One time, one of the robbers I was with got wrestled to the ground during a getaway. I gazelled it back down the street to rescue him. He was being slaughtered by two cowards that had set about him; however, I had a ting on me. I pointed it at them, and they fucking ran. I saved him.

On another occasion, I went in and saved a guy who had been injured, despite the fact that he’d already turned the robbery into a nightmare by scheduling it wrong and missing the money. I risked ten years’ jail for the pittance that we stole, but I rescued him anyway from the jaws of certain capture. I was pissed off and annoyed, but I still went back for him – like a US marine.

I was also getting a rep as someone who could tolerate pain. One of my most defining features is my unbelievable ability to endure horrific personal injury. Whenever I had to have stitches, I refused to take anaesthetic. I could feel them sewing through the skin, but I’d smile. It was a macho thing with me. I wanted my tolerance of pain to be known.

The next robbery involved a wages van for a huge factory. The security guard got out of the van, and I ran over and punched the guy so hard in his visor that it smashed into his face, just as I had done on my first job. He immediately went down. The visor had cut into his face and blood poured out of his nose. Edgar grabbed the bag, and we made off with the booty. When we got to the safe house, I pulled off my mask and subsequently hit the roof. In front of me was a girl I knew; in fact, it was her place.

‘I don’t want nobody knowing what I do,’ I said.

‘Well it’s her house, and she wanted to be here,’ the others replied.

A bit of pandemonium broke out. I got about £7,000 from that rob so gave her £500 to keep her mouth shut. She never, ever said anything, but she always looked at me funny afterwards.

I was getting a good rep, so I was recruited by another gang. The first robbery with them targeted the monthly wages for a shoe factory. The intel reports said there would be £100,000 to £250,000 in a little glass office inside the plant. This time Johnny Phillips, Curtis Warren’s right-hand man, was on the team, as well as two white guys called Smith and Jones. My job was to stop any potential have-a-go heroes in their tracks. We gave little 18-year-old Jonesy a shotgun; he was only a baby, but the gun would be enough to persuade the cashiers to hand over the money. First, it was Smith’s job to get us into the glass office by any means necessary.

Our problems started as soon as we got to the office. The cashier wouldn’t let us in, knowing she was protected by a big glass partition and wooden frames which supported the conservatory-style structure. Smith screamed, ‘Open the door, open the door,’ but she held firm, thinking she was safe behind the bulletproof glass. However, when it came to security, they clearly hadn’t catered for the powers of a world-class athlete. So I stepped up from behind and kung-fu kicked the structure on the right angle of one of the joints. The whole partition came crashing down. It was an absolutely fantastic noise. Everybody in the factory then knew we meant business.

We got the money and got in the car. Suddenly, we realised that Smith wasn’t with us. To give Jones his due, he said, ‘We’re getting out the car, and we’re going back in to get him. He’s me mate.’ We couldn’t leave a Spartan behind, no matter how fucking stupid he was.

Back inside, we found Smith still looking round for more money, trying to redeem himself for failing to get the door of the office open. He was running round terrorising everybody, the fucking idiot that he was. We grabbed him, took him out and drove off. When I counted up the loot, I realised we had only ended up with £2,000. I was fuming – absolutely livid. I had risked myself for a measly two grand. I never worked with those fools again.

However, one good thing did come out of this incident: the importance of forensics and how dangerous they were to a criminal was reinforced to me. For instance, Smith had refused to burn a new Berghaus jacket that he had been wearing underneath his boiler suit that day. The bizzies went to his house and matched up fibres from the partition that I had smashed down with those found on his top. He ended up getting a nine-year stretch. I laughed my cock off when I heard about it. From that day forward, I always made sure I got rid of my clothes – no matter what job I was doing. I reckon that saved me 100 years in jail time. So, I guess the job hadn’t been a total waste after all. Every cloud . . .

According to the papers, Curtis Warren was doing armed robberies too, and he was a good blagger. However, things started to change when all of these guys started to go to prison. There’s a scene in the film Essex Boys that illustrates the scenario perfectly. There’s a couple of blaggers in jail, where they’ve come across nerdy student types on the prison wings. One of the armed robbers has got a picture on the wall of his cell – I think it was a Ferrari Testarossa, a car worth about £100,000 in the late 1980s. He looks at the car and says, ‘This is my dream car. I’m going to have one of these one day.’

Then the weak student guy nervously butts in and says, ‘I’ve got one of those.’

The hardcore blaggers reply, ‘Shut your mouth,’ meaning don’t be fucking silly.

Nonetheless, he explains, ‘No, no, no, I’m not bullshitting. I’ve got one of them. I’m in here for growing and bringing in weed, and I’ve got one of them as a result.’ He was a Howard Marks type of guy.

So that was how those amongst the blagging community realised that drugs were the future. It was ironic that they had gone to jail to have their futures curtailed yet they’d found a better path within the four walls of their cells . . .

