No More Heroes

by Stephen Thompson

‘Deal.’

  He started gathering up the dishes and I went to the toilet. I needed to go but when I got there I decided to hide the gun and pick it up on my way out. After what Theodore had said earlier, it seemed liked the least I should do. At first I didn’t know where to put it. I tried to wedge it behind the cistern but it wasn’t concealed enough. In the end I hid it in the boiler cupboard then went to join Theodore in the kitchen. We washed the dishes in silence.

  * * *

  I continued to hide out, coming into Hackney only to sign on and to cash my giro cheques. The rest of the time I spent cooling my heels in Edmonton. To supplement my income I started selling a bit of hash from my flat to a bunch of white kids who lived on my estate and who smoked the stuff as if it was going out of fashion. To earn the money to support their habit they had turned their local area into a virtual crime zone. They must have broken into every car, house and shop within a five mile radius of the estate. Their parents, those who weren’t banged up, had allowed them to run so wild they had become almost feral. They hated everyone who tried to come between them and their freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted. They especially hated the police, and as I had no love for the Met’ myself, I could relate to them if only on that score. They took a real liking to me. Not only because I always had good hash – they had a particular weakness for Lebanese Brown and I would go out of my way to try and get it for them – but also because I was black.

  It was for kids like these that the word ‘wigga’ was coined. Their clothes, the language they used, the music they listened to, even their hopes and dreams; all of it was influenced by black culture, and specifically Jamaican culture. This one wanted a black girlfriend who wore nothing but batty-riders, that one wanted as fearsome a rep as a Yardie, another wanted to go to Jamaica to smoke Sensi all day, every day. They were utterly ridiculous. But I liked them. So much so that I allowed them to have the run of my flat. Most evenings they would assemble in my front room to smoke hash till late into the night. In return for my hospitality and generosity they gave me their loyalty and even their love. They couldn’t do enough for me. If they went out on the thieve, I got first refusal on their ill-gotten gains. When Old Bill came snooping about, they acted as my early-warning system. They had my back. They looked up to me. They also feared me. It was important that they did and I made sure of it by regularly brandishing the Browning. At the sight of it they’d become, quite literally, dumbstruck. Whenever they made me angry – which was often – I would shout and threaten them and wave the gun about and send them scurrying for the door like so many rats fleeing a larder. I didn’t like to frighten them in this way but I had to do it from time to time to keep them in check. After my bouts of anger they would give me a wide berth for a few days, but then slowly, one by one, they would drift back and things would return to normal.

  Living as a kind of exile in the back of beyond, playing Fagin to a gang of juvenile crooks – and white ones to boot – was not my idea of a life. But then I couldn’t see a realistic alternative. I might have yearned for a more honourable, more virtuous way of living but I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t see beyond my immediate situation. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to be on the run any more. I was fed up of hiding. I had to do something to bring the situation to a close.

  * * *

  Dealing from my flat was always going to attract the attention of the police, but I did it in the hope that when they came calling I would receive enough warning from my scouts to be able to get rid of whatever I was holding. It didn’t turn out that way, not exactly. On the day the police smashed in my door, I got the heads up soon enough to be able to hurl my block of hash and the gun out the back window of my fifth-floor flat, but in my haste I’d forgotten the bag of weed in my bedroom. Fortunately it was only small, half an ounce of prime red-beard Ses, so when I appeared in court a few weeks later it was on the lesser charge of ‘possession’ and not the much more serious ‘possession with intent to supply’. I pleaded guilty and was fined two hundred and fifty quid and given a six-month suspended sentence. I thought it was a bit harsh, but at least I had walked out of court. The fact that I now had a criminal record was almost a minor consideration.

  I got my hash and gun back. I had written them off as lost, but even as I was being handcuffed one of my boys had sneaked round the back of the flats and picked them up for safe keeping. For his initiative I rewarded him with an eighth of Leb and a lot of praise.

