Читать книгу Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood - Tim Pritchard - Страница 7

Could I have gone through a different door? If I’d been told to be a plumber and could have made money, maybe I would have gone down that route. Or if I’d met a fireman first or been shown some other life maybe I wouldn’t be here now. But no one in the ’hood does those types of things. The people I met in Angell Town were drug dealers and burglars. That’s what I knew first. There’s not really no choice.

JaJa

It was Naja who first noticed that something was up. He saw a white police van reverse into the estate and then quickly drive out again. He didn’t quite know why but something told him that it might be a police dog unit. He looked around nervously at the others.

‘Something dodgy is going on.’

The others hadn’t seen it. Ribz, who had already been there for an hour, was smoking weed and ‘coching’, Angell Town speak for chilling.

‘Relax, Naj. It’s cool.’

Naja wasn’t so sure.

There were only five of them on the Marston House walkway that day. On any other day there would be eight or nine of them, but JaJa, Naja’s older brother, had gone off to Wandsworth prison to visit Blacker who was serving time, Birdie had taken off a couple of hours earlier and Phat Si was on Brixton Road buying some takeaway jerk chicken. That left Naja, Ribz, Inch, Sykes and Skippy pacing the council block’s second-floor corridor armed with small plastic bags of weed and heroin. They were waiting for the first ‘cats’, or punters, to arrive.

It was Tuesday 17 December 2002 at about 3 p.m. and it was bitterly cold.

None of them had any real reason to be alarmed. From their position on the second-floor walkway of Marston House they had a clear view over the whole estate. They would have plenty of warning if the ‘feds’ came. That’s what they called the police, a name taken from all the American gangster shows they’d watched on TV. And anyway, they were sure that most of the residents would tip them off if there were any signs of police activity. Even though what they were doing was illegal, they were still surrounded by friends and neighbours. All of the gang had grown up in Angell Town. Ever since they were tiny kids, they’d ridden their bikes, kicked a ball about and run around in the streets and concrete playground at the heart of Angell Town. JaJa and his younger brother Naja had even grown up in one of the flats in Marston House, just along the corridor from where they were now standing.

When it was built in the 1970s, Marston House was designed as a model of urban planning. Now the ugly, squat, concrete council block with its urine-stained and graffitied stairwells was mostly empty and derelict, earmarked for demolition as part of Lambeth Council’s scheme to regenerate the area. It was still the centre of their world, though. ‘The block’ was their fiefdom. Here they ruled the roost as the most feared or, depending on your allegiance, the most respected gang in the area. Their name, the PDC, the Peel Dem Crew, was taken from ‘peel dem’, Jamaican street slang for ‘rip them off’, ‘steal from them’.

And they had done plenty of that. They had all served time in young offenders’ institutions and prisons for muggings, armed robberies, gun crimes and ‘steaming’. It had been all the craze a couple of years earlier. A bunch of them would charge into a shop, such as a newsagent’s, a supermarket, or even a bank or building society, and just go for the till and take whatever they could. Often the shopkeepers or bank clerks had no time to react. Or if they did, the gang would just run them over and knock them to the ground. They’d have raided the till before anyone could raise the alarm.

From below came the sound of shouting. Something is about to go down. This time Naja kept the thought to himself. He stamped his feet to keep warm.

‘Go and find out what is going on.’

Inch was closest to the stairwell. He headed along the landing towards the stairs. He was small and stocky. That’s how he got his street name. He was sure that it was just some of the ‘cats’ causing a commotion. He suspected that there was another gang nearby trying to muscle in on the action by stirring up the punters to take their custom away from the PDC.

Too much noise was never good for business. On a good day they could each make several hundred pounds, but some days the punters just didn’t show up and they were left with unsold bags of weed or wraps of ‘B’ and rocks of crack cocaine. Those were the days when ‘shotting’, as they called it, felt like hard, boring and cold work. The laws of supply and demand for ‘B’ or ‘Brown’, more commonly known as heroin, were the hardest to predict. The customers for heroin tended to be real addicts who turned up at any time of the day or night demanding their fix. The money they used to buy the brown powder was always ‘dirty’ money, stolen generally, perhaps from a mugging that might have happened just a few hours previously. All the gang recognized that with addicts you could never be sure where the money came from. It came from ‘God knows where’. But as long as they got the cash they didn’t mind. The addicts preferred to operate in the shadows. That’s why Inch had to get the commotion sorted out. If necessary he could get hold of some pistols or a MAC 10 sub-machine gun stashed away with friends, but he didn’t believe it would come to that.

