He went to the door, opened it, and Chrissy came barging in as white as a ghost, looking dishevelled and petrified.
Eddie, Old Frank, Andy and Tony the Greek just stared and stared at him.
I wondered if he’d had a rough session with the bird – encountered her old man, or had a row with the minder. I thought Chrissy might have stabbed the minder, because he always carried a blade. If he had, I reckoned that was all we needed – the Old Bill pulling us in for a murder or a GBH over Chrissy shagging some old tart.
I told him so, but he said something else had happened; he was shaking like a leaf.
‘You haven’t nicked her sparklers, have you?’ I quizzed him.
‘No, there was none of that,’ he gasped.
‘Well then, what the fuck is going on?’ I demanded.
‘We knocked back a few vodkas …’ Chrissie said, looking a bit sheepish.
‘And?’ I urged, desperate to get to the bottom of things.
‘It wasn’t a woman. The “she” was a man.’
We all fell silent and gaped at Chrissy, waiting for him to reveal all.
We’d heard stories of this happening, but had never encountered any incidents in our manor or involving any members of our firm.
‘She – or should I say he – took me back to a right posh place in Hampstead. We had a load of vodkas and one thing led to another. Everything seemed fine and we went into the bedroom, kissing all the time.’
‘Get to the point,’ I told him.
‘She started to give me a blow job and I sucked her thru-penny bits.’ He shuddered. ‘Then I put my hand down her knickers, but there was no fanny down there. It was a big, hairy cock and she had a huge hard-on.’
‘What?’ We all shrieked with laugher.
‘You’re having us on!’ I said, in between fits of mirth. ‘And you were sucking the tits and getting a blow job! Come on, I’m not having that!’
‘No, no, it’s true! He or she, or whatever it was, jumped out of bed and put the light on. There was a wig on the dresser and I was looking at a geezer about fifty years old!’
Tony the Greek had to repeat everything twice, as usual: ‘It was a fifty-year-old geezer! It was a fifty-year-old geezer! He had a big hairy cock! He had a big hairy cock!’
‘Fucking hell, you got a blow job off an old geezer and you didn’t know it was a bloke.’ I grinned, stunned at the bizarre story.
‘But she had a real woman’s tits!’ Chrissy pleaded. ‘Please swear you won’t tell anyone else.’
That was never going to stay quiet – Andy made sure it was the talk of the pub the next night. After that, every time Chrissy took a bird home he checked her private parts first. It meant Chrissy got a reputation as a dirty bastard and a pervert, so I suppose he couldn’t win.
All our women were clued up not to say anything to anybody about what we did for a living. I remember I’d been dating a girl in Finchley for a few months. One night, I planned to take her out for a meal and on to a club afterwards. She asked me to pick her up at her house and meet her mum and dad for the first time. I said that was no problem, and agreed to turn up at eight o’clock.
Old Frank the driver took me to the house in a nice little middle-class street. I knocked on the door, Kathy answered and invited me in.
She was just finishing getting ready, which always pisses me off. To this day, I’ve never met a woman who gets ready on time. You always have to hang around for at least half an hour.
Needless to say, her mum was in the kitchen, cooking the old man’s dinner. She offered me a cup of tea, which I dutifully accepted. Then the question came that all mothers ask: ‘What do you do for a living?’
Now, wearing one of my best three-piece suits, I didn’t look like a building-site worker. I didn’t look like I collected the rubbish and I was far better suited and booted than any club doorman.
‘I’m in banking,’ I lied, thinking quickly.
As it happened, that didn’t seem to be much of a lie: I collected money, paid out a lot of money and collected bad debts. So you can see where I’m coming from.
‘That’s a good job,’ Kathy’s mum said. ‘Is it good pay?’
‘Yes,’ I lied again. ‘We have a good bonus system, so the money’s good.’
Desperate to move the conversation away from my occupation, I asked what she did for a living.
‘I don’t work,’ she told me proudly, in a £5 accent, sounding posh. ‘I’m a housewife. My husband has a good job as a police inspector.’
I nearly choked on my tea.
‘Are you all right?’ Kathy’s mum asked, looking concerned as I spluttered and gasped for air.
‘Yes, I’m OK.’ I gulped. ‘The tea went down the wrong hole.’
So an inspector in the Old Bill was coming home to dinner, I was taking his daughter out on the town to meet all my villainous friends, and Old Frank the driver was outside in his dodgy, high-powered motor.
Kathy had never mentioned that her dad was in the Old Bill. They were the last people in the world I wanted to upset, for obvious reasons. I was up shit creek without a paddle, and needed to get out of there fast.
When Kathy came downstairs, I thanked her mother for the tea and made a hasty retreat for the front door. Kathy followed, and must have been wondering what was going on.
‘Just drive,’ I said to Old Frank.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘No, I think I’m coming down with a tummy bug. I’ll see if I can eat something. Take us to that Indian place we went to last week.’
As soon as we arrived I had a bite to eat, said I was feeling worse, and told Kathy I felt really sick, which wasn’t a lie. I told Old Frank to drive her home and I never saw her again.
