10
WITH the groundwork prepared in Holland the next step was to head out to the Costa del Sol and follow up on my contacts out there. Aaron had sorted out his house, a nice place on a leafy avenue, with five bedrooms and a big garden. He was ready too.
We booked a flight together and flew into Marbella, having a couple of drinks and a catch-up on the plane. Everything was ticking over with Eddie and we could examine other possibilities. The future looked bright.
The heat hit us like a wall as we stepped off on to the runway. We found accommodation quickly and settled in. One of the first things I did was meet up with Uncle Micky for dinner. He looked great, suntanned and really well.
‘You were right,’ I told him. ‘Old Bill made my life untenable back home.’
He nodded. ‘So stay out here. You’re done in England. Don’t bother with that anymore.’
‘I know.’
‘You still have to be careful though John. Interpol are getting hot on all the Brits out here. They send spotters into nightclubs, to pick out groups of English. If there’s a few of you together, they swoop in with mobile fingerprint scanners. Anyone who’s wanted back in the UK, they’re gone, straight away, so don’t get silly out here and think you can mess around. You’ve still got to be smart.
‘The other thing to look out for is the Russians. They’ve turned up in the last few years and they’re ruthless as fuck. They’ll end you quicker than the law will. If you have any problems with Russians, you’ve got to have it with them. It’s probably best to get in first. The crazy bastards will iron you out and iron all your family out too, if they feel like it. They went after a bloke recently who was getting a haircut, burst into the hairdressers with a Kalashnikov, opened up and killed everyone in the shop, just to make sure. They don’t give a shit. Half of them have grown up in war zones and their value of life is completely different. My advice is not to fuck about with them.’
At the time I had little to worry about, though. I was not wanted back in the UK, meaning Interpol would not interfere, while my business arrangement with Eddie and his boys meant I was fixed up for the near future. I wasn’t desperate for new work, Russian or otherwise. With that untroubled attitude, I soon realised why the Costa is such a popular place for the criminal fraternity.
In Marbella and its surrounding areas, there are incredible amounts of exciting ways for rich, young men to spend money. At times I was staying up for days, going from a bar, to a club, to a restaurant for breakfast. Then off to a clothes shop for some fresh togs, throwing the previous night’s clothes in a bin, buying some toothpaste and brushing my teeth in the sea, before going back to another bar and so the cycle would continue. I could quite easily spend 20 or 30,000 euros without stopping.
Cocaine was my drug of choice, although I was knocking back the booze and doing handfuls of Es as well. We got top quality gear through our network and as much of it as we wanted, whenever we wanted it. Five o’clock in the morning and you need an ounce of coke and 20 pills? No problem Mr McAvoy!
A favourite of ours was the pool party on Nikki beach, a tantalising slice of pure hedonism. There were podiums with half-naked dancers and everyone in the place was off their head on drugs. You could bounce about chatting to film stars, then Saudi princes, then top international businessmen. Me and Aaron would go down there, spend money like there was no tomorrow and think, ‘Yes! We’ve cracked it!’
One time I shared a spoon of coke with a well-known American businessman at the bar and he told me he had just sold one of his companies for nearly £100m. He bought ten crates of champagne and asked for it to be distributed around the club. Another time we shared a table with Antonio Banderas. None of it seemed unnatural.
The truth was that whole period was one in which I was incredibly happy. I was a young man, living life to the full and enjoying everything. I could look back on my time in prison with a smile. It seemed a lifetime away and I was surrounded by like-minded people.
We were mixing with multi-millionaires and royalty and the funny thing was that they were trying to get around us. We weren’t living in their shadow. They admired who we were as people, the self-earned lifestyle we had at such a young age. Their attention and companionship brought all sorts of new opportunities.
There was a day in the middle of the summer that myself and Aaron were sitting on Plaza beach. It was nearly lunchtime and we wondered which bar to hit before getting some food. I looked over the ocean and all the sun-seekers moored in the shallow waters. A DJ was playing tuneful house music in the bar behind us. We were just coming up on some lovely, floaty Es. Everything seemed so right.
‘Do you know what, mate?’ I said. ‘We are gonna make this. I can feel it in my guts.’
He reached over and slapped me on the shoulder.
‘I’ve been thinking the same thing. We’re gonna smash it.’
‘Listen though,’ I said, taking his hand. ‘If anything ever goes wrong, if you go down, I’ll come for you, all right? That’s the way it has to be.’
Aaron squeezed my hand back.
‘Of course mate. Me too. I’m always there if you need me.’
It wasn’t just the drugs talking. Both of us meant it. The criminal life can get you like that.
