Powder Wars by Graham Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

I say’s fuck it. Cuts my losses. Jumped out and got on my toes over the fields. It was about five-to-eight-grand load lost, but it would give the others a chance to get clean away.
    It was all in a night’s work, as far as I was concerned. There were plenty more successes than no-gooders. For a good couple of years I was doing pure wages – week in, week out – often more than five to ten grand a week. You’ve got to remember that the average weekly wage was about £30 a week then, so it was happy days.
    Sometimes we’d just drive a wagon through a wall like a battering ram. One time we did this at a warehouse storing tens of thousands of pounds worth of salmon. We used the work’s wagon we’d found on the premises. But during the get-away the brakes totally went when I was doing about 70 mph. Bottle went, to be truthful, but there was no way I was going to let go this little fortune I was carrying. So I stuck with it all the way to the drop-off point. Round roundabouts, through red lights. The full fucking sitcom skenario. It was touch and go and that, but I managed to deliver the load and get the money for it.
    A few days later Ritchie rang me: ‘Birds’ clothes. Pricey gear, it is. Frocks and all that. There’s two wagon loads just leaving the docks and they’ll be parked up for the night in a depot down south. Get your wagon ready for Friday night.’
    At that time I was getting very into being a young businessman. Was making maximum use of my assets in my haulage business. Very proud of it I was, and all, too. In the day they were doing legit deliveries for proper firms all over the place and of a night and at weekends they were commandeered for hole in the walling. No logistician in the business was as efficient as my good self. Pure Sir John Harvey Jones, I was, know where I’m going? It was busy. I was having to get more drivers and lads in to work for me. Sometimes, it was that chocca, it was touch and go whether I’d have a wagon available for doing a warehouse. I’d got our Snowball working for me. He was one of the family. But he was a pure black sheep, knowmean? Even in a family of black sheep, the cunt could not be trusted. At all.
    A few days before we were going to do the women’s clothes job I was getting calls from my legitimate customers saying that stuff was not getting delivered or it was constantly late. I didn’t mind anyone having their own sidelines and that, but he was taking the piss. When he got back to yard I told him to sort hisself out otherwise I’d fuck him off.
    â€˜And make sure that ten tonner is back by Friday afternoon,’ I double warned him, for good measure.
    Comes Friday, he’s not back. I makes a few calls and the lads tell me that he’s been hanging around with this South End villain called Dave Dicko. Dave – or Dick the Trick as we called him – dabbled a bit with the warehouses and that. He had his own wagons, but it was obvious that he was paying Snowball to use mine in robberies and that. I knew that because they’d pinched some of my burning gear, so it was obvious they were breaking into warehouses and that.
    Like me he had his own haulage firm and an engineering business. He went on to become a very big gangster, in all fairness in the end. Snowball had been card-marking Dave Dicko on warehouse jobs that he should have been ringing-in to us. Only fair and that. So it was triple fucking betrayal in my book. They were using my wagons and my burning gear to rob places which my good self should have been robbing. Liberty or what? Not only that but his non-appearance with the lorry fucked up the bit of work re. the tarts’ clothes. Could not get hold of another wagon for the life of me. Am £5,000 down and Richie is going spare, la. Calling me all the cunts, he is.
    Fuming, I gets in the jalopy and goes out looking for Dave Dicko. I found out that the cunt still lived with