Wild Thing (27 page)

In April 1988 my father died. Over the years he’d had two relatively minor scares involving his heart, and doctors had advised him to give up smoking, but Dad had refused. My father started smoking during the Second World War, after he had volunteered to join the army aged just 17. After six and a half years’ service he left but retained the smoking habit that would later claim his life. My thoughts on both of my parents are too painful to commit to paper. I am just grateful that neither of them suffered at the end. My parents were on holiday in Spain and were dancing together when Dad’s heart failed. He was rushed to hospital, but he passed away shortly after arriving. Mum came home alone, and Dad’s body was flown home a week later. Margaret, the children and I all attended the funeral, which I don’t mind admitting broke my heart. My father was a top-class fellow, a real man’s man. If I have grown into being half of the guy he was, I will die a happy man. Even though Dad retired at the age of 59, he used to leave the house every morning and carry out voluntary work for the elderly within his community. I only found out when some of the people he had helped turned up at his funeral. My mother struggled to carry on after losing my father. Her health deteriorated, and her once-vibrant never-say-die personality diminished. In August 1991, while visiting Bournemouth on a coach trip, Mum’s heart failed and she died. Like my father, Mum was a remarkable person. In her youth she had been the Northern Counties sprint champion and insisted on her children living a clean, healthy lifestyle. My mother was cremated, and I placed her ashes on my father’s grave. Despite the pain I still feel after losing them, I take great comfort from the fact that they are once more together and forever will be.

 

THE BIBLE CLAIMS THAT THE GOOD LORD GIVES AND THE GOOD LORD TAKES
away. In July 1994, just three years after the death of my mother, Margaret gave birth to our fourth child and my seventh, a daughter named Sarah-Jane. Three years may seem like a long time, but in my heart my beloved mother’s passing still felt like yesterday on the day that Sarah-Jane was born. I’m not a religious man, but Sarah-Jane’s arrival into the world brought me inner peace and helped heal the pain caused by my loss. The birth of my children and the passing of my parents undoubtedly made me more mature and – let’s not get carried away here with sentiment – ‘slightly’ more responsible! Ideas about returning to work in nightclubs were no more, and I genuinely did my best – although I concede my idea of success may be considered to be failure by others – to be a good husband and father at home.

Jimmy Sheridan and I first met when I was working at Lautrec’s. I had been involved in an altercation with three men, and I ended up knocking one of them out and hurling the other two through the door and out onto the car park. When it was over, Jimmy walked up to me and introduced himself. He was laughing and said that he had never seen any man being hit so hard in his life. Everybody in London knows Irish Jimmy Sheridan. If there’s money to be made, you’ll find Jimmy somewhere amongst it. Jimmy has a son named Jason, who was living in Basildon, Essex, during the early ’90s. He was friends with some of the men who later became known as the Essex Boys firm. For reasons known only to Jason, he purchased a revolver from one of them. However, he didn’t have all of the required fee, so the gun was stored in a false ceiling in the reception area of Raquel’s nightclub, where the man worked. Jason was told that he could have the gun when he came up with the rest of the money. A few days later Jason went into Raquel’s and asked his friend for the gun, promising he would pay whatever was owed at the weekend. The man relented and handed him the gun and ammunition.

Within hours this act of charity was proved to be an act of stupidity. The doorman was called up to the dance floor because Jason had put the gun to a reveller’s head and threatened to shoot him. Nobody knows if the man’s dance steps or dress sense had provoked Jason, but he was clearly upset. The club manager, who was called to the incident, demanded to know how a man had got into the club carrying a loaded gun. Pausing momentarily, trying desperately to think of an excuse, the doorman eventually replied, ‘You’ve got it wrong, mate. Wait here.’ He grabbed Jason by the arm and escorted him from the building. When he returned, he said to the manager, ‘What’s the problem?’

The manager, almost choking in disbelief, replied, ‘Problem? What’s my problem? He put a loaded gun to a man’s head!’

The doorman began to laugh. ‘That wasn’t a loaded gun, you fool. He’s been to a fancy-dress party. The gun was an imitation.’

