Gangsters' Wives (16 page)

We actually were supposed to get married on Friday, 13 June, just before midnight, but because we argued so much, we finally said our vows in the first minutes of Saturday the fourteenth. You’d have thought that might have been a good omen but it didn’t turn out that way. I can’t even remember the year any more, probably around 1989.

Anyway, afterwards we walked out, changed into more appropriate clothing, then we sat in Caesar’s and started gambling. We could really only afford for one of us to gamble, and Mark is really a bit of a card shark. We sat down at the blackjack table and got hit on by this gorgeous couple, who obviously were into swinging. I thought that was kind of a weird start to a marriage, being propositioned about wife swapping. In the end we told them thanks but no thanks and played cards and drank until we were ready to pass out. The next day, Mark insisted we had consummated the marriage, but all I remember is the passing out.

It was basically more of an arrangement than a marriage. But Mark did say to me, ‘If we do decide to get married for real, we’ll do it in a church back in England.’ Later I called him on that, and he said, ‘Why would we do that? We’ve been together ten years now’, and the moment was gone.

We’d decided we would move to Chicago after the wedding, but those plans changed when Mark flew back to England for a holiday and couldn’t get back into the States after the immigration authorities checked into his records. So then we were apart for a few months, which wasn’t exactly ideal for newly-weds! But we were talking on the phone a lot, and finally I decided to go over to England for a holiday.

By the time I went, we’d been apart for six months, and in that time he’d got right back into the swing of things for the first time after coming out of prison and he had become The Man. It was the heyday of the rave scene. There were people making money hand over fist out of Ecstasy. He wasn’t the guy on the corner selling them. He wasn’t the guy in the pub selling them. He was the guy supplying the whole show. The head honcho.

Everywhere we went, people knew who he was. We’d go to clubs and the doormen knew him because they bought in their own supplies from him, so wherever we went we were shown straight in. We never had to queue anywhere. And because he had this reputation after shooting someone, everyone was scared to death of him. In those days nobody even had a gun, let alone had shot someone with it.

It was a whole new world for me. You’d think I’d be horrified by the idea of being married to a big-time drug supplier, but I was quite thrilled by it all. I was just this little American girl, you know, I’d never known anyone who’d had more than a traffic ticket. It was exciting.

And it wasn’t long before that kind of world started to rub off on me. At that time, Mark had people working for him and this woman befriended me who was part of his organisation. We went to some pub and I parked my car right outside. We were having a nice time, minding our own business when all of a sudden this drunk guy jumped up on my car and walked straight over it. It was only a Ford Fiesta, no big deal, but it was the audacity of it that incensed me.

I shouted out, ‘Excuse me. That’s my car.’ The guy just looked at me and continued walking and gave an extra stomp on the boot.

I thought: Oh,
really
? And without even pausing, I got the bottle of beer I was drinking and smashed it over the side of this guy’s head. I’d never done anything violent in my life. I could have killed him but it didn’t even occur to me.

Luckily this guy survived, and launched himself at me. Then this other guy came over to hold us apart. And the girls I’d been talking to were just looking at each other saying, ‘What the hell is she doing?’ They dragged me down the street, got me into a cab and got me away.

After that I kept getting messages from people saying, ‘Donna, don’t go back to that pub. That guy is crazy. He says that if he finds that American bitch, he’s going to kill her.’ I didn’t need telling twice.

Then rumours got back to my husband. I don’t know what he did or said, but the next thing I knew, the messages coming back to me from this guy were very different. ‘Tell her I’m very, very sorry.’ ‘Tell her it won’t happen again.’

That was the first time I thought: Oh, so that’s who I’m married to. That was the first time I realised how known he was, and how scared people were of him. That was the first time I realised who he was, and who I was – and I liked it.

But I was never really involved in the details of what he did. I didn’t want to be. I always said to him ‘the less I know, the better’, so if the heat came down, I wouldn’t be tempted to say anything.

I know that on a few occasions, something would go wrong and he and his friend Joe would have to go round to ‘sort things out’. What exactly he did to these people who needed ‘sorting out’ I have never found out to this day, and don’t want to find out.

