Gangsters' Wives (18 page)

The first I knew of it was when one of the other doormen came rushing round to my house and said, ‘Viv’s been shot.’ He was crying. I said, ‘He couldn’t be. I was just talking to him.’ I had my pyjamas on as I’d been getting ready to go out. I got into my car and raced to the hospital so that I’d be there before he was. Viv arrived in the ambulance. He was still alive. He told me: ‘Don’t cry.’

The police said he’d be all right. I really thought he would be. Like I said, we all thought he was invincible. Then the doctor came and said: ‘I’m afraid your husband is fighting for his life.’

After that, it’s a daze. I don’t really remember what happened next. I know that at some point they took me aside and said, ‘We haven’t been able to save him.’

I was in shock and on Valium for about six months. I just didn’t want to live. If I hadn’t had two young daughters I don’t think I’d have been able to carry on.

It was so hard to take in. Viv was such a popular guy. Everyone loved him. He was the kind of man who carried bags for people and bought groceries for old ladies. He just wasn’t violent – he was no angel but he never harmed anyone unless he absolutely had to. So for him to die in such a violent way was so shocking.

Even worse was the fact that no one was ever caught. Lots of different names have been put forward but no one knows who actually did it. I think the police did their best at the time but all their investigations led nowhere.

It was twelve weeks after he died before he was eventually buried. The funeral was a daze for me. When I’ve seen photos, it seems like there were millions of people there, but I just don’t remember it. His parents were heartbroken, particularly his dad. It’s a terrible thing for parents to outlive their child.

The Valium kept reality at bay for a while. If I could have kept on taking the tablets for ever and not had to face the world I would have done that, but eventually I had to stop them, for the sake of my family.

That feeling inside my heart was horrendous, the pain of it. We’d never got round to being married, but we were married in almost every sense. Of all the women he’d been with, he’d only ever lived with me. I missed him more than I thought possible.

We’d had so many hopes for the future. It was very hard to give up those dreams and move on. I kept thinking of how my life should have been, if he’d lived. I’d play songs over and over that reminded me of him, and I never wanted to go out.

I knew I had to move on, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t looking to meet anyone else. I never thought I could, but eventually I hooked up with Michael, who’d known Viv well. He had four children and his wife was unwell and I offered to help. We finally got together ten years after Viv died.

I was thirty-four when Viv died. I’m fifty now, but it doesn’t feel like that long ago. I still think about him every day. I talk about him with people all the time.

But I don’t regret any of it. In spite of the grief I’d do it all again. I feel like it was such a pleasure and a privilege to have Viv in my life. Even reading those words back doesn’t do justice to how I feel. He was just such a lovely person I can’t even begin to describe how lucky I feel to have known him, and the same goes for my family. He gave us so much in every sense – our lives are so much richer for having known him.

If he’d lived I’m convinced Viv would have taken a back-seat role in his security business. After the drugs came, the police had to be much tougher. Before that, people used to come to the bars saying the police had sent them to ask Viv to sort out trouble. The drugs changed everything. He was the one standing out against them and that’s why people wanted him dead.

I think there are many people today who didn’t even know Viv but who regret what happened to him. After he was shot the club scene in our area got much nastier.

After Viv died, I was horrified by the things that were said about him in the press. The papers called him an enforcer and a thug and it made me so angry. People don’t even consider the feelings of the families – his kids, his parents. Viv wasn’t a gangster. You’d see these things in the papers, but the truth is no one from the North-East is a gangster. The papers can just print anything they like.

It made me very angry. It made me want to set the record straight. We were very affected by the things they said about Viv.

He was just a big-hearted man who did his job and did it well and cared about people. There’ll never be another one like him.

It’s hard to believe that the softly spoken, bearded man, shyly showing off his artwork on the wall of his mother’s compact Worthing house, could once have been one of the world’s biggest cocaine barons. Terry Barlow’s girlfriend Lyn watches him with almost maternal pride as he explains his paintings in his quiet, diffident voice. Terry’s criminal career ended with him being tried and imprisoned in both Spain and Italy for the same offence (importing forty kilos of cocaine). In total he was sentenced to twenty-nine years in prison, of which he actually served thirteen years in jails in Italy, Spain and finally the UK. When Lyn met him, he was out on parole. The couple now live a quiet life in the seaside town, looking after Terry’s elderly mother
.

