Chris had a simple vision. He’d worked as a surveyor in a massive building corporation and had noticed that businesses were obliged to spend millions on security for their sites – on unreliable gangsters who always let them down. His dream was to set up a clean, efficient, gangster-free security company and take the world by storm.

Chris set up his first company with a man known as the Pugilist. Not the best idea. By the time I caught up with him, Chris was on his arse. He was sleeping on his mum’s couch, his house was in danger of being repossessed and, worst of all, he was driving a Rover. Chris and the Pugilist didn’t have the best relationship – and there was fuck all Chris could do about it.

Enter the Frenchman. I was desperate to buy into Chris’s utopian dream. I had a chat with the Pugilist, and he brought me on board. My first job was to go and collect a ten-grand debt from a furniture shop. I entered the store and immediately asked the skinny proprietor to give me the keys. He said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

I replied, ‘My name’s Stephen French. You owe our clients ten grand for rent. I’m seizing the goods in the shop.’

Meanwhile, Chris was bombing around with a calculator, adding up the price tags. The owner then piped up and tried to threaten me: ‘I know a few faces. I’m going to make a few calls, and you’ll be dead within an hour.’ To be fair, he was connected to some very bad firms, but when he went away and did his research it was clear that he was told, ‘If the Devil is in your shop, the best thing you can do is give him the keys and leave.’ So he did.

The itinerary in the shop amounted to 50-grand’s worth of pine: beds, wardrobes – everything you could possibly think of made of fucking pine. We decided to flog it in a half-price sale and invest the 25-grand profit in our company and vision for the future – all for a little growl at some prick. That was good business as far as I was concerned.

The beauty of the situation was that it was all legitimate business – tax paid. Again, it all came down to utilising the skills I’d learned at the Inland Revenue – reputation and psychological intimidation. My unique selling point was that I could make debtors think that the moon was going to fall out of the sky and land on their house if they didn’t pay. My favourite phrase was, ‘If you double-cross me, you’ll be seeing me in your fucking dreams. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. You’ll be seeing me when you’re asleep.’ Often, they had something to hide, so I was playing on the ‘guilty act, guilty mind’ theory. Of course, I would only say this to debtors who threatened me – and Chris never knew that I said things like that.

Anyway, we had this whole heap of pine, so the first thing we did was bring our partners down to have the pick of what they wanted. My wife chose a bed and wardrobe and basically kitted our bedroom out in pine. Chris’s mum and the Pugilist’s bird did the same. All equal. Therefore, it came as a great shock to learn later that the Pugilist had been sneaking pine out the back door and keeping the money for himself. At first, I didn’t believe Chris when he told me. I said to him that my loyalties lay with the Pugilist, as he had brought me on board in the first place. However, I also understood company politics. If the Pugilist fell on his own sword, the path would be clear for me and Chris to propel the company out of the small time and into the blue-chip world where it belonged.

The idea of catching the Pugilist in the act appealed to my Machiavellian nature. Whether you’re planting bugs for the White House or stabbing your co-worker in the back over the water cooler, you have to get deep down and dirty. People don’t climb the greasy pole by being kind and making grand gestures. They slide up it, propelled by backbiting and base human behaviour.

Chris said to me, ‘The Pugilist has been selling the beds incomplete without any fitments. To prove it, just go and knock on the door of someone he’s sold one to and tell the person that the Pugilist forgot to give them the fitments. If they take them off you, we know he’s been selling beds. We can then confront him with the evidence.’

Soon after, I found out that a gangster had bought a bed from the Pugilist. I knocked on his door and said to the gangster’s moll, ‘I’ve brought the fitments round for the bed that the Pugilist sold you.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘The bed’s upstairs. We still haven’t put the wheels on it.’

The gangster realised what was going on and screamed at his bird, ‘What the fuck are you saying to him?’ However, he knew the game was up.

To be honest, I was very upset and emotional about what had happened. I took the Pugilist for a drive, told him to get out of the car and said, ‘Let’s fight.’

He said, ‘I’m not fighting with you, Stephen.’ He wasn’t frightened of fighting me – he would’ve had a go. However, he said, ‘I like you too much. I’m having some problems and that, and I’ll just leave the firm.’ He was embarrassed about the situation.

Come Christmas, I knew he was struggling financially, so I dropped a couple of grand off for him and his family to get them through the day, because, believe it or not, I was developing a social conscience – and he had a lovely young family.

The path to glory was now clear. Chris and I set up a holding company called CDS Management, which stood for ‘catering, development and security’. The key to running a successful security company was dealing with the ‘intangibles’, such as fights with other security companies, death threats and hand-grenade attacks – day-to-day occurrences in the cut-throat world of the security business. That was my area of responsibility; Chris had no idea that any of this went on.

We immediately won a big catering contract from a Japanese car company to feed their workers. That took in two grand a week in cash at 60 per cent profit. The debt recoveries also started to fly in. With the surplus cash, we started building housing estates. If I had only known how easy it was to make money legitimately, I never would have chosen the path to evil in the first place!

However, some of my old compadres weren’t as good as me at staying ahead of the law. One by one, they began to fall by the wayside, purely because they ignored the writing on the wall. Curtis Warren moved to Holland to distance himself from his sidekick Johnny Phillips, who was in a hell of a lot of trouble over the David Ungi incident. However, in 1996, the Dutch police linked Curtis with approximately £125-million worth of cocaine and jailed him for 12 years. I hear he spends a lot of his time behind bars trying to stay ahead of currency changes. According to some sources, he’s got a lot of money buried all over Europe, and every time they bring out a new £20 note or new note in a foreign currency he has to get his minions to dig it up and change it over. He’s lost a lot of money that way.