Powder Wars Read Online Free PDF Page A

paid. Don’t mind if I do, thank you very much. I was only 17. Already I was being cut into half a decent skenario about the town and that.
    The wages weren’t great. But they weren’t a insult, either. £20-a-night to start with going up to a £50, if I kept the gangsters out. This was 1967 and a feller in Fords at Halewood would have to drill a lot of fucking bolts onto a lot of fucking Anglias to earn his £20 every week.
    There was also fiddles to be milked on a job like this. For e.g. there was what I could make on the door myself. Used to charge normal punters £1 and £2 for the sea dogs. I had the sense to charge big groups of people coming in, say, £20 – £10 would go to me, £10 to the management. Small time, I know. But it all adds up. And I got a little taxi firm going. No licences or none of that. Just a little illegal one ferrying carloads of sailors and brass back to their ships at a fiver and tenner a throw. I’d just been banned from driving for two years for robbing a car – but it made no odds. Sometimes, if there was no one else to drive the jalopies, I would run them myself. All the ships had bars on them. So I’d just sit off in the bar all night, waiting to take them back or whatever. Drinking free booze while the sailors got up to no good with Liverpool’s finest.
    One night one of the seamen passed round a joint. That was the first time I’d come across drugs. It was just pot. A lot of the lads weren’t into it ’cos of the hippies and that. I thought it was sound, all the same.
    But the real benefits to running a door were more strategic. It got me straight into a classier kind of robbing, a tastier bracket of work altogether, if you will. Being on the door meant that there was a lot of better work being put my way. Bigger jobs, more money. It’s as simple as that.

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    The Hole In The Wall Gang
    In the late ’60s Paul was invited to join his uncles’ infamous Hole in the Wall gang. The six-strong mob, run by brothers Ritchie and Ronnie Mellor, were daring commercial burglars who robbed warehouses containing valuable commodities. They were dubbed the Hole in the Wall gang by police because of their trademark method of entry – to literally smash their way through the reinforced walls of bonded warehouses using drills and oxy-acetylene burners.
    Although their method was relatively unsophisticated, each member of the team was a specialist and the planning was thorough. It paid off. The gang’s hit rate was mind-boggling. At their height, the Hole in the Wall gang were breaking into three warehouses a week all over the North West. The newly built motorways were opening up virgin territory further afield all the time. Each bit of ‘work’ netted Paul on average between £5,000 and £10,000 – staggering earnings for a young buck.
    The booty was varied – whisky, brandy, cigarettes, cloth, industrial machinery, coffee, tea, meat, hi-fi equipment, tyres, canned food. The swag list read like a freighter’s inventory, which it most often was. There was no rhyme or reason to what was stolen. As long as the Mellors could line up a fence to sell the load quickly, within hours of the raid, it was fair game. If not, if the fences could not cough up the readies instantly, often before the break of dawn deadline, the lorry loads of swag were simply dumped at the side of the road. They were written off by the gang and left to rot or be discovered and it was onto the next one.
    The gang’s motto was ‘slash and burn’. Plenty more fish in the sea. The North West of England was the warehouse of the world, stuffed to the brim with new and exciting goods during this post-war manufacturing boom. There was no point haggling over a wagon full of freshly stolen goods – the trail of evidence was too hot. Get Rid Quick was the order of the day.
    Sometimes the jobs were to order. Other times they were