Читать книгу Rise of the Footsoldier - In My Game, The Choice is a Jail or a Grave - Carlton Leach - Страница 9

The first thing that caught my eye was that the geezer had a gold tooth.

The second was that he was holding a shooter.

And the third that he was pointing it at me.

My door work and bodyguard work had taken me deep into gangland, into the dangerous world of the blaggers and the drug-dealers, turf wars and terminations. Now someone was coming to terminate me. With violence all around me for the last 20 years and my battle scars evident for all to see, I was now facing the possibility of an early epitaph on my tombstone.

Strangely enough, at that moment in time, as dawn slowly lit up London and I stood facing the gunman beside the River Thames at Battersea, I didn’t particularly care. I was fuelled up on steroids and speed, a 17-stone man-mountain, and I was feeling no pain. The drugs had made me feel invincible. The geezer with the .45 was not a threat, he was a challenge.

I found myself shouting at him, ‘Come on then, you cunt, shoot me.’ My safety mechanism had snapped. That little man in my head who comes along when I’m in deep shit and says, ‘Don’t do it … don’t be silly now, Carlton,’ had taken a hike. There was just this lunatic standing there, full of bravado, full of drugs, caution thrown to the wind, saying, ‘Come on then, kill me.’

The black geezer was getting closer, his eyes were wide and glazed, his face was a twisted smile, the gun hand unsteady. He was obviously out of it, probably crack. The smile wasn’t because he was pleased to see me. We’d clashed earlier and he was back for revenge.

Me and big Chris and a few other lumps were doing the door at a special boat party, members only, which had been laid on by some of the rave crowd. These two black guys had turned up and walked up the gangplank towards the boat. I told them it was invitation only. I could see some of the girls at the party looked scared. These two blokes had given them trouble earlier. I tried to be diplomatic.

‘Look, mate, it’s membership only and we’ve got our capacity on board.’

The biggest of them muttered something like, ‘I’m so and so, I go where I want.’

I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck who you are. You’re not welcome.’

A fight kicked off and I grabbed him by the throat, pulled out a knife and said, ‘Look, mate, we don’t want this grief. You’ve caused the fucking problem. If you don’t fuck off I’m going to drag you behind that tree and cut your fucking throat. How do you want it?’

All the boys were on steroids those days and were pumped up and growling at everybody like wild animals. Not a pretty sight. Off the black guys went muttering dire threats that they’d be back to kill us. We were told they’d been trying to get on to the boat parties for a couple of weeks but kept getting turned away. One was a crack-dealer and a heavy cocaine user. Dangerous people and not to be underestimated.

We thought they’d got the message from the assembled heavies blocking their path and wouldn’t give any more hassle. How wrong can you be? Half-an-hour later, they were back. By now, I knew the main man was called Mr L. I discovered he had a track record for violence and brutality and headed one of the biggest dealer rings in South London. He was back for vengeance. He stood there for a few seconds smiling at me. Then he unzipped his leather jacket. Before he could pull out a weapon, we were on him. Bang, bang, bang. He was on the floor.

I said, ‘We’ve warned you, we know who you are, we know how bad you are, so if you come back again we’ll have to kill you.’ With that, I cut him across the face, a fucking great gash down his cheek. He’d pushed and pushed. It was 7.00 in the morning, I’d worked two different clubs through the night and I was at my limit. It had to be settled here and now. As I cut him, I said, ‘Right, that’s your final warning. Fuck off and keep out of my way or you’re dead.’

The combination of tiredness, drugs and raging anger saw me talking like a psychopath. But I really needed this cunt off my back. I hoped he’d got the message. Again, I’d read it wrong.

The sun was fighting its way through heavy cloud over London at the start of a new day, already marred by aggravation. I’d agreed to do the door at the boat party ’til 2.00 in the afternoon, and we were starting to relax. I was sitting on the Thames wall talking, a couple of my boys were sitting in my new BMW 535i having a snort of coke off the back of my A–Z when a car pulled up in the street about 100 yards away. I saw a black bloke wearing a baseball cap with a big sticky plaster slapped across his face, almost comical, as though in a cartoon. Andy said, ‘It’s that black geezer.’

I said, ‘No, no it’s not, can’t be.’

It was; and he was looking for trouble big time now. He walked up the slope towards us. Then he pulled out the shooter. The boys started ducking for cover. As he got nearer, I could see he was still out of it. He was laughing like he was really enjoying the situation. He was getting nearer, the Browning automatic looking bigger and bigger with each stride. The gold tooth was gleaming.

To this day, I don’t know what made me do it, but the brave pills kicked in and I was fronting him up and saying, ‘Come on, you cunt, shoot me.’ Whether this was sheer stupidity or the ultimate test of my fearlessness I don’t know. I’d done a lot of things to test my arsehole, but this was pushing it now. That little devil was in my ear saying, ‘Do it, do it.’

Now there were about 15 yards between us. ‘If you want me, you’ll have to kill me,’ I taunted him. My sense of self-preservation was gone. I pulled out a knife and shouted, ‘Come on then, you want some of this?’

