a con is born
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hall. There was something about the snooker hall that made me a different sort of person and gradually I got worse, more violent. I grew to be indifferent to other people s feelings if they stood in my way. In truth, I think that I began to enjoy fighting and got a kick out of hurting people. It made me feel in control. It was all part of always wanting to be the best, best at school, best at snooker, best at thieving, best at fighting and drinking. If it meant that to show everyone that I was the best someone else had to have a slap, well that was their hard luck. I am not proud of having been violent. As I grew up I found it harder and harder to control my temper and I got into fights over meaningless, stupid things. Although I could take care of myself, I was never proud of fighting but felt that in some circumstances I had to fight. I could not control my temper and that made me violent. I would burn up inside and lose control over what I was doing. I became addicted to violence. Benny and I had a lot in common. He was a Scots Catholic who came from a tough part of Glasgow where men are really hard. I was from South London, where people are not quite as blindly violent but where they can be very slippery. Benny, like me, was not the tallest of men but he was terrifically broad and strong. If he hit you, you stayed hit. I bought a bunch of skeleton keys double-enders is what we called them. It was the era of the glass shop doors and skeleton keys would open them easily. We could walk into most locked shops with them alarms were very rare in those days. We would drive around in a stolen van until we located a suitable shop with the right kind of merchandise and the right kind of doors. We usually turned up late at night or early in the morning, opened up the glass doors, got inside the shop and locked the doors with us inside. When we were locked in, we would sort out what we wanted to take away, get everything by the door, then open the back of the van and load the stuff into the van. We would sell the stuff to any one of a number of local fences we knew and go out spending the loot. One day at Putney I was coming back from selling goods that I had previously stolen when I got stopped at Putney Bridge by a police roadblock. The police asked for my name and address. This was my first brush with the law. I gave them an invented name. Whose car was it? I said that it was mine. They asked where I lived and I gave him some address in North London about the furthest place I could think of at the time. They asked for the logbook. I said it was at home. They asked for my driving licence. I didn t have one so I said that it too was at home, I would produce it for them later. They said they would like to take me to the police station to sort things out. I said You re not taking me anywhere. OK, they said, smiling, we ll drive round to your house and find the log book. I said, OK, that s what we ll do. They put me in the back of their police car and asked me to direct them to my home and the false address was five or six miles away from where we were. They
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03/04/03, 09:57