The Devil Read online

  Also by Graham Johnson:

  Powder Wars

  Druglord

  Football and Gangsters

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781845968915

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  Copyright © Graham Johnson, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY

  (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 9781845961787

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast

  This book is a work of non-fiction. In some cases names of people, places, dates and the sequence or details of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects, the contents of this book are true.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Dedicated to Abbey, Connie, Dionne, Emma, Raya and Sonny

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First of all, a massive thank you to stephen French for telling his story, because, after all, this is his book. He gave up his time for hundreds of hours of interviews, and travelled up and down the country to ensure that this book could be written. Thank you to my copy-editor Emma Murray of Editing and Beyond for her eagle eye, suggestions and advice. Her efforts often went way beyond the call of duty. Also, thank you to Anna Hunt for proofreading and Rohan Tait for picture editing.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s note

  Preface: They Called Me the Devil

  Prologue

  PART ONE – THE RISE

  1. Better the Devil You Know

  2. Good Versus Evil

  3. Raising Hell – The Turning Point

  4. The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands

  5. Deal with the Devil

  6. The Apprentice Taxman

  PART TWO – THE PLAYER

  7. Full-time Taxman

  8. Raise the Devil

  9. The House of Horrors

  10. Defy Beelzebub

  11. Satanic Verses: Rules and Politics of Taxing

  12. Gates of Hell

  13. Playing Devil’s Advocate

  14. The Prince of Darkness

  15. The Grim Reaper

  16. Come Hell or High Purity

  17. In League with the Devil: FWMD – Frenchie and Wozzer Make Dollars

  18. Luck of the Devil

  19. The Devil is in the Detail

  20. Hell’s Kitchen

  21. A Pressing Engagement

  22. The Devil’s Scorpion

  23. Miracle Escape

  24. The Day of the Jackal

  25. The Devil’s Ghost

  26. The Devil’s Court: The Case of the Cavalier Attitude

  27. The Devil Rides Out

  28. Sympathy for the Devil – The Epiphany

  PART THREE – THE STRAIGHTGOER

  29. On the Side of Angels

  30. Up from the Ashes

  31. Selling Your Soul to the Devil

  32. You Can Take the Devil Out of Hell, but . . .

  33. An Explosive Family

  34. Hell’s Angels

  35. Hell Fire

  36. Problem-solver Extraordinaire

  Epilogue: Sins of the Father

  Postscript

  Glossary

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based on a large number of interviews with the main subject, Stephen French. Other research materials included press cuttings, criminal records and interviews with witnesses, criminal or otherwise. However, the story is mostly reliant on Stephen’s personal testimony.

  I decided to write the book in the first person, using ‘I’ instead of ‘he’, so that the reader would get the story from Stephen’s perspective and not mine. I decided to do this in an attempt to bring the reader closer to the action and to give a direct insight into what Stephen French did, thought and felt, with as little spin, analysis or journalistic input as possible.

  There is a glossary at the back of the book if you’re not familiar with some of the slang used.

  Graham Johnson

  August 2007

  PREFACE

  THEY CALLED ME THE DEVIL

  You may think that my life is a doddle, what with the luxurious flats in Canary Wharf, the penthouse apartments in Liverpool city centre, £70,000 cars, Christmas in the Caribbean, and the five-star hotels in Las Vegas, New York, Florida and the Indian Ocean. Well, let me share with you a strand of the rope that gives me strength and makes me who I am. From my earliest memory to when I was 15 years old, I was bullied on a daily basis. During that period, I was stabbed with scissors, hit with a poker, lashed with curtain wire, scalded with hot water, and punched and kicked endlessly. Pain became my best friend. But then, when I was 16 years old, my balls dropped and I began to man up. I stopped the bullies with a well-aimed and even better propelled everyday house brick. Yeah! Leave me the fuck alone.

  At 17, the bullies were back, this time with a concealed blade: a steak knife homing in like an Exocet missile for my throat in a deceptive and lightning attack. I was unarmed, lying down on my mother’s couch, maxing out. A nanosecond somehow became an eon, and I managed to get my left arm between my throat and the grim reaper. The blade was violently plunged through my arm, midway between my left wrist and elbow. It pierced my skin, its serrated edge scraping across the bone and completely severing three tendons, pinging them like overstretched rubber bands. I was left with the use of my left index finger and my left thumb only, but I could still make a fist. I weighed around 175 lb, but I was on my feet. My throat was not cut, as had been my assailant’s murderous intention.

  In the melee that ensued, my bright-red blood sprayed my mum’s front room, and I knew without being told that I was in a fight for my life. As I subdued my armed assailant with my bare hands, I knew instinctively that I would find myself in this situation many more times. And as my assailant passed into unconsciousness, I also knew – with a heightened, almost primal awareness – that I would always win and never lose a death match. That was the first attempt on my life, thirty years ago in 1977, and from that day to this there have been several more attempts to assassinate me – my enemies have tried to burn me, melt me with acid, shoot me or kill me in any way possible. This is my story . . . THEY CALLED ME THE DEVIL.

