LIFE AFTER LIFE

  ‘A’ wing was home to top security prisoners, mainly armed robbers, facing very long sentences. Needless to say, everyone was under a lot of stress.  Many had been put away by informers, so were virulently intolerant of anyone they didn’t know or trust. The effeminate Dave was still very much an unknown quantity. Once again, he was regarded as being ‘only a pouf’. The vast majority ignored him.

  On the wing, waiting to go to trial, was the notorious and prolific ‘Wembley Mob’. These were exclusively premier division ‘chaps’ who, apart from a string of major bank robberies, had robbed one bank of over £250,000. They were innovative and had a certain organisational flair. Some were natural leaders. Soon they had a viable escape plot going.  

  There were several linked elements to the plan and, for it to work, each had to be carried out smoothly. The most audacious element was to overpower all the warders and take control of the wing. Then, using a key taken from a warder, they would let themselves out into a side yard where dustmen were emptying bins into their dustcart. The exit from this particular yard was through double wooden gates. The dustcart would be driven at and through these. Once into the street outside, some would get away in waiting cars, others would take their chances on foot.

  The essence of this plan was timing. Once the warders were overpowered there would  be only a short time before the general alarm was raised and police rushed to block off roads surrounding the jail. Further, the dustcart was in the yard for only a short time too. 

  Breaking the various elements down further, the plotters were confident they had everything covered. There were certainly enough ‘heavies’ to overpower the warders and the ‘Wembley Mob’s’ driver, Dan, was one of the best ‘wheelmen’ in the business. He was confident he could drive the dustcart through the wooden gates. However, opening the wing gate to the yard with the captured keys was problematic. There were quite a few keys on the warders’ key rings. It could take some time to find the right one to open the yard gate. Precious seconds could be lost and these precious seconds could mean the failure of the plot. The ultimate nightmare would be for the wrong key to jam in the lock.

  By coincidence, there were a couple of ‘chaps’ on ‘A’ wing who knew of Dave’s abilities with keys and locks. Had he made the approach himself he would have been rejected out of hand. With their recommendation though he was in on the plot.

  It was May of 1973 that the plan was put into action. By now 30 or so people were involved and everyone took their positions. The first move was to be made by a leading member of the ‘Wembley Mob’. Henry was to jump on the wing’s Principal Officer in his office and take his keys. That would be the signal for everybody else to overpower the rest of the warders. 

  There had been no doubt that Henry was equal to the task. At six feet tall and fifteen stones, he was facing a twenty-year sentence. Henry hovered near the doorway to the P.O.’s office. Then he hovered some more. Other people standing about started to get uneasy. They couldn’t understand why Henry hadn’t jumped on the P.O.

  To Dave, standing very close to Henry, it was all too clear. The pasty white face spoke volumes. Taking the initiative, Dave threw himself at the P.O. Both fell to the floor of the office with a resounding crash. Other inmates piled in and helped him subdue the P.O. Elsewhere on the wing, desperate inmates threw themselves upon the nearest warder. 

  With the P.O.’s keys now in his hand Dave led the charge down to the yard gate. He had already identified the key he would need. He thrust it into the lock and swung the gate open, all in one smooth movement. The mob behind him brushed him aside as it thundered into the yard where battle immediately commenced.

  This was all too much for the dustmen. Terrified, they fled to the far corners of the yard. The two warders guarding them fought back though, as more warders poured through the gate behind the escaping mob. With the inmates armed with the dustmen’s brooms and shovels and the warders with their riot sticks, the battle raged around the dustcart. 

  Dan, the ‘Wembley Mob’s’ ‘wheelman’, had jumped behind the wheel of the dustcart. Dave had jumped in beside him. Dan froze, puzzled by the unfamiliar controls. The lifting arm of the dustcart was up, holding an un-emptied bin. It would have to be lowered to pass under the brick arch over the wooden gates. He tugged at various controls with no effect.

  Suddenly, Dave pushed him aside. Taking the wheel, he started the cart and drove it straight at the wooden gates. The gates shattered as the front of the cab smashed through, but the upraised lifting arm and dustbin collided with the brick arch and the cart came to an abrupt stop. There was a path to freedom though, either side of the cart though. Battling inmates broke free to run past the cart and into the street.

  The ‘Wembley Mob’ had arranged for a large van to be left in the street. Now they fought their way towards it. This was to be their mistake, for, by now, more and more warders were arriving on the scene. With the windscreen smashed and a warder lying across the wheel, the van was going nowhere. Then the police cars started to arrive. Soon the escapers were lying battered and bloody in the road.

  But not Dave. He had taken one look at the situation with the van and decided that it was a poor prospect. With another escaper following, he ran through the door of one house, into a back garden, through another house and into another street. They repeated this process several times. Within minutes they were a quarter of a mile away. Dave hailed a passing taxi and they piled in. 

  This was his fatal mistake. Black taxis are part of the police radio net. The driver heard news about the escape on his radio. Surreptitiously, he called the police and said that he thought he had two of the escapers on board. Police cars quickly surrounded the taxi and Dave and the other escaper were both arrested. By some considerable irony, the other, nearly successful, escaper was also openly gay. 

  Dave was returned to Brixton and promptly beaten up by the warders, then placed in solitary. A further charge of escaping was added to the other charges he was already facing. 

  At his trial Dave refused to recognize the court. Again, from a professional criminal’s point of view, this was sheer stupidity. The ‘chaps’ were well aware that the legal process was something like a game. Both sides made various manoevers to try to influence the jury one way or another. One well-known ‘chap’ had a ploy of bursting into tears at a crucial point in his trials. It had won him several unwarranted acquittals and no one condemned him for it. It was all part of the ‘game’.

  Only political prisoners, like the IRA, ever refused to recognize courts. By doing so Dave could only have antagonised the judge. As a result he was sentenced to ten and a half years, probably double what he would have got if he had behaved sensibly.

  I had learned none of the above from Dave personally. A likeable aspect of his personality was that he never bragged about his achievements. This impressed me all the more.

  However, if Dave had thought that his latest, gutsy exploits would lead to him being fully accepted, he would have been disappointed. Unfortunately for him, the category ‘pouf’ cancelled out all the other factors in many people’s eyes. This was further compounded by the fact that Dave couldn’t have a fight to save his life. If he had been violent his gayness could well have been ignored. Ronnie Kray was gay and no one ever called him a pouf.

  Even though I was now aware of Dave’s abilities, I had no intention of asking him to join in our escape plan. We didn’t need him, or anyone else for that matter. Quite obviously, the more people involved, the greater the difficulty in getting away unseen or, at least, with a decent start. And if we were going to include someone quite gratuitously, then we would have chosen them from our immediate circle of friends.

  But Jeff had heard about the forced delay in handing out the impression of the key. Normally our security was tight, but another failing of Mick’s, apart from his dithering, was that he told too many people about his business. We guessed that Mick must have told him, because Jeff pulled me to one side and asked if, in view of the delay, Dave could have a go at making a key from the impression.

  I, personally, was against the idea. Although I quite liked Dave as an individual, I still wasn’t over-impressed by his professionalism. My fear was that he would damage the impression, or worse, lose it. Then we would be back to square one again.

  John, Stewart and Mick though were of the opinion that it was worth a chance. Dave assured us that he knew what he was doing and that, not only would he make a working key, but that he would hand the impression back completely undamaged. I duly handed the impression over, saying that I wanted it back as soon as possible.

  To my great surprise, Dave gave me it back the following day. At the same time he showed me the key he had made. I was immediately impressed. It actually looked like a proper key, the shiny metal silver-soldered together, but with the rectangular ‘flag’ blank and blackened with candle soot.

  He had a further request of me. As he was in ‘patches’ and worked in the top-security mail-bag shop, Dave would never get the opportunity to try the key out in a gate. He knew that I worked in the tin shop, which had several sets of gates in obscure corners. He asked me to take the key into the shop and try it out.

  I was committed to help him now, although, secretly, I still doubted that he would be able to make a key that worked. Once again, it was down to his ‘image’. He was so far from what I considered a capable, professional criminal to be.

  There was a room called the spray shop that was attached to the tin shop. It was separated from the tin shop by double, unlocked doors. Two cons worked in there on their own, although all workers in the tin shop had easy access to it. A civilian instructor would go in occasionally, but the warders, sitting in set posts in the main shop, never did.

  I didn’t know either of the two cons personally, but once again the ‘Parkhurst solidarity’ factor kicked in. I entered the spray shop and approached both of them. “Do either of you two fellas mind if I try a key out in that gate in the corner”, I asked. One immediately jumped up from where he had been sitting and replied, “You go right ahead, mate. I’ll watch the door for you.”

  I turned the key in the lock and, being a ‘blank’ of course, it struck against something inside and wouldn’t open the gate. But where it had struck the lock’s levers, there were now scratches and scuff marks on the blackened ‘flag’. I took the key back to Dave.

  He worked on it over the dinner-time ‘lock-up’ period and handed it back to me as we unlocked. The flag was completely blackened again, but he had cut shallow notches along one edge. I took it into the shop and tried it in the lock again. Once again it didn’t turn the lock, but there were now another set of scratch marks on the ‘flag’.

  Over the next several days, deeper notches were cut. Each time I would try it in the spray shop gate. Each time it wouldn’t turn the lock. I was now rapidly running out of patience. Trying the key out each time wasn’t without risk, both for myself and the two fellas who were looking out for me. Further, I was on the top security, Category ‘A’ list myself. Should I be singled out for one of the special searches that ‘A’ men regularly had, the key would be found. That would be the end of me and this particular plot.   

  Nine times I tried the key and nine times it wouldn’t open the gate. On the tenth time I had resolved to tell Dave that was enough. To my great surprise, on the tenth try the key turned smoothly in the lock and the gate opened. Just to make sure, I repeated the process several times. I hurried back from work that tea-time to tell the others in the escape that we didn’t have to send the impression out now. We had our key.

  This immediately put us on an action footing. It meant that we could have a go within a couple of weeks. However, we would have to decide where we would go from. I was the only one of the group who worked in the tin shop, so that wasn’t an option. We still had a lot of planning to do.....

to be continued

  In many ways the subject matter of the article was dear to me in that it was a tragic tale of someone who had once been a friend. I didn’t doubt that ‘Maxim’ would place the emphasis in all the wrong places and I wasn’t to be disappointed. Their emphasis was on the ‘cross-dressing bank robber dressed in a tight black leather mini-skirt’. To those of us who knew him well, Dave Martin was a whole lot more than that. For us, the emphasis was on a system that could turn a gentle, genuinely non-violent guy into something that was a parody of his former self. That it ended in tragedy was all too predictable. This, then, is the story of the life and tragic death of ‘Dave the Rave’.

GLOSSARY

                    ‘A’-man…a prisoner in the highest security category

                     Chaps…an almost mythical grouping of criminals whose ethos includes:-  

                                  professionalism in the pursuit of crime; loyalty to others of their         

                                  kind; hatred of and non-cooperation with authority, and courage.  

                                  Many aspire to membership, few qualify.

                     Chief….chief officer, the most senior, uniformed officer in the jail

                     Con…convict or prisoner

                     Face.. a person well-known amongst criminals, one of the ‘chaps’.

                     Firm…group of criminals joined together for a criminal project.

                     Fours…fourth landing

                     Met…..Metropolitan Police

                     Ones…ground floor landing

                     P.O….principal officer

                     Raver…prison homosexual

                     Slop out…to empty the contents of one’s chamber pot in the recess.

                     Staunch….loyal and trustworthy

  Around every prison there are always flocks of scruffy, moth-eaten pigeons, and Parkhurst  was no exception to this rule. There was a constant scrum of them out in the yard, fighting over a crust or some other scrap of discarded food. 

  Suddenly, a seagull would land amongst the throng, it’s pristine white feathers and clean lines making it stand out as a thing of beauty compared to it’s fellows. By comparison, it seemed a queen amongst birds.

  Dave Martin’s arrival at Parkhurst had all the imagery of a seagull landing amongst pigeons. Parkhurst was an old, down-at-heel prison, with the average age of the cons much higher than at most prisons. The weather hardly encouraged stylish dress either. On the other side of the hill to Albany Prison, Parkhurst took the brunt of the cold winds. The all-pervasive stench from the nearby sewage farm added to a general atmosphere of decay.

  Consequently, the cons dressed for comfort rather than appearance. Long gray overcoats and shapeless khaki raincoats were the order of the day. Old blue berets were pulled down tightly around the ears to keep out the chill. On the wings, people lounged around in untidy grey jumpers or discoloured ‘grandad’ vests. Had there been an award for Britain’s best dressed con, it would never have been won by an inmate of Parkhurst. You could imagine the entire population being transferred to some Russian gulag and no one looking a bit out of place.

  One day, into this sartorial wasteland, came Dave Martin. I was lounging in the cell doorway of Dave Bailey, a close friend, when I saw two warders coming along the ‘ones’ landing escorting a con I had never seen before.

  He was quite tall, but walked with his head bowed, giving him a stooping look. The most striking feature was his hair. It was a cascade of auburn that fell around his shoulders, bouncing and glistening with a sheen that the Silverkrin girl would have been proud of. It framed a long, angular face with a large, hawk-like nose. The nose was a decidedly ugly feature, but such was the softening effect of the hair that the overall impression was one of some beauty.

  His neck was long and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple. Fastened around the midpoint was a silver necklace of inter-linked shields, each about an inch square, making it look like a silver band around his neck.  

  Narrow shoulders gave way to a chest bordering on the emaciated. This was flanked by two painfully thin arms. Draped around his upper body was what could only be described as a blouse. It was of a black silky material, with an exaggerated collar and long sleeves that ended in butterfly cuffs. From one wrist dangled a gold bracelet.

  The next striking feature was his trousers. The length and slenderness of his legs was highlighted by a pair of blue jeans with a bright yellow stripe of a different material down each outside seam. The stripes meant that he was an E-man, someone who had tried to escape and was now on the ‘watch’ list. 

  Such ‘watch’ list clothing was generally referred to as ‘patches’. These usually consisted of a shapeless pair of prison overalls with a piece of yellow material sewn down each side. This guy’s ‘patches’ though were a pair of faded denims, skintight at the waist, hips and thighs, but flaring out downwards from the knees. The wide, bright yellow stripe either side was an integral part of the jeans. They had clearly been tailored with some skill On his feet was a pair of brownish moccasins. The lack of any rigid sole made him drag his feet to cushion the impact as he ‘skated’ along.

  This was a startling apparition by any standards. On the ‘ones’ in Parkhurst, at 8.30 in the morning, it was incongruous in the extreme.

  “’Ere Dave. Have a look at this guy”, I managed to blurt out as he passed by on the other side of the landing. 

  Dave came and joined me in the doorway. By this time the figure was just disappearing through the door into ‘D’ wing, the wing where I lived. “Oh, that’s Dave Martin”, said Dave with a smile on his face. “They call him ‘Dave the Rave’ because he’s a raving pouf. He’s all right though. Very staunch, with plenty of guts. He’s a bit warm at escaping too. He was in the escape at Brixton and his gameness put a few of the so-called ‘chaps’ to shame. To be arriving at this time he must have just been slung out of Albany.”

