Two generations down the line, the love between the three families had imploded. All three grandsons had moved down to London to make their fortunes in the drugs game. Now they were at war, locked in an everyday ghetto conflict of drugs, guns and death, without any respect for the family history. It was 1997. I was thirty-eight years of age with a three-year-old daughter. My adopted son Danny was 17 and had already been in trouble with the police on several occasions. Through my connections, I had managed to keep him out of jail.

One of Nathaniel Earl’s grandsons was called Lito Earl. Lito’s parents were decent, law-abiding folk. Lito, in contrast, worked for a white drug dealer who happened to be the husband of a very famous pop sineer. One day, a member of a rival eane shot Lito, and he ran to the police, like a rat. Later, in a classic case of Scouse perversion, the gunman paid him £30,000 to drop the charges, which he duly did. On hearing about Lito’s good fortune, our Danny naturally wanted a cut for himself, so he started to plan a taxing expedition with a few of his mates. One night, Danny and his mate Harley Jaafan, the grandson of Papa, kidnapped Lito and took him to a secret abode. Danny whispered into Lito’s ear, ‘You’re not keeping that fucking money. We’re taking that money off you because you’re a rat. Hand that fucking money over.’ Like father, like son.

Not surprisingly, Lito Earl didn’t have the 30 grand on him, so Danny got on the blower and repeatedly called members of Lito’s gang to get them to come up with the £30,000 as ransom money. These phone calls set off a chain reaction through the ghetto. It wasn’t long before I got a call. A guy called Lance Holman – acting as special emissary for the Earl family – phoned me up and said, ‘Look, your Danny has kidnapped Lito Earl. His mum’s talking about going to the Old Bill if her son isn’t set free. Can you sort it?’ I was particularly annoyed by all this hassle, as it was a Friday evening and I had been all set to go out for a nice bowl of soup down the Marbo (a Chinese restaurant) with Dionne.

I knew from experience that the first thing I had to do in this type of situation was to nominate an emissary for myself – someone who knew the parties involved and could mediate on my behalf. Therefore, I nominated a drug dealer mate of mine called Neo. Next, I phoned Danny, but, predictably, he had switched his mobile off. So I called up one of his mates and told her, ‘If you get hold of Danny, just tell him to let the lad go.’

I spoke to her again a few hours later, and she said, ‘Danny spoke to me, and he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He hasn’t kidnapped anybody.’

Did he think I was brand new or what? Other dads tell their kids off for forgetting to put petrol in the car. Here I was trying to sort out a kidnapping as though it happened every fucking day. Within hours, I’d got hold of all my connections on the street to try and find out the location of Danny and his gang. Once I knew where they were, I could SAS the ken, rescue Lito Earl, give our Danny a slap on the wrist and hand Lito back to his mum before she called the bizzies. Then I would be free to enjoy a nice Chinese meal with my wife.

Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. The Earl family lost their nerve before I could act and went to the police. In response, the bizzies launched a sting operation to nail Danny and his mates. First, the police taped all the ransom conversations. Second, they planted a stooge to pose as one of Lito Earl’s gang and agree to the £30,000 ransom. Finally, they put £30,000 worth of traceable money into a bugged bag and sent it to the kidnappers in a taxi.

However, our Danny was too cute. He had the wherewithal to separate the money from the bugged bag. The police ended up losing track of the cash and the kidnappers – and they blew their top. Imagine if the papers had found out – the shame of losing £30,000 to a bunch of rag-arse kids would have been huge!

Under pressure to save face, the bizzies redoubled their efforts, using cell-site analysis to try and track the location of the kidnappers’ mobile phones. However, Danny kept moving Lito and his kidnap team around the ghetto from safe house to safe house. Eventually, there was nowhere left to hide, so, as a double bluff, they opted to go to the London HQ of the Jaafan family, hoping that the police wouldn’t cotton on. All they needed was a few hours to dispose of any evidence, get Lito Earl to agree to a cover story, clean him up, give him a cup of tea and tell the police it had all been a big misunderstanding.

However, the bizzies were hot on the trail. Twenty armed officers raided the Jaafan house and caught Danny in the bathroom. At first, the bizzies were more interested in finding the £30,000 of traceable money they had lost. However, they soon found the cupboard was almost bare. Only ten grand remained – the rest had disappeared.

That night, I got a phone call from the police station. ‘It’s me, dad,’ Danny said. He sounded very subdued and forlorn, and I knew it would fall on my toes to find a solution to the mess he found himself in. It was not the first time I had been obliged to get my adopted son out of a tricky situation, and I toyed with the idea of washing my hands of him altogether, but my conscience soon got the better of me.

I got together with Harley Jaafan’s dad William, and we came up with a plan. We each agreed to come up with ten grand as a bribe to Lito’s folks to drop the charges – half the money up front and the rest when the case was dismissed. If Lito withdrew the statement of the kidnap allegation, only the ransom tapes and some police statements could be used as evidence in the trial. However, if the statements remained in place and they were found guilty, they stood to get between ten and twelve years. The statements made by Lito and his parents were the most damaging for Harley and Danny. But I knew from various sources that Lito and his family were shitting themselves at the thought of having to face the Devil. They knew that if they went ahead with the court case and put my son in prison, there would be serious repercussions.