The manager looked more shocked by the blatant lies the doorman was telling him than by the fact that somebody had nearly been executed on the dance floor. ‘You think I’m stupid,’ he said. ‘The gun’s no longer on the premises, so I cannot prove it was real. Make sure it and your deranged friend never darken the doors of this building again.’ The manager walked away shaking his head and mumbling to himself. The doorman raised his hand and the DJ drowned out his laughter by putting on another record.

The following week Jason was forced to go to another nightclub because he had been informed about his lifetime ban from Raquel’s. Jason and his friend Simon Wally washed up at a venue called Time, which was just across the road from Raquel’s. During the evening a girl accused Jason of pinching her backside and demanded an apology. Jason denied doing any such thing and told the girl to fuck off. The girl, who was by this time extremely irate, stormed off saying that she was going to fetch her cousin, who would sort Jason out.

Simon and Jason thought the girl was either drunk, mistaken or both, so they continued socialising without thinking any more about the incident. About an hour later Jason went to the bar to get himself and Simon a drink. As he turned to walk away after being served, a man head-butted him in the nose and a fight broke out. The girl’s cousin had found Jason, but he was soon wishing that he hadn’t bothered. Jason wrestled the man to the floor, sat astride him and began to give him a lesson in the art of fighting that he was unlikely to forget. The door staff intervened, but instead of pulling the men apart, they began to attack Jason. He fought back but was overpowered and ejected from the club. ‘Wankers! Wankers!’ he screamed as he got to his feet. ‘I’ll be back for all of you!’

Simon ushered his friend into a taxi and the pair left the scene. They told the taxi driver to take them to Jason’s house, which was less than a mile away. Throughout the journey Jason was saying that he was going to get a gun and shoot the people who had assaulted him. Simon was trying to calm Jason down, but he had totally lost control and was having none of it. He told the taxi driver to wait outside his house, ran inside and returned a few minutes later. ‘Take me back to Time,’ he ordered the driver, ‘and don’t hang about.’

When they got out of the taxi, Simon was still pleading with Jason to calm down, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Jason walked with purpose to the club entrance, flung the doors open, pulled out his gun, identified the men who had assaulted him amongst those in the packed reception area and began to fire. One man raised his arm to protect his head and a bullet struck him in the elbow, travelled up his arm and exited through his wrist. Another was struck in the ankle as he fled. People were screaming and running everywhere. Jason had made his point, so he turned and walked away. He was later arrested, charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment.

Jimmy, like any father, was concerned about the company and way of life his son had become immersed in. What was done was history. Jimmy knew that he couldn’t change the past, but he hoped that he could guide his son Jason towards a brighter trouble-free future for when he got out of jail. ‘Come with me and see him,’ he said to me. ‘I need people to tell him he can’t live his life like that. He might listen to a big guy like you, Lew.’

I didn’t know if Jason would listen to me, or anybody else for that matter, but if I think I can help somebody, I will always try. A few days later I found myself heading down the M2 with Jimmy. Our destination was HMP Maidstone, where Jason was serving his sentence. Maidstone prison looked quite daunting as we pulled up in a pub car park across the road from it. The high stone walls and ancient gatehouse seemed to scream out ‘abandon hope, all those who enter here’. I didn’t mind visiting one of the 600 souls it housed, but I wouldn’t want to spend the night in there.

Jimmy said that he always smuggled Jason in a few forbidden creature comforts to make his time inside a little easier. These illicit gifts included cash, which is not allowed in prison but is worth double its value on the black market inside, whisky, which is also forbidden but much sought after, and tobacco, which is allowed but expensive when purchased on a prisoner’s meagre wages. Jimmy and I bought a bottle of whisky and filled up two plastic Lucozade bottles with it. Jimmy explained that he used Lucozade bottles because the lids and the bottle were made of plastic, which could not be detected when officers used metal detectors to search us. Jimmy and I secreted the bottles down our trousers and then entered the prison. We were told to sit in a large waiting room before being called through to an adjacent room one at a time. ‘Anything metal put it in that box,’ the prison officer said as I entered the room. ‘Have you got anything you shouldn’t have?’ he asked.