  As I took all this information in I realised that, as he was going to be on the same wing as me, Dave Martin and I would probably come in contact with each other quite a bit. Now there was a rather ambivalent attitude to gays in most prisons, and Parkhurst was no exception. Generally speaking, they were beyond the pale. There was all the usual hypocrisy. Although quite a few of the ‘chaps’ would have a ‘dabble’ at different times and in different places, blatant, effeminate gays were not accepted in the company. 

  It was nothing to do with their being weak or not staunch, because some gays were very  violent indeed and would never ‘grass’, no matter what. Many of us were just locked into the code of the ‘chaps’, where gay behaviour was publicly condemned. Quite simply, it was blind, hypocritical prejudice and I was as guilty of it as anyone else.   

  When I returned to my wing a little later I saw the newcomer taking to Jeff, who lived in the next cell to me. Jeff was gay too. At just over five feet tall, with dark, Italian looks and flowing black hair, Jeff had been a sometime companion of several of the ‘chaps’ in other jails. Although he was generally accepted and everyone talked to him, the ‘chaps’ wouldn’t have him permanently in their company as a friend either.

  I knew him from the trouble at Albany a couple of years previously. He had acquitted himself well in the riot, as well as the subsequent hunger strike in the punishment block. He was the first person to welcome me when I arrived at Parkhurst. We weren’t close friends by any means. In truth, his homosexuality embarrassed me. However, it normally went unmentioned, unless he made a joke at his own expense. We often spoke and got on quite well.

  I suppose I could have guessed that he would link up with Dave. It transpired that they new each other from Albany. As I approached, Jeff did the introductions. I was immediately struck by Dave’s soft-spoken, intelligent, cultured manner. His large, bony hand shook mine with no trace of effeminacy. I was relieved that, like Jeff, Dave wasn’t exaggeratedly camp. In fact, neither was camp at all.

  As part of the introductions, Jeff mentioned that Dave was a clever and resourceful escape artist. That immediately pulled me up short. Jeff had obviously told Dave who the most resourceful escapers on the wing were and was trying to link him up with me in this respect.

  The hope of escaping was one of the things that kept me going. Further, my close friends were similarly engaged in trying to escape and we currently had quite a viable plan going. Secrecy was paramount. This, coupled with my prejudice against gays, meant that there was no way that Dave could be in on the plot, whatever his skills.

  There were four of us involved in the plan, Stewart, John, Mick and myself. We were part of a much bigger group of Londoners, many of whom suspected that we were plotting an escape but weren’t party to the details. That didn’t mean that collectively and individually they wouldn’t help us in any way they could. This ‘network’ was the one thing that Dave Martin didn’t, and probably couldn’t, have.

  Mick had been at Parkhurst for several  months and had managed to make some useful contacts. The most important of these was his relationship with a civilian tradesman in the ‘Works Department’. To all intents and purposes these were ordinary plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, etcetera, who worked for the prison. Whilst it was much frowned upon to get close to the warders, it was accepted that a ‘Works’ tradesman who treated the prisoners decently could be similarly treated in turn.

  In truth, the relationship was basically a financial one. Mick paid the civilian to bring in various articles like drink and tobacco. The problem, from my point of view, was that Mick liked to plan almost as an intellectual exercise. Very little actually got done. I prevailed on him though and he got the civilian to bring in two pairs of bolt-croppers. These were to cut the wire of the perimeter fencing. 

  I had been thinking of the small, single-handed variety and had even provided Mick with a British Standard reference number taken from a catalogue in one of the prison workshops. Mick said that he didn’t need it and insisted that he knew what he was doing. In the event, the civilian brought in two pairs of double-handed bolt-croppers, each about two feet long. As far as effectiveness went they were ideal, but for secrecy and ease of concealment, they were much too big. 

  To make matters worse, they were handed over to us in the compound at exercise time. We had the cover of a couple of hundred cons milling about, but very little else. The bolt-croppers were much too big to hide down our trousers, but luckily one guy was bringing in a pillowcase full of laundry. He took both pairs off us, stuffed them inside the pillowcase, draped a towel over the handles that protruded and blatantly walked into the wing past dozens of warders.  

  This was typical of the solidarity that existed amongst many cons at Parkhurst. Had the guy been caught, he would have lost six months remission, spent two months in solitary confinement, probably including 15 days of bread and water diet, and then been transferred out to another jail. Ironically, the guy wasn’t even a close friend, just someone who believed in the code of the ‘chaps’.

  Once inside the wing, we now had the problem of hiding them until they were needed. One pair we hid inside a partition wall up on the ‘fours’; the other was buried out on the sports-field by one of the gym orderlies as he marked the football pitch for the weekly game. Again, this orderly wasn’t a close friend, just a loyal, honourable guy.

  The civilian workers, just like the regular warders, had a bunch of keys that let them through strategic doors and gates. Now I asked Mick to get his man to give us an impression of the key that opened all the barred gates in the jail. We told him how to do it and he brought in a piece of cuttle-fish inside a matchbox, with a perfectly pressed impression of the key we needed.

  The next stage of the plan was to put the matchbox containing the impression inside a large soft toy which someone had made on a hobbies class and hand it out on a visit. It had to be handed out by someone who had children, which excluded the four of us. However, there was no shortage of volunteers. The only misgivings the guy who handed it out had was that his wife might have trouble getting the toy off his child in the car park, where it was due to be handed over to someone else.

  The impression was to go to ‘John the Bosch’, a well-known and very experienced ‘key man’ in London. It was no mean feat to make a copy of a Chubb key, yet ‘the Bosch’ had managed to do so on several of his prison sentences with a minimum of tools. Outside, with a workshop at his disposal, it should be comparatively easy for him. However, as the visit was still over two weeks away, we had to keep the impression hidden in the meantime. 

  Over the next few days I caught glimpses of Dave Martin about the wing. He rarely seemed to be wearing the same thing. There was a stylishly-tailored denim jacket made out of an overall jacket and a little thing in purple that could have been a tie-dyed gym vest. Two more coloured blouses and a cut-down gray overcoat added further depth to his wardrobe.

  The effect on the warders was quite amusing. They obviously knew he was a skilled escaper, but other than that they just didn’t know what to make of him. His camp appearance, if not his manner, embarrassed them. They were as much locked into their chauvinistic codes as we were.

  As an E-man he had to have regular security searches. Any warders detailed to carry out these searches came in for a ribbing from the others. Dave took full advantage of this. As sleight as he was, and there were some burly, brutal warders at Parkhurst, he wasn’t at all intimidated by them. If, for example, one of the warders insisted on him stripping right off, Dave would say something like, “Oh, if it’s just my arse you want to see…” and proceed to pull his trousers down, revealing coloured, frilly knickers. At this stage the warder would rapidly back off.

  This was quite a clever strategy by Dave, because one of his favourite hiding places for contraband items was behind his balls. After all, what warder is going to run his hands over a notorious gay’s private parts in full view of other warders? The outcome was that Dave hardly ever got a thorough search.  

  Most evenings, when allowed out for ‘association’, I would hang about the wing with Stewart and another friend of ours called Barry. They would smoke what they called ‘laughing baccy’ and the warders called cannabis. I thought ‘laughing baccy’ more appropriate, because when they were on it they spent most of the time laughing and fooling about. Both had well-developed senses of humour and both were quite mischievous with it.

  Sometimes when they were ‘off their faces’, they would suggest that we should pay a visit to ‘pouf’s parlour’. This was a reference to Jeff’s cell, where he would regularly sit with Dave. There was nothing remotely sexual in our visits. Barry and Stewart were notorious mickey-takers. They were obviously intrigued by the fact that two effeminate, ‘bitch’ poofs were together. A favourite joke was, “Who’s turn is it to wear the trousers this week?” It was just fun, with no vindictiveness. Everyone would laugh and enjoy themselves. 

  It was during these sessions that I got to see more of Dave’s character. In public, about the prison, he seemed quite shy and timid. There was no surprise about this. Parkhurst was an extremely violent prison. Many of the cons had been thrown out of other jails for their violent conduct. In many ways Parkhurst was the Home Office’s ‘end of the line’ for recalcitrant prisoners whom they had given up on reforming.

  Although he was no coward, Dave was no warrior either. He had never done martial arts and had no boxing skills, so his slender frame didn’t lend itself well to physical combat. Neither did he have the crazy viciousness that would drive him to use a knife or iron bar. So in a prison where there were many predatory, violent cons, he was at a considerable disadvantage. 

  Even for those of us who were quite capable of extreme violence, some of these ‘nutters’ could be a problem. But then the support of the ‘chaps’ would swing into operation. It would be treated as a ‘bit of work’. Plans would be made and weapons readied. The attack, when it came, would be unsuspected, short and extremely brutal. The offender would be cornered in his cell, the recess, or somewhere else out of sight of the warders. He would be coshed, stabbed and left severely injured. The weapons would be  disposed of and clothes would be changed. Other cons would be ready to say that the perpetrators had been with them, well out of the way, at the time of the attack.

  With this kind of network of support, even someone like Mike Tyson wouldn’t be too much of a problem. We prided ourselves though on the fact that we weren’t liberty takers and bullies. Anyone who got this treatment had made a move against us first. And it was the only way to survive in the violent world that was Parkhurst. 

  Dave didn’t have this kind of support. He would, quite literally, be at the mercy of some predatory bully who decided to have a go at him. This must have been all very un-nerving for him. 

  Even though he never spoke about his previous crimes, bit by bit, from various people, details did emerge. We knew he hadn’t been an armed robber or notoriously violent criminal, because none of us had ‘worked’ with him, heard of him, or knew others who had. So if ‘professionalism in the pursuit of crime’ is a pre-requisite for membership of the ‘chaps’, then Dave surely didn’t qualify. He would have been more aware of this than anyone.

    Dave grew up on a run-down, ‘sink’ estate in Highbury, the only child of honest, hardworking, if poor parents. This was no disbarment from anything, as the majority of us working class criminals had similar backgrounds. Unlike us though, there was no ‘borstal’ or ‘approved’ school to curb his teenage criminality, because he had worked as a racing car mechanic until his early twenties.

  Dave’s pride and joy was his Lotus-Carlton, on which he lavished hours of his spare time and hundreds of pounds of his wages. Its subsequent theft devastated him. I met his father, Ralph, many years later, still living in the dingy flat on the run-down estate, and he was adamant that this event had turned his formerly hardworking son to crime. Soon, Dave was stealing cars himself and, in 1970, was sentenced to three years for car theft. 

  He served part of this sentence in Maidstone Prison and despite serving time alongside him, fellow prisoners could hardly remember him. He was that quiet and unremarkable. Whatever other effects it had on him, Dave came out bi-sexual. A high degree of coercion and intimidation is used for sexual ends in jail and no one knows whether this change was brought about willingly.

  The lust for revenge he emerged with was entirely of his own volition. That it was directed at the Chief Superintendent who had supervised his arrest says as much about his un-professionalism as it does about his rebellious spirit. To the professional criminal, the police are an occupational hazard. They are hated as a species rather than as individuals. No professional criminal goes out of his way to unnecessarily antagonize them. Not Dave though. That the Chief Super was stationed at his local police station made his conduct all the more reckless. 

  Like Dave, the Super was a racing car enthusiast. His pride and joy was the classic Jaguar XK120 that he parked in the secure yard at the back of the police station. With car theft rapidly approaching epidemic proportions in London it was safe here. Or rather, it was safe from anyone but a person with the skills, determination and sheer cheek of Dave Martin!

  One moonless night in 1972, Dave, dressed in black camouflage clothing, climbed into the yard at the back of the police station. Lighted windows overlooked the yard and officers could be seen working at their desks. Occasionally, other officers parked or retrieved their cars from the yard. Quite unperturbed, Dave worked away quietly. 

  He cut the padlock on the yard gate, then broke into the XK120. Releasing the hand-break, he pushed the car through the now open gate and into the street. Here he started it up and drove away at speed. 

  One can only but imagine the Super’s embarrassment. Within hours the theft was the talk of the station. He was a man not known for his good humour either. His passion for the car was well-known. Station staff walked on egg shells lest they do something to incur his wrath. 

  Late the following afternoon, Dave phoned the station. The officer who answered asked the nature of his enquiry. Dave said that he wanted to speak to the Super. When the officer prevaricated saying that the Super was a busy man and couldn’t come to the phone for anyone, Dave interjected. “Tell him to come to the phone, otherwise I’ll set light to his fucking car”, he thundered.

  The Super was rage personified. “Who the hell are you and what do you know about my car?”, he roared into the phone. Every head in the large office turned to watch. 

  “You listen to me very carefully”, said Dave evenly, he was enjoying himself now. “I’ve got your car and if you don’t do exactly as I tell you I’m going to set it alight.”

  In the face of this threat all of the bluster went out of the Super’s tone. Noticeably lowering his voice he asked what Dave wanted. “I want you to repeat after me, ‘Please can I have my nice car back?”, instructed Dave. “Do it, or I’ll definitely burn the car.”

  The Super hesitated, then glanced surreptitiously around the office. Every eye was on him, but quickly turned away. Lowering his voice even more the Super pleaded, “Please can I have my car back?”

  “No, that’s not what I asked”, said Dave, as if reasoning with a child, “ you forgot to say ‘nice’. It’s ‘please can I have my nice car back?”

  Closing his eyes and screwing up his face the Super said, in a voice that was little more than a throaty whisper, “Please can I have my nice car back?”

  “Of course you can, Super, of course you can.” Dave’s tone was conciliatory now. “It’s at the airport.”

  “Which one?”, asked the Super eagerly.

  “Orly, you cunt”, said Dave as he put the phone down.

  Now this was all very funny stuff, but from a professional criminal’s point of view it was sheer stupidity. The outcome was that the Super and the local police concentrated all their attention on catching Dave. That he was wanted only for car theft, burglary and fraud didn‘t at all merit the resources they poured into the hunt.

   Soon there was a high-speed car chase, ending in a crash. Now it was time for the Super to have his laugh. Dave found himself in Brixton Prison charged with car theft and attempted murder as a result of the car chase. Further, his police report was so vindictive that he was placed on the escape list by the prison authorities and had to wear ‘patches’.

  For most people this would have been the end of the story, but not for Dave. His first priority was to escape. This was easier said than done, because, as an E-man, he was located in ‘A’ wing ........  

…… to be continued.......

  The following day we drove down to the coastal town of Jacmel to witness their Gede celebrations. Linda explained that we wouldn’t have to worry so much about security considerations, which would allow us more opportunity to objectively observe the proceedings. I gathered that she hadn’t enjoyed the experience of the previous day either.

  The genteel decay of the French colonial buildings of Jacmel was a refreshing change from the urban collapse of Port au Prince. There was still grinding poverty, but the beggars who accosted us in the cemetery were much more restrained than those of the day before.

  That evening we witnessed two Gede ceremonies that could hardly have been more different. The first was presided over by an enormous white woman called Carol. She stood all of six feet three inches in her stockinged feet and must have weighed sixteen stones at least. She was fat in places, but the overall impression was one of a strapping, great woman. Similar to some of the ex-pats who frequented the Oloffson, she seemed to have several young Haitian males in attendance. 

