Free The Devil by Graham Johnson Page B

army, so I made up an excuse and got him away from the bizzies as soon as I could.
    One of the coppers saw this and turned on me, ‘You’re lying French. You fired this gun. The shot’s been fired from inside. End of story.’
    So I said, ‘Well, if that’s what you think, you prove it, but I’m telling you they shot at us.’
    The bizzy retorted, ‘Well, why did all 300 of them run away, then?’
    I replied, ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe because you fellas turned up.’
    This logic bemused him, and it also made the bizzies look good, a kind of reverse flattery, so he swallowed it.
    Suddenly, the phone in the nightclub rang. It was Tommy Gilday. Aldous picked it up, and Gilday immediately started trying to rewrite the history of the rout. He said, ‘I knew there were only blanks in the gun,’ blah, blah, blah, trying to undermine our glorious victory.
    Aldous was frightened of Tommy, so he was gibbering, ‘Yeah, but, no, but, yeah, but,’ and almost being nice to him. What I had come to realise in dealing with these guys was that you didn’t give an inch. You didn’t call them ‘Tommy’, and you didn’t talk friendly with them. You let them start to doubt their own confidence. Let them start to worry. Let them start to think, ‘Who the fuck is this guy Stephen French who they call the Devil?’
    I snatched the phone off Aldous and said to Gilday, ‘I’ve got a real fucking bullet with your name on it, so fucking come back.’ Bam – I slammed the phone down. Josef Stalin-like – uncompromising.
    Now, what you have to realise is that this guy was used to his peers and enemies – mainly other middle-aged, white gangsters – sucking his cock and telling him how big his muscles were, what a criminal mastermind he was and how they were not worthy to sell his kilos of brown and white. Like all godfathers, he was seriously fettered by his suck-holing crew. Now here I was, a young black kid whom he had never met, showing him no respect and what’s more telling him to go fuck himself. For the first time in his career, Tommy had been confronted by a dark, animalistic force as unpredictable as nature itself. The result – his head was wrecked. The battle had been won in the mind – and I was the victor. End of.
    Theatricality and dramatics – great weapons, man, great weapons. You’ve got to be able to back it up, mind you, if it goes to the wire, but a lot of my success was down to my invincible Japanese mindset – I had a siege mentality.
    So, instead of trying to attack us on a different night – and with 300 personnel under arms, he would have been assured of total victory – he caved in. He called for a powwow instead – the underworld equivalent of the Paris Peace Accords. Now, what you’ve got to realise is that in the past these white gangsters would never have tolerated black criminals, never mind negotiate with them. However, the black community was becoming more powerful. Ebonics and little bits of our culture were finding their way into the mainstream. Suddenly, everyone was wearing tracksuits in the street. We started that. Saying ‘Yeah, man’ – again, a black thing. Even The Beatles were influenced by black culture. Before they played at The Cavern, they used to go and buy pot off a black barber called Lord Woodbine. He taught them the blues. So, subliminally, black culture was kicking in – and the ripples were being keenly felt in the underworld. We had finally come of age as a force to be reckoned with.
    The mediators of the powwow were two well-known black doormen from Toxteth called Smith and Suncher. Smith agreed that his house could be used for the sit-down. Because Gilday knew Smith, he would come under his protection. We only laid one ground rule. If at the end of the parley we couldn’t find a solution, we had to agree not to engage in