Free The Devil by Graham Johnson

would steal a load of gear but cave in to underworld pressure and end up giving it back. The victims used to send emissaries, mates of mates and all that lark, to talk a taxman around or, if that failed, to threaten him. But me? No. You could send who you wanted – the SAS, the fucking SS led by the mujahideen – but you were not fucking getting it back. You’d have to snatch it from my cold, dead corpse. And this wasn’t just said for effect or theatricality. It was the god’s honest truth. Even if a victim tried to get their gear back, the chances were that they wouldn’t be able to find me. Nobody knew my address, I had no credit cards, no bank cards – the CIA couldn’t trace me. I didn’t exist except in a drug dealer’s nightmares. And my family was always kept safe, so my victims couldn’t get at me by kidnapping my loved ones. In a nutshell, I ran a hermetically sealed operation. It was watertight.
    Before I went to work, I’d go into character, like a method actor. I’d immerse myself in a part. I’d get my game face on. I’ve seen that in films, such as Pulp Fiction in which Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are talking shit about Big Macs but go into mode before they bang on the students’ door.
    Nonetheless, when I came out of ‘game’, something inside of me raged against the evil. I knew that there was something better for me out there. I passed my access course, and in September 1985 I won a place at Liverpool University to study psychology. In the back of my mind, I hoped that I could give up crime one day and get a decent job.
    In the meantime, I was leading a double life. By day, I went to lectures and sat in the library with blonde girls from the Home Counties. At night, the Devil would come out to play. Technically, you could say I was leading a triple life, as I was still training hard as a kick-boxer. I won my first world title at Wembley Conference Centre on 25 November 1985. I was the light-middleweight supreme champion of all four million members of the World All-Styles Kick Boxing Association. I was the only world champion the university had ever had, and they went cock-a-hoop over it, putting me in the campus newspapers.
    I opened a sports management company called Wear Promotions. Between having a business to manage, drug dealers to rob and training to do, I found myself too busy to attend any lectures. When it came to my finals, I terrorised the lecturer into telling me what questions would be on the exam: psychological intimidation – the art of fighting without fighting.
    In 1988, I graduated with a 2:2. Not bad. Although I was the only one out of forty students to get a full degree, I still couldn’t get a job. So I decided that if no one would employ me, I’d employ myself and opened up my own security business, supplying doormen to nightclubs. Ironically, that later opened up a mass-market for me to sell narcotics, on a hitherto unknown scale, direct to the consumer. I was working front of house and controlled the supply into the clubs.
    There was a bar on black lads at a nightclub called The Grafton, so I forcibly took the door off the gangsters who had it. The underworld didn’t like a nigger getting uppity, so the threat of war went to DEFCON-1. To defend the club, I installed the fiercest crew on this planet at maximum-force readiness. We had Stephen French, British, European and world kick-boxing champion; Andrew John, of the British karate team; Jack Percival, Commonwealth boxing gold medallist; Brian Schumacher, captain of the 1984 Los Angeles olympics British boxing team; Sidney Bulwark, an infamous local boxer but a terrible bore; Aldous Pellow, former British Army boxing team; Big Victor, a real heavy street fighter; and Gerry the Gent, the nicest guy you could wish to meet but a vicious cunt once he’d had one over the eight.
    In our looming war, a racist hard case called Tommy Gilday