We also took his red Mercedes convertible off him, sold it out of town and subsequently bought a brand-new one with the dough. On the way back, I dropped Marsellus off near his house. I went 150 yards up the road, looked in my mirror and saw the police swooping down on him. I had managed to escape by the skin of my teeth.

Consequently, I found myself on my toes in Manchester. Most people think that if you go on the run, you have to go abroad. However, if you follow basic rules, you can stay hidden for years, just miles from your manor. Top criminals like myself – and solicitors defending a case – rely a lot on the apathy of the ordinary police officer. Basically, they’re lazy bastards, and the only thing they care about is getting paid. I moved 30 miles up the road, lived under an assumed name, got myself a little flat and set up shop again in an Asian area called Rusholme. I also took the precaution of securing a safe house in Cleckheaton, near Leeds – just in case.

Any visitors from my old life simply had to cover their tracks when they came to see me. For instance, when Dionne came to visit, she would start off by leaving our house in Liverpool and travelling to my auntie’s, who lived over the water on the Wirral. Dionne would park her car outside their house, with the police watching it. My uncle would then take her down the back garden and smuggle her into a secret car a few streets away. She would then jump on the train to a place in the countryside before switching to a bus to Manchester. If there had been tail on her, she’d have lost it by then. In the meantime, the main surveillance team would be left sitting in front of my auntie’s house, thinking she was in there having a cup of tea.

One day, Dionne came to me with a message from Johnny Phillips. Like me and Marsellus, he was in the shit with the bizzies, and he wanted my help in straightening out a witness. A well-known man in the city by the name of David Ungi had just been gunned down in the street. David was white and the shooters were black, so the murder had triggered a massive gang war between the two communities. I was trying to build bridges through a white cousin of mine called Toby Marshall, who I’d saved from being killed by Johnny and members of his gang. The police couldn’t link Johnny to the murder of David, but they were able to pin an earlier attack on him. They had a star witness, a guy called Bubble, who I knew very well. I made a deal with Johnny: if I leaned on Bubble and told him to withdraw his statement, Johnny would in turn lean on the witnesses against me and Marsellus to get us out of our predicament. Mona had snitched on us for torturing him with the iron. I hate grassing bastards who run to the police when it gets hard for them. Johnny came to see me in Manchester to go through the details. As a sweetener, he gave me a Colt .45 and 15 grand before he left.

I stuck to my side of the bargain and slipped back into Liverpool to threaten Bubble. I told him, ‘If you go through with this, if you give evidence against Johnny, your life will be over. And even if I don’t get you sooner, it will be murder for the rest of your life.’

The next day, a terrified Bubble withdrew his statement and told the police he hadn’t seen anything. Johnny was off the hook. I didn’t lean on Bubble to cause any offence to the Ungi family; I was doing it to get myself out of a situation. I was trading off one thing for another to solve my problems. Tony Ungi, the eldest brother, is a guy I respect a lot, and I would do nothing to offend him. And that goes for the other brother Joey, too. It was just a case of realpolitik.

The bad news was that Johnny (who was later killed by contract killers) was as full of shit alive as he was dead and didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. To add insult to injury, he had the cheek to ask me for his gun and money back. I told him to go and fuck himself. ‘Until you’ve done what you said you’re going to do,’ I said, ‘that’s my payment, cos I’ve kept my end of the bargain.’ He knew that he owed me, big time.

The downside of being on the run was that it cost a lot of money to lead a double life. I had both a British and a Russian passport, which cost a few grand. Fake documentation to enable me to hire cars cost hundreds of pounds. I had to buy a different car every few months or get one given to me. Everything had to be bought in cash so that I wouldn’t leave a trail. My safe house had to be paid for up front. Furthermore, I had to keep on the move, which meant a lot of hotels – and they had to be four or five star. I wasn’t able to cook anywhere, so I had to eat out. You’re talking at least £15,000 a week just to keep your show on the road, if you’ve got a certain kind of lifestyle. Out of that, I had to keep my family going as well – mortgages, new cars, holidays, the works.

To keep the money coming, I started once again to deal drugs at a prolific rate. I used every trick in the book to avoid paying for them, so I could make double the profit. I took counterfeit money with me to buy the drugs. Every week, I’d buy 50 grand’s worth of blouse notes for £200 and use it to buy a couple of kilos of cocaine from sucker dealers. I’d put the money in a plastic bag and let them see the cash when I walked in the room. If they managed to touch it or feel it, I’d let myself down. However, just showing a man a washing bag full of money and saying, ‘I’ve got my money, mate,’ often put him at his ease. I’d crack a few jokes and be gone with the gear before they’d even cottoned on.

When I was feeling cocky, I wouldn’t even bother with fake money. I’d just fill a bag with potatoes and leave the dealers with that. I’d buy ten kilograms of cocaine for the price of a sack of spuds. Some of them would moan and threaten me afterwards. At the end of the day, they were acting illegally, so it was an open playing field as far I was concerned – a gladiatorial arena in which only the fittest would survive. If you can’t hack it, get out. Get yourself a nine-to-five. Don’t come fucking crying to me cos I’ve taken something off you. Just come and try to take it back off me. That was my philosophy.

Nevertheless, even by taxing, I still couldn’t keep up with my massive expenditure. I had a lot of money stashed away, but sometimes I couldn’t get access to it. A lot of people owed me money, so I ended up constantly chasing them in order to keep the cash flow going. I’d been asking Curtis for my ten grand for months. Ten grand to Curtis was like a gnat’s bite to an elephant – fuck all. However, for some reason, he still wouldn’t give up the goods. I’d even been asking for my dough through his partner Peter Lair, who had a grudging respect for me, because we still had a connection through Andrew John. None of them would tell me to my face that they thought I was a cunt, but I knew they were saying it to each other behind my back.

Anyway, one day, Johnny came to see me about a solution. He was still feeling guilty about his failure to lean on the witnesses for me and Marsellus, and he knew I wanted compensation for it. He told me that he knew where £450,000 of Curtis’s money was hidden. This was an example of the kind of treachery that was common in the world of drug dealers. Johnny had temporarily fallen out with Curtis, and anyone who fell out with Curtis always came round to my back door to see the taxman for retribution. They were always coming to see me saying, ‘Oh, I fell out with him. He’s such a prick, and he’s got this here and he’s got that there.’

I was only really interested in my ten grand – as a matter of honour. However, if there was a bonus £440,000 going, then I’d have that as well. So I started to plan how to rob Curtis’s money. To be honest, I did this reluctantly. If he had kept to our agreement and paid me back the ten large, I would never have done him wrong. But he tried to dismiss me as a minnow when in truth I was a killer whale. I brought in a mate called Mick ‘the Scorpion’ to help. He was called the Scorpion because he was capable of deadly, extreme and irrational criminal betrayal. He got the name from an old parable: the story of the scorpion and the crocodile. The scorpion says to the crocodile, ‘Take me across the river.’ The crocodile is reluctant but is persuaded by the scorpion, who explains that he will not sting him because then they would both drown. So the crocodile jumps in the river with the scorpion on his back. Halfway across, the scorpion stings him. The crocodile asks, ‘Why have you stung me? Now we’re both gonna drown?’ The scorpion replies, ‘I’m a fucking scorpion, man. What did you expect?’ That was Mick – everyone expected him to sting them. However, I understood his philosophy. If I didn’t give him the opportunity to fuck me, he’d help me out.

We soon found out that Curtis had two minders looking after the money in the loft of a house – a doorman called Rory and an Arab lad called Abdul. The plan was to get Mick the Scorpion to dress up as a CID officer with fake credentials. He would then blag his way in. I would steam in behind him, armed to the teeth, take care of anyone inside and grab the money.

The stash house was round the corner from a pub called The Dart. On the night of the attack, I sent the Scorpion up to the door. I had my mask and gloves on, my tools to hand and was crouched down in a nearby car. I was coiled up like a spring. My adrenalin was flowing, and I was ready to fly. It was fucking show time.

However, when the Scorpion knocked on the door, all hell broke loose. Rory ran out of the house, shouting, ‘I know it’s you, Frenchie. Aaaagh!’ He then ran down the street, waving his hands over his head, screaming like a banshee.

‘Someone’s fucking blew us up,’ I thought. They must have known we were coming. Rory was terrified out of his wits, because he’d been tipped off that the Devil was coming for him. Mick and I jumped back into the car and got off.

At 10.30 that evening, my mother-in-law was putting out her rubbish. A voice shouted from the bushes, ‘Are you Stephen French’s mother-in-law?’

She turned round, shit herself and said, ‘Why, why what have I done?’ She expected to be shot dead.

A man appeared from the shadows. He put his hand in his jacket – and pulled out a plastic bag. ‘Curtis Warren sent this for Stephen. It’s ten grand.’

Would you believe it? The cunt had finally paid me back.