I may not have wanted to delve too deep into how he made his money, but I certainly enjoyed spending it. We had a good lifestyle – moving from home to home as he made more and more money, driving nice cars, eating out all the time. We didn’t want for anything. I was never into the designer clothes, so I wasn’t exactly swanning around in Prada, but then I was 5 ft 10, under thirty, blonde hair and a body to die for. Who needs Prada? I was a bit of a trophy wife, I guess. I looked a certain way, I was from California, and I was tough too.

Having a social life when you’re involved with a gangster is never simple. One week you’re friends with guys he ‘works’ with and you’re hanging out with the missus round at their house, and the next week he wants to kill them and they’re not allowed in the house. There’s no such thing as a real friendship base, which always used to trip my head out because I’m a really hospitable person.

Mark never had any real friends, apart from Joe maybe. They were both really into comics. Mark used to go out and buy £500 comics as gifts for Joe, but they ended up falling out.

To be honest, none of his gangster cronies seemed to really like women much either. Women were just there to be in magazines to jerk off to. I might have looked like a trophy wife but I used to say I could be a cardboard cut-out for all the interest his friends showed in me as a person.

I did sometimes get jealous of other women, because Mark was a very handsome man. But to be honest, the idea of him running off with another woman never really came into my head. He would flirt, of course, he loved to flirt. But then I loved to flirt too, although I’d never do it in his presence. He’d send me out for the night with ten Es and a hundred pounds, and my girlfriends and I would go off and have fun and flirt to our hearts’ content.

I found my own group of girlfriends – not the ones he was throwing at me because he wanted to do business with their men. I found good friends that are still my friends today. My friends are PRs, they run their own businesses, they’re financial advisors. I’m the only flake in the whole group.

To be honest, I liked the thrill of Mark’s world – to the extent that I willingly allowed myself to get involved in it. Now when I look back, I think that he couldn’t have loved me to let me do what I did. I could have been thrown into prison. I was trafficking Ecstasy pills up to Aberdeen. I’d have this huge bottle with about 3000 pills just in a carrier bag thing, and I’d take them up. I got paid something paltry like £300. Big deal, right? But I did it for the buzz.

I’d be met at Aberdeen by this couple. I’d give them the stuff, they’d give me dinner, they’d drive me back to the airport and I’d fly home again. I did it so many times the guy who worked at Aberdeen airport started recognising me. ‘Oh, you again.’ I’d say, ‘Oh yes, just going up to see my boyfriend again.’ I told myself I was doing it to help Mark, but really it was because it was such a buzz.

The arrangement was that they sent the money on afterwards, so that I didn’t travel around with all that cash. But after one trip, they suddenly went silent. No money. Mark was furious but just wanted to track them down. The woman had mentioned she worked in a top hair salon. How many of those could there be in Aberdeen? So while Mark was passed out after a bender the night before, I jumped on a flight to Aberdeen.

At Aberdeen airport I found a cab driver and told him a story about these two whose club we were sponsoring and who owed us money and I needed to find. He was intrigued. He thought it was like a movie. He took me to one salon – I walked in, she wasn’t there. Two, not there. Three – as soon as I walked in I saw her. She stopped, and then indicated to me to go downstairs while she finished a client. When she followed me downstairs, she gave me a whole spiel about the money. I said I needed to see her partner. She said, ‘No problem. I’ll call him now.’ As she turned her back on me, it suddenly occurred to me that she could tell him anything – to run, to rescue her, anything. The adrenalin was pumping and as she turned round, I said, ‘Listen, if you’re thinking of tell him to get out, don’t, darling. Because I’m telling you, I’m just the welcoming committee. He won’t like what’s behind me.’

Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t understand where they came from. I’ve never spoken like that before in my life. Tarantino eat your heart out!

After that they were shitting themselves. They thought I’d been sent up by this gang to deliver the warning and that the whole organisation was hot on my heels. It was hysterical.

The guy drove me in his lorry to the safe house where all his boys were and handed me this wad of money. Any sane person would have grabbed it and run, but I was enjoying my new role too much. I sat there and counted it slowly in front of them, note by note. Then I said, ‘Right, I get paid £300 every time I come up here, and I want that and also the flight and the cab money. Oh, and my flight leaves in a couple of hours and I’ll need you to take me to the airport.’

