by Gary Mulgrew
‘Well, they only needed to ask and we would have helped. We would have gone over there. We had already told the FSA that.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘When we first went forward, self-reported. They asked us and we told them we would help them in any way we could.’
‘You, you went forward to the FSA? You self-reported?’ His eyes widened.
‘Yes.’
‘B . . . but why? Why would you do that?’
I looked at him quizzically for a moment. Perhaps no one would ever believe us, no matter how often we said it. What is it about the FBI or the Department of Justice that leads people to believe the nonsense they peddle? Law and Order has got a lot to answer for.
‘Because,’ I said, emphasising each word. ‘We didn’t. Actually. Do it.’
Mike sat back in his seat. His smile showed he didn’t believe me, but he was intrigued by what I had said. Maybe he thought we were part of some grand double-bluff?
‘You’ve got to admit that was a dumb thing to do?’ he asked eventually, but I just shrugged my shoulders. I’d made my choices. It felt as if the oxygen and energy had been sucked out of the room. Mike stayed slumped back in his seat as I leaned toward my glass and gazed at the table. Going into the FSA was among the worst decisions I ever made, but regretting going forward was the same as regretting who I was.
‘Gal, Gal?’ One of the others – Dan maybe – shouted across to me and broke this awkward reflection. He was about my age, with a boxer’s nose and noticeably large hands and features. Although he was wearing a nice suit, it just didn’t sit comfortably on him. He looked like he was ready to bust out of it at any moment.
‘Gal, you know how to handle yourself, right?’ he asked, a large smile on his face.
I smiled back and shrugged my shoulders.
‘Yeah, you do? Where’s you from, Glasgow right? They’re fuckin’ well ‘ard in Glasgow, right?’
‘Was he challenging me?’ I thought, nervously.
‘Where do you get those scars? You don’t get them for nuffin’!’ he said, looking at my arms. I had rolled up my sleeves when I took my jacket off. I’d long stopped being self-conscious of the numerous scars on my arms.
‘Oh, they came from a woman,’ I said, smiling. (Technically true, as it was a woman doctor who was responsible for a few of them.) That brought plenty of laughter.
‘A woman? Told you he is not so tough!’ said one of the others, who seemed Eastern European, and I thought was called Haider. There followed a twenty minute show-and-tell session that ran from various broken bones, scars and knife wounds to alleged bullet holes, all, allegedly, caused by wronged women – and, surprisingly, in Haider’s case by a wronged man. After the tension of the last few hours, I was enjoying the release.
I noticed at one point Mike had slipped off to have a five-minute chat with Harry at the bar – no doubt filling him in on our earlier conversation. When they returned, Harry was looking at me more intently than ever. Out of the blue, Dan, having suddenly stopped laughing about the tapestry of scars on each of us, turned and said, ‘Gal, what d’you do wif the money?’
‘What?’ I said, still laughing a bit at the latest woman-wound – which looked more like an errant BCG scar than a mortal slight.
‘What do you do wif the money?’ he reiterated in his strong cockney tone.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked calmly, though my heart was racing.
‘When you stole the money from NatWest.’
‘I didn’t steal it,’ I interrupted him.
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. But you got all that fuckin’ money, right?’ This was a new Dan, Dan the bruiser.
‘Eh . . . yeah, yeah. I got it,’ I responded hesitantly, wondering where he was going with this.
‘And it was millions of dollars, right?’
‘Right,’ I said uncomfortably.
‘And you ’ad it in the Cayman Islands, right?’
Man, they were well informed. ‘Er, yes. It was in the Cayman Islands.’
‘So what did you fuckin’ do wif it then?’ he asked again impatiently.
Everyone was hanging on every word.
‘Do you mean how did I spend it?’ I asked stupidly.
‘Not ’ow you fuckin’ spent it, you muppet. ’Ow you got it back into the fuckin’ country,’ he said, with a serious expression on his face.
‘Oh, now I get it,’ I said, putting my drink down. Money laundering. I nodded for a few moments, laughing at myself for being so slow up on the uptake.