After that, I made a point of always asking my girlfriend at the time what her parents did for a living. I have nothing against going out with a copper’s daughter, but it’s not on if you’re a criminal.
In those days we did respect our women. No one in our firm ever beat up a woman. Nowadays, there’s a big increase in females getting slapped about because guys disrespect them. They see it on the box. It’s the culture now, and it’s imported from America. It seems like when it all happens over there, a few years later it kicks off in Britain.
A beautiful woman is now the shining light in my life, and that guiding, brilliant light is my fantastic wife, Ami. I spent a long time looking for the right one. Eventually she came along, and I never looked back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KILLING FOR CASH
THERE IS NO human or personal feeling in the crime business. Nothing.
When I was active, I would make known to all concerned: ‘It doesn’t matter whether I like you or hate you. It’s nothing personal. If I’m paid to shoot you, I’ll fucking shoot you because you are just a bit of work.’ Anyone who crossed my firm knew that they risked anything from a gun butt smashed in the face, to wounding, to a whole lot worse.
At the peak of my powers I was tough and uncompromising but as fair as I could be. I rewarded loyalty and went to the ends of the earth to punish anyone who grassed on me.
I ruled my manor in North London with ruthless efficiency, enforced lucrative protection rackets and stalked the streets with that sawn-off, double-barrelled shotgun called Kennedy. That menacing weapon took no prisoners, and the sweaty, shitty smell of fear was a familiar tang in my nostrils. I was an evil bastard and, yes, I knew all about the contract killings that were going on.
When people are prepared to kill for a living, it’s just their job. It’s the same as a drug dealer. It doesn’t matter whether he likes you or not. He sells the drugs to you because you’re not a person; you’re a £50 note.
There have been so many contract killings over the years that I’ve lost count, but let me just recap on one infamous incident. A businessman called Mohammed Raja was in the process of suing a landlord over a business deal. Mr Raja was stabbed and shot dead one night when he answered the door of his south
London home. Two men were jailed for murder, and the landlord was jailed for manslaughter. They had been hired to attack the businessman, but had they, in fact, just been trying to frighten him?
The landlord’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal, and a legal wrangle followed over a financial settlement. The landlord was ordered to pay £6 million to the victim’s family in a civil case. Contract killings can be hard to prove!
Before a contract killing, the assassin has to think: ‘We have a rat here, and we need to get this rat sorted. All we are doing is getting rid of vermin.’
The key thing is that the victim has to be dehumanised and not seen as a person at all. He has to be viewed like that because, if you killed a person, you would forever be thinking about his family. He is simply a target, to be eliminated for cash.
Guns were the main weapons in my day, but death could also be delivered by other means. Cars were used, with clever drivers at the wheel. Knives and ice picks were effective. Sometimes the methods of choice involved a poly thene bag over the head or a length of string for strangulation. It all depended on access to the victim, the location and all that.
It’s not just about violence, because organisation and skill are also vital ingredients. You can pick up a thug from the street, but you can’t train him to be a hitman. Thugs are thugs. Only a tiny percentage of the population has what it takes to be a hitman.
Contract killing is glamorised. You’re a god, killing for cash, because you decide whether someone lives or dies. You have that power; you have the power of life and death.
There are so many myths; I know the truth.
Organised execution is carried out by people who are trained with a weapon, just as a clerk is familiar with a pen. In my day, the hitman was a highly trained person. We played by the rules. There were certain codes that you had to obey; things that you could do and you couldn’t do. If you were given a target, you couldn’t shoot him in front of his wife and kids, because you wouldn’t want to be whacked in front of your wife and kids.
You would be sent somewhere and trained with the gun to be used for the kill. Normally, an ex-army person trained you with that weapon so that you didn’t hurt innocent people. Then you would go out with someone else on a job. You didn’t know the person you went out with, so you couldn’t grass on each other.
If you messed up he would let you have it anyway, and you knew that.
You didn’t want some lunatic firing the gun. A weapon might pull to the left or the right and you had to cater for that. If you were hired to shoot someone in the leg, the last thing you wanted was the gun to jump and end up shooting him in the chest, killing him. More often than not, you were there to perform a punishment exercise, such as kneecapping, and not an execution.
Sometimes you would go out and just stick a gun in the person’s mouth, or kneel him down by a ditch and fire the weapon into the ground as a warning. If he didn’t get off the manor he knew someone else would be coming soon, ready to place a bullet in the back of his head.
The army veterans were recruited into the criminal underworld when they retired. We paid better wages than alternative employers. Money has that power. It also meant that the legal forces, sent out to stop killings, were up against the best in the business.
You had to learn about various types of weapons and be able to use them, as you couldn’t use the same weapons all the time: coppers would suss your MO (modus operandi) – method of working. You had to be able to vary your weapons. You read about other hits, and trials where people had been caught. You read books about how people had been assassinated. What evidence did they leave behind? Why were they caught? It was all a study of your job.