I’m not sure those were the words I really wanted to come out, but the devil was in charge. I was frightened inside. I knew I could die here. But the wrong words kept coming. ‘Go on then, you cunt, kill me.’

I wanted the other words in my head – ‘Carlton, fuck off out of here’ – to prevail, but they didn’t. There was a stand-off of a few seconds. It seemed like hours. The gun was waving around a bit in his hand like it was too heavy for him to control. But it was still pointed my way. Then he took a shot at me. Bang!

Now everybody was running and screaming. The bullet whizzed past my left ear and thudded into the wooden hull of the boat. I thought, Fuck, he’s really going to kill me. I knew I had to kill him first. The power of the steroids and the coke made me feel strong again. I could walk through a wall. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t frightened any more. I was bouncing a bit by now. I yelled, ‘Come on then.’

He fired another shot – Bang! That went past the other ear. He was running towards me and the next shot might not miss. I looked for some cover behind a tree.

Bang! He took another shot. Then he clocked my car with two of the doormen in it. He didn’t know it was mine but decided to shoot it up anyway. He fired one through the roof and it hit the A–Z with the coke on. It missed Paul by an inch. Rather than waste the gear, Paul quickly closed the book around West Kensington and trapped the powder in it.

The gunman put another couple of shots into the car and I was working out how many bullets he’d got left. I knew it could only be a few. Was it a 9mm clip with half-a-dozen or so bullets? Or was it a more modern gun with up to 13 shots? A gamble now could be fatal. If I miscalculated by one single shot, I could become yet another statistic in the underworld’s hall of infamy.

Now big Chris was starting to move in on the gunman. The gun was being waved about in all directions. There was no telling where the next shot might go. And if Mr L was looking for a big target, ex-marine Chris could be it – 6ft 4in and 20 stone of well-toned muscle. Chris was working as a fireman and moonlighting as a bouncer so he didn’t need any hassle that might get him sacked by the brigade.

As I was thinking he should just fuck off out of it, they were tussling at close range. Then another bang and a wisp of smoke. Chris’s bomber jacket puffed out from the blast. I thought, Shit, he’s been hit. He slumped to the floor. This could be really bad news. The nutter has wounded him or, worse, killed him stone dead.

I was working my way towards him from the cover of the trees. I was thinking, Got to get to him, got to help him. Me and a couple of others were ready to charge in. Then we realised Chris was playing possum, pretending he was wounded. As the gunman turned away Chris lurched up off the ground and grabbed his arm. The shot had ruffled his coat, ripped through his baggies and just grazed his leg but hadn’t caused any serious injury. Relief all round for a few seconds. I ran at them and dived over the car bonnet. Me and Chris wrestled him to the ground. Someone emptied the gun. Then we dragged him down an alleyway nearby and he knew what revenge was all about. He received a savage beating, more than 20 stab wounds, and was as close to death as it’s possible to be while still breathing. In fact, we thought he was dead.

We could hear the sound of police sirens and a Scotland Yard helicopter. We quickly grabbed up the tools that had been used – knives, coshes and knuckledusters – and threw them into the Thames. The tide was out and we saw them sink into the mud, hopefully hidden for ever from the Yard’s finest. We went on to the boat and cleaned ourselves up as the police arrived in force with machine-guns and flak jackets. Then we had to get Chris off the plot because of his job. We had to get Paul away because he was on curfew and shouldn’t have been there. I couldn’t go anywhere anyway because my car was so badly shot up, so I said I’d stay behind with one other doorman and talk to the Old Bill, or tell them as much as they needed to know. I’d got about £2,000 in door takings in my shot-up motor and I needed to get that out of the way.

The police said, ‘Is this your car?’

I said, ‘Er, yes,’ and saw the A–Z on the back seat with some Charlie still on it. There’s a big fucker with a machine-gun standing right beside me so, without really thinking, I picked up the book and snorted the gear up my nostrils before the cops had a chance to twig what was happening. That was all I needed, Old Bill finding a load of Class A in my motor on top of the shooting and the wounding.

I walked back up the gangplank a bit unsteadily and went aboard for ten minutes to get my head together and get our story straight for Mr Plod. Nobody had seen much anyway because they’d all been hiding but I told them that it was a plain case of self-defence because the bloke had been trying to murder me. I told the cops the gunman had got stabbed by someone 100 yards away and was now on his way to hospital. They searched the area and found the gun and the used cartridges. They confiscated my car for forensic testing and I was taken to the nick for questioning.

Then they came to us and said, ‘Look, lads, we know you’ve got something to do with this stabbing because you’ve got specks of blood on your trousers.’ They said they knew who Mr L was, a main crack-dealer, one of the top boys in London, and they knew there had been a row and he’d come back with a gun to kill us. It was pretty obviously self-defence.

I thought at this stage that Mr L had died. I’d last seen him lying motionless in a river of blood 10ft long. I didn’t think anyone could survive a beating like that. He’d been stabbed up the arse, through his back and arms, half his stomach was hanging out. And he’d been beaten to a pulp with knuckledusters and baseball bats. This was underworld retribution at its most savage. I don’t seek to justify it. It happens in the jungle that is London’s underworld and that was the world I moved in. He’d come to kill us. We’d tried to kill him. Rough justice. That’s the way it was.

