Wannabe in My Gang? by Bernard O'Mahoney Read Free Book Online Page B

bouncers and I was entering the Basildon nightclub security scene at a time of change following a spate of retirements, deaths and public disorder. A bouncer named McCabe, who was once all-powerful, had recently died in a road accident and the infamous West Ham United football hooligans, known as the Inter City Firm, had taken on the hardcore of Basildon’s doormen at a rave held in the town.
    Madness had reigned that night. The ICF had come prepared with coshes, hammers, ‘squirt’, tear gas and knives. The unwitting doormen had nothing to defend themselves with other than their muscle-bound bravado and reputations. They soon lost them both. The ICF rampaged through the hall, hacking, stabbing, slashing and stamping on the retreating bouncers whose crime it was to have had one of the ICF members ejected over a trivial remark. Being a good doorman isn’t about going to the gym and throwing your steroid-bloated frame about, it is about diplomacy and understanding the psyche of the psychos you encounter.
    The Basildon bouncers were now learning this valuable lesson. Those who escaped tutorial in the main hall were captured in the car park and given the most brutal of lessons. They were beaten and their flesh torn open with Stanley knives. One blood-soaked bouncer was thrown into a lake. It was a miracle nobody died. Many of those who avoided hospital immediately ‘retired’ from the security industry, declaring almost comically, ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be.’ They were, of course, quite right: things had changed. Lager louts with bad attitudes had been replaced by smartly dressed, drug-fuelled, knife-wielding villains. Commuting to Essex from the East End of London, these villains wanted to flood the county with the ‘love drug’ Ecstasy. Disco versus rave; bouncer versus firm member; pints versus pills; they were all on a collision course and I was stepping into the epicentre without realising it.
    I thanked Dave for helping me out and told him that I would start work the following weekend. After securing additional income and the event for James going so well, I thought things were certainly looking up for me. I still had the incident with the police in Wolverhampton to sort out, but it was hardly a hanging offence.
    Over the next few days, calls from Ronnie and Reggie were fast and furious. They shouted at me and demanded that the funds be handed over to the Fallon family. I was in total agreement, but told them that I could not find the two men who actually had the money. Promise after promise followed, meeting after meeting took place, but the money never did materialise. Ronnie accepted what I had to say, but Reggie would not. He was constantly on the telephone. ‘You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that and you’ve got to hand that money over.’
    I kept telling him that I hadn’t got the fucking money, that Campbell and Brazier had the money. It just got sillier and sillier.
    I could offer no explanation other than the fact that I could not contact the two men or locate the money. Kate Kray joined in the barrage of phone calls, ringing me to tell me what Ronnie had told me five minutes earlier and what Reggie had told me ten minutes before that. Reggie Kray eventually informed me that Tony Lambrianou had been appointed to sort out the problem. He was to find out where the missing money had gone and arrange for it to be given to the Fallons. A meeting was arranged at a pub in Gants Hill, Essex. Campbell, myself, Lambrianou and one or two other people I had never met before attended. When asked about the proceeds from the boxing event, Campbell said most of it had gone on expenses. ‘Bollocks. Count the people on Tony’s table alone,’ I said, ‘12 at £40 a head, that’s £480 – plus whatever they bid for auction items.’
    ‘But Tony and people like that didn’t pay, Bernie,’ Campbell replied. ‘You can’t expect them to, they are on the Kray firm.’
    It dawned on me: Charlie