Lyn, who herself grew up in children’s homes and foster homes, is fifty-seven. Perfectly made up and looking younger than her years, she is nevertheless protective of her boyfriend, despite him being thirteen years older than her. Only when Terry is out of earshot does she talk about his past, confiding
her belief that the long years in prison left something ‘broken’ in him. Pragmatic and matter-of-fact when talking about her own unhappy childhood, Lyn softens when discussing Terry and it’s clear the pair are very close
.

As soon as he walked into the club, I noticed him. He had the most amazing eyes, and I was hypnotised by them.

‘Have you seen him?’ I whispered, still staring across the room, to my daughter Clare.

She glanced over. ‘Yeah, but he’s with two women,’ she said.

My heart sank. She was right. I’d been so wrapped up in watching the man that I hadn’t noticed his companions. But still I couldn’t stop looking at him, nor could I help but notice he was staring right back at me.

Suddenly one of the women looked towards me, whispered something to the guy, and started to make her way over.

Immediately, my pulse started racing. Had she seen me staring? Was she going to make a scene?

Instead, when she reached me, the woman leant in and said, ‘He’s not my boyfriend, you know? He’s just a friend.’

I didn’t know what to say, but before I could come up with anything, she’d returned to her friends and was whispering something to the man with the startling eyes.

‘Clare!’ I hissed suddenly. ‘He’s coming over here. What am I going to do?’

‘Just relax,’ she hissed back.

Then he was standing next to me. Taking my face in between his hands, he gazed intently into my eyes. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked. ‘Where the fuck have
you
been?’ I replied. And that was it. I was hooked – and have been ever since.

My life has been nothing if not dramatic. I come from an Irish/Jewish family, brought up in the East End. My mother’s family are Jewish, father’s Irish. It was a big family. Nan had seven kids and my mum had five. But Mum’s family didn’t like my father. He was not a very nice chap, a bit jealous. He’s still alive, somewhere in Mansfield.

Dad did a lot of things to earn a living. He worked in a pots and pans factory, a Mars Bar factory. On my birth certificate it says ‘cobbler’. He was pretty law-abiding, but he used to make us go down the market and sell things. He used to say, ‘Don’t come back until you’ve got five shillings.’ We’d rob from other stalls so we had more to sell. We’d go down with a wheelbarrow and spread out a blanket. We’d sell electrical stuff like switches. He was very good at electrical stuff – that’s where I get my knowledge from because I’m very good with electrics.

My mum died when I was ten. She had epilepsy. She was a very nervous person. I now have what she had – agoraphobia. She got to the stage where she couldn’t go out at all and was having panic attacks. She kept trying to kill herself. I’d come home from school and her head would be in the oven. In the end she had an epileptic fit from a blow to the head. She died in 1961.

I had one sister and three brothers. My dad brought his sister-in-law, who was living in Mansfield, to live with us. She was married to my dad’s twin brother but he’d died from a war wound. She came over with her two children, both girls. So there were four girls and three boys. The house was too crowded and Dad fussed over them such a lot we felt we didn’t fit in. In the end, we sat down together and said that we wanted to go into care. We’d been in and out of care before as respite for Mum. We told them we wanted to go back there.

I never lived with my father again. Until recently I kept in touch with him but then he started running Mum down so I don’t bother any more. I told his wife to take my name out of their address book. I went into care in Hornchurch in Essex. There were houses all called by names of flowers – like Rose Cottage. Now I think it’s a girls’ school, but then it was a children’s home, after that I went to Barnardo’s.

After a few years my aunt, my mum’s younger sister, took me in, and my nan had my sister, and my brothers went to my uncle. I didn’t get on with my aunt, whose two children I looked after. Eventually I got taken away from her suffering from malnutrition.