He headed down the stairwell of Marston House and got a waft of the familiar, bitter smell of dank concrete impregnated with ammonia and disinfectant. He was going to tell whoever it was to go away and that they didn’t want them standing around there. I’m going to tell them to breeze.

Above him, on the second-floor walkway, Ribz leaned against the wall and drew on a joint. He felt chilled and temporarily released from his main preoccupation. Recently he’d tried again to find out more about his dad whom he hadn’t seen since he was five years old. He’d heard that he was in America. Several years ago, when he’d visited his mum in prison, she had told him that his dad had fathered lots of children by different women and consequently Ribz had unknown numbers of brothers and sisters living on the estate. A constant anxiety of his when he was chatting up some girl was that she might be his sister. It was something he tried not to think about.

A car drove past, blasting out the beat of Sean Paul’s latest dance hall reggae hit, ‘Gimme the Light’.

Suddenly there were two loud bangs and an explosion of raucous yelling. Naja and Skippy looked round to see undercover cops appearing out of doors at either end of the block. Four cops were running towards them shouting and screaming.

‘Don’t move. Don’t move. Police.’

Naja was stunned. He was caught on both sides. Two of the cops jumped on him, pushed him against a wall and jerked his hands up behind his back. Sykes was thrown to the ground.

Ribz tried to run but was immediately surrounded. One of the cops grabbed him by the throat, hauled him along the block and pushed him to the floor. Ribz fell on his chest. He felt all the air being squeezed from his lungs and everything went black.

Skippy was pushed to the ground, a knee pressed into the small of his back, his arms yanked behind him and his wrists snapped into cuffs.

Inch was half way down the stairwell when he heard the shouts and the cries on the landing behind him.

‘Stay where you are.’

He saw everybody running in different directions. He didn’t stop to think. He blasted down the stairs and out into the road and just kept running. Out of doors and alleyways more plain-clothed and uniformed police appeared, but Inch wasn’t pulled over. He hurdled a police car and sprinted along Overton Road and disappeared out of Angell Town onto Brixton Road. He hardly noticed Phat Si walking towards him.

Phat Si was ambling back across Brixton Road towards Marston House carrying some takeaway jerk chicken for Inch when he got a call on his mobile phone that there was a dog unit hanging around Angell Town. He turned into the estate and saw the amazing sight of Inch sprinting away from Marston House chased by a posse of policemen. Phat Si stopped and watched in astonishment as Inch leapt over a police car and disappeared through an alleyway out of the estate with the group of desperate policemen pounding after him.

That’s when Phat Si realized how institutionalized he’d become. He was slow. He was so stuck on his feet. Nearly ten years of prison and young offenders’ institutions as well as the mind-numbing effects of years of drug taking had caught up with him.

He carried on walking up the road towards Marston House, his mind in such a daze that he nearly knocked over Pastor Samuels, Angell Town’s feared but respected Christian preacher, who was returning home with bags of shopping.

‘Simon. I wouldn’t go up there. The police are arresting all the kids.’

Phat Si nodded but didn’t stop.

‘Listen. Don’t get involved with what’s happening. Stay here with me. The police will get you too.’

Phat Si didn’t listen. It had been a long time since he’d listened to anybody. Ever since he was eight years old he had done just as he liked. That’s how old he’d been when his mum had walked out on him, leaving him in the care of a father who was rarely there. Since then the only person Phat Si listened to was Phat Si.

Even though the streets now seemed to be howling with the sound of police dogs and police sirens, he continued walking through the police cars and police cordons right up to Marston House. He climbed the stairs and emerged on the landing to discover his friends were getting handcuffed and twisted up. In his best voice he approached one of the cops.