  After the first raid, the police came back twice in quick succession. On both occasions they came up empty-handed – my scouts had been put on extra alert and posted at all the estate’s main entrances – but I knew it was only a question of time before they got me. I felt it was time to move on but I had nowhere else to go. I was paying a slightly higher rent than the council were charging the registered tenant, but it was still quite cheap. I couldn’t imagine where I would find such a cushy number again. I didn’t even bother considering the private rental market. Even if I’d had the necessary papers – references and bank statements and such – I couldn’t have afforded the extortionate deposit. I might have been dealing, but that didn’t mean I was rolling in dough. In American parlance, I was a nickle-and-dimer, a low-level hash dealer who still relied on his giro as a way to supplement his income. For all those reasons, I was extremely reluctant to give up my sub-let. I wanted to leave, it made sense for me to leave, but until I had something else lined up, something as cheap or cheaper, I had to stay put. It was a case of needs must.

  When I heard a high-ranking Met’ officer describe the Yardies as ‘a cancer that must not be allowed to take hold in Britain’, I began to see a way out of my situation. The officer, who was being interviewed on TV after a shooting incident in Stockwell, went on to say, ‘It would be remiss of us as police officers to underestimate the threat posed to society by these gangs and I want to reassure the public that we are not underestimating it.’ The police had to do something, or at least be seen to be doing something. And so, where in the early eighties the Yardies had been tolerated, by the middle of the decade they were being routinely arrested and deported, or ‘dipped’ as we used to say. I practically sat on my hands and waited to hear news that Fleas and his crew had been rounded up and sent home, but, depressingly, none came. They were obviously not high enough on the list of Jamaica’s most wanted, but even so, the police clearly had them on the run. Whilst not exactly living underground – there were too many haunts in the London where they could congregate without disturbance – they didn’t dare show their faces on the Front. For me, that represented progress, but it didn’t draw me out of hiding, not completely. I sneaked on to the Front occasionally, but only when I had received word from either Mitch or Benjy that the coast was clear and only for a few minutes at a time. The situation had improved, I could breathe a little easier, but my life was still very much in danger.

  The police finally got me. One night, on my way home, I got pounced on by a gang of plain clothes CID boys. They raided my flat and found my stash of hash but, by a stroke of pure luck, not the gun. At the station, under questioning, I realised I’d been grassed up and that the snake was probably one of my boys. ‘Where’s the gun, Simon? Where have you hidden it?’ I hadn’t hidden it. A mere two days before I was arrested I had given it back to Lee who said he needed it for ‘a job’ and that I could borrow it again just as soon as he had finished with it. The police had been foiled in their primary objective and were not happy about it at all. Under normal circumstances, a charge of ‘possession with intent to supply’ would have been a result for them, but in my case they regarded that as second prize. For the amount of hash they’d found, I was probably looking at a measly eighteen months inside, whereas with the gun, I might have expected something closer to five years.

  In the end I left the sub-let not through my own choice, but because the police forced the council to evict me and board the place up until such time as the new tenants moved in. Actually, technically speak
ing, it wasn’t me they evicted but the person whose identity I’d been using. I hadn’t told him I was dealing from his flat and when he found out he’d lost the place he blew his top and had a go at Ras Malachi who in turn had a go at me. There was nothing I could do to make things up except offer a bit of money – five hundred pounds – which the tenant grudgingly accepted. As to my boys, I turned my back on them without so much as a backward glance. I was so incensed at the thought that one of them had grassed me up that I decided to stay well away from them in case I did something I would end up regretting.

  During my summary appearance at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court, the police had asked that I be remanded in custody to await my trial because of the seriousness of my offence and because I was now of ‘no fixed abode’, but on the basis of my previous court appearance my brief had argued that I was hardly a flight risk and that I should be granted unconditional bail. On the question of where I resided, he gave assurances to the court that I had moved back in with my parents and that they were even prepared to stand surety against the risk of me doing a runner. My parents had done no such thing. They didn’t even know I’d been arrested, but I had sworn to my brief that they were in my corner and that they would do anything to help secure my release. Having listened carefully to both arguments, the Magistrates granted me bail, but made it clear that their decision had less to do with my solicitor’s argument and more to do with their reluctance to add unnecessarily to the overcrowded prison population. And even then they only released me on condition that I report once a week to my local nick. It didn’t matter to me what condition they imposed, because I had no intention of either reporting to the police or showing up for my trial. The moment I walked out of that courtroom I was effectively on the run, which meant that with Fleas on one side and the police on the other, I had no room for manoeuvre.