  Carol was an American with a Masters degree from the University of Massachusetts, and it showed. The carefully choreographed ceremony, held in a roofed temple with no walls, owed more to show business than to spirituality. Lounging about in her street clothes as she articulated the cult of voudou with considerable clarity, Carol sounded believable. Done up in her priestesses’ outfit of flowing blue robe, blue turban, sporting a pink silk scarf, and wielding a massive machete that must have been a yard long, she looked quite ridiculous.

  Carol, supposedly a fully initiated priestess herself, advertises voudou holidays on the internet. During some of these holidays she initiates would be voudouists into the priesthood. At the height of the ceremony, which consisted mostly of Carol thundering about the earthen floor wielding the machete with both hands, she pointed out Dave, a short, fat, bearded, Jewish guy from Syracuse, whom she had personally initiated.

  Voudou ‘priest’ Dave, in a Baron Samedi outfit he might easily have borrowed from a fancy dress shop, swayed gracelessly to the beat of the drums. Woody Allen would have made more of the role. Whatever. Us Jews are quite familiar with the role of the voudou ‘priest’, we call them rabbais. And Dave is only doing his bit for the cause. For with George W. Bush in the White House, what America desperately needs right now is more kosher witchdoctors!

  Thus far, I hadn’t been at all impressed by the degree of spirituality of the ceremonies conducted by the voudou priesthood. Those carried out by both Silva and Carol seemed to be merely voudou for tourists. As far as spiritual experiences go, they had left me cold and unmoved. I could only hope that the ceremony later that evening would be different.

    The initial proceedings hadn’t gone well. We had met with the priestess in a run down restaurant she owned in the slum quarter of the town. The bargaining over how much we should pay to witness the ceremony was drawn out and, at times, bitter. Clearly, she wanted to get as much as she could out of us. Again, this tended to detract from the supposed spirituality of the event. 

  We made our way through narrow, labrynthine alleys, in pitch blackness, as we went ever deeper into the heart of the slum. The thought did occur to me that, should we lose the priestess who was leading us, we would never find our way out again. That served to make us keep up. We arrived at the temple shortly before midnight.

  As a place of worship, this temple was entirely more impressive than any we had previously seen. It was fully twice as big as the one Silva Joseph practiced in and was lit by hundreds of candles. If it was also dual use, we saw no evidence of it. The central pole was massive. Decorated with fantastical carvings and paintings, hundreds of strange, ritualistic objects hung all over it.

  The ‘priest’s assistant was busy marking out the mystical drawings for Gede in corn-flour on the bare earth floor. At cardinal points he set lighted candles and bottles of rum. Several drummers sat in a group in a corner, while scores of celebrants in their street clothes thronged the margins of the temple. Some wore Christian crosses on chains around their necks.

  I did feel that we were intruding, both as the only whites present and as outsiders. Quite clearly, we weren’t sincere practitioners, merely curious observers. We weren’t exactly welcomed, but there was no real hostility either. With Gary filming and Linda snapping away, I decided to make myself inconspicuous and settled down in a corner.

  Suddenly, the voudou ‘priest’ appeared, clad all in purple. He seemed quite young, certainly no more than in his late twenties. He gave a signal and the drums began to beat. He was joined at the centre of the temple by the priestess, now clad all in white. A chorus of several other women, dressed in white flowing robes, circled them and the central post.

  At first it was just call and response, initiated by the ‘priest’. Then, as the beat and the intensity increased, the singing and dancing began. At the margins, the congregation swayed rhythmically, occasionally calling out and joining in the singing.

  I was trying to observe proceedings objectively. Un-diverted by the demands of participation, I was coolly appraising every event, however minor. I didn’t want to miss anything. Hopefully, my account would be a definitive one on the true nature of a voudou ceremony. 

  However, as much as I tried to remain objective and above the proceedings, slowly, inexorably, I felt myself being drawn in. The drumming was so loud now that it seemed to be inside my head. A myriad smells assailed my nostrils. The temple seemed to have grown several degrees hotter and I was sweating profusely. My very consciousness, previously casting about to take in every little thing, seemed to be focusing more and more on what the ‘priest’ and priestess were doing.

  As the drumming reached fever pitch, the women of the chorus seemed to experience some kind of seizure. One after the other, it sent them reeling and stumbling across the temple. Just when you thought they were about to fall, they were caught and supported by the rest. According to voudou lore, they had been possessed by the spirits of Gede.

  Then, after a quick swig of rum, they would break away, dancing wildly and spinning round and round in a fashion that would have made any ordinary person dizzy in seconds. The most amazing thing though was that, no matter how fast they spun, or how wildly they danced, often with their eyes closed, not once did their feet come close to knocking over one of the candles or bottles that had been placed on the mystical drawings. There was no rational explanation for this.

  By now, the whole room and everyone in it was convulsing to the deafening beat of the drums. Whatever was happening (and I still haven’t really worked it out), I was caught up in it. I felt elated, enthused, excited and moved, all at the same time. I wouldn’t attempt to try to quantify the experience with words like ‘trance’ or ‘possession’, but I had certainly attained some kind of higher state, spiritual or otherwise. 

  I like being in control. My awesome self-discipline, built up over 24 years of incarceration, was designed to achieve just that end. So to be out of control, or rather, to be controlled by other forces, was completely alien to me. I experienced a brief feeling of panic. I had to get away.

  I stumbled out into the night, disorientated and confused. Never have the shadows of a darkened street seemed so ominous. As I waited for the others I clearly remember hoping that whatever had touched me in the temple would find no foothold in me. I had come to Haiti to get rid of any spirits that might be troubling me, not to find one and take it home with me.  

  All mysticism aside, the Haiti assignment was a considerable success. ‘Front’ ran my story in their next issue, accompanied by a score or so of dramatic and exotic pictures. Central amongst the latter was one of me naked. Well not completely naked. It was shot from behind, from the waist up, with Silva’s altar in the background and the porcelain bowl just above my head. And there, on the byline for the photography, was Linda’s name. 

  It was a ticking bomb. Should Marsha ever discover the article, all the spirits of Gede wouldn’t be able to protect me from her wrath. Now that’s what I call living dangerously! 

Lying in my room that night, I mulled over what I was about to do. I wasn’t complacent about stirring up the spirit world, but I felt absolutely no fear. I was quite confident about my spiritual condition. I knew I was a strong spirit, one that had progressed from an evil orientation to a good one. I had performed that most incredible of feats, I had turned around my heart and had come to a comparative state of grace. I totally rejected evil in all its forms and was sure that it couldn’t touch me. Further, after all the years of pain, much of which I still lived with, I had no fear of death. Needless to say, I didn’t share these thoughts with Linda. 

  We set out for Bel Air the following afternoon. To my question of why the ceremony wasn’t being held at night, Linda answered that to be out after dark in Port au Prince was a sure invitation to be murdered. With absolutely no street lighting, even the police, stayed in their police stations after dark.

  If it was a special day for me, it certainly wasn’t for the usual inhabitants of the voudou temple. Washer-women, playing children, crawling infants, chickens, a goat and several cats wandered in and out. Damp washing still hung everywhere.

  Silva, still dressed in the same clothes, welcomed me warmly, then retired into a small, dark room next to the altar to prepare himself. Strange chanting could be heard for several minutes. Suddenly, a double hand-clap announced that I could enter.

  By candle light, I sat down in a chair next to Silva. He seemed to be in some kind of trance, staring about the room wildly. However, he did have the presence of mind to shake hands with me. Then he stared directly into my face for a while, before taking out a deck of cards and dealing some onto the table between us. All the while Gary filmed the proceedings whilst Linda snapped away with her camera.

  I’d like to say that he came close, but he didn’t. First, he asked if I had had trouble with a black person recently. I hadn’t, but sitting in a voudou temple in Haiti surrounded by black people, I would hardly have admitted to it if I had.

  I suppose he was warmer when he said that I was very ambitious, but he kept coming back to the question about the trouble with a black person. I scoured my memory. I had exchanged hostile looks with an officious ticket collector on the London Underground the previous week, but I was sure that wasn’t what Silva was referring to.

  After about 20 minutes, during which time the room became unbearably hot, Silva pronounced me clear of evil spirits. However, there was another problem. It seemed that there was a powerful female spirit called Erzili Frieda, who wanted to get close to me, but couldn’t because of my jealous girlfriend. The latter part was certainly close enough. I was sure that Marsha would deter even the most powerful voudou spirit.

  According to Silva, this female spirit was becoming increasingly angry, which was blocking me for good fortune. He strongly advised that I should let her come closer. To facilitate this he recommended that I take a magical bath, which he would administer personally. 

  I had to hand it to the old guy. I was sure the pitch for the magical bath would come in somewhere, he certainly wasn’t going to miss out on the extra £100. But this was quite ingenious. Anyway, as the spectacle of the magic bath ceremony was sure to be more impressive than what I had just been through, I agreed. It was usually naked, nubile, young women who appeared in the pages of ‘Front’. Surely, I’d be a welcome change. 

  I was told that there was some preparation to be done and that I should come back in a couple of hours. On my return, Silva’s appearance had smartened up dramatically. Gone were the grubby vest, crumpled track-suit bottoms and scuffed trainers, and in their place were a pristine white shirt, immaculately-pressed black trousers and highly-polished black shoes. Also, all the women, children and assorted animals had gone, and some of the washing had been taken down, Clearly, Silva meant business. 

  He welcomed me again, then withdrew into the altar room with his assistant to prepare once more. Candles were lit, incantations uttered and a large white porcelain bowl was placed on a chair in front of the altar. Into this was poured a foul-smelling brown liquid. I was then told to strip naked and stand on a board in front of the altar.

  Now I had realised that for a bath, magical or otherwise, a degree of nakedness would be required. What I hadn’t realized was that I would be stark naked. However, you can’t spend 24 years in prison and still be shy about personal matters. That had been amongst men, though. Linda, despite her new-found sexual orientation, was still a woman. I was going to have to stand stark naked in front of her.

  All modesty apart, there was also a very sound practical reason for my caution. Of all the baleful spirits that might be watching over us at this moment, the one firmly to the front of my mind was that of Marsha. What would happen if she ever saw my article in the magazine? There I would be, stark naked for all the world to see, and the byline for the photographs would contain the name of Linda, clearly a woman. It would take an army of voudou ‘priests’ to protect me from her wrath.

  My ruminations were suddenly disrupted by a small explosion and a sheet of flame. Silva had set light to the liquid in the bowl. It burned brightly for several seconds before he snuffed it out with a towel. He spun me around several times, all the while uttering incantations. Then, with Silva holding a candle just below my chin, I had to silently say a prayer to Saint Nicholas for that which I desired.

  Filling his cupped hands with some of the liquid from the bowl, Silva proceeded to rub it all over my body, from the top of my head, to the soles of my feet. Suddenly, my flesh seemed like it was on fire. My face burned so fiercely that my eyes filled with tears, temporarily blinding me. A hot flush spread through my insides. I involuntarily clutched at my groin in agony as a small droplet of the liquid entered the eye of my dick.

  Not surprisingly, every bit of my complacency had disappeared. I was now taking the experience a lot more seriously, I hadn’t expected it to physically hurt me. I wondered what trial Silva had in store for me next. I didn’t have to wait long to find out. 

  Telling me to hold out my left hand, Silva poured some of the liquid into my upturned palm. I was told that he was going to set it alight and that I should snuff the flame out and rub what remained of the liquid over my scalp. What he didn’t tell me was just how difficult it would be to snuff out the flame.

  With the palm of my left hand literally a ball of flame, I flapped my arm about in a vain attempt to put the fire out. The rush of air seemed to make the flames burn fiercer. The  pain was excruciating. I briefly contemplated slapping my hand against my side, but this would only have burned a more tender part of my body. It didn’t reassure me to see that Silva was now looking quite concerned.

  Suddenly, the flames went out. I don’t think it was of my causing, more that the liquid had all burnt up. It was a very sore left hand that I rubbed across my scalp. As I looked at my palm, two very large blisters came up right before my eyes. 

  Silva told me to get dressed and not to wash or bathe for the rest of the day. He handed me a bottle containing what remained of the liquid and instructed me to rub it over my body at 7am on a day that I had hard work to do. I took a silent oath to remain idle for the rest of my life.

  In the car back to the hotel, Linda told Gary and I what to expect at the ‘Day of the Dead’ ceremonies in the morning. For Haitians it was the festival of Gede. The Gede are a family of spirits who are guardians of the dead. They are presided over by Baron Samedi and his wife, Gran Brigitte. November 1^st and 2^nd are national holidays in Haiti. There are prayers, offerings, sacrifices of animals and birds, ceremonies and processions. However, as serious as this might be, humour is an integral part of the proceedings. As if, by mocking death, we can lose our fear of it..

  At breakfast, there was reassuring news from the hotel staff. Although the police had shot dead nine people in violent protests in recent days and there had been talk of another disturbance in Port au Prince’s main cemetery on Gede, targeting tourists and other foreigners, the Director of the National Cemetery had just announced that there would be no trouble after all.  

  On Linda’s advice, we set out early for the National Cemetery. A portly, middle-aged Canadian academic had arrived the previous day and had asked if he could come along with us. We agreed, reasoning that there would be more safety in numbers. Mentally, I steeled myself. Protest or no protest I had been warned that the coming experience would be an ordeal.

  If the buildings of Port au Prince had been merely decaying, the fabric of the cemetery was in an altogether more parlous state. Rusty gates hung haphazardly from broken hinges and the low, once-white wall was cobwebbed with cracks caused by subsidence. 

  Around the entrance milled a seething mass of celebrants. Some wore white, sheet-like robes, whilst others were dressed like Baron Samedi, with black trousers, purple scarf, black hat and white shirt. Many cradled a skull in their arm, whilst holding a black walking stick in one hand.

  The sight of two police cars and several officers was reassuring, but Linda cautioned that they would stay outside and, once we went in, we would be on our own. Of the five of us, at this point Milfort was the most skittish. He had a worried look on his face and was constantly looking about him as if he expected a sneak attack at any moment. To be truthful, I had never had much confidence in his powers of protection. At his age and in his condition it didn’t seem like he could have much of a fight. However, perhaps fear and respect were based on other things locally. 

  With Milfort leading the way, we entered the cemetery. We were immediately confronted by hordes of beggars of all ages. From young children, to aged crones, including women with infants in their arms , they cried in unison, “Blanc, blanc, un dollar” over and over again like some ritualistic chant. 

  I was firmly in battle mode. I didn’t feel afraid. I had told myself that, whatever happened, I couldn’t afford to show any fear. People pick up on fear. As just four white faces in a sea of black ones, we wouldn’t have stood a chance if the mob had turned on us. I also knew that to give anything to one beggar would only encourage the others the more. I stared fixedly in front of me and pushed through the crush.

  Suddenly, two young men in their early twenties were in front of me. Thrusting their faces into mine whilst walking backwards they shouted, “Blanc, blanc, un dollar.” I ignored them as if they weren’t there. Seeing that I wasn’t going to give them anything, their tone became even more aggressive and they began shouting something like, “Blanc, cacka; blanc, cacka.” I knew that ‘blanc’ meant foreigner, but ‘cacka’ was new to me. However, it was obviously some term of abuse. I hazarded a guess that ‘caka’ meant ‘shit’. Now they definitely weren’t going to get anything.

  Each of our party, except Milfort, was being subjected to the same treatment. Linda was taking it all in her stride. Twisting and turning she seemed to weave her way through the mob. Gary actually seemed to be enjoying himself. With his cine camera held tightly in his arms, he filmed our progress and zoomed in on the most vociferous of the beggars.

  The Canadian academic though was suffering badly. Clearly frightened, he made the mistake of giving money to some particularly persistent children. The baying mob immediately pressed forward, pinning him against a tombstone until Milfort rescued him.

White-faced and literally shaking with fear, he rushed close to us and kept both hands firmly in his pockets from then on. 

  As we battled our way towards the centre of the cemetery, most of the beggars dropped away. This gave us more opportunity to examine our surroundings in detail. We passed groups gathered around graves lit with candles, who were chanting, giving offerings and drinking the local fermented cane sugar drink, kleren. There were friendly, welcoming looks, but there were also hostile stares. Assuming an air of confidence I didn’t really feel, I pressed on. 

  Suddenly we came to a large white cross blackened with the soot of hundreds of candles that surrounded it. Scores of celebrants milled about. This was the cross of Baron Samedi and served as the focal point of the cemetery celebrations. 

  The more kleren that was consumed, the more frantic the chanting and singing became. From time to time, men would appear dressed as Baron Samedi. One gamboled through the throng, cracking jokes. He stopped right in front of me, tweaked my nose and, as I raised my hands in a reflex action, reached down and tweaked at my dick. Linda assured me that it was nothing personal, just the lewdness and humour of Gede.

  By now about an hour had passed since we had entered the cemetery. We felt that we had seen enough and that to stay longer would be to press our luck. With the assistance of two young men who had attached themselves to our party and who had protected us from the worst of the beggars, we forged a path back to the entrance. As we reached our car I gave them five dollars each. Thus ended a thoroughly unpleasant experience, one that left me exhausted from all the tension. I returned to the hotel and slept for several hours. 

If I had expected a reaction I would have been disappointed. The lady immigration official scanned the form almost disinterestedly. With a curt, “Wait here.” she walked away and out of sight behind a nearby screen. I assumed that she had gone to confirm that I should be refused entry. I turned to Gary and Linda, directly behind me in the queue, and shrugged wordlessly.

  Almost as I turned back, the immigration official was there again. Without saying one single word, she stamped the form, handed it and the rest of my papers back to me and waved me through. I could only conclude that, what with all the other criminals already in America, they figured that one more wouldn’t make much difference.

  Miami itself was a disappointment. Admittedly, we didn’t see that much of it on an overnight stay, but what we did see was characterized by massive freeways that proclaimed the realm of the car. As a result, almost no one walks anywhere. When Gary and I explored the vicinity of our hotel on foot, there were so few people on the streets that it was like a ghost town. Linda had already declared that she wasn’t one for socializing, not much of a surprise there. So Gary and I dined alone that evening in a nearby restaurant.

  The morning flight from Miami to Haiti was uneventful. I had no worries over immigration problems here and we were ushered through with a minimum of fuss. The few airport officials we did encounter treated us like they were actually pleased to see us. I knew that there were very few tourists who came to Haiti. In the circumstances, that was hardly surprising. The U.S. and Canada specifically advise their nationals not to go there under any circumstances. All the international aid agencies warn of the spiraling AIDs problem and the ever-present danger from car-jacking, robbery and random murder.

  Haiti was officially listed as a Fourth World country, and it showed. With Linda driving the hire car, we made our way through the deeply, pot-holed roads strewn with rubbish that were the outskirts of Port au Prince. On all sides, decaying buildings formed a backdrop to our progress. Clapped out cars driven manically, clogged the narrow streets that were completely without road markings. Traffic lights were very few and far between. I could see why Linda had insisted on driving. Only someone with experience of the place was liable to survive a journey by road.

  We had gone only a short distance when Linda stopped outside a scruffy-looking store. It was one-story high, like most of the buildings we had seen. Saying that she needed to buy some film for her cameras, she went inside. Gary and I followed her. Whilst she was being served, I noticed some long-bladed knives in a display case. I picked out one that looked like a Bowie knife, complete with it’s own sheath. Saying that we could do with some protection in such a dangerous place, I expressed my intention to buy it.

  The reaction from Linda was dramatic to say the least. As if stung, she spun around and confronted me. Face red and eyes dilated, she shouted that, if I bought it, that was as far as she went with us. When I asked, quite reasonably, what we should do if we were car-jacked and in fear of our lives, she replied that we would just have to deal with the situation.

  It was obvious that her mind was made up. It was equally obvious that, without her, we wouldn’t get far with our assignment. To me it made little sense. I reflected that, should we end up on the wrong end of machetes wielded by local thugs, then perhaps her attitude would change.

  Unfortunately, it set the tone for the rest of the journey. Never loquacious at the best of times, she drove the rest of the way in silence. It didn’t really affect Gary and I. With him filming, I was doing pieces to camera, commenting on our surroundings. The obvious poverty was dire. “If anyone sees someone smiling, we should stop and ask them what they’ve got to be happy about”, was one remark that just about summed it up.

  The Oloffson Hotel was a revelation. Although it had clearly seen better days, the graceful balconies with Gothic designs and acres of decorative lattices were quite beautiful. Linda explained that it was known as ‘gingerbread architecture’ and it certainly gave the impression of a fairyland gingerbread house.

  The riotous, unrestrained greenery that seemed to assault the hotel on all sides made for a perfect backdrop. I couldn’t help but reflect though that, whilst beautiful by day, it would be extremely sinister by night. A point remarked on by Graham Greene, who had said,” You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.” Greene had stayed at the Oloffson whilst writing his book, ‘The Comedians’, set in Haiti at the time of the murderous dictator, Papa Doc and his equally murderous Tonton Macoutes secret police. 

  You could tell that it was home from home for Linda. The receptionist greeted her warmly and told her she would put her in her old room. As we set off for our separate rooms Linda cautioned us against the regular power-cuts, but reassured that the hotel’s generator would restore power almost immediately. 

 That evening at dinner, it became clear that Linda intended to compartmentalize working and socializing into separate spheres. She didn’t exactly ignore Gary and I, but she did maintain her distance. After initially introducing us to Richard, the hotel’s owner, she retired to a table for four, where three people she obviously knew were already dining. In passing, she remarked that we would be going to see the voudou ‘priest’ in the morning.

  In the event, the lack of Linda’s company proved to be no loss at all. Social conversation with her was always awkward at the best of times. Further, the hotel’s other guests all had interesting stories to tell. A mix of missionaries, peace corps volunteers, teachers, journalists, writers and artists, they were eccentrics all. This seemed to be a condition brought about by the environment, rather than any inherent character trait. I felt sure they wouldn’t have behaved like it at home, wherever that was.

  One staid, middle-aged white woman, who was something high up in the peace corps, showed up for dinner on occasion with her black, Haitian boyfriend who could have been no more than 20. Not to be outdone, the elderly male missionary also had a young, black boyfriend. Other customers came and went with various beautiful Haitian women on their arm. Not one word was said, not one remark made. The rules of polite company were scrupulously observed. It was all delightfully funny.           

  Gary and I table-hopped and, over a period of several days, got to know them all. They were a fount of information about all things Haitian. The power cuts and crime were the main topics of conversation, but on the day we arrived the talk was all of the intended civil protest to disrupt the ‘Day of the Dead’ proceedings. Riots were threatened, as were attacks on white tourists. To a Government that was desperately trying to promote tourism as a source of revenue, this was a serious threat. 

  At breakfast, Linda introduced us to Milfort, a middle-aged, heavy-set black guy who walked with a limp. He seemed to be a cross between a guide, a bodyguard and a translator for Linda, who said that we should employ him to accompany us everywhere. All personal differences apart, I fully realised that I was very much in Linda’s hands as far as logistical and security considerations were concerned. Milfort joined us in the car.

  Silva Joseph was a voudou ‘priest’ who lived in the rather inappropriately named Bel Air, a festering, dangerous-looking slum in the suburbs of Port au Prince. Dressed in scuffed trainers, track-suit bottoms and a grubby vest, the elderly, wizened old guy didn’t look much at all. However, as he squired us about his domain, you could tell that he was held in some esteem by his neighbours. All greeted him warmly and smiled at us.

  The voudou temple was clearly dual purpose. Women and children were washing clothes, preparing food, eating and gossiping. Drying laundry hung everywhere. Linda pointed out the central post which held up the pitched, corrugated tin roof. It was fantastically carved with symbols and figures. This was the ‘poto mitan’ or sacred post, around which all the ceremonies revolve. When the ‘priest’ summoned them, this was the post that the ‘Iwa’ would descend to enter the material world.

  From a multitude of perspectives, not the least of them the visual one, this was something less than a gripping setting for anything. I was trying to visualize the photos we would get for ‘Front’. You could tell people it was a voudou temple until you were blue in the face, but the ultimate reality was that it looked like some ramshackle old tin-roofed shed with lots of washing drying. Couple that with the old boy in his tracksuit bottoms and grubby vest and you would have a spectacle that fell far short of the mystical.

  I intimated as much to Linda and she pointed out the altar in a nearby alcove. I had completely missed it. Black-faced, extravagantly-dressed dolls with horns jockeyed for position with dusty old skulls. Bright, multi-coloured objects of indiscernible origin filled the spaces in between. This was much more impressive. 

  With both Linda and Milfort translating, we explained to Silva what my particular problem was. I might be troubled by evil spirits. He took this in as if he heard it every day, as no doubt he did. He said that he would conjure up his own, personal spirit, Mazaka La Croix, to check me out. Then, if there was anything troubling me, he would drive it out with a magical bath. The conjuring up of his personal spirit would cost £50 and the magical bath another £100, a lot of money in Haitian terms. There was nothing particularly mystical about his prices.   

  In a similar, businesslike vein I told him I would need a receipt. Voudou ‘priest’ or no voudou ‘priest’, absolutely no one was immune from the rules of ‘Front’s accounts department. I paid a deposit and agreed to return the following day, the 31^st and Halloween eve.

...to be continued

The genesis of my Haiti story lay not so much in the fact that I was interested in voodou per se, but more in that I was looking for a situation to put myself in that would freak out the average person. With Halloween fast approaching, I figured that, of all the places not to be at midnight on that day, a voodou ceremony in Haiti must rank at the top of the list.. 

  However, I did have a passing interest in voodou for personal reasons. Following the death of my girlfriend in front of a train several years previously I had been subjected to a period of what I can only call haunting. There had been several very obvious poltergeist effects. 

  Subsequent to that, an old Jew, well versed in mysticism, whom I had met on just one occasion over a business deal, had warned a friend of mine to tell me that something was trying to take me over and that I should fight it. He had seemed a sensible old man, whom I had never seen before nor was likely to see again. There was no reason for him to lie to me. 

  Last but not least, there was the small matter of the two lives I had taken. They do say that, when you die, you meet the spirits of all those you have wronged. So what of my own spirit? To have done those supremely evil acts, did that not have strong implications for the nature of my soul? 

  I knew that the priest/witch doctors of the voodou religion were well versed in manipulating the spirit world. They also spent a lot of their time striving against evil spirits. Should I have such spirits in me they would be just the people to ask what to do. 

  Call it a consultation if you will, but this was a matter that increasingly troubled me. The haunting situation had severely frightened me and I had been a man not particularly vulnerable to fear. So, on a very personal level, the coming visit to Haiti was going to be a severe trial for me.

  Eoin of ‘Front’ jumped at the story. The juxtaposition of Halloween and Haiti had caught his imagination and he thought it would be a good story for the magazine. Further, a production company had expressed an interest in filming me on my next assignment. The story also caught their imagination. The upshot was that they would supply a cameraman for free, as well as paying half of all the expenses for the trip. In return they would want the rights to all the footage they had shot whilst in Haiti. It was an offer that ‘Front’ couldn’t refuse. 

  However, they did stipulate that they wanted some photos taken for the magazine. To this end they wanted our own photographer to go with us on the trip. They put me in touch with a young woman called Linda, who, apart from being a photographer, was also an absolute fount of knowledge about Haiti and voodou. Over several years and dozens of trips she had become an authority on the subject. She knew all the ritual of voodou, had photographed countless ceremonies and artifacts, and had an extensive collection of voodou dolls at home. 

  The meeting with her was something of a disappointment. As a venue for anything, the run-down African café in Hackney left a lot to be desired. I arrived early and Linda was late. I strenuously resisted the blandishments of the proprietor to order from the menu. I would have continued to do so had I been starving.

  Linda was a somewhat scruffy young woman in her early thirties, with short, cropped, untidy hair. You could tell that her appearance wasn’t amongst her priorities. She was pleasant enough, but underneath it all seemed to lie a deep sadness. I didn’t know if she suffered from depression, but her general air was quite miserable. 

  In order to lighten the situation between two people who had just met and who would probably be working together under extreme circumstances, I did attempt some levity at times. Linda was totally impervious to it. She answered my lighthearted question as if it had been a request for factual information, without so much as acknowledging the intended levity behind it. After a while I gave up, resigning myself to the fact that maybe she didn’t have much of a sense of humour. 

  However, she came across as a very pleasant person, and highly professional as well. She left me in no doubt that she knew Haiti and the subject matter, and that she was more than competent to take any photos we might need. She was also reasonably fluent in Creole, one of the two languages spoken in Haiti, the other being French. 

  Gary, the cameraman supplied by the production company, was as different from Linda as it was possible to be. A Canadian in his late twenties, he was as adventurous as I was and had been pursuing his passion for photography all over the world. The pair of us hit it off right away. The only misgivings I had was that sometimes I needed a sensible head to talk me out of throwing myself into desperate situations. All I would get from Gary was encouragement.

  Unfortunately for me, all the international flights to Haiti went through Miami, as Haiti’s airports were not capable of taking the big airliners. An overnight stay was required before continuing the journey in a much smaller plane. The problem was that the Americans had very strict immigration procedures. I knew that as I had a serious criminal conviction I could well be refused entry. Therefore, this was another assignment that could easily be nipped in the bud. I had nightmares of us paying for three tickets and my being sent back from Miami.

  On the flight, Linda and I sat in adjacent seats. I had done some research on both voudou and Haiti as a background to the story, but the two-hour tutorial I had from Linda more than filled in the gaps.

  My first mistake had been in thinking that, for Haitians, it was Halloween that they were celebrating. The latter is a very Westernized tradition, but, like so many other similar traditions, it is celebrated worldwide in other forms. Haitians specifically celebrate the ‘Day of the Dead’. There are numerous ceremonies in cemeteries all over the island with the biggest being in the sprawling, central cemetery in the capital, Port au Prince.