Who, the cops wanted to know, could have inflicted such injuries, even on a scumbag crack-dealer who probably deserved it? Well, we didn’t know, did we? We said we were hiding behind trees and bushes and ducking and diving to escape injury and had only got near the geezer to disarm him. We didn’t see anyone knocking the shit out of him. It must have been another little firm who’d got the hump.

The senior officer had clearly guessed the truth. He said, ‘Look, lads, it was obviously self-defence. We’re on your side. Just make a statement and we can get it all tidied up.’

We said, ‘Oh no, officer, all we know is that some black geezers came and started shooting up the place and we all hid.’

He didn’t believe us but would never get the evidence for an attempted murder charge. As we were about to leave, another cop sidled up and said, ‘If I were you, I’d get rid of all your clothes when you get home. We know this geezer, we know what he’s been doing.’ They seemed to be saying that, if he did die, it would be no great loss to anyone and might save a few of the lives of the addicts he supplied.

Tony Tucker and me were best mates then and he drove all the way from Southend to pick me up from the nick. I’d phoned Denny, my girlfriend at the time, on my mobile, after the stabbing and told her to ring the solicitors and warn them I might be in trouble. I thought I was looking at a murder rap. Denny had phoned Tony and he was straight in his motor to collect me. That’s how good a mate he was. He’d just dropped everything to help me.

The stabbing victim had five blood transfusions and dozens of stitches and spent two weeks in intensive care under a 24-hour armed guard. He was eventually charged with firearms offences and sent up to the Old Bailey for trial. They wanted me to be one of the prosecution witnesses. I wasn’t happy with that. We had a meeting in a pub the Sunday before the trial and I told the other boys, ‘I’m not going.’

They said, ‘What, you’ll be in deep shit.’

I didn’t care, I told them, I wasn’t going to court. I said, ‘It’s not the done thing. In our world, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.’

I didn’t think any of us should go. I decided to bolt up at a secret address out of London while the police were trying to serve a witness summons on me at my home address. Then I heard what his defence was going to be in court. Me and him had had a fight at the club door and he’d beaten fuck out of me. I’d pulled out a knife and stabbed him and then pulled out a gun and shot up my own car and the boat. Like you would. It was fucking ludicrous. I thought the geezer was going to play it straight and keep his mouth shut. But, instead, he was going to slag me off.

On the third day of the trial, the cops went to my mum and dad’s address and left a message saying that if I didn’t turn up at the Old Bailey by 3.00 that afternoon they would issue a warrant for my arrest and charge me with the gun offences and the attempted murder of the dealer.

I thought then that I had to go. It wasn’t worth the risk of being done with all that serious stuff just for not giving evidence.

So I was up there at the Bailey and they were asking me if I hadn’t turned up because I had been threatened. I said, ‘No, you just don’t do that sort of thing. We have our own code we live by.’

I was now chief prosecution witness and set for some tough questioning. The defence barrister had apparently applied to drag my violent past out to discredit me but it hadn’t been allowed. So to get round it his first question was ‘Have you ever appeared on television, Mr Leach?’

He’d obviously seen the Hooligans documentary I’d been in and wanted me to say I’d taken part in it as a self-confessed thug. I replied, ‘Yes, I’ve been on the telly, but the stand broke and I fell off.’

The judge was not amused and he bollocked me for being flippant. The barrister could see he was getting nowhere so he switched to the night of the gun attack. ‘You say in your statement, Mr Leach, that all you could see coming towards you was a black man with a gold tooth.’

I said, ‘But most black men have a gold tooth.’

He turned to the jury and gave them a big wide beaming smile and said, ‘Members of the jury, you will note that I haven’t.’

I said, ‘Well, fuck me, you’re the first black bloke I’ve seen without a gold tooth.’

Everyone started laughing and I got pulled up again by the judge. The barrister suggested that me and Mr L had been fighting and he’d been beating me. I said, ‘Look, mate, no one would have got that close because, if anyone gets within a couple of inches, I headbutt them.’

He claimed that I’d pulled the gun out of my car and started the shoot-up.

‘Oh, fucking hell, yes you’re right,’ I said, ‘then I pulled out another gun and John Wayne was there and we just rode past shooting at everyone.’

That brought me bollocking number three from the judge. The jury thought I was a right lunatic. The police were getting the right hump with me.

Then the defence barrister said to me, ‘Is my client the man who shot you?’

I said, ‘No, he’s not.’

He looked startled. ‘What? What are you saying?’

I said, ‘How can I tell whether it’s him? It was seven o’clock in the morning, still half dark, I was dog tired, all black men look the same to me. All I could see was a pair of white eyes and a gold tooth.’

The geezer in the dock looked at me in sheer disbelief. And suddenly his barrister was lost for words.

‘No, that’s definitely not him, it’s a case of mistaken identity,’ I added to rub salt into the wound.