  With nowhere left to turn, I moved back into the squat with Mitch and Benjy. I rarely went out. The squat was not exactly impregnable, but with all the security doors and burglar bars, Fleas would have had a hard time getting in. After showering me with praise for what I had done to Django, Mitch had turned on me for going into hiding. For him, the courage I had shown in avenging my brother had been completely undone by my subsequent behaviour. It goes without saying that I saw the situation in a different light. I believed I had done the sensible thing in the face of overwhelming odds, but to Mitch I was just being gutless. In my shoes, he would have launched an all-out attack on Fleas and his boys, given them, as he described it, ‘pure agony’.

  One day, soon after I had moved in with them, Benjy said, ‘Let’s kidnap the faggot, torture him, then give him the old Corleone treatment.’ When I asked for an explanation of the ‘Corleone treatment’, Benjy said, ‘We weigh the fucker down with cement and throw him in the Thames.’ At this, Mitch bared his teeth, like a snarling Rottweiller. ‘Yeah, yeah, and then we send a fish wrapped in newspaper to all his pussyhole friends. “Fleas sleeps with the fishes”. Ha!’ I found this sort of talk ludicrous, cartoonish, but I couldn’t dismiss it because I knew that Mitch at least was being deadly serious. Schooled in films like The Godfather and Scarface, he was itching to act out his gangster fantasies and saw my situation with Fleas as the perfect opportunity to do so. I didn’t even want to think about what they were suggesting, much less carry it out, but that was before I received news that Fleas and his boys, in a desperate attempt to flush me out of hiding, had fired shots through the window of my parents’ flat.

  To be a player, you had to observe the rules of the game. If you had a beef with someone, you sorted it privately. You never went to the police, you never involved civilians, and you never, ever targeted your enemy’s parents. Fleas had crossed the line, and from that moment he was as good as dead in my eyes.

  My parents didn’t know who had attacked them, but they suspected it had something to do with me. I protested my innocence, strongly, but they were not persuaded. More angry than afraid, they ended up calling the police, who of course couldn’t help them. An unprovoked attack without witnesses wasn’t much for them to go on. They surmised that it was probably a case of mistaken identity and advised my parents to stay away from their flat for a while, just in case.

  In films, the police always went further. They investigated, they interviewed friends and family and neighbours, they put the word out on the street to see if their informants could tell them anything, but this was real life, this was Hackney in the eighties, this was a crime involving a Black family. The case was closed before it had even been opened. A potentially deadly attack, committed with firearms, didn’t seem to concern them over-much. They were more interested in tracking me down because I hadn’t reported to the police station as stipulated under my bail agreement. After interviewing them over the shooting, they told my parents to inform me that there was now a warrant out for my arrest and that I should do the sensible thing and give myself up. There was no chance of me doing that. At that time all I could think about was how to hit back at Fleas. Now that I had Mitch and Benjy helping me out, I had made up my mind to take the fight to him. The game had changed. It was now me on the front foot.

  My plan was to rub out Fleas and hope that the rest of his crew would become demoralised and scatter. I’d heard that their heart wasn’t really in the fight, that they were only going along with Fleas out of fear, that one or two were even secretly hoping that I would do away with him and in this way remove his boot from their necks. They had come to England to escape the gangster way of life. Like most immigrants, they had come to work hard and make money to send back to their suffering relatives in Jamaica. They were more than happy to exploit their fearsome reputations as and when it suited them, but had little interest in waging a long-running war with an enemy they couldn’t see, on a battleground they didn’t know. What had happened to Django had exposed their vulnerability. And with the police now harassing them at every turn, the word on the street was that they were fed up. They wanted out of a country they had initially regarded as a soft touch – in comparison to the States – but which had proved to be anything but. In fact, a couple of Fleas’ gang had already departed for calmer shores – Canada of all places – and others were rumoured to be thinking of joining them. But until then, they were stuck with Fleas. If this was indeed an accurate assessment of the situation – and I had enough eyes and ears on the street to assure me that it was – then my goal was simple. Get Fleas.