‘I transferred back into my account with NatWest here in London,’ I said innocently enough.
‘You . . .’ he paused for a moment as he leaned forward and put his glass down. ‘You did fuckin’ wot?’
‘I transferred it back to my NatWest account in London,’ I continued. ‘I phoned them and told them I had made a big off-shore investment with a client and that a large sum would be coming from the Cayman Islands in a couple of tranches.’
Quickly looking around as I spoke, I started to slow down as I realised the significance of what I was saying. I swallowed hard. Bizarrely, I had never thought of that before.
There was a moment’s silence before Dan wrapped his large arm round my shoulder. ‘Mate,’ he said dramatically. ‘That is . . . fuckin’ quality. Fuckin’ genius!!’ he declared to the general approval of the rest of the troop.
‘You’ve got some fuckin’ balls on you, mate,’ he continued becoming much more likeable again.
‘Stealing their money one day, then asking them to ’old it the next. Fuckin’ outstanding!’ he continued, as he raised his glass once more to me.
‘It’s like robbing a fuckin’ jewellers,’ enthused one of the other guys to the rest of the group, ‘and then giving it back a few weeks later and asking ’em to keep it safe for you!!’ he said laughing. ‘Fuckin’ ‘ats off to you, Gal,’ he continued, raising his glass as well.
‘B . . . but . . . but I didn’t steal the money,’ I said almost to myself as the conversation took off again, my legendary status becoming assured. I felt embarrassed, unsure, as the compliments about the ‘size of my balls’ and my ‘cockiness’ continued.
Eventually, thankfully, we went back downstairs to one of the bars. Ray had left earlier, still laughing at me as he said goodbye, and by now the Chelsea-Liverpool game was in full swing with the club’s Slavic contingent seemingly well behind Chelski. The game was very boring, though, and I was looking to make my exit.
‘Harry, thanks for your hospitality, but I have to leave,’ I said, as I approached him with my hand out. He was talking to two other guys who looked like well-dressed businessmen.
‘Give us a minute,’ he said to them as he put an arm around my shoulder. ‘Don’t fancy any of the eye-candy?’ he said motioning to a couple of elaborately dolled-up ladies sitting nearby on a sofa.
‘Are they all hookers?’ I asked naively.
‘How can they be hookers if they’re already paid for?’ Harry asked, with a wink. ‘There’s a couple of rooms upstairs for the members’ exclusive use, if you’re interested.’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Not my thing really. I’m picking my boy up tomorrow and I don’t want to be a wreck for him.’
‘None of this is really your “thing”, is it?’ he asked sympathetically.
‘No, not really,’ I responded looking right at him.
He nodded. ‘Gal, can I give you a bit of advice?’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t go to Texas. Whatever happens, don’t let them get you to Texas,’ he said with some sincerity.
‘I’ll try not to,’ I answered, a bit too glibly.
‘No, no,’ he said more forcibly, putting both hands on my shoulders. ‘I want you to fink about somefing for me,’ he said in a slight change of direction.
‘OK,’ I said, hesitantly.
‘Cyprus.’
‘Cyprus?’ I said.
‘Cyprus. Hundred grand. Special deal for you. Land for you to build on an
d a new identity. Passport, paper, credit cards, the full boona.’
‘£100,000,’ I repeated numbly, my head spinning at the thought of being Asil Nadir’s neighbour.
‘A one-off deal for you, Gal; you’ll just cover our costs. I’m doing this because I think you’re getting fucked by the Yanks and our own fuckin’ government, and I don’t like it.’
‘Look, Harry,’ I said, placing my hand on his arm and moving a little away to break the spell. ‘I appreciate what you’re saying and I appreciate the offer. But I’m going to fight them and I am going to win the extradition. If need be, I’ll win easily in a court in Britain,’ I asserted, still at that stage believing it.
‘You’re not listening to me, my son. You’re never going to trial in the UK; they know you wouldn’t be found guilty, otherwise they’d have done you ‘ere in the first place. They’ll get you to the US then you will never make it to a trial. No one does.’ That wasn’t technically true, but I got his point.
‘Cyprus,’ he said again.