  Voudou has strong historical links with Catholicism and some Catholic ritual can still be seen in modern day voudou. However, originally, voudou was a revolutionary movement by the slaves as a means of resisting their enslavement. At times it was banned by the white, slave-masters, but continued to flourish underground. Finally, the Catholic church withdrew it’s priests from the island in protest at it’s continuance This was when voudou became the official, mainstream religion. Today, millions practice it worldwide.

  My second mistake had been in thinking that voudou was some kind of black magic cult. There are secret branches that invoke evil and use magic for bad intent. The sorcerers, or Boko, do their work in cemeteries or at crossroads. They can make objects to bring harm, ‘wanga’, the most feared of which is ‘voye’, which can bring death.

  But the vast majority of voudou worshippers strive against evil, just like in Western religions. The celebrants worship a pantheon of spirits that rule different realms of life, under guidance from the voudou ‘priests’, called ‘oungans’ if they are male, and ‘mambos’ if they are female.

  Practitioners of voudou believe that, at the point of death, the soul and guardian spirit remain in the body. A ‘priest’ must force them out. The soul sinks into the abysmal waters for a year and a day to gain knowledge. Then it will be raised by the ‘priest’, using another ritual.   

  The spirits, or Iwa, can be invoked in a number of ways. Each one has it’s own symbols, songs and dances as well as it’s own symbolic drawing, called a ‘veve’. In ceremonies, ‘veve’ are drawn on the floor to coax the spirits into the earthly plane. The ‘priest’ will encourage the spirit into the material world with drumming, singing, dancing and magical chants. The act of possession is the supreme gift that the spirit can bestow on the celebrants, but no one knows who the spirit will enter. When possessed, celebrants exhibit the unique movements and actions associated with that spirit.  

  I listened with interest as Linda explained all this. Before I had had my own experiences with spirits following my girlfriend’s death, I would have dismissed the whole lot as so much mumbo jumbo. But, as a rational individual, I still hadn’t been able to explain some of the things I had seen and heard. So, unless I was to deny the evidence of my own senses, something unseen and spiritual had entered this material plane. Therefore, why should I refuse to believe that a voudou ‘priest’ could conjure up spirits. 

  The more I talked with Linda, the more I got to understand her. Miserable or not, there was no harm in her. To the contrary in fact. You could tell that she believed much of voudou lore, although she didn’t admit as much, and I didn’t ask. In her own way, she would always strive against evil influences. 

  On the surface, she seemed like a troubled spirit, someone searching for something. She confessed to having her own collection of voudou dolls at home. Occasionally she would add a new one, which would cause trouble. There would be bangs and crashes from the room where the collection was, and, when she went in, the new doll, or several near it, would be on the floor. Sometimes she had to return the doll to Haiti.

  In further conversation though, it emerged that her miserable state had a far more mundane cause. She had recently emerged from a very unhappy relationship. It seems that her boyfriend, who she cared deeply for, had walked out on her. She had taken it very hard. So hard in fact that she had ostensibly turned against men. She gave the impression that she was now a lesbian. Her hair was cut in a man’s style and some of her clothes lacked femininity, but in all the time I was with her she never mentioned a girlfriend, or any other romantic attachment for that matter. I took her ‘lesbianism’ to be merely an extreme rejection of men in general.

  In view of the fact that we were being open with each other, I decided to make a confession of my own. It was also founded on sound practicality. As I filled in the U.S. immigration form, I had to tick the box indicating that I had served a prison term of over five years. I had to consider the possibility that, on landing, I might be refused a visa and be held in the cells overnight, before being put on the flight to Haiti the following morning. In that instance, I wanted to establish where we should all meet in Haiti should we become separated.

   Gary was intrigued and wanted to know more. I promised to explain later. Linda looked shocked. She wasn’t curious, just put out that she had misjudged me, I think. However, always the consummate professional, she recovered and carried on with planning the trip. 

  Miami International Airport was a nightmare. I have been received into prisons with better grace. Massively long queues led to uniformed immigration officials who had unanimously discarded good manners long ago. I knew that the push of a button would bring up my criminal record anyway, so perhaps openness was the best policy. Handing over my press card at the same time as my passport and immigration form, I pointed to the box I had ticked acknowledging that I had served more than five years in prison. 

.... to be continued

Just try to imagine this. You and five of your friends are going away for the weekend. You get off the train at the ferry terminal and the port police take you aside. They put each of you in a separate room and say that your local police are coming and they want to talk to you.

  The local police arrive and immediately start screaming at you that you’re dirty, murdering bastards. Bombs have gone off in your hometown, killing dozens and maiming hundreds. You protest that it’s nothing to do with you, but the police say they don’t care, because you’re going down for it anyway. 

  Over the next three days they beat, threaten and torture you all until some of your friends can’t take it any more. They sign statements admitting guilt. At the subsequent trial you’re all convicted of mass murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. It takes 16 years for you to prove your innocence! 

  On the night of the 21^st of November 1974 the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign reached an unprecedented level of murder and mayhem. There have been claims that warnings were given, but the stark facts are that at 8.18pm a blast ripped through The Mulberry Bush bar in Central Birmingham, killing ten people and injuring forty. 

  Two minutes later, a second bomb went off in the packed basement bar of The Tavern in the Town. That blast killed eleven and injured one hundred and twenty six, mostly young people. 

  There was a massive outpouring of public anger and revulsion at the outrage. It was accompanied by a fierce backlash against Britain’s Irish community. Consequently the police were under immense pressure to find the culprits and get convictions. Six Irishmen, domiciled in England, were arrested, beaten, tortured and made to sign confessions that were eventually to get them life sentences. 

  A long, drawn out campaign was started by the men, now called the Birmingham Six by the media, to prove their innocence. It was only after the intervention of Chris Mullins, MP, followed by two ‘World in Action’ reports, that they were released. They had served sixteen years!

  I believed the Birmingham Six were innocent long before they were finally cleared on appeal and released. Not that it was a subject that occupied my attention in any meaningful way. Every jail has its complement of innocent men. For the rest of us trying to survive the tragedy that our own lives had become, it was nothing important. If we thought of them at all it was that they were ‘poor sods’. At least we had done something to merit our sentences.

  On my travels from one top security jail to another, no matter how the regimes might differ, there was always one constant. At recreation time and exercise time out on the prison yard or sports field, the IRA prisoners would always congregate together. The most senior IRA man in the jail would automatically be the commanding officer, for these were men who considered themselves to be prisoners of war, not convicts. He would ‘hold court’ with the other IRA men. Although they did mix quite widely with other prisoners at other times, these meetings were solely for IRA members.

  I was with all the Birmingham Six in various jails and at various times. Never once did I see them sit with the IRA. The real IRA men would tell us that the Six weren’t and never had been members. To many English prisoners that was too fine a distinction to make, so they shunned them anyway. They wandered lonely, tormented and ghost-like, across a human landscape blighted by tragedy and suffering.

  I had been in Gartree Prison with Paddy Hill, one of the Six. I was there for only three months, yet never spoke to Paddy or even noticed him. Innocent or not, that was the degree to which he had become a faceless person in the human warehouse that is our long-term prison system.     

  After my release though, I did see quite a lot of him. Paddy had formed an organization called MOJO (Miscarriages of Justice Organisation) to fight for miscarriage of justice prisoners still incarcerated. Much of the journalism I was doing was related to criminal justice issues. I also got involved in the cases of other innocent men. It was inevitable that we meet.

  I was always impressed by Paddy’s concern for others. He gave of himself tirelessly for countless campaigns, usually started by the innocent person’s family. And there was no ‘grandstanding’ with Paddy. He wasn’t after recognition, or even thanks, he genuinely identified with the person’s predicament and wanted to do all he could to help.

  As an experienced and skilled observer of the human condition, I couldn’t help but make certain assessments about Paddy. They were so starkly obvious. Although neither nasty or vicious in any way, either by word or deed, he seethed with a barely suppressed anger. At times it exercised him to such an extent that he could hardly keep still.

 Once he started talking about miscarriages of justice it would all pour out of him. He would fulminate and rage against the system in an uninterrupted torrent of pure bile. Sentences would be run together, liberally littered with foul language. If it was a cathartic release it certainly didn’t leave him spent and at peace. The anger and pain inside of him seemed utterly bottomless. 

  He readily confessed to bouts of uncontrollable rage, coupled with periods of deep depression. He slept only intermittently for a few hours each night. Often he would feel trapped in his apartment and would go for long walks at all hours of the day or night. He couldn’t relate at all to people. It had caused absolute chaos in his family life. Unable to relate to his wife or children, he had left them. This caused him severe feelings of guilt.

  So even though he had physically left the prison sentence behind, it had not left him. Its mark was on him for every second of every day of his life. As someone who had experienced an extended period of extreme hardship and suffering myself, I had made something of a study about how people dealt with such things. I spoke to Eoin about doing an interview with Paddy Hill for ‘Front’ and he was very much up for it. For the magazine article I edited and structured the interview to make it easier to read. But here I will let Paddy speak to you himself, verbatim.

  N… Paddy, can I just take you back? I know it will be painful. First, was there a book

  P. …I wrote a book, ‘Forever Lost, Forever Gone.’

  N. …So Paddy, you’d never been nicked before in your life?

  P… Oh no, I’d been nicked before. I had a criminal record, violence, gang warfare, slicings and all that. GBH, wounding with intent to commit, etcetera, all part and parcel of coming over here and growing up in Birmingham. It was a very racialist city and very gang oriented. The problems that I encountered when I first came over were not really mine. Most of my problems were my younger brothers’ and my sister, people picking on them. We were a big family, six of us and I was more than capable of taking care of myself. And of course, coming out of the back-streets of Belfast, I’m the first person to admit that I was a vicious little bastard. But was a very happy-go-lucky guy, er, I was involved in taking and driving away. I loved motor bikes. I was only a kid, 15, just left school in ’59, then brought over to Birmingham. To be honest, I didn’t want to come over, but I had so many family over here, uncles and aunts and cousins etcetera, so we ended up coming over because there was nothing in Belfast for us, no work etcetera, usual thing. And my father had just come out of the British Army after 30 years service in ’59 and the reason he left, he was in the Territorial Army and he was an unarmed combat and weapons instructor for the British Army, but they wanted to make him the resident SM and they wanted us to move to Hollyrood Barracks and anyone who knows the geography of Northern Ireland, that’s like going into the lion’s den, and of course we weren’t going to come out of the Ardoyne in to there so my father came out of the British Army, but my older brother and the second eldest of six joined the British Army and came over here, then my Dad came over, then me Mum, then they came back over to Belfast and took us all over.  And, of course, I lived in different parts of Birmingham and ended up in a place called Summer Lane. At the time it was probably the poorest area of Birmingham. It’s where all the poor Brummies..and a lot of them had Irish connections, marriage, etcetera, Scots and, as I say, I just fell in love with it. And of course I ended up meeting a girl and I fell in love with her and got married and by the time I got married I’d, for want of a better word, made a bit of a reputation for myself, and everybody knew to leave the family alone and that was it like. There was me and three mates and we all looked after each other, you know, there were four Scots fellas and three Irish, there were seven of us and the biggest one was five feet four, and we were all like, vicious, but we looked after each other and our families and that was what it was all about and I’m very proud of the fact that even though I’ve got a criminal record, none of my brothers have. I sent them all to college. They became master tradesmen, one of them’s a master carpenter, another’s a master builder, etcetera, and none of them’s ever been in trouble. I took all the trouble being the oldest one there, I thought it was my job and if someone had to go to jail, I was prepared to go to jail and I did it.

N. …It was old time values.

P… Exactly, and that’s the way it was in the old areas, every body stuck together and by the time 1974 came around I was a happily-married man. I had five daughters and, of course, I had a son, he was the youngest of the six. And to all intents and purposes my world was complete. We’d always wanted a son and my world was complete. And of course in 1972 in Ireland things had escalated and the Provisional IRA which had just been set up then after the civil rights thing in ’60. After that was set up, someone in the Army command at home in the IRA made a decision to take the war to the mainland. And in and around the Midlands between 1972, which culminated in the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974, there was probably about 60 to 70 bombings that had occurred in and around a 30 to 40 mile radius of Birmingham and of course during all those attacks, up ‘til then, the only fatalities was one person dropped dead down in the Old Bailey bomb from a heart attack and the only other fatality was a bomb disposal expert in Birmingham who tried to defuse a bomb. And of course everybody knows that most of the IRA’s deaths in those days were what were called ‘own goals’, because the method of bomb making then was very crude compared to the technique they have today, that has become so sophisticated over the years. And then in 1974, in August, the whole pattern of bombing in this country changed for some unknown reason, and before that, bombs that were planted, there was always adequate warning for the areas to be safely cordoned off, and until  mid ’74 the exact locations were always given. There was never any obscurity about them, they were precise and exact. And due to that saving grace, there were no people that were injured or killed before then, but then the whole pattern changed and we had the M62 coach bombing, which a young English girl, Judith Ward, was finally fitted up by the same forensic scientist who fitted me up, Dr Skuse. In fact, the evidence he gave against Judith Ward was the exact opposite to what he gave in the Birmingham Six case and, of course, shortly after that came the Guildford and Woolwich bombs in the October.

N… When was the M62 bomb?

P… That was in August ’74 and then there was the Guildford and Woolwich in October ’74. And of course, in between there was other bombs in and around the country. But the next major one was the Birmingham pub bombings. And the revulsion that that sent around the country was, I must confess I have never read an account in a newspaper, anything, about the Birmingham pub bombings. By the time I got access to the newspapers it had sort of disappeared from…you know. And the only news that was in the newspapers then was the fact of us going to court every Thursday on remand.

N…. So you were actually on your way over to Ireland when you were arrested?

P… I was. On the night in question, in 1974, in November. James McDade,a young Irishman from Ardoyne in Belfast, who I grew up with, who comes from the same area as me. And of course, one of my co-defendants, Jerry Hunter, we all lived together in Birmingham, we worked together, although I didn’t see much of McDade, he was a loner, but Jerry Hunter and myself were very pally, we worked on numerous painting firms and what have you. And Johnny Walker and Richard McKilkenny, we all came from the same area, Hughie Callaghan. And we knew James McDade and, of course, when he blew himself up….I didn’t find out until the Sunday. I thought at first it was a Scots fella because of the way it was being pronounced. And I found out on the Sunday and I found out Jerry and them were going to go home for the funeral and of course, I made my arrangements as well, because I had an aunt, my aunt Mary who reared me in the Ardoyne, we lived next door to my aunt and my granny. So I was going home to see my aunt and also, as I said at my trial, I would have paid my respects to Mr and Mrs McDade on the death of his son and, of course, at that particular time and even up to the present moment, people in the upper classes in this country, especially judges in the courts, they have a very hard time understanding Irish culture. They don’t seem to understand and never wanted to understand, that in relation to funerals, funerals are probably the biggest business in Ireland and they are carried out with such reverence etcetera, and as I try to tell people when I am speaking at universities and public meetings, if I had a choice to go to a funeral or a wedding, I would take the funeral. And the reason why, if it was a drink and you like the craic, and at that time I did, if you go to a wedding, the wedding only starts on the Saturday and finishes on the Sunday and that’s it. But if you go to a funeral, the funeral lasts for a week. And everybody sits around telling yarns. It’s a non-stop craic for three or four days while the body lies in state at home. And of course, I would have gone to McDade’s funeral, not as the prosecution put up at the trial that we were going to honour a big IRA hero etcetera. Bullshit! It goes to show how ignorant the judges are and the upper classes are in this country in respect of the IRA or anything Irish. In relation to the IRA, they never display any form of heroism for anyone. They don’t have any other rank other than one and the only rank they have is the Quartermaster. In our trial they put us up as, Johnny Walker was a brigadier, there was lieutenants, there was fucking captains, you name it. And Billy Power who had only joined, who had only joined the IRA a half hour before, according to the prosecution, and he became a lieutenant instantly. People like us laugh because we have to, but it’s so stupid, but this is the sort of things that were portrayed at our trial.