Revolvers were always used, rather than automatics. An automatic spits out spent cartridges whereas a revolver keeps them in the chamber, and that is what you want. You don’t want to be bending down on the floor looking for spent cartridges as they can provide DNA for the forensics people, so an automatic is a non-starter.
You also needed a profile on the target, in the same way as intelligence services did their homework. You looked at things like their age and criminal contacts – you didn’t want to be talking to someone who knew this guy. What made him tick? What was his routine? What did he like and not like? What time did he go to work or take his dog for a walk? Planning had to be perfect.
Your target’s patterns were noted down and weak areas identified. You were looking for a time and place when there were no witnesses. The person had to be isolated, allowing the execution or punishment to take place.
People who do these things are not mindless thugs. There is so much to it that, if you were a moron, you couldn’t do it.
The aim of a successful hit was to make sure it stopped gang warfare – and it did actually stop gang violence.
Our way of thinking was: ‘We have a problem. Some of these crime families could blow up here. We don’t want it to get out of hand. So it’s best that we eliminate the cause of the problem.’
You would be contacted to see if you were up for a bit of work. It could only be given to you by someone who was known and respected in a firm. You would know that person’s background, sometimes going back as far as three generations. And you knew that if the police got hold of that guy he would be banged up, but would never grass on you.
In a typical, discreet killing in the 1970s, the death was made to look like an accident. No one suspected murder.
After all, when you kill someone you don’t want it to appear like a hit, and get the coppers all over it. So, you might know that your target is a diabetic. He could have an accidental overdose of insulin, go into a coma, and it looks like natural causes. Who else would have given him an injection? That is how it worked. And look at lethal injections with poisons. What about the KGB? They did their work with umbrellas injecting people and all that. If it looks like a heart attack or other natural causes, then all the better – aggro from the police in those cases is minimal.
In my day, when a message had to be sent out to other firms – usually because someone had overstepped the mark – then a more public execution took place. A motorbike or a car would pull up in a busy street, the killer putting a bullet in the back of a man’s head. Or someone would be dismembered and body parts left all over the place.
Occasionally, if one firm wanted to send a message to a firm that had caused aggravation, they would kill one of the gang members and send out either a hand or the eyes. They sent the eyes because they could only belong to the one person – a hand could have been nicked from a hospital or mortuary or somewhere like that. The eyes told the brutal truth.
In extreme circumstances, I’ve heard about the Colombian necklace being used. The target’s throat would be cut, with the tongue brought out through the neck. That is still a popular method with drug cartels. Those cartels are also lethal with chainsaws, sawing people up in the bath while they are still alive.
When we heard about the Jill Dando killing, we knew straight away that it wasn’t a professional hit. We wouldn’t kill anyone in the media because of the outrage it causes, so they’re safe. Same as you wouldn’t hit a copper. You don’t go shooting policemen unless you want a lot of aggravation. You’d have to be an absolute maniac to shoot a copper.
The value of life has changed dramatically since I was involved in crime. Now, we have lunatics on the street who’ll do it for five grand so they can buy a bit of smack or whatever drugs they’re on. They think it’s cool. They read crime books which glamorise everything. They all want to be the man with the gun.
It’s always been easy to get hold of a gun. You can even just get a replica and have it converted into a lethal firearm for a few quid.
If you go out with a gun always remember that, when people come looking for you, they will have a weapon. You will die a violent death if everything catches up with you. It might even come to the stage where you might have to top yourself. You can get to the stage where it is time for you to go. Do you want to d
o a life sentence with a thirty-year recommendation, living in a stinking cell for the rest of your life? Or do you have a nice bottle of champagne or brandy, enjoy a nice meal, then put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger?
You can’t go out shooting people, killing people and all that, if you’re not prepared to go the whole way for yourself.
When I first became involved with guns it was a strange feeling. It’s quite shocking to look back at it. If my children came up to me now and said, ‘Dad, I’ve got a gun,’ I would be horrified. I just can’t imagine them going around with guns the way I did.
The change in criminal society happened when the drug culture started coming in. There is a vast amount of money to be made from it. It started off with a load of hippies just enjoying the feel-good factor and love-ins and flower power and all that. Then organised crime saw that there was money in it, and some rivals had to be eliminated.
Upper-class people enjoy cocaine at their parties. It’s lovely, just having their friends around and enjoying a nice evening. They don’t know what happens further down the chain. The money they’re spending goes on illegal money lending. It goes on bringing illegal weapons into the country, violence on the street and protection. The upper-class cocaine users don’t realise it, but they’re helping to build up a criminal empire.
Eventually, their money helps to pay for someone’s execution.
Outside the criminal culture, there are no feelings for anyone else. Victims of a contract killing don’t count. It’s not personal. If they get in the way and get shot, or they want to have a go at you and you shoot them, it doesn’t matter. They’re a bit of work. You’re paid to shoot other villains. It doesn’t matter if you like them or don’t like them.
Back in my day, hitmen were paid a certain amount of money to blow someone’s leg off – that was what they did for a living. And they killed for a fee without as much as a second thought.
It was all about the money. Nothing else mattered.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 10
