Read Powder Wars for Free Online Page B

holding depots and factories and that outside the port?’ Hardly fucking Meyer Lansky, I know. Just a bit of common sense, to be fair. But it paid off. The first one we did was a warehouse on the East Lancs Road. It was like a huge distribution depot where freshly imported commodities would be loaded onto wagons. There was so much going on that there were half-loaded wagons all over the place, waiting for the next shipment to come in, so that they could be filled up and fucked off to wherever they were going. It was chaos. I didn’t even bother bringing one of my own wagons. I thought, ‘I’ll just drive one of theirs away.’
    I was pretty good at starting them without the keys, being by then a haulage contractor myself. Easy peasy. So we just walked on there in broad daylight with overalls and donkey jackets on and that, as though we were warehousemen, and went from wagon to wagon looking for the best loads to have off.
    Coffee was always a banker. High-value, low-weight and the fences could liquidise into readies within hours. A pure cash converter, it was. It’s the same today with the smackheads, robbing it from the Kwickie and Netto and that. Smaller scale, I know, but same principle. That and razor blades. The horrible cunts.
    So we comes across this huge heavy-goods half-full of top grade Columbian coffee. The wagon next to it had thousands of tins of corned beef in it. Being logistically efficient and that, it pained us to leave with a half-load so we thought, ‘Have the Fray Bentos as well.’ The market-stall folk love all that, by the way, robbed tins and that. Hand-baled that into the coffee wagon and got off. Dick the Stick did the lock on the gate and we were off. I drove it about eight miles down the East Lancs to a pub called the Oak.
    We always set up the fence beforehand on jobs like this. This time it was a feller called Bobby McGorrigan who was handling it. Bobby was a sound feller. Allday, he was. Trust him with anything. He could get rid of anything and he’d pay you out cash there and then if you wanted. Not that we was short, or nothing, but he wasn’t like some of these fences who were worse payers than ICI, knowmean? Ninety days and all that corporate carry on. Fuck that. Bobby was staunch. He was basically a straight-goer who had gone to jail on some small-time charge. He used to be a cab driver and he’d use his cab to ferry shoplifters around town, but in jail he’d met a little family firm called the Hughes. Post-jug he started investing their money into nightclubs and car showrooms and that. He was a money man. A washer. Made them good dough, he did. Then he went from strength to strength, rising up the criminal ladder until he ended up being a top fence. I got to know him because if the Hughes got into any trouble they’d come and see me. I was their bit of weight, if you will.
    Bobby, who was a big fat bastard who we called Bob the Dog, later ripped his brother off on a big deal to enable him to buy his own garage. This same brother, Bobby’s brother, was waiting at this pub to drive the wagon full of coffee and tinned ham from there. Got my five grand and got off. End of story. Remember it was the late ’60s and that was a lot of dough for a young fellow.
    A few days later we hit another warehouse just outside Wigan. Again it was coffee and whatever else was in there. This was a two-wagon job. A card-marker had told us that the firm left two or so wagons there in the depot overnight, so we planned just to load them up and get off. Is right, logistically and that. We were extra looking forward to these pre-Chrimbo touches because the wages were straight into our Xmas backbins, knowmean? Kiddies’ presents, Chrimbo bevvies and all of that. Even yours truly was feeling the pinch. I mean, the lads need an extra bit of tank at that time of year, don’t they, no matter who they are? So Ritchie, as philanthropic and family-friendly as