N…. At what stage did you realize that you were in trouble?

P…. I remember I had very mixed feelings, because people were under the impression that we were arrested. We were never arrested. When we got to Heysham boat station I met a cop there who, a detective constable of Heysham port security, he was from Morecombe police force. He questioned me. I had a wonderful time with that man and his sidekick, a superior officer, a sergeant Watson, and I was involved with two police forces. The one the Morecombe police force and the other the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad. In relation  to the Morecombe police force I have only one complaint against them. And that complaint is in respect to the way they closed ranks and didn’t come forward to tell the truth about us being tortured at the police station. They admitted off the record you could hear the screaming and they knew that we were getting battered and tortured something terrible, but none of them come forward and still have not today. But in respect of my treatment in the hands of the Morecombe police, they couldn’t have treated the Royal Family any better. I have nothing but the utmost respect for them. And with detective constable Willoughby, I had the craic with him, and on television that was portrayed that there was some sort of hue and cry and big police blockade on the ports. Bullshit! There wasn’t even a cop on Heysham port security when we got there and when we come through the door onto the concourse, there were half a dozen plastic tables laid out with two cops on each and I walked up to one of them and he asked me where I was coming from and I told him where I was going, Belfast, etcetera, and he asked me to step into the office and I asked him where it was and he pointed behind him at a portakabin and he asked me a number of questions, where I was coming from, where I was going, my age, normal routine, because I’d  been in the hands of the police. He asked me if I owed any fines, but I said I paid them. I told him that I had criminal convictions, but wasn’t wanted by the police. I told him I was clean, have been for years. We had a great craic and we come out of there and was talking about the football match the night before. He walked me along the concourse and took me up the gangplank of the boat and we stood there talking for about ten minutes and he wished me a good voyage. And he came back on the boat about a half an hour later and took me off and told me that the officer in charge wanted to talk to me. That there had been some explosion in England. And when I come off there I went over to the security offices and went in and it was then that Sergeant Bell had informed me that bombs had gone off in Birmingham and, I’ll never forget his words, he told me, quote, excuse the pun Paddy, you know how things get blown up out of all proportion, but this is serious, bombs have blown up and there have been over two hundred people injured and there’s 14 killed, but I can tell you it’s serious. I said, “I understand, sir.” And he asked me if I had any objections to seeing Birmingham police. I said, “No, what time’s the next train back?” He said that there was no train ‘til the morning, but not to worry because Birmingham police would come down and take a statement from me. But would I mind going down to Heysham? 

N…. So where are the others?

P…. I was taken into a little office, so I think they are getting the same treatment. But I’m clean so I don’t give a fuck. I waited about ten minutes, got in a car with two policemen and drove down to Morecombe police station a few miles away and got there about two o’ clock in the morning, pissing down with rain and it was a brand new police station. That’s the thing I remember better than anything. It was glittering like a jewel in the fucking desert, you know what I mean? I got out the car and walked up the steps of the station and as I walked up those steps I never dreamed for one second Norman that those were the last steps of freedom I’d take for sixteen and a half years I walked into the police station and Sergeant Willoughby came in after me and told the desk sergeant that I was waiting to be interviewed. And he said, “you can put your feet there, Paddy” and I sat right next to the door for three quarters of an hour and the desk sergeant got up twice and left. I could have got up and walked out of the police station anytime. A short time after, Willoughby came back with a detective sergeant and we went into an office and I made a detailed statement about my movements for 48 hours.

N…. Which, as an experienced criminal, you wouldn’t have done…

P… I give them my home address, phone number, everything, gave them the information with respect to my criminal record, when I got out of jail the last time, etcetera, etcetera and I gave them a full detailed statement and they went away and I’m sitting there and they came back at half past six in the morning and they told me they checked me out, etcetera, etcetera, and that everything I had told them was 100% correct, including the fact that I was with the others and that we had stopped at Crewe to change trains and that I’d bought the teas and coffees. And I’m sitting in the custody area on a little bench, reading a book that one of the cops had given me. And I remember the door opened and I’ve got two uniformed cops in sight, one of them was Scots and we’re having a great craic, we’d been slagging each other off about the football and the boxing and the door opened and I looked up and these two guys walked in and they had bundles of clothes, shirts and jackets in their arms and they dumped them behind the door, and I could feel that they were glowering at me and I happened to look up and I could feel the vibes coming off them and I looked outside the door and there was another guy, only he had a .38 Colt Smith and Weston shoulder holster with a gun in it and he had one on his hip and I remember thinking to myself, “Fuck me, some poor bastard’s in for a rough ride”, and I never dreamt for one second that it was me. And then about half past seven, I’m sitting on the bench and I knew I’m in trouble then.

  There was a cop, I later found out it was Sergeant Bennet of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, about six feet two, 17 stone, with a military look and he’s standing over me rubbing his hands. And I was a lot heavier then, Norman, about 14 stone, 46 inch chest and 19 inch neck, I was like a little bull, and he said to me, “See you, you little bastard, you dirty, murdering, little Irish fuck-pig”, and he spat right in my face. And I went like, “What the fuck are you on about?” And he pushed me down in the chair and said, “You’ll find out soon enough you dirty, little murdering cunt” and he spat in my face again and walked away. And that’s when I realised I was in trouble. I never realised I was in serious trouble until the Saturday. They’d been battering me all day the Friday, Saturday. Just how much trouble I realised about half past six on the Saturday night. I was brought back after my second interview, they’d been at me from about a quarter to nine in the morning to 5.30. I try to tell people this and people find it amazing, but I have never, ever been questioned about the Birmingham pub bombings in my life, not even by the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad.

N…. So they’d already made up their minds, eh?

P…. Sergeant Bennet and Constable Barn told me, quote, “We know you didn’t do it. We don’t give a fuck who done it. Our orders are that we’re to get the confessions and the convictions and to use any means possible. It keeps the public off our gaffer’s back and our gaffer off our back.” unquote. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. He picked me up by the hair and lifted me up and shoved the piece of paper under my nose and said, “Read that, you fucking murdering bastard, read it. That’s our orders, get confessions and convictions, signed right to the top, we can do what we like, we can take you out and shoot you if we want, you’re going to jail, end of story. You can have it the easy way or the fucking hard way, and the easy way”, he picked up the statement form and said, “sign under the caution, sign the bottom right hand corner. We can fill it in. You can have it the easy way or the hard way.” And I said, “I aint” and that was as far as I got. They knocked me off the chair and kicked me up and down the floor again, and this carried on until half past five on the Friday. And of course, at intermittent times, they were telling me that my co-defendants were making statements admitting that they’d done this, and that I was the bomb maker. I was the explosive expert, etcetera , etcetera, and of course, I didn’t believe any of this. I knew the old fucking police routine. And they took us back down to Birmingham and tried to throw me out on the motorway and put guns in my mouth in the car, broke all me teeth. And that’s why I had to have special implants. I had no gums or nothing, my gums were busted. And they battered me again on the Saturday morning, they kept me awake all the Friday night with guns, terrorizing us. And then the Saturday morning took me out and photographed me, fingerprinted me. Took me upstairs about seven o’ clock in the morning and then they were battering me from then until one o’ clock. I remember Bennet looking at his watch and saying it was five to one and they were going to go for their dinner. I was out in the cells area and they came back about three o’ clock and they carried on battering me to about half past five, six o’ clock. They said they were going to go for their tea and they would be back afterwards. And that afternoon they told me that Billy Powers had made a statement and he’d said this, that and the other. And they brought this statement, but they wouldn’t let me see it. They read bits and pieces of it, you know, they also told me that my ex-wife had made one, saying that I was in the IRA and all this, but I knew it was all a load of bollocks, because I wasn’t in the IRA. When I got back to my sell I bent down and whispered through the vent, you know the old prison routine, but they threatened to batter us more if they heard us whispering through the vent, and it was Billy Power. And I said,” Billy, the cops say that you’ve signed a statement. Please Billy, son, tell me it isn’t true.” And Billy Power just bursted out crying and he said, “I’m sorry Paddy Joe, But I couldn’t take any more, I can’t take it.” And I said, “Don’t worry son, it will be sorted out when we get to court”, but I knew then that it was all over. And, as it turned out, we didn’t go for trial, we were already convicted. All we went for was to be sentenced. They talk about a fair trial and all that, when we finally got out they refused to put the cops up on trial even though there was more evidence, we had concrete evidence to show that they had falsified everything and they refused to put them up on trial. The magistrate said that they wouldn’t get a fair trial because of all the adverse publicity. Adverse publicity! Well even before we were charged on the Sunday, we had the Assistant Chief Constable of Birmingham on television that weekend, with our photographs and everything, and we hadn’t even made a court appearance yet. And our photographs are on television and he’s telling the whole world, “we caught the people who done the bombings, they’re covered in gelignite, these are the people who planted the bombs, etcetera, etcetera.“ Adverse publicity!

N…. Did we ever meet in jail, Paddy?

P….Yes, we met in Gartree Jail. I got slung out of Gartree five times and they had to bring me back because no other jail would take me. I spent the first four years in Gartree in the block practically, working on my case, and I spent most of it in solitary, and it was only in, what, 1985, when the World in Action program came out that they started getting off my back, you know what I mean.

N…. So when you first got out did you immediately get involved in the protest movement for other people?

P…. Oh yes, before I got out I had been with Jimmy Robinson of the ‘Bridgewater Four’, also Brian Parsons and a number of other people, and I told Jimmy, I was naïve enough, I told Jimmy that I’d give him the first year of my life. Nine months after us the ‘Totenham Three’ were cleared, but immediately after that the gate came down. During the first year I was out I picked up a number of cases along the way. Since I’ve been out I’ve been involved with about a hundred people. I’m glad to say the vast majority have gone to the Court of Appeal. Two weeks after I got out I got £50,000 as an interim payment. I’d like to say I spent it, but I squandered it. I had no valuation of money. No one spoke to me since I left jail, the last one to speak to me was the Appeal Court judge, who said we were free to leave and that’s the last person of officialdom who spoke to me.

N… Paddy, at least I had the consolation of knowing I did what I did to get in jail, but you didn’t have that.

P… I could never come to terms with it. I used to walk up and down that fucking cell every night and I kept asking myself over and over again, “what the fuck am I doing here, why am I here?” And even today I say, like the way the courts have done it, no charges against the police. In the last ten years approximately 300 people have been released by the courts, wrongfully imprisoned, and they’ve probably served between them about 3,000 years, and nobody’s done anything wrong, not one police officer has stood on trial.

N….. And this is why you formed MOJO? 

P…. Well since I’ve come out I’ve been campaigning on my own. I got £300,000 in interim payments and the only thing I’ve bought myself is a flat in Muswell Hill, cost me £100,000 and I’ve spent about £100,000 or more campaigning for people here and all round Europe, America, etcetera. And I’ve always paid my own way, never been paid for anything. Even when I go to speak I’d pay for myself. I was spending a couple of hundred pounds a week and it ended up, last year, well I’m on income support. I’m getting deeper and deeper in debt, but what I want to do is set up a network of MOJO offices. However, under the new legislation that has been introduced by Jack Straw, he now states that the officer in charge of the case will be the officer who decides what is and what is not evidence, that officer will also be the officer to say which of the evidence, if any, he wishes to disclose to the defence, and also, after five years, paperwork of the case will be destroyed. Everyone knows that in respect of miscarriage of justice cases, under the present system that is being run by the Government, mainly the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the way the system runs, everyone knows the two biggest things in miscarriages of justice, one, is very bad legal representation, the Commission and the Government say that 65% of people wouldn’t be wrongly convicted if they had decent legal representation, the other big thing is non-disclosure with regard to legal representation. What it mans is that the cops can go into court and get away with saying anything they like. People say that the system hasn’t learned anything. I tell people that that’s the biggest, stupidest remark they will ever make. In actual fact the system has learned a hell of a lot. Under the new legislation they’ve learned how not to get caught so easily.

N…. The whole experience seems to have affected you very badly. What are the worst things?

P… The depression. My major problem is depression. The doctors told me that I had been living in a depressed state for so long that it was now normal for me. They recommended to the Home Office that I get five years deep psychological counseling. Post-traumatic stress and ‘Vietnam syndrome’ were both mentioned. The anti-depressants didn’t work. The only thing that did work was to smoke loads and loads of cannabis. If I traveled to a new place I didn’t want to go out and kept bursting into tears all the time. I had no appetite. I couldn’t sleep. I felt angry and frustrated all the time.

N…. You’ve been out for 12 years now. Is this getting better or worse?

P…. That old cliché of time being a wonderful healer is a lot of bollocks. If you’re lucky it helps you to come to terms with it a bit better, but it doesn’t heal fuck all.

  In 2003 Marsha suddenly decided that I had wasted far too much time gallivanting about the world on what she thought to be pointless assignments and that I should now do something positive with my life. She suggested that I should do a Master’s degree in criminology. I already had a B.A. Hons, which I had passed in prison. This didn’t impress Marsha one bit. She had two Honours degrees, two Masters degrees and was on the verge of getting her Doctorate. By comparison I was something of a dunce.

  I did argue that, at 58, I was a bit too old to start a career in criminology. Marsha’s answer to that was that people of 80 regularly took and passed various degrees. It did interest me though. I was very knowledgeable about criminal matters and I did think that, perhaps, I could bring a new perspective to the discipline. All it would cost me was three and a half grand of my money and nine months of my life?

  Initially, the powers-that-be at Surrey University refused to accept me. They seemed to be troubled by the small matter of my murder and manslaughter convictions. I contemplated arguing along the lines that for many years I had been working on mastering the practical side of criminology, now I wanted to move on to the theoretical. However, one man’s irony is another man’s sarcasm. Instead I got my MP, my probation officer and the head of a prisoners’ rights group to phone up and complain. 

  It was a pushover. Terrified of being seen as politically incorrect towards any minority, even one as esoteric as ex-murderers, they accepted me, with the proviso that all the other students should be warned about me. It was just as well that I had developed a thick skin over the years. I wouldn’t have cared if no one had talked to me. In the event, everyone in the social sciences department was very friendly.

  The criminology course was in its first year. There were five students, myself and four women. Assessment for the degree came in two parts. The first was based on assignments, the second on a piece of original research, a thesis. The subject matter for my thesis came to me right away.

