Gangs

Read Gangs for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Gangs for Free Online
Authors: Tony Thompson
Tags: General, True Crime, organized crime
again. I never made a penny out of those tablets.
    ‘I was getting myself into a right state. When you’re living that kind of life, spending so much time off your face, the paranoia builds up and the violence gets to you. It’s in the air and, no matter how hard you try, sooner or later it gets into your blood.
    ‘I’d bought some cocaine off this team of white guys, big nasty bastards who were friends of Sean. It was only a couple of thousand pounds’ worth and the deal went smoothly, but a couple of weeks later they started hassling me, saying I hadn’t paid them enough and that they wanted more. I couldn’t fucking believe the cheek of it so I decided to go after them, teach them a lesson.
    ‘I was a total wreck by then. I’d gone from using twenty-five pounds’ worth of cocaine a night to more than a thousand pounds’ worth every single day. All in all, I must have put the equivalent of a three-bedroom detached house up my nose in the space of a year. I was totally wired.’
    Sitting with Roberts, who for the most part is softly spoken and, despite the rigours of gang life, retains his youthful, boyish looks, it is hard to imagine that he is capable of great violence. It isn’t long before the illusion is shattered. ‘I caught up with them one night and went crazy. I chopped a couple of them up with a machete, shot one of them in the eye and chopped them over their heads and legs.
    ‘I knew that after that I was in an awful lot of trouble. The drugs were too much, they were killing me. It was hard to give it up but it was a choice of live a normal life or die.’
    With Roberts gone, Bradish struggled to find a suitable replacement for a raid and, a few weeks later, begged his old blagging partner to rejoin him. Roberts refused and Bradish took on a couple of last-minute replacements. During the raid he was caught red-handed by the Flying Squad. True to form, Bradish was carrying a loaded sawn-off shotgun and had a dozen spare cartridges in his pocket.
    ‘The only reason Sean got caught was because he had gone out on a job with two guys who had never been involved in a robbery before. They were total amateurs, didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They did way too much planning. The car they stole for the getaway had been taken a week earlier and had just been sitting around. The police knew what it was going to be used for so they kept an eye on it. When the police pounced, the getaway driver was actually asleep. He was sitting outside the bank in the car waiting, which is the wrong way to do it – you’re supposed to be driving around, otherwise you just draw attention to yourself. Sean should never have been working with them. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing and that was his downfall. But he didn’t see it like that, he didn’t see it like that at all.’
    Instead, as he languished in his prison cell awaiting trial and watching the evidence mounting up against him, Sean became increasingly convinced that Roberts had somehow tipped off the police. His response was a predictable one: using his contacts on the outside, he made plans to have Roberts killed.
    In the meantime the same Flying Squad team that arrested Bradish had tired of waiting for Roberts to commit another robbery and decided to arrest him at home, using the DNA evidence they had recovered from the raid. At first Roberts was resigned to the idea of a fifteen-year stretch and kept his mouth shut, but then he found out about what Bradish had been planning and began to see things differently. And that was when he decided to become a grass.
    ‘People talk about honour among thieves, but there isn’t any these days. Sean had no hesitation in taking a contract out on me. If I had done the “right” thing and kept my mouth shut, he’d have got someone to put a bullet in my head. No amount of explanation would have convinced him that I wasn’t responsible for him getting nicked so, as far as I’m concerned, he left me

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