Anyway, I was determined not to miss the birth, because several years before I’d missed the birth of my first son Stephen in almost exactly the same circumstances – I’d been doing a drug deal. A wave of guilt and shame flushed over me. Nothing had changed in the intervening years. I was still a drug dealer. I was still the Devil. And now it looked like I was going to be bringing a second child into my hell. I jumped into my brand-new Lexus and did the journey back to Liverpool’s Oxford Street maternity hospital in two hours and sixteen minutes.

On 7 August 1994 at 7.10 a.m., my daughter Abbey was born. I actually saw her leaving her mum, and, I have to admit, I didn’t find it a pleasant experience. It was touch and go, cos the cord got tied round her neck and the midwife had to take the baby off somewhere. My mother-in-law Sylvia, who was a fierce defender of her family, followed her to see what was happening. When they took the cord from around her neck, she spluttered into life and suddenly we had a tiny new baby. For months, we’d been having arguments about whether she’d look like me or her mum – how dark she’d be, which of our features she would have, etc. When she came out, she was the spitting image of her mother with eyelashes you could sweep the carpet with. She was beautiful. When I held her, I’d never felt love like it before, and I knew there and then I couldn’t be the Devil any longer.

From a moral point of view, how could I look this human in the eye if I was responsible for the misery and deaths of so many like her? From a personal point of view, not only did I have to stay alive, but I also had to stay free in order to make sure that this little bundle of joy got the start in life she deserved. It was a true epiphany – that’s the only way I can describe it. I filled up with warmth, love and happiness, and a single tear rolled down my left cheek. It was kind of sentimental and fuzzy – it was fuzzy wuzzy.

From that moment on, I became a different person. I vowed I would get out of the drugs game and avoid any confrontation that could lead to trouble. The epiphany happened in an instant, but I’d been building up to it for a while. In all honesty, I felt guilty. The drugs had affected all communities but had destroyed the black ghettos in particular. I had started off in the Young Black Panthers. My brother Shaun had founded the Federation of Liverpool Black Organisations. We’d dined with King Gustav at his place in Sweden with hope in our hearts. I had fought racist doormen to let black lads in. We’d been strong, fit and clear of thought. After the riots, we’d had the choice to build something positive out of what had happened. Instead, I was a drug dealer, and Shaun’s life was in turmoil. Somehow we had chosen the wrong path.

When drugs started coming into the community, people sold them and made money. They weakened our militancy. Drugs made us apathetic and turned us against our own. We started killing each other. In America, the black male under the age of 25 is an endangered species. They’re killing each other at a prolific rate, each murder going unreported. It’s started to happen here, too.

When I was a drug dealer, I would try and rationalise my actions. The more money we made, the more power it gave us. It gave us a sense that the whole community was getting strong. But then the real effects started to kick in. Drugs gave us a false sense of security. That was the eternal contradiction – the drugs were making us strong in one way but killing us in another.

I never set out to harm anyone, but I couldn’t deny that my actions had a hand in poisoning my own community. I was caught up in my own duality. If the truth be known, I did it partly because my feet were bigger than my stepbrother’s feet. As a child, I was forced to wear his shoes, because his dad would buy shoes for him and my dad liked to back horses and play cards. I had to force my feet into his small shoes, crushing them. To this day, my wife laughs at me because I like to save on the leccie. My mother would leave us sitting in the dark until she could get some money on her book for the leccie. I don’t say these things to curry sympathy or for respect. I say these things as a matter of fact.

There were other more practical reasons why I wanted to go straight. Drug dealing was getting harder, and the bizzies were catching up. Marsellus had got 15 years, and I knew they were gaining ground on the bigger fish – like me, Curtis Warren and all the rest. It was time to move on.

A few months before my change of heart, my solicitor had told me that my best quality was my ability to read when the writing was on the wall. A lot of villains get shown the writing on the wall but don’t read it. He said, ‘If you carry on the way you’re going, you’re going to get 15 to 20 years rammed up your arse.’ After Abbey was born, he said, ‘If you’re not careful, the next time that you’ll see your daughter she’ll have a daughter herself.’

That’s what straightened me out. It wasn’t fear of other gangsters. It wasn’t fear of getting older. It was fear of incarceration. I knew everything that jail had to offer, because I’d spent four months on remand. The only thing I didn’t know was the long-term effects of incarceration. Individuals who say that they’ll do a long stretch spinning on their dicks – and in the underworld we all know who they are – are either liars or insane. For anyone reading this book and thinking about being a crook – the downside is jail. Jail is a waste of your life, a waste of your time, a waste of your space. When you go to jail, it’s like you’ve died, and when you get out of jail it’s like a resurrection. You can start your life again. I know guys that are 40 and have spent 18 years in jail. It’s no good.

Even the old-school guys from the 1970s couldn’t cut it in the end. One was a villain I knew called John Haase. I had the utmost respect for him, because of his raw courage and bottle. He was a one-man army, and he feared no one. He spent most of his young life in prison for armed robbery. When he came out, he got onto the drugs bandwagon and made himself a lot of money real quick. When they arrested him, they found around £200,000 under the bed – just a small part of his financial empire. Nevertheless, when I went to visit him in Long Lartin prison, it was clear that jail had got to him. That was in 1993, a year before my epiphany. I remembered thinking, ‘If he can’t cut it, what chance do I have?’