In the normal world you might say you ‘trust someone with your life’ but it’s just empty talk, a cliché. In our world it was literal, word for word, breath for breath. I had Aaron’s back and he had mine. The contacts we made over the holiday period, coupled with the drug smuggling operation meant that we were poised to ascend to the next level, the level everyone aims for, where the lines between criminality and legitimate business get blurred by the sheer amount of money involved. At that level, the police no longer come near you. We both knew it. We were in our early 20s and about to hit the big league.
Girls came and went, like Imogen, a hostess I hooked up with. She worked at a bar called the Panius Lounge where we got chatting over a bottle of Moet. You couldn’t help but fall for her a little bit, lovely looking, classy, with long legs and silky brown hair. She was wearing tight white hot-pants when we met and we started seeing each other regularly. I would pick her up from the bar when she finished work and take her out clubbing.
On one occasion we were in a nightclub called Dreamers, one of my favourites. We danced for a few hours, did a fair bit of MDMA then headed back to hers for a spot of chemically induced lovemaking. In the morning I got up for a glass of water and bumped into her housemate Jodie in the kitchen. She was an unbelievable sort as well, with lighter hair than Imogen, but an amazing body. Marbella is like that. It attracts beautiful young women from around Europe who are looking for rich boyfriends. For any man with a few quid, it’s a great place to go!
I got Jodie’s number as well and a couple of nights later took her to a party. We shared a couple of grams of coke and boogied for a while then she started giving me her come-to-bed eyes. I was never one to say no in those sorts of circumstances, so we went back to hers and got it on for an hour or two. She looked unbelievable without her clothes.
About 2am we heard the front door go. Imogen had finished work early and rather than go out to a club, as she usually did, had come home. To make matters worse, she knocked on the door of Jodie’s room and walked in on the two of us in bed. I pretended to be asleep while they launched into a vicious argument. Imogen went bonkers.
‘You slut, you fucking slag, what are you doing with him?’
‘We’ve just got together you bitch, you don’t own him!’
‘I fucking saw him first!’
‘So what, you shag anything in trousers, you can’t say I’m in the wrong.’
I buried my head under the duvet and cracked up laughing, waiting for the to-and-fro to end. Eventually Imogen stormed out, threw her clothes in a case and left. I gave it ten minutes to make sure the coast was clear then turned to Jodie.
‘Sorry babe, that was a lovely night until the end, but I’ve got to get going. I need to sort some stuff out.’
I padded into the lounge and found my clothes scattered over the coffee table and sofa in shreds. Even the £400 Gucci loafers I had been wearing had been cut into crude triangles. Imogen had taken revenge with scissors.
Jodie went to a neighbour’s flat and banged on the door to ask if I could borrow a pair of swimming shorts to go home in. After all that I sacked both of them off, they were more trouble than they were worth.
Not long after that, I hooked up with Annalise, a tall, blonde girl with huge fake tits. She looked like a glamour model and you would spot her a mile off if you were on the beach. She was a lovely person really, quite down to earth, with a strong Scouse accent. She also happened to be good friends with a guy known as ‘Mouse’ who supplied drugs to all the British holidaymakers in the town, so she was useful to know.
I found myself on Nikki beach at about one o’clock in the afternoon, at a bit of a loose end, with a hankering for some Es. Unfortunately, Mouse wasn’t answering his phone. A lot of the Marbella crowd don’t get out of bed until the middle of the afternoon. I scanned the beach and saw Annalise lying on a sun-lounger with no one next to her, so bought her a drink and sat down.
‘Fucking hell, I’m dying for some Es,’ I told her. ‘Do you know where I can get hold of some?’
She turned around and gave me the biggest smile I had ever seen. I could tell from her eyes over her sunglasses that she was completely off her face.
‘Don’t worry, la’,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some.’
I watched in disbelief and she put her hand inside her bikini bottoms, fumbled around then made a little face as she pulled something out. Grinning, she held up a plastic bag full of tablets.
‘Old school white doves,’ she said. ‘I always think it’s wise to keep them hidden.’
She started feeding me pills on the beach and by early afternoon I was quite spectacularly spannered. We stayed there all day, drinking, popping pills, getting higher and higher. They came to close the bar at 6pm so I gave the barman 100 euros and told him to leave us there.
They cleared out the other customers and we laid there just the two of us, buzzing our blocks off and watching the sunset. We were so euphoric and starting hugging. As the last rim of sun boiled into the sea I planted a massive kiss on her.
‘I’ve fallen in love with you, Annalise,’ I told her. ‘I want to be with you forever.’ We kissed passionately until it was too cold to stay.
With our bond formed through chemical romance, we headed out for the evening and bumped into Aaron having dinner at a seafood restaurant, with a friend of ours called Harry. They both cracked up laughing when we walked in. I had sunglasses on, my jaw was all over the place, I was grinding my teeth and had a six-foot-tall page three girl on my arm. We sat at the table with them for about a minute.