Not surprisingly, I was dismissed from giving further evidence. As I walked out, Mr L gave me a half-nod. Then the Old Bill started giving me a right verbal monstering and the court refused to pay me any expenses for the day. Mr L had come back from the dead and now he’d walked out on a string of serious charges. My kind of justice.

I bumped into him two years later, after he’d been back to Manchester to some heavy-duty friends in the drug game, and had returned to London and started hitting the clubs. Everyone was knocking him back out of respect for me. So I said, ‘No, let him in.’ I thought that all the time I knew where he was I was safe from a revenge attack. If I didn’t know, he could have hit me any time, anywhere, out of the blue.

Then, one night, I bumped into him at the Aquarium Club in Old Street. He limped over, a lasting result of his stabbing injuries, and I said, ‘Right, how do you want to do it? Do you want to finish it here and now? If you do, I will kill you stone dead. You can end this feud now, call it a day, or one of us will die.’

To my surprise, he said, ‘No, no, I want to buy you a drink. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be doing ten years.’

He said his barrister had told him after the trial, ‘Carlton Leach has saved your bacon. You owe him.’

So I accepted his truce; there was no point in prolonging that particular war and I knew now I wouldn’t need to keep looking over my shoulder for a bullet coming my way.

So me and a bloke I’d nearly killed, who we’d beaten to within an inch of his life, stood shoulder to shoulder downing large vodkas like old mates. And I felt better about it. This was our code. We’d settled things our way, honour intact on both sides.

Then, suddenly, a fight kicked off in the club. People were yelling and knives were out. That was my kind of action and I waded in. To my surprise, Mr L joined me at my side. From the best of enemies, we were now fighting side by side, backs to the wall, looking after each other’s interests. I got cut trying to stop two black geezers killing each other. I stepped in and got slashed across the arm. Now we were real blood brothers. He looked across at me and said, ‘Fucking hell, mate, you don’t half attract trouble.’ That was true.

* * *

Whether I really attracted trouble, or it attracted me, I’m not sure – either way, there was no avoiding it. I was out with two of my boys, Gaffer and Fearless, and we’d been to Legends in the West End and then on to the EC1 club when we ran into a team known as The Rat Boys. I was suited and booted and had been having a social evening out chatting to a few doormen mates, so I wasn’t looking for bother. I was ready to turn my back when trouble flared. But Gaffer jumped in and made himself double busy like he usually did. I shouted at him, ‘Get back here, they’ve got good doormen of their own. Stay out of it. They’re not having a go at us so keep your nose out of it.’

But the atmosphere had got nasty. Several people came over and asked if they could stand by us because they were frightened. Although I was in the muscle game, I’d always had an ability to keep calm and make people feel safe. About 20 or 30 people were standing next to me. Next thing, two shots rang out. One bloke had been hit. The Rat Boys had gone away and had tooled themselves up with guns and they’d come back looking to sort out the geezers they’d had the barney with. I thought, Oh no, not again. Mr L had been right, I did seem to attract trouble.

Another bloke had got shot, people were screaming, the police sirens were heading our way. This time, I stood there cool as a cucumber and said to Gaffer and Fearless, ‘OK, boys, time to go home. We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is not our fight.’

With that, we calmly walked out through the door and left the fracas in our wake. This time, Captain Sensible was talking in my ear and we drove off and had a Chinese meal with no risk to any more of my nine lives. Gaffer said, ‘How can you be so cool?’

I told him it was instinct, a front, in which I get this screen that comes over me and I could be in control in dangerous situations. Most of the time, anyway. People respect you for it. But I knew it was for my own survival as much as anything. I’d had too many friends die and the last couple of years had taught me lessons.

My good pal Black Francis had got shot outside the Frog and Nightgown in the Old Kent Road; Big Ron had been shot on his doorstep. Then Tony and the boys had been wiped out in the Rettendon murders. There had been too much grief, even in my dangerous world. I’d been with people in clubs and seen everyone getting edgy, it was like something really big was about to go off. Everyone seemed to be carrying a gun. It didn’t frighten me, but I knew some day someone was going to come looking for my scalp. I was a bit of a name around the muscle scene and I was always going to be a target for some up-and-coming young bruiser who wanted to take me on because of who I was, not because of anything I’d done. Sooner or later, it was coming.

And I was becoming distrustful of my own friends; things were going on for money behind my back. I wasn’t sure of the people around me any more. I was becoming lonely in a crowd. I was feeling weakened. And I thought now was the time to get out. But could I ever really escape?

I’d been around the club scene for more than ten years. I’d witnessed a lot of villainy, a lot of violence, monstrous, shocking acts of brutality. I’d always carried a big knife. I regarded it as one of the tools of the trade and I’d never been afraid to use it. Now guns were everywhere, not knives.

An old pal from West London, a bit of a face on his own manor, came up to me one night in a club just after I had started going out with my then girlfriend Kelly and asked how I was. Then he dropped his voice and said, ‘Got anything on you?’

I knew what he meant – any weapon? I said, ‘No, no, I’m OK.’

Then he pulled a .38 out from under his shirt and said, ‘Do you want this?’

