The Crime Trade Read Online Free PDF Page B

their last breaths.
Nobody knew how many people he'd killed this way. Nobody even knew if the story was true or not. My feeling was that there was probably something in it, but if he'd ever murdered someone in such a messy fashion I suspected that he'd only done it the once, and the victim would probably have been long dead before his colon had been wrapped round his neck. I hoped so anyway.
But what was not in doubt was that Strangleman Grant was a dangerous man. He'd been residing in the UK for about ten
years, having come over in his early twenties looking to make his fortune, and had married a local girl, thereby giving him the right to remain, even though it quickly became clear that his respect for the laws of his adopted land was near enough non-existent. Of those ten years, something like half had been spent in prison, mainly for drugs and weapons offences, but he'd been out for a while now and was settled on mine and Tina's south Islington manor, which was how I knew his background. What concerned me immediately, however, was the fact that he was "hooked up with the crime organization of one Nicholas Tyndall--a new and potentially very violent player in the north London cocaine trade. A little bit of history here. Up until a few months earlier, cocaine importation and distribution in north London, particularly Islington, had been primarily the work of the Holtzes, an extended family of gangsters who'd had a stranglehold on the area's organized crime since the late 1970s, and one of whose members had been Slim Robbie O'Brien. But the Holtzes had fallen from power in spectacular fashion, their leader and one of his sons killed, and now many of their senior associates, including the leader's deputy, Neil Vamen, were in custody, awaiting trial for a variety of offences.
I'd been involved in their downfall, as had DI Malik, which was how we knew each other, but our victory had been something of a hollow one. With the Holtzes out of the picture, a vacuum had developed, and everyone knows what they say about nature and vacuums. Plenty of other outfits, some of them distinctly amateur, had tried to grab a piece of the wealth that was there to be had in the distribution of coke to the evergrowing customer base, but one of the more organized, and by all accounts more violent of them, was the Tyndall gang.
Tyndall himself was a thirty-something, locally born thug with an entrepreneurial streak who'd started out surrounding himself with men from his own estate, but who over the last couple of years had developed relations with Jamaican and Albanian criminals operating locally, and was, as a result, one of the bigger players coming through. Strangleman Grant was one of his top enforcers and was believed to have murdered another Jamaican who'd tried to rip Tyndall off two months earlier, blowing the back of his head off in an illegal drinking den in Dalston. There'd been at least fifty witnesses to the shooting but, as is almost always the way in these sort of violent in-your-face crimes within the black community, no-one was talking, particularly as it was well known that Nicholas Tyndall was behind it. Already he was getting a reputation for being untouchable.
This is the London of today, a vast multicultural city of consumers breeding an ever-growing array of gangs from every ethnic background imaginable, all vying for control of the city's huge and incredibly lucrative crime industry. I'd heard somewhere that London's organized and semi-organized criminals were responsible for raising ten billion pounds of revenues per year; mainly from drugs, but also from prostitution (now effectively sewn up by the Albanians), people smuggling and occasionally armed robbery. When I'd mentioned that figure, the ten billion, to Malik, he'd told me it was almost certainly a conservative estimate.
What I couldn't understand, though, was why Tyndall's men would be involved in robbing Fellano. I've said it before, and I hope I can keep saying it: