Powder Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

say: ‘There goes a so-many-grand-a-year man who runs a moderately successful small business. He employs half-a-dozen fellows in his construction enterprise and is, on the face of it, a legitimate business.’
    Little did they fucking know, by the way. But none of us really brought it ontop for ourselves on the flash Harry front. We were sound like that. Low-key, we were. Super low-key, knowmean?
    I’d got into robbing wagons. Just on my tod or with a couple of people who frequented the Oslo. Meat wagons, furniture vans, that sort of caper. The odd bit of hijacking. But mostly they were parked up and we’d just have them off. Sell the vehicle. Sell the contents. Get paid.
    It weren’t major wages. But it was allday, know where I’m going? That got me interested in the haulage industry. So I then decides to invest into a legitimate haulage business. It was only a small going concern but it was the thing to be into, in those days, with all the new motorways and what have you. I was doing all right with straight-goer contracts. I built it up steadily. Bought a BMC flat-back ten tonner. Few other bits and bobs. But it wasn’t long before I was getting into some jarg stuff as well. From time to time my uncle Ritchie asked me if I could lend him a lorry: ‘Of course. Goes without saying.’ Did not ask any questions. He’d bring it back the next day and say ‘Put that in your backbin’ and give me a good few grand for my trouble. Nothing trifling, by the way: twos, threes, maybe fours. A fair old drink for a night’s graft. Specially when I wasn’t even there.
    He’d say: ‘Don’t worry about it. We had a good touch on the docks.’ Meaning they’d had a load of Scotch or brandy off or what have you. Sometimes the lorry wouldn’t come back for two weeks. But I wasn’t arsed because it just meant more wages for me. After three or four of them, I told Ritchie that I wanted to drive on the next mission. Not for kicks, but because I purely knew that they’d have to pay me more if I actually went on the job, know where I’m going? As I says, I was a greedy twat, me.
    So one day my uncle Ritchie phones me up and tells me to pop down for a meeting. When I got there, there was himself and another feller, whose grid I recognised as that of a bit of a player around town and that. Bit of a face, if you will. The lad was one of the Bennett family, a North End team with a pretty staunch reputation for the old ultra-violence. Fucking nuts some of them were, those Bennetts. Proper psychos. Did not terrify myself, by the way. But they were far from beauts, all the same. So, ’cos he’s there I knows this is gonna be a half-tasty bit of work, whatever the caper might be.
    My uncle tells me that the Bennetts have the docks boxed off to death – which I know – and that they’d been dropsying the keys to various warehouses to his little squadron for years – which I didn’t. And that at that moment in time his good self was now in possession of a set of keys to a bonded warehouse full to the pure brim of top-end Scotch. All’s I have to do is drive down there with my wagon and load up with ten tons of it. Is right. Let’s go. End of. What I’ve been waiting for, in all fairness. And that’s exactly what I did. Drove my ten tonner into this bonded warehouse on the docks. Passed the busies manning the gates. Passed the security guards. Passed the dockers. All boxed off, by the way. And straight inside. Loaded up, sheeted up and got off. It was that easy. Obscene, in fairness.
    Afterwards, I dropped about forty pallets of it at a lock up in Kirby and got weighed in seven grand for my very few troubles. Get paid or what? Is that not a perfect crime? It was my first really big score. Fucking fortune in those days, by the way, and I was made up. Totally buzzing. Thought I was James Cagney, know where I’m going? And it