No, I fucking didn’t. And I didn’t want this prick offering me guns in front of my girlfriend. I’d got my daughter Carly there, too, and some family friends. He insisted, ‘Take it, mate, a bit of protection.’

No thanks, pal, I’d seen too much damage done. But then I thought, Hold on, has this geezer heard something I don’t know about? Does he think I need protection? He’s not part of my normal circle but he seems to be picking up bad vibes involving me. What’s going on? I told him, ‘I’m all right, I don’t need protection.’

But the doubt was there. I knew something sinister was in the air. What had it all come to now, geezers trying to flog me a shooter while I’m out with my family? Things weren’t right. If you live in a world of criminals, there are only two places you are likely to end up – in prison or in the graveyard. And I didn’t fancy either.

I knew that from the moment I put a gun in my pocket – and I’m not saying guns hadn’t been in my possession a few times – I had to be prepared to use it. Guns aren’t for show. They’re the most powerful and destructive weapon you can have and too many hot-heads were touting them around. It would be easy to get into a silly argument with someone drugged up or drunk. He’s carrying and he’s pulled it out. Deep down, he doesn’t want to shoot you but now he’s the Terminator and he’s got to use it to prove he’s tough and hard. The proper people in the underworld do carry guns regularly. It’s different when you are working. You are doing a job, it’s controlled. Tony Tucker carried a shooter, but only for protection when he was busy on criminal activities. At the end of the day, it couldn’t save him, could it?

There is an armoury of guns out there if you want them. They are hidden away, buried or stashed, sitting there ’til someone needs one, then destroyed or put back safely, depending on whether they’ve been used or not and might be carrying incriminating evidence. If they’ve been fired, they are best out of the way. I can get shooters from my connections at any time of the night or day and I wouldn’t hesitate to do so if anyone hurt my children or any of my family. Come and hurt me any time, but stay away from my family. That’s personal and that has a different code. The street has got its own laws, its own politics, and that’s the way it rumbles. But drugs are changing a lot of that. With drugs go lunatics, loaded guns and no principles, no underworld codes, no honour among thieves.

There is no doubt that drugs changed my life, too. I started taking steroids to build up my body, to get those rippling biceps, that bull neck, to be the toughest guy in clubland bursting out of my dinner jacket and bow-tie. And I ended up becoming a monster. I was the Incredible Hulk who could turn from nice guy to raging maniac in seconds. Just one wrong word or if my toast wasn’t done right. Any small thing and I was off on one. From taking the mild steroid Anovar, I got hooked on stronger and stronger doses. I’d look in the mirror in the morning and see my muscles getting bigger and bigger, rippling with power like someone out of a Mr Universe contest.

I had a really bad car crash in the late Eighties which laid me up for months. I needed to build myself up afterwards and I started taking the heavy-duty steroids, injecting testosterone and Sustenon, anything I could get my hands on, oblivious to any damage, mental or physical, they might do. I’d always looked after myself, trained regularly, played a lot of football, so it wasn’t as if I was a seven-stone weakling trying to build myself up to beat the beach bullies. No, I wanted more than fit. I wanted big. I wanted people to say, ‘Wow! Look at that geezer. He looks the business.’ And, of course, the bigger you were, the tougher you looked, the more the work kept rolling in. And, yes, I’ve got to admit that vanity played a big part. Doormen are the vainest people in the world. You are on parade and you need to look the part. I was Schwarzenegger. I was Stallone. And it’s definitely a turn-on for the women, too. I’ve lost count of the times I got approached for sex while I was on the door.

The downside of steroids is the terrible neurosis, the paranoia, the short fuse, the terrifying rages. I would get involved in near-psychopathic road-rage incidents all the time. If someone cut me up or did the wanker gesture, I’d go after them like a madman. I once ripped the door off a car to get to a bloke who cut me up on a roundabout. I chased him for five miles before I caught him. He was fucking petrified. Another geezer shouted something out of the window of his motor in Dagenham so I pulled across him at the next lights. He locked his doors from inside so I put my fist straight through the windscreen.

Another time, someone had parked in my space outside the Paradise Club. So I got a few of my blokes out, all beefy sorts, and we took a corner of the car each and just bounced it down the road. As we were shunting it along, the owners came back. They stood open-mouthed as they watched us heaving it about like it was a lump of plastic or something. I said, ‘Sorry, mate, but you were illegally parked.’ He wasn’t about to start an argument with six heavyweight bouncers over his parking rights.

I now know steroids are the most dangerous drugs I have ever taken in my life, and the damaging effects of my abuse will be with me ’til the day I die.

I used to take steroid courses six weeks on, six weeks off. But I found that over, the six weeks I wasn’t injecting them, I would start to feel weakened, my body was craving more and more. Sometimes I’d take more even though I knew it could be dangerous medically.

Because my body had become so big and strong I constantly needed more food. I remember the first time it happened was while we were shopping at Lakeside. My whole body started shaking, demanding food to satisfy the steroid-induced hunger. It was like shovelling coal on to a blazing fire. After that, I always carried screwtop jars of Heinz baby food around with me for a quick food fix. They contained all the nutrients and vitamins my body was crying out for. I’d take loads with me, all flavours – beef, ham, chicken – and guzzle them down six at a time, even when I was working. I know I wasn’t the only baby-food junkie either. I’d got the tip from a pal on steroids and he told me dozens of bodybuilders were whacking down baby food. It made sense to me and it helped because it was so quickly digested by the system.

But it didn’t do a lot for my foul tempers. One day, Denny served me up a meal that was about the size of a child’s dinner. I went berserk. I yelled at her, ‘How the fuck am I supposed to live on that?’ I hurled the plate across the room and it smashed against a wall. I dragged the fridge out and turned it over. I smashed up the kitchen causing hundreds of pounds’ worth of damage. And all for nothing. Just pointless rage. I picked up a baseball bat and was smashing myself across the head with it. My rage had reached such ferocity that I feared I would kill Denny if I didn’t vent my anger on myself.

Another time, I picked up a settee and threw it across the room like it was a kid’s toy. I’d lost control of that terrible violence inside me and my family were suffering. I put them through hell. I’d put a gun to Denny’s head, I’d held a knife to her throat. That’s how bad it was. I was a walking time-bomb and dangerous to be near. No wonder she eventually kicked me out.

At that period in my life, with steroids as my master and vanity as my partner, I was probably the most selfish, horrible person you could ever meet. I was out there with my mates, 20-stone monsters with 20in biceps, and getting a buzz when people looked at us in absolute awe as we walked 15-handed into a club or pub.

Back home, I was on an emotional helter-skelter, up and down, up and down, terrible mood swings, sleepless nights, four-day nose bleeds, taking coke for the all-night doors and feeling my blood pressure surging out of control ’til my head was almost bursting.

In short, steroids have left my body fucked. With fantastic help from Kelly, who was only half my age but twice as strong, I’m clean of all illicit drugs now. But I still take pills for blood pressure, my liver is constantly monitored by the doctor, most of my organs have been pushed beyond their limits and I’ve probably shortened my life by 10 or 15 years. I could go back into training, I could go back on steroids and get back to 17 or 18 stone and look brilliant, but inside, the doctors say, I would have the organs of a 60-year-old man. The heart can only take so much. It’s a muscle and when you take steroids it grows and grows to keep pace with your physique. You can end up having a heart-attack, and when they do the post mortem they find out you’ve got the heart of an old man and you’ve worn it out. I owed it to Kelly and my kids to stay clean, stay in control, stay alive.

The moment is still vivid in my memory of the day that I had passed the point of no return and given up hope of ever getting my life straight. I’d had a big bust-up with Kelly after I’d dragged her out of a party and terrified the 200 guests so much that even the doormen had locked themselves in their car. Kelly is a really pretty redhead with a lovely slim figure and a great smile. I knew other men looked at her and fancied her. They probably wondered what the hell she was doing with a lump like me, twice her age. I should have been proud that she was so attractive to the opposite sex. But that green-eyed monster got the better of me and all I felt was raging jealousy if another bloke looked at her.

After the party bust-up, Kelly didn’t want to see me again. No one wanted to know me. I knew I’d gone too far this time. I’d become a wild animal people were too scared to go near.

I got myself a gun, went to my mum and dad’s home and sat in the box room absolutely desolate. I sat for an hour looking at the shooter on my lap, then picked it up and put it in my mouth. I thought, Fuck it, I’m fed up with this world. I was 40 years old and what did I have. Nothing.

At this point, I’d had four serious, long-term relationships, nice houses, four kids by different women, but what did it all mean now? I felt a lonely, broken man. I reckoned everybody looked on me as a low-life drunk, a no-hoper, and I might as well go and join my mates down the cemetery. I could see no solution other than to pull the trigger.

I cocked the gun, then a voice told me, ‘No, that’s the coward’s way out, Carlton.’ Suddenly, I was imagining the horror my parents would suffer if they came home and found me dead with my brains splashed all over the ceiling. The voice in my head was telling me, ‘Why not prove everybody wrong? Show them what you are made of.’ I knew Tony’s dad, Ronald, had died there and then from shock at his home in Folkestone, Kent, when he was told about the Rettendon murders. He was only 63, no age these days for anyone to die. I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to my dear dad, he didn’t deserve that. Neither did Mum. And what about my lovely kids? They couldn’t have handled their dad topping himself. Not big, tough Dad, who always came up with the money at birthday time.

I looked at their photos and said, ‘No, this is not the way.’ I’d always been a fighter and I’d fight my way back from this. For my family if for nobody else. I knew I had to start again, drag myself up from the pits of despondency and make myself a better man. Nobody could help me but myself. It was time to boot out all the self-pity.

I picked myself up, threw the gun away and headed for the doctor’s surgery. His grim prognosis was everything I had dreaded: ‘Carry on with your present lifestyle, Mr Leach, and you are going to die. No beating about the bush. You will die.’

Now I really needed help. I was put on a specialist course to dry me out, build me up, cleanse my body of the steroids, cleanse my mind of the depressions and paranoia. It was many long months before I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and an end to the darkest days of my life.

* * *

Having cheated death at the business end of Mr L’s Browning, and my own shooter in my parents’ box room, I know now that I should have been the fourth victim in the headline-making Rettendon murders, alongside my best mate Tony Tucker, and two other members of our firm, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe, when they were gunned down in that Range Rover. And I’m still haunted today by the knowledge that my name is on a bullet and someone could be waiting for me any time, any day, to finish the job. That’s why I live in a home with secure access only, and when I walk out of the door I check there’s no one suspicious hanging around. No bastard’s coming to take me by surprise. They might be waiting out there for me one dark night, but I won’t go down without a fight, that’s for sure. I suppose it’s the price I’ve got to pay for getting caught up in one of the most notorious multiple murders in England.

I was one of the first people hauled in for questioning after the shootings. Because I hadn’t been with the victims, the Old Bill thought I must have had something to do with it. I told them that was crap. Tony was a great mate – why would I want to see him topped? I’ll tell you later what I think really happened that dreadful night when the boys had their brains blown out.

Up ’til then, we’d been ruling Essex like we owned the fucking place. If anyone tried to cross our paths or move in on our business deals, we’d destroy them. It was a brutal, evil world, and I was fuelled up most of the time on a cocktail of booze, drugs and adrenalin. We thought we were invincible. I was so hyped up there were times when I thought, literally, that bullets would bounce off my body. The others were the same.

We muscled up on steroids to try to look like Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger, doing coke and speed to see us through night after night without sleep. Most of the time, the four of us went everywhere together and I would almost certainly have been in that Range Rover with them on the night they were shot if they had felt they were in danger – but they hadn’t asked, so they must have felt safe.

How wrong could they have been? I’m sure I was as much an intended target as the other three. They wanted the whole firm out of the way. I can’t believe I’m here today to write this book.

We had become wild bastards in the Eighties and early Nineties. We had a huge network of bodybuilders who worked for us as club doormen and minders and enforcers, any kind of rough stuff. By controlling club doors, we could control who was running the drugs inside and we made dealers cough up £1,000 a time to operate in the top places. We were raking in a fortune and spending it like there was no tomorrow. Life was one long party. We always went out tooled up – knuckledusters, coshes, knives. It was as routine as brushing your teeth. For a really serious job, we’d think nothing of packing a 9mm pistol. We had respect – or, I suppose, I’d call it fear now – at every place we went into in Essex. Nobody messed with us. Life was a permanent buzz.

I had become addicted to violence, the threat of violence, the idea of violence. There were big drug deals going on, some I knew about, others I didn’t, and all the time there was a simmering undercurrent of distrust and hatred building up ready to erupt in open warfare. Too many people were taking too many drugs and all sensible reason was out of the window.

Once, we went to buy some nicked travellers’ cheques, worth about £250,000, from another firm of villains up in East London. They kept messing us about, changing the dates and times of the meet. So Tony decided we’d kidnap the fuckers to teach them a lesson. We arranged a meet in an out-of-the-way car park in Woodford. Some of us were carrying 9mm guns and the usual assortment of tools. Me and Pat waited until Tony gave the signal then all hell broke loose. I grabbed the ringleader and pummelled him in the head while Tony and Pat smashed up the others. Pat started hitting one bloke so hard he sent him flying through the air and on to the roof of a car, setting the alarm off. Lights started going on all round us so we ran to our cars and scarpered leaving the other lot lying about, battered and bloody. It was all in a typical night’s work for the Essex Boys. Total disregard for law and order. I’ll tell you more about the terrifying consequences of this job on another Essex villain later on.

We lived like kings and partied like animals. We spent fortunes on tailor-made clothes and ran about in Porsches, Mercs and BMWs. Women seemed attracted by the aura of violence and they threw themselves at us wherever we went, and I mean really good-looking girls, not Essex-girl slappers.

Pat Tate’s appetite for sex was legendary. He’d just been released from prison once when a gunman blasted him at his home and badly injured him. He was rushed into hospital bleeding badly and put into a ward all rigged up with tubes, bandages and plasters. Still it didn’t stop him wanting his end away, even when he was in traction. From his bed, he phoned up for hookers to visit him and got up to all sorts. He thought it was hilarious.

We were all pushing our luck with drugs. The night I came face to face with Mr L’s Browning, I was so pumped up on steroids and cocaine I felt I could walk through walls.

The terrible thing about drugs is that you don’t realise when you are on them how stupid they make you. I deserved to be shot that night. I behaved like a fucking lunatic. But that’s the way things were, just one small example of the way we were running out of control. We were getting up the noses of a lot of people but we couldn’t see the dangers brewing up all around us.

When I heard that Tony, Pat and Craig had all been wiped out on an Essex farm track just before Christmas 1995, it shook me rigid. I knew I had to take stock of my life, and get my head clear of all the shit that was going on in there.

It was three years before the killers were finally brought to justice and that gave me time for a long, cold, clinical look at where I was. My best mate was dead; my head was done in with drugs; my liver and kidneys had been fucked by steroids, and I would need medical treatment for the rest of my life, however long that might be; my marriage was on the rocks; and every relationship I’d ever had was wrecked by philandering and paranoia. Not a great track record.