I don’t know who this enforcer woman was, but she was on fire! He couldn’t do enough for me – took me on a mini sightseeing tour, took me to get fish and chips, took me to the airport. Then I went home. There was Mark, still out for the count – and me with this fat bundle of cash in my hand.

I’m a mad woman. I know it. Why was I trafficking shit? I didn’t need the money. It was just part of the thrill. In some ways I had the makings of a good criminal, but I couldn’t have done some of the things Mark did. Without going into details, I just couldn’t have done those things. I was certainly no angel, but I couldn’t have done that.

Mark and I had never had an easy relationship, but things started to go badly wrong when he got into doing hard drugs himself instead of just selling them. His behaviour became erratic and unpredictable, and we argued a lot. Then I became convinced he was cheating on me and we split up for a few months.

But I gave Mark a lot of leeway because of the problems he’d had in his life. He was mixed-race but had been adopted by an all-white family. I don’t think living in an all-white area in Leeds did him a lot of favours. There’s a story about him and his white sister coming home from school in matching uniforms, and the police stopping him and insisting he go ‘home’ to the black area. She was saying, ‘But that’s my brother.’ Some of his stories pulled on my heart strings. I was constantly using his background to make excuses for him.

When we got back together in 1993 I thought that blip was behind us, and started thinking about having a baby. We’d been together seven years by that stage, and a lot of people were telling me that if I had his baby he’d calm down. I said, ‘That’s not a good enough reason to bring a child onto this planet.’ But after everything we’d been through, I really thought we were over the worst.

For a while after our daughter Mae was born, it seemed I was right. We’d go out into the countryside and take walks, just the three of us. But as she got older that side of things grew less and less. It was like I was stuck on the back burner.

Mark would take off and I wouldn’t know where he’d gone. When he came home I wasn’t allowed to ask him any questions. He started having a huge problem with crack. Ironically that meant he was home more because, unlike the Es he’d been on before, he couldn’t take crack in public.

Our relationship deteriorated in inverse proportion to his burgeoning drug habit. Then my father died and left me another sum of money. We’d always talked about buying a bar somewhere exotic – that was our big dream. So we went to Belize and we nearly bought some property but, even though we were so far from home, Mark still managed to find the local coke dealer. No wonder that deal came to nothing.

Then we remortgaged our flat and we got the place next door and fixed it up. I thought that would give him a focus, get him away from the drugs. But I was wrong.

His drug use escalated and, as it did, his business suffered.

A lot of guys he used to deal with cut him off because of the drugs. Suddenly we weren’t making the money we used to. Some of the guys he’d worked with would still hang out with us socially – our families would still get together. But as far as business went, they cut him out. They weren’t sending any work his way.

Mark became increasingly moody and violent towards me. Now that I’ve got a lovely boyfriend who treats me well, I question myself all the time now about why I put up with it. But you have to look at it in context. There was a lot of drugs in my home. There was a lot of madness around. We went through so much money with nothing to show for it.

It wasn’t even as if our sex life was that good. It was never that kind of passionate relationship, we never had make-up sex after our arguments. So why didn’t I just cut my losses and leave?

One reason was fear, I guess. Fear of being on my own, fear of what Mark would do. He frightened me. Two was lifestyle – even though we weren’t making the big money any more, we still made a living, and I’d never really had a job. And three, we had a daughter together. I guess I thought I had to keep us together for her. He was a good dad when he was up.

I tried to convince myself I was right to stay with him and put up with it. I’d never been in love before in my life. I was naive. I told myself that he needed me. To this day I don’t know whether I was ever in love with him. I don’t even know if I believe in love. Do you know where the phrase ‘head over heels’ comes from? If you were caught being a philanderer in the olden days, you’d be tied with your arms behind your back, and your legs brought up sharp behind you until your back snapped in half. Literally ‘head over heels’. I like that explanation because I believe there’s an element of violence involved when you love someone passionately. I was certainly afraid of him. And I was probably addicted to him in a way. Who knows? Now I’m forty-seven and I’m thinking: Shit. I gave that man half of my life and he treated me like that.