The Devil Read Online Free Page A

my loss, I went straight into town to mug someone to make up for it. This was the point, I think, when I went over to the dark side for real. The beast had forced his way to the fore and was looking for an unsuspecting victim to prey on. I went into Flannigan’s Irish bar, full of rich Irish punters on their way to the Grand National. I joined the ranks of muggers, prostitutes and pickpockets who had descended on Liverpool to take advantage of the flush racing fans that flocked to Aintree annually. It was like feeding time at the watering hole – lions on the hunt for antelopes. I stood at the bar until I saw a guy pull out a nice enough wad, waited for him to get pissed up and then followed him into the toilet. I gave him a few licks, took his wallet off him and got out of there. I got about £350, which was enough to see me through. That day in 1980 was the last and only time I would ever be flat broke.
    After that, all I ever wanted to be was a hard case – to be feared rather than loved. However, I was always generous with my family. When I ate, everybody ate. When I made a packet, I made sure it got whacked out on my family. You could say that’s the penance I paid to appease my own conscience.
    Even though I was well and truly on the road to hell, the internal battle between good and evil never really left me. On the one hand, I still had the urge to be a good man and to stop fucking evil things happening, but, on the other hand, temptation was getting too much for me.

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    RAISING HELL – THE TURNING POINT
    For a man to truly achieve his destiny, his life must not be lived in isolation. It must be wrapped up with important events going on in the wider world, on a collision course with history.
    For me, the point of impact occurred on 3 July 1981. Britain was in the grip of a massive recession, nobody had a job and I was fighting grinding poverty. I had just settled down with a girl I had met about a year before, shortly after I got back from London. Her name was Maria Sampson, and my first son, Stephen, had recently been born. I was trying to get work, do the right thing and fight against the evil inside me, but it was a dustbowl out there.
    Beneath the surface of the city, incredible tension simmered between the police and the black community. False arrests were run of the mill. This was before racism became a mainstream issue, and I knew, like every other black lad, what it was like to be on the other end of a policeman’s boot. I was 11 the first time Merseyside’s finest assaulted me and 42 the last, with at least a dozen incidents in between.
    It was a summer’s day in 1981, and our Stephen was a month old. I was out with my brother Andrew John. We were at the stage of trying to physically outdo each other. We were T-shirted up, it was warm and we were hanging around on a street near the perimeter of the ghetto. Suddenly, a police officer my age – thin, naive and wet behind the ears – stepped out from one of two police cars and attempted to physically and verbally abuse us. He told us to move on, when there was clearly nowhere else to move on to. Babylonians they were, flexing their muscles.
    Another police officer said, ‘Monkeys, get back to the zoo. Go on, get your arses back to Granby Street,’ meaning that we were to get back to the heart of the ghetto and stay there.
    A lad called Leroy Cooper was with us. Leroy was the most eloquent lad I knew and today is a well-published poet. He verbally slaughtered the bizzies, and they retaliated by resorting to their old stalwarts of, ‘You dirty black bastards! You nasty niggers, get back to Africa!’
    At this, Leroy became incensed. Andrew and I, accompanied by another mate called Ivan Freeman, watched as he rammed the police car with the bicycle he was riding. Three policemen came at him and attempted to arrest him. At this point, Andrew gave me ‘the look’ – one that painted a thousand words.