‘What’s going on, officer?’

‘Go away.’

‘What do you mean go away? You go away.’

‘Just fuck off right now. Fuck off.’

Phat Si looked down on the ground to see one of his posse squirming under the grip of a hefty plain-clothed cop. Skippy was looking up at him, half mouthing, half whispering at him.

‘Blow, you dummy, blow.’

But Phat Si didn’t get out of there. Instead he looked down from the balcony at the commotion below. A policeman looked up, saw him and then looked at his colleague as if to say ‘You fucking idiot.’ That’s when both of them got up and ran for Phat Si. Phat Si was so slow that he had hardly moved before they jumped on him.

When Ribz came to he found himself sitting on the stairs, hands in cuffs with a sergeant yelling in his face.

He’d been out of it for about five minutes. Ribz still didn’t understand what was going on.

‘Look, I ain’t done nothin’.’

‘Shut it.’

‘What’s going on? Why are you holding my neck?’

‘The chief is coming down, he’ll explain to you.’

A cop was yelling in his face.

‘We saw you throw twenty rocks over the balcony.’

‘They never came out of my pocket.’

Another cop arrived.

‘It was you. I saw you. It was you.’

Ribz, Naja, Sykes and Skippy sat on the floor, dazed and handcuffed. It was as though the cops had come out of the doors and windows of every empty flat on the second floor of Marston House.

* * *

Neighbours were now congregating at windows and doorways watching the running battle. Chantelle, JaJa and Naja’s sister, came out of 124 Marston House, only ten doors down from where the PDC were getting handcuffed. She had heard the shouting and screaming and seen the police running up to the second-floor landing and grab her younger brother Naja.

Now she came out of the flat ready to ‘give the feds hell.’

She ran up to the policeman holding Naja and shouted in his face.

‘What’s he done? He wasn’t doin’ nufin’. He was just standing on the block.’

‘He was caught selling drugs. Now go away before I arrest you too.’

Chantelle just stood there shouting at the policeman, telling him to let her little brother go.

JaJa had left Wandsworth prison and was on his way back to Angell Town to meet the others. He was just congratulating himself that he wasn’t doing the drug selling shift at Marston House on such a cold day when he got a call from his mother.

‘The police have raided Marston House. They’ve taken Naja.’

She sounded frantic.

JaJa ran home. Naja was his younger brother and for years, ever since they were tiny kids, JaJa had been given the task of looking after him. His father had beaten up his mother and to stay alive she’d had to take her kids away from the family home. Since then, JaJa had taken the role of the man in the house and, although he’d been in and out of prison, he was expected to keep his younger brother out of trouble.

That’s why, when JaJa got home, his mother was furious with him.

‘They’ve taken Naja to Brixton police station. It’s your fault. You’re supposed to be looking after him.’

JaJa tried to remain calm. He knew that when he’d left the other members of the PDC earlier that day at Marston House none of them had any guns on them and the amount of gear they had could be passed off as drugs for their own use. He wasn’t worried. He believed they’d all be able to get off.

The doorbell rang. JaJa went to answer it. Standing in the hallway were three police officers.

‘Elijah Kerr. We are arresting you on suspicion of supplying class A drugs.’

JaJa wasn’t worried. I don’t have any drugs on me. I don’t have any in the flat. They can’t get me for nothing. He treated the whole thing like a joke.

‘I’ve done nufin’ wrong. You can’t pin anything on me.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘Shut it. You’ve got nufin’ on me.’

The policemen just laughed in his face and took him away.

When he got to Brixton police station the others, including Naja, Phat Si, Ribz, Skippy and Sykes, were all there, being held in separate cells. The police were still laughing and joking around.

JaJa shouted at the others through the cell bars.

‘We’re goin’ home, don’t worry, man. They ain’t got nufin’ on us.’

But no matter how much confidence he showed, how chilled he felt, the policemen around him still seemed to react with delight whenever he protested that they were clean.

Locked in their cells, JaJa and the others banged on pipes and yelled at each other through the bars, in a potent mixture of excitement and trepidation.

‘We’ll be out of here soon.’