‘What the fuck have you been up to?’ Aaron asked.
‘There’s no way I can eat anything lads,’ I told them and went off with Annalise to continue our one-night love affair elsewhere.
Towards the end of the summer, Elodi came down to Spain with a couple of friends of hers, Lucia from Switzerland and Faye from Dubai. Lucia was an incredible-looking, dark-haired, willowy girl who spoke five languages. She was easily the most impressive woman I had ever met, while Faye looked like an Arabian princess. For a while they became my night-time companions and we went out 24/7 for the best part of a month.
One night we found ourselves in Dreamers and were there until it closed at five in the morning. We’d all done so much gear there was no chance of sleep, so we went back to my place, then went straight to the beach. We were only there for about five minutes when I jumped up.
My heart raced and my face poured with sweat, as I suffered the onset of what coke users call the ‘horrors’. A feeling of paranoia washed over me, my vision blurred and my legs shook.
We got back in the car, drove back to my flat and as I laid there naked on the bed, with Elodi beside me, I genuinely thought I would have a heart attack. I stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep for hours, heart thundering, breath short, waiting for the drugs to wear off. Gripped with fear, I promised myself to stop overdoing it. I was pushing my luck, sometimes getting through hundreds of pounds of drugs in a week. It was great fun, but seriously unhealthy. I knew if I kept going like that I could have major problems.
By then, the middle of August 2005, I was still in the process of moving my life to the continent permanently and paid a couple of friends to hire a van, load it up with furniture and belongings in London then drive it out to Spain. I organised a few hundred quid and quarter of an ounce of top-notch cocaine for them, so they could keep themselves awake and do the whole journey in one hit. Unfortunately, the air conditioning broke and they arrived on the Costa after 24 hours of solid driving in a terrible state. High as planets, but dehydrated and suffering with heat exhaustion, it took them a few days to recover.
Still, with the last of my possessions with me in Marbella, I felt truly settled. I had no reason to return to the UK and no intention of doing so, until I got a phone call reminding me that Paul, my crazy friend who had been with me for my arrest, was celebrating his 25th birthday in early September back in London. A big party was planned and Paul had especially requested that I receive an invitation. We had been through a lot together. He hadn’t cracked when the police applied pressure before the trial and I felt I owed it to him to be there.
Aaron and I booked ourselves a flight back to the UK and Elodi drove us to the airport.
‘Why are you going back?’ she asked as she dropped us off.
‘Just a party I need to go to.’
‘I don’t get it, why not stay out here?’
‘Its fine babe, I’ll be back next week.’
‘I’ve got a bad feeling.’
I laughed.
‘Bad feeling about what, you silly cow?’
I gave her a kiss goodbye and headed into the terminal with Aaron. On the plane I told him I was quitting drugs. The risk to reward ratio wasn’t working for me anymore and I had to think of the future. He didn’t believe me, but I was determined.
We landed at Gatwick and I went straight into a phone shop in arrivals to buy a pay-as-you-go. I didn’t want to give out my Spanish number to anyone while I was back.
Johnny came to pick us up and as we were heading up the M23 back to London, I wrote the new mobile number down on a strip of paper and gave it to him.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Johnny asked.
‘Drop me round my Mum’s please mate.’
‘Okay. I’ll come and pick you up again later. We can go out.’
Mum was delighted to see me and kept talking about how well I looked. It was nice to see her happy. I had put on some weight and developed a lovely tan.
In early evening Johnny phoned and said something had come up. He would not be picking me up after all. In some ways it was a welcome relief. All summer in Spain I had burned the candle at both ends and an early night was sensible. By 11pm I was asleep in my old bedroom at home. First thing in the morning, at about seven, my new phone rang. I answered it, assuming it was Johnny as he was the only one I had given the number to.
‘Hello mate.’
‘Hello?’ The voice was unfamiliar. ‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s Kevin.’
I had not heard from Billy’s associate Kevin Barnes for years. He had been acquitted when their case had come up, but by the time of his release I had already been put away, meaning there had been no opportunity for our paths to cross.
‘How’d you get my number?’
‘I was out with Johnny last night. He told me you were back.’
‘Well it’s great to hear from you Kevin. How are you?’
We exchanged a few pleasantries and chit-chat.
‘So as you’re back for a few days, how about a meeting?’ he asked.
There was no reason to rebuff an old friend and we arranged to meet for breakfast at a local café that morning. I had no idea at the time and sadly neither did he, but Kevin was subject to an enormous, combined surveillance operation by the Met and the Flying Squad. I met him outside the café, shook his hand, then went inside and ordered a bacon roll and a coffee. All the while I was being videoed and photographed.
It only cost about £4, but in many ways it would end up being the most expensive breakfast imaginable.