The Devil (7 page)

When he said this to me, I nearly fell over. I put my hand over the receiver and said to Andrew, ‘We're keeping half this stuff and he thinks we're taking too much, but he's prepared to give us ten grand for it!' Only then did the figures start to compute in my brain – ten grand probably didn't even cover half the amount we had. ‘A.J., we've got to find out what this stuff is worth,' I said.

At that time, I had no understanding of the amount of money involved in drugs, or the value of cocaine or anything like that. You have to remember that I was 23 or 24 years old, a member of the England karate team and I didn't drink much or smoke – I was a finely tuned athlete, whose body was a temple, and I usually only sipped orange juice. And I had fought all temptation to get involved in the business of Class A drugs – until then.

Strangely enough, we turned to my old mate Curtis Warren to value the stuff. He'd just been released from prison for holding up a security van. When inside, he'd become friends with Callum, an incredible, untouchable villain. Callum was from a dynasty of traditional gangsters who owned a snooker hall and gym and invested heavily in drugs. Today, the dynasty is worth tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of pounds. Callum and Curtis were only starting off then, but Curtis was still able to tell us that our kilo was worth about £1,000 per ounce. We found out we had £35,000 worth of gear.

Armed with this info, we phoned Robin back and told him that from then on we were his unofficial partners. I said to him, ‘We've got your gear back for you. You wouldn't have had it if it wasn't for us. Whatever you're getting for it, we're having half. We're not looking to do anything bad, like kill you. But next time you get one, we'll come with you as your partners to make sure you don't get robbed.' Deep down, I think Robin was just happy to have two good enforcers on his side who weren't looking to rip him off or do anything bad to him.

Word soon spread that we provided protection for drug dealers, helping them if they had a problem. Drug dealers started flocking to us, saying, ‘Such and such has robbed ten kilograms off me. Can you get it back?' Or ‘One of my distributors took five kilograms on tick and has bumped me the money. Can you recover the debt?'

Commissions on recovering narco debts started flooding in. Then Andrew and I hit on a brilliant idea – we should be more proactive. Robin's problem had been a passive situation that involved us solving an existing drugs robbery through negotiation. He had come to us. Why not go out there and generate our own business? Why not simply rob the drug dealers directly? Why not use extreme violence to make them give us their drugs and money? After all, they weren't going to fucking snitch on us, were they?

Thus began my descent into drugs, organised crime and what is now known as taxing. It was strange timing, because it was all completely at odds with developments in my family life, which had become more stable. After many years, I'd finally made peace with my dad for abandoning us. For the first time, we were doing the father and son thing and being friendly together. The reconciliation had started very tentatively and frostily more than ten years before when I'd been forced to go and visit him when I was aged about eleven. At that time, he was living with the same babysitter he'd run off with. When it was time for me to leave, he told me to give her a kiss goodbye. Fuck off. She was nothing to me, and as far as I was concerned she was the reason my dad wasn't at home with us. I've always had a fierce loyalty to my mother and anyone close to me, so I dodged under my dad's arm, jumped over the couch and ran out the house to avoid her.

When I got to the age of about 18 or 19, my balls had dropped, and I actually considered myself a man. Only then did I start to empathise with my dad. He had fought in the war for ‘Queen and Country' and had been entitled to come to the UK. Yet Britain in the early 1960s was a cold and racist place. On top of this, he also had the added pressure of being on the run. He had entered a mixed-raced relationship with my mum, who already had three children by two different men, and had two kids with her. No wonder he had fucked off – the pressure was too much for him. After realising this, I began to make allowances and started to build a relationship with him.

However, it wasn't as simple as that. Though I'd forgiven my dad on a surface level, I hadn't realised the effect an absentee father was having on my life. Although I didn't fully understand it at the time, my violence, aggression and propensity to evil and crime were partly down to my dad having not been around. While I was growing up, I'd had a series of uncles – my mum's boyfriends – but I'd never had a father to teach me right from wrong and how to deal with certain situations.

