall and chuck it in the back seat, to make it look like I was up to something. If they were watching me I knew they would be extra hot on me that day. Then I would just spend the afternoon pottering around Hyde Park, doing about 15mph.
After a couple of months of living like that, the novelty wore off. I still had six months of my licence to serve and couldn’t keep it up for the duration. That level of constant paranoia can get to you.
I went down to the car, removed the trackers, took pictures of them and threw them in a carrier bag. Then I phoned Henry Milner, who told me to go and see him at his office in Hatton Garden.
‘Hello John!’ he beamed, when I arrived. ‘Come in.’
I sat down and looked at him. He could tell something was up from my face.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘They’re all over me.’
I emptied the carrier bag out on to the table and his eyes widened in shock.
‘Good God man!’ he cried. ‘Don’t bring those into the office. They’re probably listening to everything we’re saying.’
He called his secretary and asked her to take the trackers back out to reception. After the door closed behind her he said, ‘John, listen to me. Whatever you’re doing, stop. Stop now.’
I had not committed any actual crime as such since getting out, but I had been to a few meetings, rubbed shoulders with a few faces. ‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked. ‘I’ve only just got out and they’re not giving me room to breathe.’
‘Look John, you know how it works. If I write to the Met and tell them they’re harassing you, all they will do is write back and say, “We neither confirm nor deny that we placed tracking devices on your client’s car.” It’s nonsense, but it gets them off the hook. Obviously they haven’t got a warrant for this, but we can’t press the issue.’
Henry took a couple of photographs then wrote a legal statement verifying he had seen them. I thanked him, put them back in the bag and drove down to the Thames by Surrey Quays. There were a few joggers and dog walkers wandering about, but I didn’t let that bother me.
‘Have that you cunts,’ I said. I pulled the batteries out and chucked them both into the river. The devices sank into the dirty water without a trace and a misplaced feeling of liberty rose in my chest.
The truth was, all it meant was from then on the game changed. They knew that I knew. I still had to be careful, maybe even more so than before, but the police would have to back off a little bit.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was the Flying Squad. They hadn’t forgiven me for beating those nine charges at the Old Bailey and what I said to them in the dock. Currie and his boys were desperate to put me away.
Fortunately, among my many associates were a few involved in buying, letting and developing properties, whom I used to organise temporary accommodation. No one was to know where I lived so I would move from one set of digs to another, every four to five weeks. They were nice places, fully furnished, but I couldn’t risk staying at one address.
My paranoia was such that if anything slipped out about where I was living, I would move immediately. On one occasion in a bar, Johnny forgot himself. A girl asked where I lived and I lied, but Johnny was a few drinks into the evening, chimed in and said, ‘That’s not right John, you’re living on Bluethorne Road.’ I had a real go at him later, slept somewhere else that night, then the next morning cleared my stuff out and left.
Whenever I moved I would go to WH Smith and buy packs of small coloured stickers, so I could put them over the screw fittings on my plug sockets and light fittings. If I went out, the first thing I would do on getting home would be to check all the stickers for disruption. That way, if my flat was entered while I was out and listening devices were installed, I would know about it. Bugs are usually fitted behind electrical points.
For the same reason I would put tiny strips of sellotape around the doorframe so I could see if anyone had been in. To alleviate the stress, I treated it all like a game, like the chess matches I enjoyed as a child. I had to think several moves ahead of any surveillance that could be taking place.
Whenever I was in a car with another player, we would have pointless, false conversations, never, ever about crime, just in case they were listening. We would try to sound as normal as possible.
‘So how’s things at the office John?’
‘Yeah, not bad, got a big report to do for Thursday though.’
‘Looking forward to the big match at the weekend?’
‘Oh yeah, can’t wait.’
I had a kid who went out and nicked cars for me. He would take them off garage forecourts and places like that. If anyone left their keys in the ignition, even if only for a few seconds, he would jump in and be away. Once he stole it we would ring it up.
We would find a hire car of the same model and get false plates made with that registration number then put the fake plates on to the stolen car. One of us would hire the rental car and nick the tax disc. That way you could drive around in the stolen vehicle and know that if police run a check it will come up as a legitimate car with tax and insurance. You can only do that for a month or so, then dump it and get another one.
Generally, I would only drive ringers and any cars I had, I would not park them near my house. When driving I wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. I would go to the Oxfam shop and buy second-hand clothes then leave them in the back seat. That way, if it ever got found, it would have other people’s DNA in there as well as mine.
I continued to get a buzz out of it, enjoying the feeling that I was smarter than them. I joined a gym, a posh David Lloyd place where I used to lift a few weights and jump in the sauna, just for reasons of vanity. It was absolutely crawling with police. I got a little thrill from talking to them and passing myself off as someone else. I would sit in the Jacuzzi and ask, ‘What do you do for a living then?’
‘I’m in the police. You?’
‘I’ve got my own internet business. We do website design and graphics.’
‘Oh, interesting.’
‘So what department do you work for?’
‘I’m on the safer neighbourhoods team.’
‘Oh, I bet that’s hard work, isn’t it? Dealing with all those little scallywags? Rather you than me.’
Despite the fun I invented for myself, I was also under pressure. I began to sense that their observations were becoming more overt. They knew I was playing games and didn’t like it.
There was a blonde woman with a fringe who I knew was connected to the Flying Squad and I kept seeing her around. If I parked my car, she would drive past. I would come out of a shop and see her walking away on the other side of the road. She kept popping up everywhere.
While I waited for the last couple of months of my licence to play itself out, I decided to start up a legitimate business interest with Aaron. We found a wholesaler who sold us cheap sex products, dildos, lubricants, porn, anything sleazy. The idea was to get a couple of girls we knew in an office with a few phones and a computer. They could run it for us and it would bring in a few quid until I started working properly.
As a result, we booked an appointment at HSBC in Bromley to discuss setting up a business account. It went well enough, although they asked a few awkward questions. As we left the branch a friend of ours called Tim drove past and beeped his horn at us. Moments later my phone rang.
‘John, it’s Tim.’
‘All right Tim?’
‘I’m good mate, what are you doing outside the bank?’
‘Just had a meeting, why?’
‘There’s a plain car on the corner of Charleston Road, with a man and a woman in it. The woman had a camera with a long lens. She was taking pictures of you.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘She had blonde hair with a fringe.’
‘Cheers mate.’
Anger swelled in my chest. I was not even planning any robberies, but the bastards were really limiting my freedom. I could barely go out and buy a pint of milk without them following me. It helped to clarify things in my mind. My only option was to wait for my licence to expire and go abroad. They were giving me no choice.