The bonus was that Customs weren’t even switched on at the time, and it was a free-for-all. It was much easier sending a mule to pick up a parcel of drugs from some country than jumping over a counter with a shotgun. You could just go to wherever you needed to go by day boat – Holland, France, Spain – load your granny up with gear and send her back. If you actually had the foresight to have a false bottom in your suitcase, that was even better, and you could do what you wanted. It was hardly James Bond, but Customs were going for the obvious smugglers, pulling over the guys that stood there with their scruffy suits on with fags hanging out of their mouths; in other words, the ones who looked a bit suspicious. However, a pensioner wearing a floral dress and a twinset and accompanied by a few kids could walk straight through with ten kilograms of cannabis and even get a smile off the duty officer as she went by. Once again, our two friends – misdirection and subterfuge – came into play.

It was when the mainline hard-core criminal fraternity – not your burglars and your pimps but your armed robbers – piled into narcotics on a gold-rush scale that the drugs explosion took place. Armed robbers were the royalty of the criminal fraternity. They were the hard men, the violent men, the ones not to be messed with – the men that were supposed to be given respect. They were the men from the boxing and martial-arts fraternities who had the town halls to pioneer drug empires. Even if you traced the origins of families such as the Arifs and the Adams in London, you’d find that they were armed robbers before they became involved in drugs. If you traced their criminology and mapped out their criminal family trees, you’d find armed robbers at the core. It was where the initial funds came from – the first injection of six, seven, eight or ten grand that was needed to get from one continent to another and to pick up a shipment and get it back again. After that, when criminals saw the amount of money that could be made, they wanted more. Initially, everyone started off on weed – first one kilo, then two, then one hundred and so on. Back then, the main objective of every young ambitious gangster was to get a tonne of weed. If you could do that, you were a Hall of Fame guy. Then everyone started trying to outdo each other.

But, according to Customs and Excise reports, Curtis Warren took it to a different level – he bought a tonne of coke. He was buying a kilo for between £3,000 and £4,000 in Colombia, and selling it for £30,000 a kilo in the UK. The dealers were selling that for £1,000 an ounce. You do the maths. There was £30,000 to £40,000 clear profit for them on a kilo.

So, in the early to mid-’80s, all the conditions – environmental and personal – were in place for my entry into the drugs trade. However, I was holding back. Even though my peers were growing rich, I was trying to fight the evil inside me. Again, something inside me was telling me that it wasn’t right. Instead, I threw myself into martial arts. It paid off, and I attained my first dan in Shotokan karate.

I’d have done anything not to sell drugs, so I kept looking around to see how I could make money from my fighting skills. Still, I couldn’t even afford to go for a night out at that time. I took a job at Liverpool University as a community sports teacher, but I was trapped in a flat with Maria, my son Stephen and her three kids from a previous relationship. Deep down I knew that there was only one way to a better life – and that was education. I enrolled on an access course in the hope that getting qualifications would one day get me out of the mess I was in.

However, things took a different turn one measly pay day when I headed down to Kirklands, my favourite bar. This was a really cool place to go, where black lads used to meet white girls. There was a doorman there called Fred Green, who used to make life difficult for me and Andrew John whenever we tried to go in. He always tried to make us pay, knowing that we were skint, while all the time he was letting everyone else in for free. We wanted revenge, but we didn’t think that we could take him individually, so we did what’s known in the trade as a ‘double bank’ on him. I attacked him from the front, whilst Andrew came from behind, and we had it away with him. As he was rolling around on the ground, we both looked to the stars and had an idea. If we could actually defeat the man on the door, why couldn’t we just take over the venue’s security for ourselves? So we did. He was an old lion who was starting to lose his teeth, so he didn’t make too much noise when we told him that the door was ours.

From the off, Marcello Pole, the millionaire owner of the bar, took a shine to me. He said, ‘You’ve had the ability to remove Fred from the door. I’m going to give you a chance, cos I’m a believer in the survival of the fittest.’ After that, to give him his due, he gave us the contract. Nevertheless, he still said, ‘You’ve got to let me stay in charge of the bar and business.’

I find that when you meet new people in life, it takes between thirty seconds and one minute to find out whether they’re good for you or not, and Marcello and I knew we were good for each other. Other young bucks with the taste of fresh blood in their mouths would have tried to take the whole club off Marcello. However, I knew that if I allowed him to give me instructions, he would always feed me when I was hungry. He was an experienced businessman and had been involved in clubland for over 30 years. He had seen it all before – the hard cases coming and going. He wasn’t intimidated by me; he knew that I was just the latest in a long line of faces. It was a case of ‘Here’s the new guy I’m dealing with’ as far as Marcello was concerned.

The door at Kirklands was like a crash course in drug dealing and our first proper entry into that game. In a way, the drugs came to me in the end. They always do.