I had been raised mainly by women, and that is why I'm now so in touch with my feminine side. Believe it or not, it's being so sensitive that's made me so harsh. You wouldn't believe how sensitive I actually am, because it's covered by layers and layers of socialisation process and attitude. In part, I blame my father's absence for my chequered history – car thief by the age of 11, burglar by 13, mugger by 15, urban ninja by 18, armed robber by 21 and on the verge of becoming a drug dealer and protection racketeer by 24. Still, to this day, my dad's the only guy that I've never confronted about the things he's done to me. We've got this father–son dynamic: I can't face him down and tell him about the pain he's caused me. It's the elephant-in-the-room scenario.

However, it wasn't all a downer in my personal life. At that stage, I had met the woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life. Her name was Dionne Amoo. I first spotted her walking along the street. Then I bumped into her at a birthday party and instantly fell in love with her. The only problem was her boyfriend.

She used to come into Kirklands, so one night I went over to her boyfriend and said, ‘Dionne doesn't want to be with you any more. She's with me now. I'll give you the first shot free and after that it's all on.' He never fought me for her; he just walked away, and since that day we've been together.

As for Maria, I found out something about her that destroyed my trust in her. I moved out and left her to bring up my son Stephen, with my full financial support. Danny, my adopted son, was being brought up by my family.

Meanwhile, Andrew and I had decided to turn our business idea into a reality. There was certainly a gap in the market for something we called a ‘taxman'. This was an individual who preyed on drug dealers, taking their money off them by any means necessary – in other words, an underworld extortionist. The plan was to learn where these drug dealers held their stash of cocaine, heroin or draw and anything else of value, such as cash, cars, jewellery or expensive assets. How? By kidnapping and torturing them and stealing everything they had.

The philosophy behind taxing was simple. As drug dealers were involved in illegal activities themselves, they couldn't very well go to the police if they had been done over. Therefore, they could not rely on the biggest gang in Liverpool to protect them – Merseyside's finest boys in blue, the police force. As I had learnt before, unreported crime was the best crime, and the only recourse drug dealers had was the underworld. Gangsters were the only people that they could go to for help if they had been taxed – to ask them to threaten the taxman into returning their gear. However, at the time, Andrew and I thought we were invincible. We were fearless world-champion athletes and nobody could touch us. So that didn't fucking bother us.

PART TWO

THE PLAYER

7

FULL-TIME TAXMAN

My first taxation was on a heroin dealer called Brian Wagner from the Everton area of Liverpool. Me and my mate Marsellus conned him into thinking that we wanted to purchase ten kilograms of heroin – worth about £250,000 wholesale.

Strangely enough, he invited us to his mother's house to do the deal and took us right up to his bedroom. Here was one of the biggest Class A dealers in the city, taking us up to his room as though we were going to listen to pop records. I quickly came to realise that the majority of drug dealers weren't very smart guys. They'd put their most valued narcotics in their own houses, under their own mother's bed. How fucking daft is that?

I sat on his bed while he took out a blue Puma sports bag from his wardrobe and laid it on his Liverpool FC quilt cover next to me. Then he showed us a packet of the gear, containing about five kilograms.

I said, ‘Well that's nice. But where's the rest?' He shrugged his shoulders and said that he couldn't show us the other five kilos, so I pulled a gun on him and pistol-whipped him across the mouth. We were in game now. He knew that this was no run-of-the-mill sale. He was bleeding, saying that he didn't have any more kilos, so I put the gun in his mouth and said, ‘Tell me where it is, prick, or I'll put your fucking brains all over that Pink Floyd poster on the wall.'

He mumbled some bollocks about ‘no more gear', so I rammed the end of the barrel further into his mouth, smashing his teeth.

Meanwhile, his mum was shouting up the stairs, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, lads?' She didn't know what was going on, and there she was getting out the chocolate HobNobs for her visitors.

‘No thanks, Mrs Wagner,' I said politely, pushing the gun further down her son's throat. I then said to Wagner, ‘If you don't fucking tell me, I'll do your fucking ma as well, you fat cunt.' With that, he loosened up a bit.