The police yelled back telling them to shut up.

Late that night they took JaJa into an interview room. He knew what was going on. He’d been through the same process many times before. He wasn’t worried. But when he saw the TV screen and the video camera he knew something bad was about to go down.

The investigating officer pulled out a small videotape and put it in the camcorder. He turned on the television. JaJa looked on in amazement as the screen flickered into life to reveal a shot of the balcony of Marston House. It showed figures walking up and down the second-floor landing handing over small bags and collecting money from punters. The tapes went back a whole month. JaJa cursed himself. He’d felt that something had been up for several weeks but he’d never reacted to it properly. He now realized that the police had inserted undercover surveillance teams into the empty flats in Marston House and its neighbouring blocks and had `secretlyhad `secretly videotaped them for weeks. JaJa had the sort of flash of insight that only occurs under extreme pressure.

That’s money for you. It’s the risk. It makes you do stupid things. Sometimes when you’re on the street you need it so much it blinds you. Even from obvious things.

When Ribz was taken into the interview room and shown the same videotapes he protested. The tapes they had on him only showed him walking up and down the stairs in Marston House. They didn’t show him actually selling drugs. But the cops had a surprise for him. When they tested his fingers they were stained with a special ink. Undercover officers had bought drugs from him using marked notes. Ribz knew then that he would have to admit his guilt. I’m bang to rights.

Back in his cell JaJa thought about the effect it would have on the others. It was Phat Si he felt most sorry for. Naja, Sykes and Ribz were young offenders so they’d probably get a year in some young offenders’ institution. Skippy had only ever received minor convictions. JaJa had managed to stay out of prison for a couple of years so the court might be lenient on him. But Phat Si had just come out of a long prison sentence. He’d been suspected of attempted murder but, in the end, was found guilty of firing a gun into a crowd. He’d only been out a matter of weeks and now he was going back in again. The only good thing was that somehow Inch had slipped the police net.

As soon as he’d got out of Angell Town and onto the Brixton Road after the police raid, Inch knew that he was on the run and he wasn’t sure where it would end. From Brixton Road he fled to his girl’s place. He had to avoid the ‘feds’. He was panicking. Fucking hell. At least JaJa isn’t nicked. That makes it better. He had no idea that, at that very moment, JaJa was also being led in handcuffs to Brixton police station. He didn’t tell his girlfriend what was going on but he knew that she realized that something was up.

She could see the way I was and I knew I can’t get nicked but I was stuck and I couldn’t think properly, innit? It was crazy, man. I was thinking of getting out of the country. I was dumb, I should have breezed but I was too scared. I thought no way am I going to the airport. What if they nick me there? I’ll be mad.

Inch called some of his friends, who told him not to worry and tried to calm him down. He decided then that he would hang out and stay with friends in different places. That way he would never be in one place for too long. That way the police wouldn’t be able to track him down.

It would be two months before he was caught.

A month after the Marston House raid, Ribz, Sykes and Naja were taken to the Inner London Crown Court in Camberwell and sentenced, under their real names, Byron Cole, aged 19, Michael Payne, aged 21 and Naja Kerr, aged 18, to twenty-one months in Feltham. Later that same day, Skippy aka Errol Cole, aged 23, was given three and a half years. Phat Si and JaJa, real names, Simon Maitland and Elijah Kerr, both aged 22, got three years and nine months.

By the time he got out two years later, Elijah Kerr, aka JaJa, was a changed man. But the world outside had also changed. Marston House, the council block he’d grown up in, had been demolished to make way for brand new, award-winning housing. The Angell Town estate had been redeveloped. Brixton had been yuppified. Britain had gone to war in Iraq.

Within three months of his release, JaJa’s fellow PDC gang members Blacker, Ham and Justyn would be gunned down in the streets around Brixton. Phat Si would be shot in the leg outside JaJa’s flat. A new, radical Islam would be preached on the streets outside JaJa’s local mosques in Stockwell and Brixton. Four suicide bombers would kill scores of people in the heart of London. An innocent Brazilian would be shot in the head at the local tube station. Things were changing, and changing fast.