‘Mounting bills and a bad back,’ I replied. The prison officer waved the metal detector around my body, asked me to pick up my possessions and then told his colleague that I was clear to go through.

As I sat in another room with Jimmy, awaiting final clearance to go into the visiting room, a bald-headed man wearing dark glasses and a long Crombie coat walked in. Moments later he was joined by a man I immediately recognised as Charlie Kray. I had met Charlie in several nightclubs where I had worked, so we exchanged pleasantries. As we were talking, a prison officer entered the room and asked us all to follow him to the visiting area. When we eventually sat down with Jason, Jimmy and I talked to him about the past, the present and what the future might hold. He appeared to be listening, but I don’t think he was taking in much of our advice. When everybody in the visiting room appeared to have settled, we purchased several cans of Coke from the canteen, drank half of each can and then, after checking that nobody was watching us, topped them up with whisky, which we gave Jason to drink.

Shortly afterwards a female prison officer with a full figure stopped at our table and said that she could smell alcohol. We naturally denied having any in our possession. The officer then accused Jason, who was clearly pissed, of drinking. I stood up and asked her if her poorly paid job was really worth all the trouble she was about to cause. After looking me up and down, she leaned forward, whispered, ‘Don’t ever take the piss out of me again,’ and walked away.

The confrontation, despite no voices being raised, had been noticed by a lot of people in the visiting room. I saw that Charlie Kray, the man in the glasses and others at their table were looking over and laughing. When they saw me looking back, one of the men got up and walked over to our table. ‘Reg Kray,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Are those bastards giving you grief?’

Reg Kray, one half of the infamous Kray twins, was much shorter than I had imagined he would be. In his prime Reg had been a competent boxer who could have done well in the ring if he hadn’t turned to crime. I noticed he was wearing a gold boxing glove on a chain around his neck, so he was obviously still a fight fan. Jason knew Reg well because he was housed in the cell next door to him. He introduced us all to Reg, who then sat down to talk to us for a while. Although we had never met, Reg said that he’d heard of me through his friends in Ilford and around the East End. He asked me to meet his friends, whom he had left sitting at the other table. I was introduced to his brother Charlie, whom I already knew, Freddie Foreman, a kid named Bradley Allardyce and the man in the dark glasses.

Unbeknown to me at the time, Allardyce, who was serving nine years for robbery, was Reg Kray’s lover. Allardyce was released a couple of years after we were introduced, but in 2005 he was sent back to prison for life. Allardyce and two other men, Wayne Turner and Shane Porter, were found guilty of murder and conspiracy to murder. Their victim, David Fairburn, aged 26, was stabbed and beaten to death in Barking, Essex.

Freddie Foreman seemed like a decent guy. He told me that he too was a big boxing fan. Foreman was a major player in London’s underworld during the 1960s. He had murdered a man named Ginger Marks and a prisoner who was on the run named Frank Mitchell. Foreman had also disposed of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie’s body for his friends the Krays. I was sure Mickey Green’s wife, the former Mrs McVitie, wouldn’t have approved of the company I kept that day.

The man in the glasses stood up to shake my hand. ‘Dave Courtney’s the name,’ he said. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and started to tell me all about himself. I knew I had seen this man somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite place him. He reminded me of somebody I had slapped and ejected from Boobs nightclub in Croydon, but in all fairness I couldn’t be sure. He knew a lot of people I knew and claimed they always spoke highly of me. Courtney has been involved in one or two controversial incidents since we met. As a result different people I know hold opposing views about him. All I can say is that, on the rare occasions that I have met him since, he has been humorous, polite and good company.

I continued to visit Jason with Jimmy on a regular basis. Regrettably, when Jason was released, it was clear that, as I’d assumed, he had chosen not to listen to anybody. His father Jimmy is a good well-meaning man who tried to help him. Jason repaid this kindness by attacking him whilst armed with a hammer following a heated argument about Jason’s behaviour. They no longer talk, which is a terrible shame. At the time of writing Jason is back in jail. I hope that one day he reads this, contacts his father and they are both able to put the past behind them.