Free Powder Wars by Graham Johnson Page B

siren in the background. The scally stops shooting up the club and gets off. We dusted ourselves down and got off to another club. The scally with the sawn-off got nicked, by the way. His name was Syd Tollett. Eight years he got himself, for blowing the windows in. Could never understand that type of behaviour.
    After Nash went back to London and that, it was Billy’s responsibility to make sure that the Cockneys got their parcel of dough every month. It got taken down on the last Sunday of every month – no back answers, no excuses, get paid or get off to South America and don’t come back. Pure grands there was in there. Me and Billy got our due, goes without saying, for making sure it had a smooth trip, etc. Making sure it didn’t leave the train unauthorisedly at any other point than Euston, knowmean? Sometimes Billy would take it down himself, so he could go on the piss and hit the casinos and that, which he loved, by the way.
    Nash came up four times in total after that. The script was always the same. He’d come into the Oslo to see me. I’d take him around all the Liverpool clubs and then we’d head back the Oslo at two o’clock. Billy would turn up and him and Nash would talk business all night.

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    The Scrapman’s Gang
    Paul’s next big scam was a multi-million pound construction racket. He masterminded the large-scale theft and re-sale of thousands of tonnes of building materials, scrap metal and mechanical plant from all over the UK. It was big business and until that time a largely unknown crime. The post-war building boom was in full swing. Billions of pounds were being poured into the construction industry – high-rise flats, new towns, new hospitals, motorways, pedestrianised town centres, industrial estates, even new railways – all manner of projects were going up at breakneck speed, with seemingly scant regard for the protection of assets.
    Paul was quick to recognise a gap in the market. On-site security was relatively poor, and as far as competition from other criminal gangs was concerned, it was untouched, wide-open virgin territory. ‘Get paid,’ he thought, as he surveyed the miles and miles of valuable but unguarded materials that lined the work-in-progress M62 motorway, the subject of his early ‘market research’.
    For the job, Paul brought together the Scrapman’s Gang, a small band of criminals, like himself, with good contacts in the haulage and scrap trades. He had a fleet of trucks at his disposal and he bought a scrap metal business as cover. The Scrapman’s Gang’s first target was the under-construction motorways. As fast as the contractors could lay the miles and miles of steel-erected reinforcements for the roads and bridges, the gang were able to rip them up and spirit them away.
    Night after night they returned, often to the same section of road, to steal the mesh structures that had been put in place that day or to remove the huge bails of freshly delivered steel rods that lay at the side of the foundation ditches. The gang moved on to stealing bulk loads of steel girders from industrially sized construction sites and then onto dismantling whole steel-framed buildings piece-by-piece using powerful oxy-acetylene burners, cranes and mechanical pulleys.
    Many of the buildings were brand-new factory and warehouse complexes covering several acres and worth millions of pounds. In a fraction of the time they took to erect, they were pulled down or left standing supported only by a dangerously minimal structure, carefully left in place like a giant optical illusion to allow the gang to make a clean getaway.
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    PAUL: After the Hole in the Wall gang I took a year off from what I called full-time work – the organised robbing of warehouses night after night. Wearing me down, la, it was, to be truthful. Was also getting a bit para with the busies and that too with the lads getting a bit slovenly of