‘OK, OK,’ I said, suddenly feeling tired and overwhelmed and anxious to start the long journey out of London.
Harry re-asserted his grip on me one last time, his eyes searching into mine. ‘Just promise me you’ll fink about it. Fink about it. OK?’ and with that he patted me on the shoulder, gave me a nod and turned away.
The evening after my last chat with Angel, I lay back on my bunk in Big Spring and wondered why I never did ‘fink’ about Harry’s offer. I suppose I was fighting to regain my life, not run away from it. Besides, at that stage, maybe only a gangster could see what I could not – that I was screwed.
Someone came to collect me from my bunk around 10.30 p.m. The lights were already down; respectful of the rules of the Range, the messenger boy nudged me gently and asked me in a soft voice to come with him. I recognised him as one of Angel’s guys. They had a whole chest-bumping, fist-clenching thing that they did and I’d often seen Angel chest-bumping and fist-clenching with this guy in the past. He was young, short, quiet, sharply cut and all business. I’d barely jumped down and he had already headed off. The door had been reopened after the count. It probably wouldn’t finally close until around 11 p.m., but there were already significantly fewer people moving around; lots of inmates preferring the tranquillity of sleep to the perils of a few more hours awake in Big Spring.
I followed my escort through the main thoroughfare and up the stairs to the first floor of Sunset. Without checking I was still behind him, he moved swiftly through the first Range, Range 7. It was longer than our room, with even more people – maybe around 120 inmates. There were a few people moving around in the subdued light, but not many. It made me think of how submarine quarters would be at night-time.
We moved through another large, rectangular room almost 200 feet long, then continued to the end of it and on through a long corridor with a further warren of rooms either side of the corridor that acted as satellites of Range 8. I’d never been here before, and these sub-rooms were much smaller, housing no more than twenty or thirty inmates each, perhaps offering more discrete accommodation for the high-status prisoner. Some of the rooms looked as if they used to be offices or large storage cupboards, but all were jam-packed with this backwash of humanity. In the subdued light I could see no more than brief silhouettes, but the place reeked of despair and depravity. This was the net effect of America’s choice to continue to imprison a large section of its underclass – now totalling 2.3 million men and women – or ten times the per capita rate of any other Western country. In a nation where a local mayor of a small town, a congressman or a senator could never be elected if they suggested any kind of softening on crime, this was the living, writhing result. My love affair with America had been easy when I was riding high as a smartarsed banker, but the entrails of this country were so much harder to admire.
The continued cutbacks in funding, and the insistence that philosophically prisons were about punishment – that rehabilitation wasn’t a cure – meant that conditions would only get worse here, and the strain on space would grow ever greater. It also meant the gangs could not only flourish, but begin to occupy the ‘policing’ vacuum left by the over-stretched cops.
There were no closed doors to any of these rooms, but the narrow corridors connecting them twisted and turned in various directions, giving each off-shoot some sense of isolation and privacy. I couldn’t imagine the cops would venture down here very often, and by the time they did whatever ‘stuff’ was taking place would surely be over. One more turn took me to a very congested corridor, outside what seemed to be the final room in this network. There were Native Indians, African-Americans, Mexicans, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans and Colombians all milling around or kicking back outside – a multitude of guards, it seemed. Among them I saw SlumDawg and at that moment I knew I’d reached the shot-callers. As I slowed down and started to ease past them, my messenger stopped at the door to the room and turned to face me, flicking his head to motion me to enter. The last person I had to squeeze by was SlumDawg – unpleasant both because of our proximity and the fact that he reeked of alcohol.
The room itself couldn’t house more than ten or twelve inmates – and must at some stage have been a storage closet instead of a place where men spent their lives.
‘Hey Scotland, how are you doing? Come on in,’ Angel called out, jovially fist-bumping me and offering no further introductions as I squeezed my way in. There were probably eight or nine other guys in the room, some sitting, some standing, some looking at me, some not. It was hard to get a handle on them since none of them introduced themselves or offered their fists for a bump. No one seemed interested in the pleasantries. There was a seat between them, right in the middle, which Angel motioned for me to take. I hesitated; I would be right in the middle of a tightly congested room with people in the front, around and behind me, many of them standing up as I was sitting down. That intimidated me. I moved forwards, but then foolishly hesitated again.
‘Go on, Scotland,’ Angel said, his sardonic smile taunting me as he motioned me towards the chair. Getting a grip of myself and allowing my fears no airtime, I moved smoothly through the faceless gathering and sat down. I was trying to attach shot-caller to gang, but that was difficult since four were Hispanics and looked more like bingo callers than shot-callers. I smiled at the tubby little round one right in front of me. He didn’t smile back. He had a tattoo of a hand with two fingers held up in a V-sign on his shaven head which I knew was the West Texas Syndicate insignia. He had some papers in front of him which, having finished staring at me, he began to read again.
No one spoke for a moment, and I realised they were waiting for TexMex to finish whatever he was reading. A second look confirmed it was my papers, even though they had already been returned to me – which meant, incredibly, that the gangs had access to a photocopier. Was there a Gang Admin Centre somewhere in this warren? I realised I had seen TexMex a few times before. I had noticed him talking to the guards and once in the guards’ office in the ground floor of Sunrise. It had stuck in my mind because you seldom saw anyone converse much with the guards and it was unusual to be so openly chatty.
Angel smiled, as did the man I took to head the Native Indians, before my eyes settled on a white, hairy, crazed-looking guy – who I guessed was the AB shot-caller. He was big, very big, like an overfed biker, and unusually healthy looking for a member of the Master Race. I averted my eyes from his quickly, way too quickly I realised, in a movement that could easily be construed as showing fear. I tried not to lose my composure, but now I felt awkward about where to look. Just swallowing seemed to take on a magnified significance, as I become painstakingly aware of my every movement, my every breath. Feeling I was crumbling under their gaze, I tried to re-assert control over myself and to at least raise my gaze again to this assortment of hardened criminals. Doubts started creeping through my mind: what was I doing here? I was a fraud. I was afraid. What did they want from me? My neck felt stiff, as if my head
weighed a hundredweight – had anyone noticed?
I battled for control of my fears and forced myself to look at the AB leader again, who was now leaning over talking to one of the other shot-callers. No one seemed to have noticed my mini-crisis and I began to relax a tiny bit more as I started to assess the AB shot-caller in detail. He was a big guy alright, and my eyes were drawn to what seemed like the same tattoo across his chest that I had seen on my first day in Big Spring when the ABs were on their recruitment drive. Another Bob hater, I thought, mystified by their bizarre relationship with Bob, until the big man turned towards me and the full stupidity of my mistake was exposed to me. The tattoo didn’t say ‘Bob Hates Me’ but ‘God Hates Me’. I replayed the bemused look of SlumDawg and his sidekick as I’d told them to take their gifts and ‘give them to Bob’, mistaking the key word thanks to the neckline of his low-slung vest. What an idiot I was, I told myself, feeling more confidence drain from me; an idiot abroad. Why hadn’t I just kept my mouth shut?
‘This ees strange,’ said TexMex eventually raising his head, and looking at the other shot-callers. ‘All that money and so short?’ He meant the length of my sentence – or rather, he meant that I must have squealed in order to get one so short.
‘No estoy un rata,’ I said slowly, my Scottish accent rolling over the word ‘rata’. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d used Spanish, perhaps it was the sincerity behind my words, but it seemed to have the desired impact. Angel spoke quickly to TexMex and the other Hispanics in Spanish – too quickly for me to understand, but he was stopped abruptly as the AB shot-caller suddenly bellowed, ‘Eng-glish!’ adding, ‘Come on, Angel, you know the rules about this shit.’
Angel smiled and grimaced at the same time, in a way only he could.
‘Okay,’ Angel began. ‘We only speak English in this meeting. You know the deal, Scotland. You’ve caused too many waves since you got here and we need to sort out who you are going to run with and whose protection you fall under.’
‘Yeah, protection at a price,’ I thought, as his words confirmed all my fears as to the purpose of the meeting.