  Mitch was in his element. He spent a lot of time and energy discussing what methods of torture he would use against Fleas and how he would bring him to such heights of pain that he would end up begging to be killed. I just wanted the guy dead, quickly and without fuss, but I had to let Mitch have his pound of flesh if I wanted his help. As for Benjy, he was happy to go along with whatever. He wasn’t exactly making up the numbers, I knew that if we got into a jam he wouldn’t be found wanting, but he was not and had never been as vicious or vindictive as Mitch. He wasn’t after blood for the sake of it. He just wanted to help his friends.

  Fleas lived in a basement flat of a three-storey terraced house on a quiet residential street in Stamford Hill. He shared the flat with his girl Barbara, one of those British-born black girls who thought being with a Yardie was about as exciting as life got. She doted on Fleas, couldn’t do enough for him, despite the fact that he regularly beat her and flaunted his other women in her face. The first time I saw her – she had come to see Fleas on the Front – I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was a hot summer’s day and she had dressed accordingly in a yellow, figure hugging mini-dress with a plunging neckline. It didn’t seem right to me that someone like Fleas, with his peanut head and matchstick frame, got to have regular sex with such a hot girl. He was no fool. He knew what a catch Barbara was and didn’t take any chances with her, especially not with his boys. He was the alpha male among them, and they feared him, but Barbara had the type of body to make them forget their fears.

  To abduct someone like Fleas required a bit of
thought. Much too sure of themselves, Mitch was all for jumping him in broad daylight, but I wanted no part of what I saw as a very dumb move. For one thing, it wouldn’t be easy to subdue Fleas and bundle him into Mitch’s 3-series Bimmer without attracting witnesses, and for another, it was well known that Fleas never left home without his Beretta. Given that we were also armed – the Browning was now back in my possession – there was just too strong a risk of gunplay. As I saw it, the better option was to gain access to Fleas’s flat when he was out and surprise him on his return. And we wouldn’t even have to break in. We simply had to watch the flat till we knew Barbara was home alone then knock on the door, take her hostage and wait. Mitch initially objected to my plan. It wasn’t gangster enough for him, there was no action and no audience, but the moment I mentioned Barbara he did a complete U-turn.

  Staking out Fleas’s flat was not as straightforward as I had hoped. Mitch had to park his car far enough down the street to be out of sight, yet close enough to the flat to be able to observe the comings and goings. We managed it, but only just. Trying to see if any patterns emerged, we watched the flat for five nights in a row, from Monday through to Friday, working in shifts, starting at five in the afternoon and finishing at midnight. We didn’t bother with the weekend because we were big ravers and not even Fleas could keep us from our weekly rendezvous with Sir Biggs Hi-Fi. Fortunately, our five-day surveillance gave us all the information we needed.

  For a gangster, Fleas turned out to be quite the homebody. He came home every evening at eight or thereabouts. Herself no stranger to routine, Barbara usually came home from her job – she worked in a trendy clothes shop in Islington – around six. Our window of opportunity, then, was the two hours in between.

  As the big day approached, I started to lose my nerve. To steady myself, I focussed on two things: I thought long and hard about how close my brother had come to dying and the fact that my parents had been forced to hide under their bed while Fleas and his crew had been spraying their flat with bullets. And even that wasn’t enough to stiffen my resolve. Finally I had to resort to drugs. In the hours before we set out on our mission, we freebased half an ounce of Charlie. We also spent a lot of time demonising and dehumanising our enemy in order to make the job of killing him that much easier. Working ourselves into a vein-popping, eye-bulging state of rage, we agreed that Fleas was a cockroach who deserved to be squashed. Barbara’s character was also assassinated. For allowing a piece of shit like Fleas put his cock inside her she was nothing but a filthy whore. There was no question that she too would have to be snuffed out, but only after we’d had our way with her and made Fleas watch the show. It hardly seemed credible to me that I should have found myself in that situation, plotting such vile crimes with all the deliberateness and calculation of a sociopath, but that was the person I had become. How it happened I neither knew nor, by that stage, cared.