  Through associating with Paddy and getting involved in miscarriage of justice issues I had met several other wrongfully imprisoned men. There is a prison term used to describe someone whose mental state is in considerable disarray. We say that they are ‘shot to pieces’. All of the wrongfully imprisoned men I had met were thoroughly ‘shot to pieces’. 

  I had wondered why they should be like this when the vast majority of guilty men who had done very long sentences had survived in much better mental condition. I decided to make this the subject of my thesis. If it had been an article for ‘Front’ no doubt I would have called it, ‘Shot to Pieces’. In social scientific jargon it didn’t have quite that ring, becoming, ‘Coping strategies and enduring psychological trauma in some miscarriage of justice victims’. Here is the ‘Conclusion’

  Conclusion

                    There is abundant evidence that human beings are affected by their environment, whether it be by the mechanism of ‘dynamic interchange’ (p.5) as described by Ittelson, Rivlin, Proshansky and Winkel (1974), or by some less interactive method. And if they are going to be affected by any environment, then they are most surely going to be affected by prison, that harshest of human environments so eloquently described by Toch (1979, 1992). However, the point at issue here is how deeply the individual will be affected, and will the effects be lasting and, perhaps, irreversible?

  There is much in the literature to support the argument that significant psychological damage can be caused by a prison sentence. However, once a rigourous scientific methodology is applied to the results, there is little evidence to show that it will endure after the inmate leaves the institution.

  Zamble and Porporino (1988) predict that, “most men will return to some approximation of their behaviour before imprisonment” (p.148). Following their review of the literature, Walker (1993) and Gearing (1979) agree.

  My own experience and that of the three lifers I interviewed for the control group also strongly support this position. Jack equates the experience to that of his school or army days. When Peter thinks of the prison years he just thinks of the good times. For John it was “an education you can’t buy”. For my part, I still have many prison friends with whom I regularly talk about the old times and manage to laugh.

  As traumatic as the experience was at the time, it has left no lasting, harmful effects. There is no sleep disturbance, fear of crowds, traumatic association, difficulty with relationships, or any of the other conditions that seem to afflict the ‘miscarriage of justice’ group. If Peter now considers himself to be a “well-balanced, reasonable guy”, then perhaps this description fits all four of us. The experience is behind us.

  The same cannot be said for the six men in the sample group. There are the grave diagnoses by the many psychiatrists they have seen between them, and, especially, those of Dr Adrian Grounds. Apart from this, Paddy Hill, Raff Rowe, Michael Davis and John Kamara all show clear signs of dyscontrol and disequilibrium. According to Menninger’s categories, they are not coping. If we include self-intoxication and narcotisation, neither is Bob Maynard.

  Similarly, none of this group fits neatly into Goffman’s categories of coping strategies. The closest is Goffman’s ‘intransigent line’, but this is “typically a temporary and initial phase or reaction, with the inmate shifting to situational withdrawal or some other line of adaption”. (p.62) However, the inmates of the ‘miscarriage of justice’ sample group maintained their ‘intransigence’ for the 12, 16 or 20 years of their incarceration.

When we come to examine the coping strategies of the control group vis a vis the sample group we sees significant differences. All the control group settled down comparatively quickly in their sentences. Even I abandoned my escapes and ‘prison activist’ role afterten years. This means that the four of us had many years of stable, if monotonous, prison routine before we were released.

Further, we all enjoyed the support of prison friendships. Peter says, “I couldn’t have made it without the support of my fellow prisoners.” Jack talks about how he “got support from other inmates and found them to be good fellas.” John speaks of other inmates taking him under their wing and I had support from the Londoner’s criminal network. Paddy has referred to the support he got from other prisoners, but in his own words he was, “in and out of blocks, 40 moves and lie-downs, thrown out of Gartree nine times”. This also involved a considerable period of solitary confinement. John Kamara did 16 years in solitary. Raff and Michael spent long periods in isolation in the punishment block. This life-style is not conducive to either forming or maintaining friendships in prison. I, and the others of the control group, enjoyed the social support of friendships that often lasted several years.

Then there is the enormous damage that solitary confinement does to the psyche. ‘Miscarriage of justice’ victims typically do far longer spells in solitary than normal prisoners, so this in itself could be a contributory factor to their experiencing enduring psychological problems on release. I, and many other prisoners who were ‘career criminals, also had the support of a sustaining ideology. I believed that the distribution of wealth in society was unfair and a spirited man would, of necessity, come into conflict with the law. Imprisonment then becomes an unwelcome, if not entirely unexpected, result of this outlook.

McKorkle and Korn (1954) reflect something of this view when they say, “In many ways,

the inmate social system may be viewed as providing a way of life which enables the inmate to avoid the devastating psychological effects of internalising and converting social rejection into self-rejection. In effect, it permits the inmate to reject his rejectors rather than himself.” (p.58 in Goffman) Needless to say, the innocent, ‘miscarriage of justice’ victim does not have the support of this or any other inmate sustaining ideology.

Another factor is the effect of being different, being ‘innocent’ in a world of guilty men and how much this set them apart from their fellow prisoners. From my own experience, in the cynical world of long term prisons, there is little sympathy for ‘innocent’ men. If anything, they remind other prisoners of that especially traumatic early period when they themselves were fighting to prove their innocence. They failed and have moved on. They are settled down, doing their time and don’t need to be reminded of it. Raff’s remark, “I made no friends in prison” is deeply disturbing. I have never, ever heard of anyone before who never made a friend in prison. It is symptomatic of all that is wrong about the way he forced himself to do his time. There is little doubt in my mind that the way the sample group forced themselves to do their time, the isolation, etc, is a major, contributory factor to the subsequent enduring psychological damage. However, it isn’t the whole story. There is a final trigger. Maynard and Dudley are the two ‘miscarriage of justice’ victims who spent the longest in prison. Yet, on the face of it, they have suffered nothing like the enduring psychological damage that the other four of the sample group have. So if the contention of this paper is that a further effect of suffering a miscarriage of justice is enduring psychological harm, what is it that is different in the cases of Maynard and Dudley? At first sight, Maynard and Dudley could have been members of the control group. They quickly settled into the prison routine, without recourse to disobedience and rule breaking. It could even be said that Dudley fits Goffman’s category of ‘colonisation’ by using his painting ability to take the maximum advantage of privileges available.

Both were committed criminals in so far as they had extensive criminal records and had served significant jail sentences. Both were supported by networks of friends in prison. In

Dudley’s words, “It was no hardship going into prison…you know the routine.” And like the control group, they have emerged from prison with little obvious psychological damage. They have reintegrated themselves into their social milieu in a comparatively short time. There is some underlying bitterness, but nothing like that of the other ‘miscarriage of justice’ victims. Neither is there traumatic association with all things that remind them of prison. On interview, both were relaxed and as ‘normal’ as any of the control group. There was little to distinguish them from men who had never been in prison. When pressed for an explanation of how he had re-adapted so well, and with so little obvious psychological damage, Maynard suggested that it was a function of his having been a professional criminal. As a professional criminal he had expected to go to prison. He even went so far as to say that, had he been framed for the sort of crime that he had actually committed, though not been caught for, he could have fully accepted it. Dudley certainly shared the ‘professional criminal’s’ outlook too. So perhaps that was it, then. Even though Kamara had done a four and a half year sentence for armed robbery and Rowe and Davis had both served short sentences for minor crimes, perhaps it was the fact that Maynard and Dudley had considered themselves to be professional criminals (with all the mindset that went with that) that prevented the latter pair from suffering enduring psychological harm. I wasn’t really convinced. Then I realised something that had not fully registered with me before. Both Maynard and Dudley had been released from prison in the conventional way that most long term prisoners are released. They had gone through the whole procedure of open prison, town visits, working outside, home leaves, working on the hostel scheme and finally release. It was after they had been released that they had been cleared. Talking of the release procedure, Cohen and Taylor (1972) say, “there is much attention in ordinary prisons to preparing the inmate for this transition:- vocational training, half way hostels, pre-release programs”. They also refer to, “the psychological ‘bends’ the men will face as they re-surface.” 

Apocryphal tales abound of the old lag who has served all his sentence in a closed prison only to refuse to leave on the final day due to an inordinate fear of freedom itself. There are very few ‘frills’ in prison. The Prison authorities do not waste money on things that have no proven, practical worth. The pre-release procedure is expensive in terms of

both staff time and prison resources. It is there for a good reason. When I am asked what my first day of freedom was like after more than twenty years inside, I always ask in return what day they are referring to. Is it my first ‘town walk’ with the Governor; my first ‘town walk’ on my own, my first day ‘working outside’; my first day with my mother on home leave or even my first day on the hostel scheme? It most certainly wasn’t that last day when they finally signed the paper and let me go. For the average long-term prisoner, freedom is a lengthy procedure rather than an event. For ‘miscarriage of justice’ victims it is an event, and a cataclysmic one at that. Except for Maynard and Dudley, all were taken from their cells in a closed prison and released within hours. What a supreme irony it would be if the very thing they had yearned for, for so many years, immediate freedom, was the very thing that did them enduring psychological harm!

So, be careful what you wish for!

  With two assignments for ‘Loaded’ now under my belt I felt that I was beginning to understand something of the art of writing for magazines. Above everything else, as far as men’s ‘mags’ went, the subject matter had to be dramatic and exciting. Although not consciously attempting to do so, I did realize that my style owed a lot to ‘gonzo’ journalism. I understood this to be when the writer/commentator interacts with the story and, indeed, becomes part of it. Hunter. S. Thompson, of course, was it’s most famous exponent.

  This did not preclude me from writing in the same vein. After all, I felt it to be as a direct result of who I was (my notorious criminal background, that is) that I got most of the stories in the first place. That, coupled with an almost suicidal, self-destructiveness which took me into dangerous situations in the first place. 

  I also felt that it brought integrity and honesty to my writing. If someone was good enough to trust me with an interview, then the least I could do was to let them speak in their own words and not twist things or offer value judgements. The latter would be left to the reader. No doubt I was still overly-conscious of the criminal fraternity’s characterization of most journalists as ‘grasses’. I was determined to establish some trust.

  I was aware that both gonzo-ism and honesty were given different degrees of freedom in different magazines. The ‘Loaded’ experience had by no means been a bad one. By and large they had published my articles almost verbatim, with relatively minor changes. Further, other than a few instances when it was a case of ‘Loaded did this’ or ‘Loaded did that’, they mainly credited me with all my actions. 

  However, I hadn’t missed the fact that ‘Loaded’ was just a minor part of a large publishing organization. I didn’t kid myself that, when push came to shove, if the powers-that-be determined that something needed changing or given a different slant, then that is exactly what would be done. And the first thing I would know about it was when I read the article in the magazine.

  This was something that definitely worried me. If I had given my word to someone that I would give them a fair hearing, what would they think when they saw the article under my name with a completely biased slant to it? Would they accept the explanation that it had been done without either my permission or my knowledge? And what would that do for my fledgling reputation of integrity? With this in mind, as well as a desire to give myself as much independence as possible, I looked around for other magazines to write for. 

  I had met Eoin McSorely at several of the media bashes in and around Soho. He had read my, ‘Parkhurst Tales’, as well as my pieces for ‘Loaded’ and liked my writing. He was currently features editor for ‘Front’ magazine and he asked me if I would write for them. 

  Now ‘Front’ was definitely the new kid on the block. A more recent creation than its longer-established rivals, it was still struggling for market share. Presently it was selling between 150 and 200 thousand copies a month. In order to attract attention and make a name for itself it was brash, in-your-face and determinedly irreverent. If there had been a poor taste award for men’s magazines then ‘Front’ would definitely have been in strong contention.

  However, I had been to their offices and was impressed by their down-to earth enthusiasm and unpretentiousness. There had certainly been some at ‘Loaded’ who had thought that they were minor celebrities in their own right. I sometimes got the impression that I would have to be careful not to put noses out of joint. There was none of that at ‘Front’. They were just a collection of working class boys out to have a bit of fun and turn out a good magazine at the same time. 

  What impressed me most of all though was Eoin’s assurance that he could guarantee me absolute editorial integrity. If I wrote it and they agreed that it could go in, then that is exactly the copy that would be published.  

  In the event, a story suddenly came up which dictated that what I wrote must be exactly what was published. In jail I had become friends with a couple of Hell’s Angels. Now they asked me to cover the funeral of one of their members who had just died. They trusted me to do a balanced piece. With the guarantee of editorial integrity firmly in mind I took the story to ‘Front’. True to their word they published it in its entirety. Here’s the story.

The phone call had come from Moose, an old friend. We had met in Long Lartin top security jail more than a decade earlier. Friendships fired in the furnace of the institution are often strong and en during. Ours had certainly lasted well enough.

I followed directions and met him at ‘Angel Farm’, the clubhouse of the Hell’s Angels Kent Chapter. A half-mile long concrete path led across fields to a sprawling complex esconced behind a high, spiked fence. Moose opened a gate and let me into a yard where several Harleys were parked.

“Maz is dead”, were his first words, as we shook hands in the gathering gloom of late evening. He had died in a road accident the previous day.

  I had never met him but I knew that Maz was the Angel’s national spokesman when dealing with the press or the public, quite a significant honour in an organization where all members are Brothers of equal standing. By coincidence, I had actually spoken to Maz on the phone recently, trying to arrange a trip to Arizona to interview the legendary Sonny Barger, founder member of the U.S. Angels.

Moose led me into a long, low, barn-type building done out like a saloon. Several grim-faced Angels stood drinking at the bar. All wore their Angel colours, drum-tight over bulging muscles, tattoos much in evidence. 

I had never hung around with the Angels, but I knew of them, mostly from the jailhouse. In there, and on the street, they were known to be proud honourable men, whatever their prejudices. If an Angel gave you his word, you could bet your life he would keep it. If he put his name to a deal, the deal would be done. And in this messed-up, jungle of a society that we live in, that’s no small thing. 

We all sat round a large table as Moose made the introductions. They were friendly enough, but their individual and collective grief was sufficient to charge the atmosphere with a feeling of impending violence. I was still wondering what it was all about and why I was here.  

  Cookie began on behalf of Kent. “Norman, we’ve heard about you from Moose and some of us have read your books. We feel we can trust you.” He paused, I thought to control his grief, but it was rage that burst through. “We hate the fucking press”, he screwed up his face in anger and looked sideways at his Brothers, who nodded in agreement. “Whatever we do we can never be right. Very shortly we will be burying Maz and we don’t want them taking the piss in any way. On behalf of Kent Chapter we’d like you to write an account of Maz  and the funeral.”

  What could I say? It wasn’t an offer I couldn’t refuse, because I really am my own man, whatever the cost. I felt, at first, flattered, then honoured. Again I reflected on the values of our society, of Queen’s birthday honours and medals, often unmerited. There would be none of that for a man such as I, and none wanted. I would settle for this vote of confidence from my Angel peers.

  On the drive home, exactly what I had let myself in for began to sink in. I knew nothing whatsoever about Maz. What if he had been one of the wilder exponents of the biker life-style? Could I, in all conscience, write positively about that? No doubt all would be revealed to me on the day, a day I was now looking forward to with considerable trepidation.