  My name is Stephen Thomas French, and I grew up in Liverpool 8 during the 1960s and ’70s, becoming a man in the 1980s. The narrative that follows could be superimposed onto the lives of any number of black males born of a mixed marriage in 1960s south Liverpool. When I first decided to help Graham Johnson write this book, I knew I had a good story inside me, but I also knew that I should take advantage of the life experiences of the people I’ve known throughout my life – including 25 years security experience and 30 years as a martial artist, man and boy – and the thousands upon thousands of individuals I’ve met during my pursuit of health, wealth and happiness.

&n
bsp; The tile for the book is The Devil. There was much discussion about this between me and Graham Johnson. Initially, the working title was Tall, Dark and Dangerous. During the course of his research, Graham discovered that some of my enemies referred to me as the Devil. He became very interested in this and said that this must be the title of the book. I tried to compromise with him and suggested They Call Me the Devil as an alternative. I reneged after discussion with him, because I understand the commercial grab of the The Devil as a title, but I would like to go on record and say that I am a true and devout Christian and I believe in the Holy Trinity. I hate and loathe the Devil. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he did not exist. Where there is good there is bad, where there is ying there is yang, and this a belief that I hold very, very strongly. So, to my mum, wife, sister and daughter, the women that are really important to me, I apologise for the title of this book, but it’s for reasons of sensationalism and commercialism, plain and simple, and has nothing to do with my faith. And if there are any objections of a divine nature, I assure you, Lord God in heaven, that the intentions behind this book are based on honour and integrity.

  Stephen French

  August 2007

  PROLOGUE

  The Tefal steam iron was red-hot as I pressed it hard onto the top of the man’s back, just below his shoulder. He jolted violently, but the silver duct tape wrapped around his mouth muffled his screams. I gave him a squeeze of steam from the power jets, just for good measure. The acrid fumes of burning flesh whooshed around the basement room, carried by the plumes of vaporised water, tinged by the sulphur-like smell of charred hair. There were pools of piss, shit and blood already on the floor, so it didn’t really matter. Yet the victim still refused to give up the location of his drugs or money. I temporarily removed his gag, and he blabbered that he didn’t have the goods. When I put the gag back on, he begged for mercy using his hands and eyes.

  The man taped to the chair in front of me was one of Britain’s top drug dealers, worth between 30 and 40 million pounds. He had boasted about fearing no man and was responsible for the murder of many – mainly his enemies – during his underworld reign. Amongst his peers and rivals alike, he was feared like a death-camp commandant and revered like a dictator. No one had ever dared touch him. Me, personally – I couldn’t give two hoots.

  Forty minutes earlier, my partner Marsellus and I had burst his ken: a spartan, suburban mansion in a commuter town, just outside London. Our aim was to ‘tax’ the drug dealer – that is, to steal his drugs and money. Mucus now dripped from the man’s bloodied nose, the detritus of kidnap and torture soiling his Lacoste T-shirt and pastel-blue tennis shorts. The steel plate of his wife’s state-of-the-art iron was now smeared with the sludgy, brown mess of burned human matter, mostly skin and follicle.

  Using the same controlled, monotone voice – which I had learned from the psychological warfare manuals now used in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib – I whispered into the godfather’s ear, ‘Tell me where the pound notes are, and I’ll turn the iron off. You’ll never see me again.’ But he refused to play ball, shaking his head desperately.

  There followed a few seconds of struggle, while Marsellus kicked the chair backwards and wrestled the detainee’s shorts and boxers off. Within the same motion, I thrust the near-melted-hot Tefal onto his naked bollocks, ramming it home hard for full effect, following it through with multiple blasts of steam.

  Within two hours, I was on my way back to Liverpool with £320,000 in the boot of my Lexus and 20 kilograms of cocaine secreted at a safe house in Walthamstow in east London. Before I left the drug dealer’s mansion, however, I wasn’t able to resist going back for the biggest thrill of all. As he lay semi-conscious on the floor, coated with a thin film of vomit and bile, I lifted his head up and looked into his defeated and terrified eyes. Now I would show him just how bad I really was. I took my balaclava off. His eyes screamed in horror as he recognised my features.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘You’ve just been taxed by the Devil. I really do exist. Now, what the fuck are you going to do about it?’

  In my game, revealing your identity to a victim was a cardinal sin, but I couldn’t resist this encore: showing him who had done this to him, challenging him to seek revenge. Of course, I knew that he never would. I was just testing myself, and, with that, I disappeared into the night.