From experience, I realised that they would be looking for a way out. I also knew that 20 grand was a lot of money for people like Lito’s mum and dad. I’m not saying I’m anything special, but to me ten grand isn’t a great deal of money. To me, it is just a half-decent holiday in the Maldives or somewhere – nothing mad, just one of those all-inclusive deals. Dionne’s got to go to a place like that. There’s no fucking her off for two weeks in Portugal or anything like that.

Anyway, my intermediary Neo arranged a meeting between me and Lito’s parents in a well-out-of-the-way pub in Wales. Being a cautious individual, I had invested in some state-of-the-art ex-KGB anti-surveillance equipment. I was feeling a bit apprehensive in case Lito’s folks had gone to the bizzies about the proposed rendezvous. I could easily have been driving into a trap. If truth be told, I was gambling on the French fear factor, letting my reputation do all the work and relying on them to make a deal without any fucking about.

When I got to the pub, it was quite busy. I scanned the room and spotted a little couple sitting together in the corner. The mother was black and the father was half-Chinese. They looked very frightened indeed. They had no idea who they were supposed to be meeting. Neo had just told them to be there if they wanted everything sorted out. I went over and told Lito’s folks that I was there to sort out the problem. I then asked them politely to search me – to convince them I wasn’t some police stooge all wired up. Then I whipped out my bug detector to give them a quick scan.

Lito’s mum said, ‘Look, we don’t want no trouble with Stephen French.’ She used the third person as though I was some kind of reverential being. ‘During the kidnapping,’ she continued, ‘we tried to get a message to you so you could persuade your son to release Lito. If that had happened, we wouldn’t have gone to the police.’ She then whispered, ‘We don’t want to go to court.’

We cut a deal. The next day, I got Neo to drop ten grand to them as a deposit. By accepting it, they had joined forces with the Devil in perverting the course of justice. However, the case dragged on, and after a few months the charges still hadn’t been formally dropped. This was partly because Lito had foolishly carried on his drug-dealing activities following the kidnap and had ended up on remand, and partly because Neo had failed to make regular contact with Lito’s old dears. Later, I discovered the reason for Neo’s lack of assistance. It was all down to bad blood between him and Danny.

Apparently, Neo had been driving past Danny’s house one day with two kilograms of heroin – worth around forty grand – in the boot of his car. Suddenly, Neo realised the bizzies were on to him. He pulled over, got the gear, vaulted the fence into Danny’s back garden, knocked on the kitchen window and asked Danny to hold on to the drugs. If Danny had been caught, it would’ve got him ten years in jail. Later, Neo only gave Danny £500 for his troubles. Danny found this paltry amount disrespectful, considering he had just put his neck on the line for a mate, so he plotted to tax Neo. Neo became aware of Danny’s plan, approached me and I put the blocks on the tax.

Anyway, I knew Neo was playing me over the whole kidnap debacle, so I cut him out of the picture. As usual, I had to sort the mess out by myself. First, I went to see Lito’s mum and dad again, and said, ‘I’m telling you, when the police have finished with this case, they won’t be interested in protecting you, but they might be interested in investigating your murder.’ I was using a bit of theatricality and dramatics to put the frighteners on them.

Lito’s dad said, ‘Are you saying you’re going to kill . . .’

I said, ‘No, I’m only saying that the police might be interested in investigating it.’

Second, I got one of the top dogs in the same prison as Lito to send him a message from me: ‘Your family has got French’s family in jail. You’d better let young French go.’

This had a huge impact on Lito. Imagine that you’re in jail and one of the top guys has just come into your cell and made a threat like that. As soon as I got word my message had been delivered, I made a call to young Lito. Bang! The whole thing fell apart there and then.

When Danny’s case got to court, all that was left as evidence were the tapes. Unfortunately for the officers involved, they had failed to follow the correct procedures when recording the tapes and the case was dismissed.

However, that wasn’t the end of the matter. William Jaafan ended up blaming me for the whole situation and reneged on our deal to provide the rest of the bribe money to Lito’s parents, thus owing me ten grand. I wasn’t particularly bothered by this. I was just glad to have my adopted son home. Nonetheless, one of my allies used this conflict as an excuse to settle an old score with the Jaafan family. He had a go at William about what a dirty trick he had played by not paying up as originally agreed. In response, Jaafan threatened him with a gun, and full-scale urban warfare ensued between my firm and their family.

One day when Grandmother Jaafan got into her car, it exploded, and she lost both her arms. It turned out that someone had planted an improvised explosive device made of Semtex next to the car and remotely detonated the bomb. Grandmother Jaafan had looked after my dad and Nathaniel Earl when they had first come to this country. From Windrush to urban warfare in just two generations.