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pure whetted my good self’s appetite for some more.
    I’d been looking for some steady work for a while. A trade, if you will. Something to get totally into. A lot of villains were getting into the safe-blowing and that. Safes was all the rage at the time. The hoola-hoops of the underworld, if you will. Crime is like that, to be fair. There are trends and fads which come and go. Like one person tries something and everyone else has to get on the bandwagon and get into it. Villains, like everyone else, are attracted to bandwagons.
    For instance, you’ll get a team who are into counterfeiting or cat burgling or whatever, and they’ll learn that another particular firm are doing very well out of safe-blowing. So they’ll jump on that bandwagon. They’ll be right on it as though they’re fucking Alias Smith and Jones or whatever. So the next time the good firm goes through the roof of a picture house to blow the safe on a Sunday night, there’s a queue of fucking chancers lined up in front of them. Scaffolders or what have you, playing at it.
    I’ve met a lot of phoneys like that. Loads of them. Dreamers who think they’re international jewel thieves because they’ve got a black polo neck and a balaclava or whatever. As I’ve always said, that’s why the prisons are overloaded, with cunts like these bringing it ontop for all and sundry. But that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Free enterprise and all of that.
    But the point is, economically it’s fallacy of composition. There’s not enough to go around. But I’m not going to go on about it. Fuck that, fuck the safes, I thought. I was a merchant of calculated risks, an informed speculator, an adventure capitalist, if you will, and as far as I figured, safes was a purely saturated and mature market. But what about the other options?
    There was armed, of course. A lot of folk were getting into the old blagging at that time. Banks. PO’eys [Post Offices]. Wages vans, etc. It was fair to say that the late ’60s/early ’70s were the golden years for armed robbery. Is a fact, by the way. But it wasn’t a caper that yours truly was fond of. Never liked pointing guns in the faces of civilians, to be fair. And I’m not being all Kray twins about it, saying that we was a better class of villains and all of that baloney. We was scoundrels, no two ways, but terrifying office birds and that always left me a bit thingy.
    Of course, there were some hardcore firms who did things right, minimum collateral damage and all of that. But on the other hand there were also a lot of spray way merchants [indiscriminate gun users] who were getting involved as well. Pure hotheads, know where I’m going? Did not think nothing of popping the driver of a security van or whatever, who was only doing his job, by the way, or firing one off in a bank, at the drop of a bally.
    I mean, I’m all for perforating the ornate plaster for effect, to focus folk’s minds and that. No worse than bomby night that, in my mind. But some of these FNGs were pure Mai Lai merchants, know where I’m going? Birds, kiddies, the lot. Kill ’em all, let God sort them out. Did not give a fuck who or what they shot at. Did not like that side of it one bit. So on the numerous occasions I was invited to go in on a blag I politely turned them down. And some of them firms looking to recruit my good self were pure hard hitters, by the way. Did not take a knock back too kindly, they didn’t.
    The Hole in the Wall gang was my perfect crime. OK, so the money from each bit of work wasn’t as good as say blowing a safe or robbing a bank. Those lads might be looking at 20s,30s,50s from a nice job. But we weren’t taking the same risks as these heavy-duty peelers, were we? Neither were we looking at those same figures converted into time, if we got collared, were we? And the thingimijig is, those big jobs don’t come along