My schoolteacher, Joanne Barlow, had noticed me coming to school in the snow with no coat, and she befriended me and looked after me. Then social services came and got me and I went back into care. Then, when I was twelve, I went to stay with Joanna. Now I think it’s funny that her name was Barlow and so is Terry’s. It’s like a good omen.

Joanne was very good to me, but she’d already applied to be a missionary in Nigeria so when she went away, I went to live with another couple. They were fine, but then we had to go to stay with the husband’s father who was ill. He was a nasty old man and sexually abused me. They thought I was ungrateful because every time he was around I’d be rude to him. I was about fourteen. I ran away and went back into care.

When Joanna found out what had happened, I went to stay with her sister Kate in Buckinghamshire. So you could say I’d had a bit of a rootless upbringing. Certainly by the time I’d left school at fourteen I’d experienced a lot more than I should have done.

At eighteen I got married to Keith and had my son Gary, who’s thirty-eight. It’s common among kids who grew up in care to have children early – I suppose it’s a desire to create the family they missed out on. I was far too young, I wasn’t ready. I knew how to defend myself but I was immature emotionally.

Keith was a good provider, a carpenter. We lived near Bletchley in what’s now called Milton Keynes. Three years later I had Clare. I’ve now got three grandchildren, including a seventeen-year-old. Keith and I were together twelve years before we got divorced. I was running a pub in Haywards Heath at the time. After that I had two long-term love affairs, but neither of them came to anything.

By the time the new millennium came round, I was living in a flat in Worthing and was really depressed and tired with it all. I felt like my life had been full of failures. I stopped going out altogether.

One day in 2001, my daughter rang me. She said, ‘You can’t keep sitting in the flat night after night, you’ve got to go out.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to.’ She said, ‘I’m driving down now, I’m going to pick you up and we’re going out.’

There’s a pub near here with a nightclub attached. Clare insisted we were going there. I really didn’t want to go. At forty-nine, I felt I’d be the oldest person there.

She dragged me into the pub for a drink to get my nerve up, then we went to the nightclub. I was standing there feeling very self-conscious, but then I saw the man with the fantastic eyes coming in. I found out later Terry had been on E when he came over and took my face in his hands. I was so naive, I didn’t even know what E was.

‘What’s an E?’ I asked.

He said, ‘It’s Ecstasy.’ I said, ‘What’s Ecstasy?’ He said, ‘Never mind.’

When I met him in the nightclub it was a Wednesday night. We didn’t really talk much but he said, ‘Let’s meet up for a coffee on Friday.’ ‘Friday?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with tomorrow?’

So we met the next day. I was with my daughter and granddaughter. I said, ‘Go round the corner and have a look, see if he’s there, and tell me if he looks as nice as last night.’ She went to look and said, ‘He’s there.’

We talked and talked. I couldn’t believe he was sixty-two. He dropped a few hints that he might have some big secret in his past. He told me that I might not want to go out with him if he told me everything. I kept saying that nothing he said could shock me.

He eventually came out with it all about three weeks later. We’d been seeing each other every day and I think he was frightened about my reaction if I found out from someone else. As he was telling me, I was looking at him and thinking: You’re having me on, you’re not that sort of person. Then he showed me his legal papers – translated into different languages, and I knew it was true.

Terry had been done for big-time cocaine smuggling. He’d been sentenced to twenty-nine years in prison, and had actually served thirteen. He’d known all the big people, like Pablo Escobar. He was right up there.

He made an awful lot of money. He lived in America with his wife and they lived the high life with his daughter and sons. Nice house, boat, cars. But he’d got so big, he was running around like a headless chicken and by the time he was caught I think it was almost a relief.

I’ve seen a picture of Terry and his wife together. She’d hurt her eye and has a patch over it. They look like Bonnie and Clyde. Terry was always having to go on the run from the Colombian mafia. One time Terry even went on the run with his mum. She’d come over to see him and then all of a sudden he was saying: ‘Right, Mum, pack your bags, you’re coming with me.’ Another time he was on the run with his daughter. He’d run while they were looking for him then come back when the heat was off.