‘I've got it stashed close by,' he admitted.

‘Good lad,' I said, putting the gun in my back pocket, like you see in the old films during a stick-up.

I marched him out of his house. However, as we were leaving, his mum spotted the blood from where I'd just hit him. She said to him, ‘What's happened, Brian? Are you all right, son?'

Fair play to the lad, he just smiled and replied, ‘We're just messing about, mam. Don't worry. Just wrestling and boxing and that. I'm only going to the car to get plasters. I'll be back in a minute. Put the kettle on.'

We all smiled, thanked her for her hospitality and got in the car to go and find the goods. Dickhead was in the back, I was driving and Marsellus was in the passenger seat. We were travelling north in the direction of the new cathedral when suddenly blue lights appeared behind us. Oh dear! The bizzies. I had a firearm on my person, five kilograms of heroin in the boot, a top drug dealer held under duress in the back and the police were about to stop us. Had his mum got suspicious and called 999? ‘No,' I thought. ‘It's too quick, surely?' I looked for other bizzy cars. ‘If his mum didn't call them, what the fuck is going on?'

My brain started to work overtime as I tried to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, Marsellus interrupted my train of thought. He said, ‘Kick it, kick it,' street talk for ‘Foot down and get off'. ‘Kick it, Stephen, now.'

He was panicking, but I said, ‘No, I can blag this.' By then, I had concluded that it was a routine stop. Even back then, I had nerves of steel. I didn't want a chase all over the city. I knew my limitations behind the wheel of a car – I'm no getaway driver. In fact, I'm not even a very good jockey. ‘No, it's OK, I can handle it,' I insisted.

Marsellus replied, ‘No, Stephen, no. Take the chase. It's too on top.' But I wanted to see if I could speak to the police officer. If he intended to arrest us, we would have to take it from there, but there was half a chance I could blag it if he was just a traffic bizzy.

I jumped out confidently and said, ‘Yes, officer, how can I help you? What is the problem?' I gave him my details, using a false name and address, and all the while I was lining him up for a good right hand, just in case. If he was to decide that he was blowing us through or calling for back-up, then it would all be on. The bizzy would get knocked out, and I would be getting off. Then again, why take that chance? For some reason, I had a sixth sense for that sort of thing. I didn't feel any danger about the tug. I didn't feel it was on top, despite the fact that Marsellus was still nudging me and telling me to, ‘Kick it, kick it. We can do it! Take the chase. It's not too late.' No, I knew that my false details would match with my description, so I was going to front it out for the time being.

The bizzy started taking notes and going through the motions. It turned out that he didn't even want to search the vehicle, he just wanted to tell us about a broken tail light. ‘Get it fixed,' he said.

Meanwhile, I was still lining up for a right hand, because I knew that it could go either way. If things went wrong, it would be a case of escape by any means possible. However, in the end, the bizzy drove off, and I got back into the car. Marsellus and I sat heavily into our seats. He turned his head towards me and said, ‘You're fucking good, you. You are really fucking good. Now let's go.'

Meanwhile, Wagner was in the back, probably thinking, ‘What's going on here?' He was one of the top grafters from one of the toughest barrios in one of the most on-top cities in the world. He was a pretty streetwise guy. Nonetheless, he had just watched a live lesson by a ‘big-top operator' in action. I actually reckon he was half impressed – half rooting for me, even though we had kidnapped him. After all, he was also a villain at the end of the day.

Once we were on our way, he directed us to some lock-ups at the back of a school, where he had the rest of his gear stashed. We quickly relieved him of the other five kilograms, stripped him naked and let him go. That was our first tax – a quarter of a million pounds for a few hours' work.

Funnily enough, the same guy got taxed three or four times after that by different crews. He ended up – and I've got to be very careful about bandying this label about, because I've been tarnished with it as well – as a police informer, to get him out of a prison sentence later on in his life. I haven't heard much of him since.