I know that the men who were convicted of killing the boys, Micky Steele and Jack Whomes, are banged up for life but I can’t shake the fear that I might be the next one to catch a bullet if old scores are going to be settled. The murders were supposed to have happened after Tony, Pat and Craig had been lured to that farm track on a bogus drugs deal. Maybe yes, maybe no – whatever happened, they paid too great a price. Meanwhile, I’m keeping my head down having rebuilt the shattered remnants of my life, making sure I’m one jump ahead of any bastard that comes looking for me.

It had been 20 years of violence, from a tearaway on the football terraces to a fully fledged thug, and I just wished I could have turned back the clock. Maybe if I’d stayed at the job I was trained for, marine engineering, it might have been different. But I got caught up in the culture of violence, and violence itself is a lethal drug. I chose that world; I had to live with the consequences.

It started when a club in Stratford had a doorman knocked out one Friday night and had no one to mind the door on the Saturday and they asked if I fancied it. I’d already got a reputation as a hard-case West Ham supporter and they knew I could handle myself. Fancy it? Like a duck to water.

Terrific. I was 21 years old, fit as a fiddle and here I was doing door work in a bow-tie. I was Jacko. It was like a fantastic, exciting game to me. Then the drug culture arrived in clubland and the world all changed. And I had become trapped in the middle of a vicious spiral of drugs and violence that was to take me to the heights of perceived invincibility and to the depths of total despair.

I was lured into this world, strangely, by the supposed safe drug Ecstasy. I was doing door work when the rave party boom came along in the Eighties. I remember looking down on 8,000 people dancing in a warehouse in East London that had been taken over by some underground rave organisers. There were some hard people there – boxers, violent people, soccer hooligans I knew – but everyone was loving each other. Nobody was giving bother. I’d been in clubs with 200 people and been in fights three times a night. But now we’d got a new phenomenon. All these people full of love and peace. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I’d never experienced a feeling like it. I was in my late twenties by then and, honestly, hand on heart, had never taken a drug of any sort. Looking at that mass of people all holding each other in a sort of universal embrace at four o’clock in the morning, smiling, happy, kissing and hugging, not wanting to go home, I knew I had to try one. It intrigued me, I wanted to know.

That was the night I was seduced by lady Ecstasy and my life was to change for ever. My eyes fixed on the strobe lights and I was tripping. I was in another world. All I wanted to do was talk to people, be nice. The tough soccer lout, the brawny doorman, became a hippy tripper. I was thinking to myself, this is great.

I couldn’t really explain it. I’d worked in clubs in London, North, East, South and West, and everyone was at each other’s throats, but this was lovely. I couldn’t believe 8,000 people could be together all night and there was no aggro. No wonder the Americans had given the same tablets to their Vietnam veterans to help conquer the terrible traumas of war. They were then class A, medically prescribed drugs to help the soldiers cope with flashbacks and nightmares and, to date, had few side-effects. Now they had arrived in Britain as a party drug and the crooks were cashing in. It was only a matter of time before bad gear was being produced and someone was going to die. The inevitable happened, and usually it was a pretty girl who took the fatal dose. Then came the death of the ex-policeman’s daughter Leah Betts in Essex and the Ecstasy culture was in the headlines and our firm was being linked to the tragedy amidst a surge of public outrage.

If I hadn’t taken that tablet, if I’d just said no, I don’t think I’d have taken the path I did, would never have got mixed up in the drug world, and never done the terrible things I did. It was probably the most stupid thing I ever did. But because I started taking it, somehow I convinced myself it was right. From a £40-a-night club doorman, I was suddenly in the drug scene big time with money sloshing about everywhere, looking after rave promoters, loads of drink, unlimited Es and slowly but surely the door was being opened to bigger and seedier things. Then came the big stepping stone to the heavier stuff and the gang wars and the violence and then murder and it could all have been avoided if I’d turned my back on one small pill. Whatever the experts say, there’s no doubt in my mind that one drug leads to another, up and up the ladder ’til all you can do is fall off. I’ve been there, seen it, I’ve had that ultimate buzz and then gone looking for something better, something new. Now it sickens me.

I’ll never forget the day just before the murders when I went to my mate Tony’s house and saw him out of his head and injecting cocaine into a vein. Here was a man who was so proud of his body, a fitness fanatic, and there he was pulling down his shirt sleeves trying to hide 30 fucking needle holes from me. I was shocked. But then I’d got no room to criticise. I was on steroids for years and, in my opinion, they are the worst drugs of all, by far. The emotional and physical side-effects are catastrophic. You can become impotent or you can go the other way and become a sex addict. That’s the way I went. I became a rampant superstud. I wanted to fuck eight, nine or ten times a day. I had two girls on the go at the same time then but still wasn’t satisfied.

That caused problems with relationships when I started looking elsewhere. I was a horrible, revolting sexual predator, but couldn’t see it.

I’ve seen six or seven mates die over the years. I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been to a lot of funerals. I won my toughest battle and got clean of drugs and for the sake of my kids and the few people who still believed in me I had to make sure my funeral was not the next one.