The Secret Gangster: Gangland Canning Town

They sat on this book for sixteen years. Twice it nearly went out. Twice it got put back in the drawer.This is the third version. And this one made it.There's a particular feeling you get, sitting across a table from a man you've known thirty years, knowing that what's sat between you — unsaid, unlooked-at, waiting — is heavier than the table itself. You drink your drink. He drinks his. Neither of you puts the thing into words because words are what you spent a lifetime learning not to use.That's where this book lived. For a long time.I was born into one East London and came up in another. The East London I was born into had bomb sites for playgrounds and women on their knees scrubbing front steps at six in the morning because that's what decent women did. The East London I came up in had nicer cars and worse people. Somewhere between those two I made a choice. Or a choice got made for me — I've had years to think about which, and I'm still not sure it matters.What I'm sure of is this: I was good at it. For a long while I was very good at it. And being good at it cost exactly what you'd expect it to cost, except the bill came in instalments and kept coming long after I thought I'd paid it off.This isn't a book about being hard. Plenty of men have written those, and most of them weren't. This isn't a book about the big names either, though some of them walk through the pages on their way to somewhere else. This is a book about what it actually felt like — the mornings and the money and the mugs and the mates, the long quiet stretches between the things that make the papers, the weight of a phone that rings at four in the morning and the lighter weight of one that doesn't ring at all when you need it to.I pulled it twice. First time, a man got paid to polish it, and by the time he'd finished it sounded like someone else's book with my name on it. Second time, I had a look round at who was still breathing and decided a few of them would rather I hadn't bothered. So back in the drawer it went.Time sorted some of that out. Time will sort the rest.Every word in here is true. Or as true as a man's memory can make it, sixty-odd years on, with a glass of something decent in his hand and nothing left to prove.Some names have been changed. Not to protect the innocent — there are precious few of them in these pages — but because a man can tell his own story without handing anyone else's to the wolves.You'll understand as we go. Read more