  It was bright, if somewhat overcast, as I drove Justin, my photographer from ‘Front’, towards Angel Farm and the funeral. There had been some initial resistance when I had mentioned that ‘Front’ was backing the piece. “Didn’t they do that article on the ‘Outcasts’, growled Cookie? The ‘Outcasts’ were the Angel’s sworn enemies. 

  “I’m sure there was nothing personal in it”, I reassured. “As far as I’m concerned you know exactly where you stand with ‘Front’. Once they agree on my copy, I can trust them not to change it behind my back.” I didn’t want some smart-arsed backroom boy tacking on an irreverent piss-take that I would only see when the magazine came out. 

  It was still early, but already hundreds of bikers lined the dirt track alongside the clubhouse. Hundreds more milled about inside the grounds, their bikes parked en masse, shards of light glancing off highly polished metal in the early morning sunlight. The several millions pounds worth of custom-built Harleys were the Angels collective pride and joy. 

  The men themselves looked every bit as impressive as their machines. If there were any small, weedy Angels about I couldn’t see them. Hulking giants, muscles bulging, bedecked in full angel finery, strode about giving each other their clenched-thumb handshake.     

  Every Angel in England was here, together with a score or so from Holland and representatives from several other European countries. Three South African Angels came with the Dutch contingent and there was even an angel from Nova Scotia.

  With them came their ladies. Of all ages, leather-clad and confident, they looked just as capable of riding the bikes as their men . And in fact they were. Most of them rode their own bikes.

  Outside, along the dirt track, hundreds of other mourners congregated, with scores more arriving every minute. There were several other ‘patch’ clubs present, which even I, with my limited knowledge of biker politics, knew was unusual. 

  A dozen Satan’s Slaves, wearing their colours, stood with their bikes in one group. Further down, a smaller group of ‘Headhunters’ lounged just a stones throw from Pompey ‘Road Warriors’ and Wiltshire ‘Lowlanders’. Maz must have had broad appeal to unite such different groups in mourning. 

  Then there were your normal, regular motorcycle enthusiasts, hundreds of them, all on various types of bikes. There were Jap bikes, Harleys, custom-built trikes that looked like something out of ‘Mad Max’ and a rocket-bike with a built-on thruster that was clearly of the space age. Finally, at the far end of the track, a couple of dozen cars, jeeps and vans waited to take their place in the cortege.

  Suddenly, the roar of engines and a cloud of dust announced the arrival of a new group. Leather-clad, riding bikes and trikes, they were similar to those already here, but for one, quite significant, difference. They were all women. I hadn’t been aware that there was an all-woman biker club, but these were ‘Women in the Wind’, founded in the U.S. in 1978, extant in the U.K. for the past 12 years.

  Hard against the clubhouse fence was parked a large, flat-bed truck to which was hitched an equally large trailer. Both were piled high with hundreds of floral tributes. Some just saying ‘Maz’, others in the shape of bikes, they came form all over the country and all over the world. H.A. Long Island, H.A. South Carolina, the Flying Deuces, Angels everywhere were saluting their fallen Brother.

  Quite incongruously, a blue and white striped police car inched its way through the crush to park opposite the truck. Two fresh-faced young coppers, one male the other female, chatted away quite oblivious to the forces of the Apocalypse gathered around them. There was no fear and no hostility either. Maz was known, and it would seem, liked by both of them. They also had a relationship, of sorts, with the Angels. They made it clear that they expected no trouble. The funeral would be solely a traffic problem, not a public order one. 

  By now I was quite puzzled. This man Maz was being mourned by people from all walks of life. In an age beset by ‘isms’, how could a Hell’s Angel, a member of a club not known for its gregariousness, unite so many disparate groups?

  So I went in search of him, or rather, what remained of him, the part that lived on in the minds of others. Quietly, discreetly, trying hard not to intrude on personal grief, I asked mourners about their recollections of Maz.

  Dr Ian ‘Maz’ Harris, Ph.D., got his Doctorate at Warwick University. His later book, ‘Biker, the Birth of the Modern Day Outlaw’, was based on his research. He had been a founder-member of the Kent Chapter of Hell’s Angels and, when he had died aged 51, he had been an Angel for 25 years. 

  In a club of rugged, free-thinking individualists to whom leadership was often anathema, Maz rose to become their national spokesman. He was a leading light in the organizing of the Kent Show, the biggest custom-built bike show in England and also the ‘Buldog Bash’, the annual Angel party-cum-bike-show held in the Midlands. His whole life revolved around bikes and the free-spirited lifestyle he felt went with them.

  On a personal level, he was warm and friendly, without either airs or graces. He was articulate and a great story-teller. But over and above all these things, he was a writer! He wrote for the bike magazines ‘Back Street Heroes’ and ‘Heavy Duty’, amongst others. His columns, ‘Radical Times’ and ‘Street Talkin’ celebrated bikes and the ‘biker spirit’.

He wrote on topics as diverse as engines, civil rights and pornography and, in so doing, had touched the lives of so many. Cookie told me that thousands of e-mails had arrived from people who had been reading his stuff for years and felt that they knew him. They just wanted to say how sorry they were to hear of his death. 

  Bjorn, a close friend and fellow Angel from Sweden, said, “ I grew up reading ‘Radical Times’. Maz was an inspiration to all bikers everywhere.” Which would go some way towards explaining why all of Kent’s motorcycle police were on duty when several should have been off. They came in for free, out of respect for Maz.

  Suddenly, like a giant clearing its throat, hundreds of bikes coughed, then roared into life. Justin, who had been scurrying about in a feeding frenzy of photography inspired by such an unusually visual subject, raced to take his seat on Moose’s pillion. They jockeyed to take their place in the column of Angels that snaked slowly behind the hearse as it made its way out of Angel Farm. 

  On a day of death, everybody felt strangely invigourated. There was sadness, but pride and defiance too. Never mind what the straight world might say, they were on their way to bury a man honoured and beloved by them all. Whatever else they are, the Angels are a warrior caste. And woe betide anyone who would disrespect them this day.

  With a thunder like an approaching Panzer division, the cortege turned onto the A2. The extent of the police operation to facilitate the funeral immediately became apparent. Traffic in both directions had been stopped. As the procession passed along the carriageway, police on bikes and in cars sealed off all tributary roads. 

  The surrounding countryside came to a halt as people came out of their houses and places of work to stand and stare in amazement. Riding several abreast, the column of bikers stretched back as far as the eye could see. One estimate put the number at 3,000. Most rode bare-headed as a sign of respect, a special concession on this special day. 

  As the cortege came into Crayford, it seemed as if the whole town had turned out. They stood in gardens and at the side of the road, quite silent, hats in hand. 

  St Paulinus Church and its graveyard was beautiful as only English country churches can be. Never before could a more incongruous-looking crowd have stood within its precincts. Grim-faced and in total silence, the Angels and their fellow bikers sat in the church and stood amongst the graves as the service was relayed over loudspeakers.

  The Reverend read the euology between some of Maz’s favourite music. ‘Like a bird on a wire, I have tried in my way to be free’, sang Leonard Cohen. 

  Maz’s sister, Jane, thanked everyone for coming, acknowledging in passing that she had always shared her brother with his Brothers in the Angels.

  Then it was over. Like a film fast-forwarded, or pages flicked through in a picture book, we filed out of the church, gathered around the grave, said our ‘goodbyes’ to each other and headed off, lost in our own thoughts. Maz had touched our lives and, through that touching, there was now a sense of loss. 

  That he was a biker, a member of a so-called outlaw biker club, was neither here nor there. There would be captains of industry, knights of the realm, politicians of repute laid to rest with but a fraction of the respect paid to Maz Harris this day. You have your heroes, we will have ours. We know that Maz rides with the angels.    

  We all repaired to a local restaurant as guests of El Director. The food was sensational, the conversation lively. Once again I was spared probing questions by my lack of Spanish.

  In a three-car convoy, we descended on the prison. There was immediately a problem, but I was expecting it. Prison guards are the same the world over. I’m sure there is a multi-national somewhere that manufactures the basic model, probably in association with Microsoft. The gist of the matter was, they didn’t give a flying f--- who we were. It wasn’t visiting day and we didn’t have a valid visiting order. So we couldn’t see Garavito, who obviously wasn’t their favourite prisoner anyway. 

  Impasse! But suddenly help arrived in the form of the senior prosecutor for the entire province. Dr Janet Espinosa was a statuesque, middle-aged woman, in a flame-red evening gown that she had obviously been wearing at the function she had so recently left. Perhaps El Director had phoned her for help. Dr Espinosa didn’t suffer fools gladly and, clearly, she felt that she was confronted by fools. Like sheep behind the shepherd, we followed in her wake as she forced a bridgehead through the assembled ranks of the guards and past the main gate. Here, in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer walls of the prison, battle commenced.

  Various lower order officials duly appeared and entered the fray. Overweight guards, carrying machine guns, pistols and riot sticks like small trees, milled about in confusion. Dr Espinosa was magnificent. Wielding her mobile phone like a short sword, she cut through the various levels of bureaucracy. One final, telling phone call to someone extremely senior in Bogota seemed to do the trick. But first we would have to leave until the paperwork was done. 

  Danny, Julia and myself had been watching quite passively as the battle raged around us. Now, as I turned to leave I asked Danny about the inscription over the gate leading to the inner prison proper. Danny translated it as saying, “Here enters the man, not the crime.”

  “Is that where Garavito is?” I asked Julia through Danny.

  “No, he’s over there”, she replied, pointing.

  I followed the direction of her finger and saw a small, squat, one-roomed building that seemed to have been added almost as an afterthought to a one-storied, white-painted administration office that stood barely thirty paces away. It had been built of concrete blocks and left unpainted. The whole thing looked decidedly temporary. The one window was heavily barred but unglazed. In the opening stood Helga and the figure next to her could only be Garavito. He had been watching us all the time.

  We had been so close to him that now I didn’t want to leave. However, there was no option. We withdrew to a café that stood opposite the jail and spent a fraught 20 minutes waiting for the next development. In the event, it was a compromise. “They will allow you to see, him, but only for ten minutes” declared Dr Espinosa.

  As we entered the jail again two things that Helga had said kept coming back to me. “Call him Alberto not Luis. His father always called him Luis and it upsets him.” And, “You mustn’t show that you’re afraid of him.”

  Then first warning I would strive to remember, but the second wasn’t relevant at all. I had met too many crazy and dangerous killers in my time in jail. Most of these had chosen fully grown adults as their victims, yet I had stood my ground. In fact, a child killer like our Alberto here would have stood a very good chance of being severely bashed in many of our long term jails. And more likely than not by myself, had I had the good fortune to bump into him. So of all the emotions that were exercising me at that moment, fear wasn’t one of them.

  Whatever was going on inside of me at an emotional level though, at an intellectual level it was absolutely clear that I had to be professional. I truly felt that, in many ways, I was ideally suited to get into Garavito’s head. Handled properly, he would be a fount of information on what drives serial killers. This information could be crucial in other investigations. It would take a while to win his confidence, but over time I was confident that he would more clearly describe this ‘strange force’ that overwhelmed him at the time of each killing.

  I approached the barred window and put out my hand. Garavito reached through and shook it. As he rattled away in Spanish I was frantically trying to size him up in the short time I knew was available.  ‘Nondescript’ was the word that sprang to mind. He was the janitor of your apartment building who you only spoke to in passing; he was the driver of the school bus. The handshake was weak, his eyes vacuous and empty. If he was a driven man, then the demon that had driven him was noticeably absent today.

  According to Danny’s translation, Alberto was very interested in the proposed documentary. He cursed the Colombian press for calling him a monster. Clearly, he felt that the BBC would be more circumspect.  He stressed that he didn’t want to be exploited.

  All the time, Helga hovered in the background. I had been so focused on Garavito that I hadn’t noticed anything else. Suddenly I became aware of the dozens of canvasses that stood on easels, chairs, tables and were spaced about the room on the floor. Mentally, I gasped. They were quite breathtakingly beautiful. All were oil paintings showing in exquisite detail the flora and fauna of various jungle scenes. In the middle of each was the corpse of a young boy. This was how he was working with Helga to locate missing bodies. Garavito’s recall was phenomenal. Each painting had proved accurate down to the last detail.

  The juxtaposition of the two extremes of beauty and horror was spellbinding. With Garavito in the foreground and Helga drifting in and out of the paintings it was all quite surreal. I was sure that, in such a setting, a documentary would prove to be mesmerizing.

  Suddenly, Garavito started to jig about and sing. The unexpected movement snapped me out of my reverie and caused me to jump. I instantly regretted it. I was determined to show no weakness to this man. Around me Helga, Julia and Danny were all smiling broadly. Quite clearly I was missing something.

  Danny explained to me that the jingle Garavito was singing was from a popular Colombian TV soap called something like ‘Betty the Ugly’. Garavito had put his own words to it concerning himself. If nothing else it alerted me to the fact that our Alberto was something of a narcissist.

  All too soon the visit was over. Garavito reiterated his intention of cooperating with the documentary and, in fact, signed a note to that effect which Danny had quickly drawn up. My enduring memory is of him standing amongst his paintings and waving as we retreated to the gate.  

  We assembled in the café opposite the prison again and this time we were joined by the Director of the Prison. Lt. Col. Manuel Martinez had been 30 years in the police before assuming his present post. Strangely for someone in his position, he was a pleasant, avuncular man, whose time-worn face seemed forever wreathed in smiles. He had never seen the like of Garavito. “He is a stone in my shoe”, he confessed. “It’s a full time job just keeping him alive. If the other inmates got hold of him they would kill him. So would some of the guards.”

  Dr Espinosa joined us and proved to be a fount of information. As the senior prosecutor of the province she had been the first to question Garavito. She maintained that he told her that the true number of his crimes was 1,800 murders and 3,000 rapes.

  She further remarked on the significance of the area in which Garavito was born. Armenia, the capital town of the comparatively tiny Quindio Province, has the highest number of Satanic groups of any town in Colombia. The previous year, Armenia was devastated by an earthquake. The local people said that it was God’s punishment.

  Back in Bogota I was jubilant. Not only had I managed to do the cocaine factory story, to the delight of Eoin and ‘Front’, I now had a potential TV documentary for the BBC as well. I immediately phoned Tom Mangold and filled him in on all the details. I fully expected to be coming back the following week with a TV crew.

  Tom’s tone was doubtful. “What language does he speak”, he queried?

  “Well, Colombian Spanish, of course Tom”, I couldn’t fathom why he was being so obtuse. All was soon to be revealed though.

  “That’s the problem, Norman. We had a good line into an Indian serial killer but he only spoke Urdu. If they don’t speak English the Beeb aren’t interested.” 

  So even though I had been the only journalist ever to be allowed to meet with Garavito and had a world exclusive for a documentary, no one was interested in doing it. I cursed the realities of the media world I was still only discovering.

  On the plane back I measured the numerological significance of Garavito’s name. Using the system A = 6, B = 12, C = 18, D = 24, etc, etc, I summed the letters of ‘Garavito’. I got the number 558. If you further sum 5 + 5 + 8, you get the number 18. The significance of 18 is that it is the sum of three sixes. 

  And as we all know, 666 is the number of the beast!