  PART ONE

  THE RISE

  1

  BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

  I was born in Liverpool on october 1 , the son of a flame-haired white woman of Irish immigrant stock and film-star looks, and a black West Indian seafarer who was on the run for killing a man. Now, I am not going to bore you with a long family history, save to say that I am the product of the Irish potato famine and the African slave trade. I know that you want to get to the guns-and-drugs bit real quick, so I’ll keep it brief.

  My dad, Thomas Benjamin French, came to the UK aged 26 in 1955 from Trinidad as part of the ‘Windrush’ wave of immigration overseen by Enoch Powell. A year later, he married Vera Hughes, my mum. But it wasn’t long before he fucked off – with the babysitter, in fact – leaving my mum with five children from three different fathers. There was my elder sister and brother Carol and Tony Desson, my middle brother Shaun Deckon and my full sister Helen French, shortly followed by yours truly. Having an absent father had a profound effect on me and was one of the main reasons I fell into a life of crime.

  My mum sacrificed everything to bring us up. For a long time, I thought she was a vegetarian, because she would give us children the meat at teatime and go hungry herself. My first experiences of violence came from within the home – from my sister Helen. She tormented me physically, mentally and emotionally with fists, bats and knives from the age of three. That was probably the second reason I became a gangster. Helen gave me an incredible ability to tolerate pain, for which today I give thanks to her, for it has saved my life on many occasions.

  At the age of six, I experienced racism for the first time. It was 1966, and I was keen to buy some World Cup Willy football stickers from the local sweet shop. My mum had hidden us under her coat to keep us out of the rain, but when she took it off in the shop the whole world stopped. The shopkeeper was disgusted that the white woman in front of the counter had slept with niggers. But it taught me an invaluable lesson. From that day on, I would not let prejudice and bigotry bother me.

  Though my mum had a fierce love for us, she sometimes broke down under the pressure of trying to raise five children – every colour of the rainbow – without any money or support. I first went into care in North Wales with Tony when I was seven. On every occasion after that, I ran away. One time, I sneaked back home to discover that my dad had returned – to have an affair with the social worker, who was supposed to be looking after us. He had sex with her right on my mum’s bed.

  I picked up my first conviction for robbing cars at the age of 11, fuelled by the high-speed chases I had seen on The Sweeney. But I soon realised that nicking cars was not going to make me money. Enter George Osu – a real-life black Fagin. He was only 16, but he was a movie star to us all. Tall and slim, with the neatest of neat afros, he wore a long, black leather midi coat just like Shaft, and he always had pound notes on him. George’s bag was house burglaries. It all came down to one thing – small windows. Only kids could get through them. At one time, George himself had been a house burglar – the kid who squeezed through those windows – but now he’d grown too big, so he was looking for others to recruit. George took me under his wing because I was skinny and nimble. He showed me how to get into a house and trained me how to systematically clean a place out. Soon, I was screwing two houses a week, and we made lots of cash. In no time at all, I was dressing just like George.

  Meanwhile, the violence and racism of everyday street life were turning me into a world-class athlete. Every day I had to run the gauntlet of older skinheads who wanted to beat me to within an inch of my life. Skinheads were
fierce-looking individuals – bright red ‘ox-blood’ Dr Martens, Fleming jeans, braces, Ben Sherman shirts and Crombie overcoats lined with red silk to soak up a nigger’s blood. My nickname soon became Frenchie Lightfoot, because I could move like the wind and was as slippery as an eel. My body was like a reed: no meat, just tall with long legs. Sometimes the skinheads came to our house, and we had to barricade ourselves in while the windows were smashed and the door was booted in.

  Not only was I fast, but I was also becoming a champion fighter in waiting. My sister’s beatings had made me immune to pain. Most people are not hurt when they’re hit, they’re just shocked because they’ve never been hit before. However, I was so used to getting battered that I was able to strike back immediately. I also took up boxing, perfecting my natural ability for street combat, and was soon cock of the school.

  To complement my physical prowess, I started honing my intellectual capacity by questioning everything going on around me. Come the early 1970s, we were the first generation of post-war British-born blacks. It wasn’t like we were just off the boat we felt that we had a right to be here. Black people had been in Liverpool in one form or another for 400 years, and this gave us a deeper sense of heritage and connection with the UK. The upshot was that we were militant and the first minority to fight back. At the age of 12, I joined the Young Black Panthers, a fierce black rights group based on the one in the States. The Observer Magazine the colour supplement of the Sunday broadsheet – came to do an article on us. They took a picture of us climbing the wall outside the Anglican cathedral. The bit in the text below about the skinheads was spot on:

  The Great Wall of Liverpool surrounds the cathedral and is a conveniently situated training centre for Young Panthers.

  Getting up to the top is what matters. Going up fast and skilful like a novice commando gives you new confidence, prestige and sinew. Qualities that are going to be tested in your next encounter with white skinheads. The inner city district of Liverpool 8, near the cathedral, has appalling housing, bad schools and chronic unemployment. Whites and blacks are trapped together in the same vicious cycle of slumdom.